St. Simeon of Jerusalem was a cousin of Our Lord and one of the greatest leaders of the Apostolic Church in Jerusalem. He suffered the same cruel martyrdom as our Lord, being crucified outside Jerusalem.
WHO WAS ST. SIMEON
St. Simeon was the son of Cleophas (also called Alpheus). Celophas was the brother of St. Joseph and he was married to a woman named Mary who was one of the women at the foot of the Cross (cf. Jn 19:25). We know that Cleophas and Mary had at least four sons (and probably some daughters too), since the holy evangelists provide their names. When there was doubt among Jesus’ countrymen, as to how He could speak with such wisdom and had such miraculous power, the objection was raised: “Is not this the carpenter’s son (i.e. Joseph)? Is not his mother called Mary, and his brethren (i.e. cousins) James, and Joseph, and Simon and Jude?” (Mt 13:55) The ‘Simon’ referred to here is also known as Simeon. Thus he was the nephew of St. Joseph and the Blessed Virgin and cousin to Christ Our Lord.
According to the best knowledge of the holy Scriptures from amongst the Fathers, the James and Jude mentioned in Mt 13:35 are both two of Jesus’ Apostles. “James” is St. James the Lesser and “Jude” is St. Jude Thaddeus. The two epistles in the New Testament attributed to James and Jude are in fact their works. St. Simeon, the third of these brothers, was at least five years older than our Savior. Along with St. John the Baptist, these were some of the only relations of Jesus who had faith in Him. St. Luke also informs us that these cousins of Our Lord received the Holy Ghost on Pentecost Sunday, for he writes: “And when they were come in, they went up into an upper room, where abode Peter and John, James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James of Alpheus, and Simon Zelotes, and Jude the brother of James. All these were persevering with one mind in prayer with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren. In those days Peter rising up in the midst of the brethren, said: (now the number of persons together was about one hundred and twenty" (Acts 1:13-15). The Father’s understand this to mean that St. Simeon was also there, numbered among the ‘brethren’ of Jesus in this group of 120 disciples.
A LEADER IN THE APOSTOLIC TIMES
When St. Peter left on his missionary journeys and became bishop in Antioch, he left St. James the Lesser as Bishop of Jerusalem. He is the same James of Acts 15:13 who wrote the decrees of the Council of Jerusalem and the same who St. Paul refers to as one of the pillars of the Church in Gal 2:9. (He is not to be confused with St. James Major who was the brother of St. John the Apostle and preached in Spain and was the first apostle to be martyred – killed by Herod Agrippa in Acts 12). St. James of Alpheus led the Church in Jerusalem for twenty years, attempting to convert the Jews and worked hard to maintain relations among the early Christians and Jews. However, as the political situation grew worse with Rome and more violent rebellious Jews grew in prominence and power at Jerusalem, St. James as targeted as an obstacle to their evil ambitions. Thus, they put him to death in 62 AD with the accusation that he was a blasphemer. The first hurled him down from the heights of the Temple and then beat him to death with clubs. St. Epiphanius relates that upon the death of St. James, the surviving apostles and leading disciples met in Jerusalem to appoint a successor. They unanimously selected his younger brother, Simeon as the new bishop. Most likely, he had already been helping in the governance of the fledgling Church. (Note, St. Epiphanius is one of the great scholars and historians of the early Church. He lived from approximately 310-403 AD and was bishop of Salamis in Cyprus.)
In the year 66 AD, when both St. Peter and St. Paul, suffered martyrdom in Rome, a great rebellion broke out in Judea. It was led by zealous seditious Jews revolting against their Roman overlords. (The Jewish historian Josephus chronicles these events in detail for those interested in this important history.) The Christians in Jerusalem were warned by a special revelation to flee the city for its destruction was impending. In all likelihood, it is St. Simeon who received (or at the very least authoritatively validated) this divine revelation. Thus, St. Simeon led the Christians in an exodus out of Jerusalem to a nearby city called Pella. When Nero’s general, Vespasian, arrived in Judea to put down the rebellion and lay siege to Jerusalem, the Christians had already escaped. Following the death of Nero, Rome fell into civil war and Vespasian was eventually able to defeat his opponents and become emperor. He left his son, Titus, to complete the siege and destruction of Jerusalem – which occurred in 70 AD. The utter destruction of life in the holy city was horrific. Warring Jewish factions within Jerusalem attacked and destroyed each other’s food supplies. The hunger was so intense that some mothers boiled their children alive in order to eat them. Cannibalism was seen everywhere and once the Romans entered the city the streets ran with rivers of blood. Titus was so enraged with Jerusalem that he completely destroyed the temple and left not one stone upon another. Josephus claims more than one million Jews who were in the city died in this virulent massacre (counting all those dead at the hands of Jews or Romans), yet not one single Christian lost his life!
REBUILDING JERUSALEM
After this great destruction, St. Simeon led the Christians back to the ruined Jerusalem. They helped rebuild the city and won many converts. The Church flourished exceedingly on account of St. Simeon’s powerful preaching and countless miracles; multitudes of Jews accepted the truth of the Gospel and professed faith in Christ their Savior. A number of leading Jews from amongst Sanhedrin, Scribes and Pharisees who rejected and abhorred this growing Christianity, convened their own “council” on the coastal city of Jamnia. There they attempted to purge Judaism of Christian tendencies and even redrafted the Scriptures, excluding all those books which had not originally been written in Palestine in the Hebrew tongue. Thus, they rejected the books of the New Testament (written in Greek) as well as seven books and several parts of the Old Testament. (Protestants today use this version of the Old Testament, instead of the Septuagint version used by Jesus Christ and His Apostles). Then, just as their predecessors had conspired against Christ, so too these Jewish leaders began to plot against His cousin, St. Simeon.
BATTLING HERETICS
Yet St. Simeon had many other pressing matters to deal with. In addition to physically rebuilding Jerusalem and the Church, he was having to fight off the devastation wrought by heretics. One group called themselves the Nazareans. They were a cross between Christians and Jews. They accepted Jesus as a great prophet but believed He was a mere man with both Joseph and Mary being His natural parents. They joined all the ceremonies of the New and Old Law and observed both the Jewish Sabbath and Sunday. One of their number, Ebion, began his own offshoot by adding his own errors. He taught various superstitions regarding the angels, rejected the teachings of St. Paul, only accepted one gospel (an apocryphal ‘gospel of James’), and permitted divorce. The Ebionites even allied themselves with the gnostic arch-heretic, Cerenthus, who was the ‘arch nemesis’ of St. John the Apostle. The authority and power of St. Simeon was able to keep most of these heretics in awe. However the dissension amongst these various groups claiming Christ’s discipleship was exacerbated by their Jewish antagonists and the tension towards violence continued to escalate.
MARTYRDOM
Emperor Vespasian (69-79) and his son, Emperor Domitian (81-96), had command all to be put to death who were ‘seditious sons of the race of David.’ Once Trajan (98-117) came to power and reissued this edict, St. Simeon’s enemies seized the moment for the malevolent plot. Along with certain heretics, they accused him before Atticus, the Roman governor of Palestine, as being both a son of David and the leader of the seditious Christians. Naturally, nothing could have been further from the truth since St. Simeon had earnestly led his people in peaceableness and had been instrumental and keeping at bay the simmering violence of the warring Jewish factions. Nevertheless, under false testimony, Atticus condemned him to be crucified – and this despite the fact that he was 121 years old! For several days he first underwent various tortures designed to break him into renouncing his Christian Faith. The whole Church in Jerusalem prayed for him, and despite his frailty and age, he persevered. Such was he strengthened by the Holy Ghost that he suffered with great patience and mildness, without showing any sign of fear or irresolution. Thus he drew the admiration of many, including Atticus himself. Finally he hung upon a cross outside Jerusalem and died in the year 116 AD after governing the Church in Jerusalem for about forty-three years.
AFTERMATH
Following St. Simeon’s death, there was a deluge of execrable heresies in Jerusalem and violence erupted with the greatest of fury. It seemed as if hell had poured out legions of demons upon the nascent Church. The Romans had to put down a second Jewish revolt in 117 AD known as the Kitos War. Then an uneasy decade followed. Heresies, fueled by Jewish errors and nationalism grew so rampant that a man named Simon Bar Kohba was able to convince many that he was the long for awaited Messiah. Jews, Nazarenes, Ebionites, Gnostics and many others rallied to his cause. His revolt is known to history as the Third Jewish Revolt against Rome. It was the climax, the worst and the last. Rome laid waste to many of their cities, and utterly demolished Jerusalem. Emperor Hadrian then ruled that no Jew would ever be permitted to return to live upon its ruins. The Roman legions killed more than half a million Jews. Many more Jews were then dispersed throughout the world via the Roman slave markets. Since that time, the Jews never again had a homeland and were a dispersed people (until the 20th century…). Although the Christians did not support Bar Kohba or fight in his revolution, they were perceived as Jews by many Roman authorities and this served to increase the antagonism and persecution which would fall upon the Christians for several more centuries.
Exhortation taken from Butler’s Lives of the Saints:
“The eminent saints among the primitive disciples of Jesus Christ were entirely animated by His spirit, and being dead to the world and themselves, they appeared like angels among men. In the midst of human applause they remained perfectly humbled in the center of their own nothing. When loaded with reproached and contempt, and persecuted with all the rage that could inspire, they were raised above all these things so as to stand fearless amidst racks and executioners, inflexibly constant in their fidelity to God, before tyrants, invincible under torments, and superior to them almost as if they had been impassible. Their resolution never failed them, their fervor seemed never slackened. Such wonderful men wrought continual miracles in converting souls to God.” And we know that in the last times and in those evil days when persecution intensifies once again, yet more fiercely than ever, we will once again have saints to equal and surpass the witness of these glorious martyrs. “We bear the name of Christians, but are full of the spirit of worldlings, and our actions are infected with its poison. We secretly seek ourselves, even when we flatter ourselves that God is our only aim, and whilst we undertake to convert the world, we suffer it to pervert us. When shall we begin to study to crucify our passions and die to ourselves, that we may lay a solid foundation of virtue and establish its reign in our hearts?”