HistoricalChristian.Faith

Thaddaeus / Jude

Alone among the Twelve, this apostle cannot be securely named. He stands tenth in every list, in the third group of four — but Matthew and Mark call him “Thaddaeus” (some manuscripts “Lebbaeus”), while Luke and Acts, in the same place, call him “Judas of James,” and John lets a “Judas, not Iscariot” ask a single question at the Last Supper. The church long ago harmonized these into one apostle of several names, and then reached further and identified him with Jude the author of the Epistle of Jude — though that Jude names himself “brother of James” and is usually reckoned a brother of the Lord, one of the “brethren” the Gospels keep apart from the Twelve. Around this silent, many-named figure two great legends grew: the tale of King Abgar of Edessa, healed and converted by a Thaddaeus; and the medieval story of a martyrdom with Simon the Zealot in Persia, which gave the two apostles their joint October feast. This page is less a life of the apostle than a history of what was remembered and claimed about him, set out earliest source first: the tangle of names in the New Testament, Eusebius and the apocryphal letters of Abgar, Jerome’s harmonizing of the names, the apostle-lists and the Golden Legend, and the modern scholarship that pulls the names apart again. This is a biographical tradition-timeline: its “witnesses” are the datable sources that report on him, and the contested questions — is he one apostle or several? did he write the epistle? did he found Edessa? — are weighed on their own argument pages below rather than settled by assertion. For the shared ladder of sources and how far to trust each rung, see the apostles hub.

Related doctrines: The apostles — see also the apostles (overview) · Simon Peter · Andrew · James, son of Zebedee · John, son of Zebedee · Philip · Bartholomew · Thomas · Matthew · James, son of Alphaeus · Simon the Zealot · Judas Iscariot · Matthias · Paul

Timeline

The New Testament (c. 30–90)

The New Testament gives this apostle a fixed place and an unfixed name. In the third group of four he stands tenth — and where Matthew and Mark write “Thaddaeus” (the Received Text of Matthew “Lebbaeus, whose surname was Thaddaeus”), Luke and Acts write “Judas of James.” John, without listing the Twelve, names a “Judas, not Iscariot” among them, giving this apostle the one saying the Gospels record from his lips. Of his mission, his labours, or his death the New Testament says nothing at all. Distinct from him in its own telling is Jude the author of the short epistle, who calls himself “brother of James” — naming him with the “brethren of the Lord” (James, Joses, Simon, and Judas) whom the Gospels set apart from, and among the unbelievers before, the resurrection. Whether the several names are one apostle, and whether that apostle also wrote the epistle, are the two knots that everything after tries to untie.¹

Eusebius and the letters of Abgar (c. 325)

The earliest connected story attached to a “Thaddaeus” is the legend of King Abgar of Edessa, which Eusebius gives in full, claiming to translate the correspondence of Abgar and Jesus from the royal archives. Yet his Thaddaeus is not one of the Twelve: Eusebius twice calls him “one of the seventy,” sent to Edessa by the apostle Thomas — “Thomas, one of the twelve apostles… sent Thaddeus, who was also numbered among the seventy disciples of Christ, to Edessa.” The Syriac source behind the tale, the Doctrine of Addai, names the missionary “Addai” and likewise reckons him one of the seventy-two. So the very first “life of Thaddaeus” belongs, on its own telling, to a lesser figure of the same name — and the letters at its heart were judged forgeries already in antiquity. Whether the apostle and this Addai are the same man is weighed below.²

Jerome harmonizes the names (c. 398)

What the New Testament left as a tangle, Jerome tied into a single knot. Commenting on the apostle-list of Matthew, he took Thaddaeus, Lebbaeus, and Luke’s “Judas of James” to be one man — “he is called Judas son of James by the evangelist Luke, and elsewhere is named Lebbaeus… one must believe he had three names” — and, elsewhere, folded in Jude the Lord’s brother and the epistle-writer as well, so that a single Judas carried the apostolate, the kinship to Jesus, and the canonical letter. The first of these harmonizations (that the list-names denote one apostle) is a sound instinct; the second (that this apostle is the Lord’s brother and wrote the epistle) revives the same cousin-machinery weighed on the perpetual-virginity timeline and does not hold. Both are separated and weighed below.³

The apostle-lists and the Golden Legend (uncertain date; c. 1260)

Where the New Testament gives no mission and no death, the late catalogues supply both — and pair Jude with Simon the Zealot. The apostle-lists scatter his labours across Mesopotamia, Persia, and Armenia and cannot agree; the Edessene strand collapses him into Addai of the seventy. Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend (c. 1260) gives the fullest form, sending Simon and Jude together into Persia to confront the sorcerers Zaroes and Arphaxat and to die in a pagan temple, where the priests “ran upon the apostles and hewed them to death.” From this joint martyrdom the Western Church keeps their feast on 28 October, and Western art gave Jude a club and Simon a saw as the emblems of their deaths. It is late legend — a millennium and more after the events — and church memory, not history.⁴

Modern scholarship

Critical study keeps the two knots apart and answers them differently. The first — that Thaddaeus, Lebbaeus, and “Judas of James” name one apostle of the Twelve — is widely accepted as the most economical reading of four parallel lists, confirmed in part by John’s independent “Judas not Iscariot,” though it remains an inference. The second — that this apostle wrote the Epistle of Jude — is generally rejected: the apostle is “Judas son of James,” while the epistle-writer is a brother of James who sets himself apart from the apostles, and so is better identified with Jude the brother of the Lord. The Abgar mission, on its own sources, belongs to Addai of the seventy, not to the apostle, and rests on documents long known to be apocryphal. Stripped of the borrowed and the legendary, the apostle Thaddaeus / Judas-of-James is left almost as blank as the Gospel lists found him: a name — several names — a fixed rank among the Twelve, and one question asked in an upper room.⁵

Arguments

Related arguments — the name and identity of Jude

Two questions of identity run through this apostle’s whole tradition, and they are best taken in order, for the first is far stronger than the second. The first stays inside the apostle-lists: are the several names one man? The second leaps outward to a canonical letter: did that man write the Epistle of Jude? Keeping them apart is the key to the whole tangle.

Are Thaddaeus, Lebbaeus, and Judas of James one and the same apostle? (assessment: plausible)

The harmonization of the list-names is a good one: the disputed name holds the identical slot in all four lists, John independently attests a second apostolic Judas “not Iscariot,” and “Lebbaeus” and “Thaddaeus” are manuscript variants of one name, not two men. It remains an inference — the lists do give different names, and no text equates them — so it is coherent and probably right without being demonstrable. Plausible — indeed the likeliest reading of the data.⁶

Did the apostle Jude write the Epistle of Jude? (assessment: weak)

The identification of the apostle with the epistle-writer takes the less-probable option at every step: the apostle’s name is most naturally “Judas son of James,” the epistle-writer calls himself “brother of James,” and that writer bids his readers remember “the words… of the apostles” as though he were not one of them. The letter belongs far better to Jude the brother of the Lord, a distinct man whom the Gospels keep apart from the Twelve. Held in the West through Jerome’s fusion, but resting on identifications the text resists. Weak.⁷

Did the apostle Thaddaeus found the church of Edessa? (the Abgar legend) (assessment: weak)

The Edessene tradition that a Thaddaeus healed King Abgar and planted the church there is early and doubly attested, but its own witnesses deny it to the apostle: Eusebius and the Syriac Doctrine of Addai alike make the missionary “Addai, one of the seventy,” sent by the apostle Thomas. The letters that dramatize it are apocryphal, and the legend was very likely seeded by a later Christian king of Edessa. That Edessa was evangelized early may well be true; that an apostle of the Twelve founded it is not what the evidence shows. Weak.⁸

Sources