by Tom Bissell
Very little mention is made of Simon the Cananaean/Zealot during the first three hundred years of the church. Basil of Caesarea, who died in the late fourth century, mentioned that Simon expired of natural causes in Edessa, of all places—one of many instances in which a legend associated with Jude/Thaddaeus intermixed with a legend associated with Simon. A later, more whimsical legend places a youthful Simon among the “shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock,” to whom, in the Gospel According to Luke, an angel announces the coming of Jesus. In the fifth or sixth century, various Coptic legends developed that had Simon traveling to Britain.
Thaddaeus, along with Bartholomew, is one of the “first illuminators” to which the Armenian Church traces its origins. Indeed, Thaddaeus has been called the “first patriarch of the Armenian Church.” Other legends land him in Mesopotamia and Syria. A Coptic legend called The Preaching of Judas Thaddaeus in Syria describes Peter and Thaddaeus’s highly tedious adventures, one of which involves a “harlot” being stripped of her clothes before the apostles and magically levitated and twirled around as a plaything by Peter. At the end of the text, we are told that Thaddaeus died nonviolently in Syria after he and Peter “built them a church, and…wrote for them a Gospel and a Book of commandments.”
A legend in which Simon and Jude/Thaddaeus preach and travel together can be found in a compendium work once called The Apostolic History but now known as Pseudo-Abdias, so named for its pseudonymous author, Abdias, a supposed bishop of the Babylonian church and member of Luke’s Seventy Disciples. The relevant section of Pseudo-Abdias, called The Acts of Simon and Jude, is actually a section of a section called The Acts of James the Less, though scholars assume that Simon and Jude’s adventures were once part of a separate longer text. In the story, Simon and Jude battle the Persian sorcerers Zaroës and Arfaxat, who were driven out of Ethiopia by Simon and Jude’s fellow apostle Matthew. They also somehow become entwined in an Indo-Persian land war. During the pair’s travels, however, the wizards Zaroës and Arfaxat continue to bedevil them and eventually gather together enough priests to attempt to force the apostles to sacrifice to their gods. The apostles consider their options: destroy every heathen in sight or accept the palm of glorious martyrdom. According to this legend, “They chose the palm….The priests and people attacked the apostles and slew them.”
In Eastern Christianity, traditions about Simon and Jude/Thaddaeus’s martyrdoms are not prevalent, but the Western tradition typically assumes they met their end together in what would today be Iran. When it comes to how exactly Simon and Jude/Thaddaeus died, Christian storytellers did not skimp on the gorier details. The implement purportedly used to cut the Simon of legend from skull to groin was the two-man ripsaw, which accounts for the numerous statues and paintings of Simon carrying such a saw. Earlier legends of Jude/Thaddaeus’s death mention a club or cudgel, but later legends imagine him as having been killed by the helmet-splitting medieval European weapon known as a halberd, which, like Simon’s saw, has proved to be its victim’s ghoulishly enduring symbol.
III.
The following morning, Sunday, I arrived at Saint Sernin’s at around 6:30, just in time to watch a fleet of white vans pull up and park around the basilica and several dozen French Arab men climb out and throw up their Sunday-market tent stalls. Many of these Arabs were recent immigrants to France, or at least I imagined they were due to their many layers of clothing and how often they blew into their hands. It was fifty degrees, yet many of them seemed to think they were hiking across southern Greenland. Shortly after the Arabs came the Chinese merchants, and then the African merchants: by 7:30 a.m., the stalls were open for business. I could suddenly, sort of, understand why a man of Gérard’s generation was so alarmed. The sight of Toulouse’s grandest basilica surrounded by Arabs and Asians and Africans—even if they carried French passports—would have been enough to make a crusader soil his armor.
Toulouse’s Sunday market offered wares both predictable and not. Predictable: stall after stall of soccer jerseys with FLY EMIRATES and VODAFONE stenciled across the breast. Less predictable: dangling carousels of saucy ladies’ underwear, which several head-scarfed Arab women were buying in gross. One of the Chinese stalls sold only batteries and complicated hair dryers whose accompanying voltage adapter sets were larger than the hair dryers themselves. Several African stalls sold tribal masks and carved wooden statues, because when one is strolling the edge of a Christian basilica on a Sunday morning in southern France, a child-sized Namibian fertility idol is the very definition of an impulse buy. Most of the market’s customers were Arabs. Quite a few of the police officers patrolling the market in their light blue short-sleeved shirts were also Arabs. The only French vendors I saw were the older hippie Frenchwoman with flyaway hair selling her handmade jewelry, the young Frenchwoman selling bicycles that appeared to predate the invention of the automobile, and an older Frenchman, whose face bore the haggard gravity of an actor condemned to performing Beckett for eternity, hawking dirty cardboard boxes of books, which contained such classics of French literature as Malraux, Flaubert, Valéry, Crichton, Ludlum, and Auel.
A while later I stood outside the western entrance of Saint Sernin’s, where an elderly white French couple was waiting for the doors to open for Sunday’s service. (The Kronenbourg beer bottles from the previous evening were still there.) The couple and I chatted a little—they spoke English—and they seemed intrigued to learn of an American who had come all this way to see the resting place of Simon and Jude (as Saint Sernin’s referred to him). The couple knew the relics were here, they said, but they had never visited the actual reliquary. How long, I asked, had they lived in Toulouse? “Thirty-five years,” the woman said. And how long had they been attending Mass at Saint Sernin’s? “Thirty-five years.” My hopes for finding an interesting apostolic site here correspondingly dimmed.
The gears and tumblers within the smaller door to the right of the basilica’s main doors began to click and turn. The smaller door opened, and a young French Vietnamese man with blond streaks in his hair, a diamond earring, and a boxy hit-man suit welcomed us in. He was holding what looked to be several bastilles’ worth of forearm-sized keys. I spontaneously requested an interview with this intriguing young man, which he agreed to do with a bright, surprised smile. We sat down in his basilica’s last pew.
His Vietnamese name was Tuan, but he had long adopted the French name Henri. His grandparents were from Haiphong, in North Vietnam, and in 1955 they fled to South Vietnam with a quarter million other Vietnamese Catholics during the mass exodus known as Operation Passage to Freedom, which was conducted by the French military and overseen by the United States. After two years in Saigon, his grandparents fled again, to Paris, and from Paris to Toulouse. Henri was born in Toulouse, spoke better English than Vietnamese, and had no wish ever to travel to Vietnam. It quickly became clear that Henri was as uninterested in hearing about my experiences living in Vietnam as he was in what I ate for breakfast that morning.
Henri’s tasks as a layperson included welcoming parishioners for the morning Mass. Whenever a member of Toulouse’s large immigrant population peeked into Saint Sernin’s, Henri said, he did his best to make him or her feel at home. It was only reasonable, he said, and Christlike, to extend to other immigrant families the same welcome his family had been afforded, even if these immigrant families were not interested in full conversion. Hearing such sentiment spoken aloud by an agent of French Catholicism, which had become the roach motel of France’s unusually scary right wing, was heartening.
I asked Henri whether members of Toulouse’s Arab community ever visited Saint Sernin’s. “Sometimes,” he said. “Not very often. In our congregation, we have many Africans, many Asians. But we have few Arabs.”
“What about native French people? Are they a large part of your congregation?”
“Older French people, of course. The younger people do not always come here. I don’t know why.” He smiled. “I wish
I did.”
“Last night,” I said, “I found two young French people drinking beer on your basilica’s front steps.”
Henri sighed. “Yes,” he said. “Sometimes they do this. I don’t know why. Again, I wish I did.”
“What can you tell me about the relics of Saint Simon and Saint Jude?”
Henri turned and looked down the basilica’s long, narrow nave toward the altar, beneath which were many crypts, including the reliquary of Simon and Jude. “Their relics have been part of our basilica for many centuries. We honor them as well as our other beloved relics.”
“Do you have any thoughts or beliefs about Simon and Jude?”
Henri thought for a moment. “They were the”—he searched for a word—“companions of Christ. Les douze apôtres.”
“They’re not very well-known.”
“No, this is true,” he said, “but we know the legends, yes? How they died in glory for Christ.”
“Do you think it’s possible they died together, side by side, like some of the legends say?”
Henri held my gaze. “I think anything is possible.”
Our interview done, Henri went back to working the door, and I began my Saint Sernin’s walk-through, bidding the world of functional architecture—rooms, hallways, doorknobs, translucent glass—farewell. As a pilgrimage church, Saint Sernin’s was designed to accommodate thousands of Christians at once. Its layout thus adhered to what is called a pilgrimage church plan, as opposed to the more conventional layout of a basilica that did not periodically find itself awash with seven thousand sweaty Christians who had been walking for weeks. What determined the pilgrimage church’s layout was relics. As the historian Bamber Gascoigne notes, “Nowadays a place becomes a tourist resort if it has a good beach, or famous buildings and works of art. In the Middle Ages, when every tourist was a pilgrim, what mattered was relics.”*3 Radiating chapels were needed to properly display a basilica’s showcase relics, and these chapels needed to be accessible even while Mass was being conducted. This accounted for Saint Sernin’s ambulatory, which traveled along the side aisles adjacent to the nave and past many chapels once crammed with relics.
The most interesting thing inside Saint Sernin’s was its high, multiply barrel-vaulted ceiling, which must have mesmerized every pilgrim to have ever stepped inside. Everything about the interior of this basilica, from the nave’s seemingly endless rows of thick white pillars to the chapels’ forty-foot-high arches, resulted in a fascinating spatial dementia, so that virtually everywhere you stood in Saint Sernin’s you felt as though you were at the end of a forbiddingly long hallway. When you looked up at the barrel-vaulted, many-ribbed ceiling, meanwhile, you were overcome by the sensation of having been swallowed by some great alabaster whale. Contemplating this basilica’s enigmatic and cave-like immensity, I was reminded that the word “basilica” comes from the vocabulary not of religion but of royalty. I touched one of the massive chalk-white columns along the nave: ice cold, graphite smooth. How inhuman the home of a king can seem.
The interior of Saint Sernin’s was restored in the 1970s to get the stonework’s famed, long-faded red-white tint back to what it was imagined to have been a thousand years before. The result was not quite reddish or whitish but both—the color of blood with milk poured into it. In the middle of my journey up the nave, I turned and looked back at the organ loft, which housed a tremendous agglomeration of black wood and silver pipes, looking like some fiendishly ornate weather-controlling machine.
At the baroque high altar—an infestation of golden eagles and cherubs—the ambulatory became a rotunda that wended around and led into the chancel, along with its apostolic crypts. But now more people were entering. When I first walked into Saint Sernin’s, there were only four parishioners inside, all of whom were white French in their sixties (at least). As I waited, younger parishioners arrived. As Henri had indicated, all were immigrants. One young man told me he was from Cameroon, another was from Ivory Coast, yet another was from China. I wound up sitting in the first pew. The service’s opening bell sounded. I turned and verified that I was the youngest white person in Saint Sernin’s by several decades. I wondered how the older Catholics here dealt with Saint Sernin’s kneelers, which had no cushion. They were so monstrously hard it felt as though I were genuflecting on a diamond reef. After the penitential rite, I turned around again and counted my fellow parishioners attending Sunday Mass at the largest Romanesque church in Europe. There were fourteen of us, counting Henri.
IV.
A wide array of New Testament commentators have imagined that the apostle Luke refers to as “Simon, who was called the Zealot,” was also a member of one of the ancient world’s most reckless and vicious revolutionary movements: the Zealots. As the fundamentalists’ fundamentalists, the Zealots were blamed by Josephus (who personally knew and despised many of them) as having been so deranged, intransigent, and “vile beyond belief” as to have essentially caused the Roman destruction of Jerusalem during the Jewish War.*4 A few popular Christian histories have pointed to the socio-revolutionary piquancy of the Twelve Apostles containing both an anti-Roman Zealot named Simon and a Roman tax collector named Matthew. The delighted underlying assumption is that the persuasive force of Jesus’s message was able to ally two men conditioned to hate each other.
Unfortunately, this is bunk as both history and analysis. “Simon, who was called the Zealot,” was not and could not have been a member of the Zealot party, which did not exist until more than three decades after Jesus’s death. It is distantly possible one of the apostles later became a member of the Zealot party, but there are no traditions to indicate that and quite a few to indicate the opposite. (Josephus does refer at one point to two Zealots—brothers, in fact—named Simon and Judas, but these are assuredly not Jewish Christian apostles.) In all likelihood, Simon’s epithet, the “Zealot” or “zealous,” was needed to distinguish him from the Twelve’s more famous Simon, Simon Peter.
There is little evidence that Jewish “zealousness” prior to the 40s and 50s was primarily focused on opposition to Palestine’s Roman occupation or that this kind of zealousness was akin to extremist nationalism.*5 Later in the first century, with the rise of the Zealots and other extremist Jewish groups, zealousness and nationalism more closely aligned. According to Josephus, Ananus ben Ananus, the former high priest of Jerusalem, gave a public speech in the mid-60s that used the Zealots’ fanatical nationalism as the primary strike against them. (While this speech is almost certainly Josephus’s invention, it is probably accurate in its reflection of the high priestly class’s opinion of the Zealots.) “The Romans,” Ananus pointed out, “never went beyond the bounds set [in the Temple] for unbelievers, never trampled on one of our sacred customs, but reverently gazed from a distance at the walls of the Sanctuary.” As for the Zealots, Ananus said, they “stroll where they like in the Inner Sanctuary, their hands still reeking with the slaughter of their countrymen!” The Romans were not ideal masters, as Ananus admitted, but life under Roman rule was far better than “subservience to the scum of our own nation.” Soon after this speech, the Zealots helped engineer the savage murder of Ananus ben Ananus. “I should not be far wrong,” Josephus wrote, “if I said that the fall of the City began with Ananus’ death.”*6
In the less politically volatile time of Jesus, a “zealous man” was probably akin to the type of person Paul had been when he was a Pharisee known as Saul. Zealous men of this type understood themselves as the guardians of the Law and habitual minders of those obligated to obey it. This did not necessarily mean they were dragging Law-breakers before the authorities and handing out rocks for stoning. More likely, the efforts of little-z zealots were grounded in public-shaming efforts. As the scholar Richard Horsley writes, “What little evidence there is suggests that ‘zeal for the Law’ was an individual, not a collective, feeling about the importance of other Jews’ faithful observance of the precepts of the Torah.” Horsley notes that even in the literature of the
Qumran community, the most fanatically zealous Jews of their era, the word “zeal” “occurs with striking infrequency.”
It is nonetheless uncharacteristic of Luke to allow a word like “zealot,” which had unsavory implications, to find its way into his gospel, much less into the circle of the Twelve. Elsewhere in the gospel, he takes pains to disassociate Jesus from hot-button political movements and words. Take the Greek word lestes (“bandit” or “brigand”), which appears several times, and in several contexts, in the gospel tradition. In common Greek usage, “bandit” was used to denote simple highway robbers and thieves. The problem this type of banditry posed was always present for Jews, especially those who conducted business between cities, as Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan famously establishes. After the mid-40s, however, when social strife in Roman Palestine spiraled out of control, the word took on subtler, more political insinuations. This is evident from Josephus, who called banditry “the chief curse of the country” and viewed just about anyone who caused trouble in Palestine after the mid-40s as “bandits,” regardless of whether their troublemaking had criminal or political intent. (Once or twice in The Jewish War, Josephus is unable to resist using “bandit” as a synonym for “Zealot.”) Just how highly charged “bandits” became after the Jewish War is apparent in Luke’s refusal to use the word in his account of Jesus’s trial and crucifixion, wherein we meet three men who obviously were supposed to be bandits in the pre-40s sense of the word.