Simeon of Jerusalem

The kinsman of the Lord

Everything securely known of Simeon comes from a single second-century Palestinian writer, Hegesippus, whose five books of Memoirs (Hypomnemata, c. 175–180) are lost but survive in the quotations of Eusebius of Caesarea. Hegesippus is the nearest thing the Church possesses to a local historian of the Jerusalem community, and he had his information from the Judean Christians themselves; it is he who reports, in the words Eusebius preserves, that Clopas was a brother of Joseph, and that his son Simeon was therefore cousin (ἀνεψιός) of the Saviour.

The Clopas in question is the man of John 19:25, where among the women at the Cross stands "Mary of Clopas" — on the natural reading his wife. The Byzantine tradition goes further and identifies this Clopas with the Cleopas of Luke 24:18, one of the two disciples who walked to Emmaus on the day of the Resurrection and knew the Lord in the breaking of bread; the roll of the Seventy Apostles accordingly numbers "Cleopas, brother of Joseph the Betrothed" fourth and "Simeon, son of Cleopas, bishop of Jerusalem" fifth. On this reading Simeon was the child of a household already gathered about Christ before the Passion: a father who saw the risen Lord, a mother who stood by the Cross.

Simeon himself, the synaxaria say, saw the Lord's miracles in his own mature years and believed; he is not named in the Gospels among the disciples, but he belonged to that circle of the Lord's relations — the desposynoi, "those of the Master's household," as the third-century chronographer Julius Africanus called them — who are found in Acts 1:14 gathered with the apostles and the Theotokos in the upper room, and who afterwards carried great weight in the churches of Palestine precisely because of their kinship. The Church numbers him among the Seventy whom the Lord sent out two by two (Luke 10:1), and this is the sense in which she calls him apostle.

Second bishop of Jerusalem

When James the Just was put to death by the Temple authorities — about the year 62 by the reckoning of Josephus, or on the eve of the war by the sequence Hegesippus implies — the church of Jerusalem had to be given a new head. Eusebius, drawing on Hegesippus, describes what happened with unusual concreteness: the surviving apostles and disciples of the Lord, together with those who were of His kindred according to the flesh (for most of them, he notes, were still living), came together in council and with one voice judged Simeon the son of Clopas worthy of the throne of that church. The mother church of Christendom thus passed, for a second time, into the hands of a kinsman of the Lord — a fact from which later writers drew a doctrine of the desposynoi as a kind of hereditary Christian caliphate at Jerusalem, and from which the tradition draws only the honour of the family of Joseph.

Simeon's tenure was long — the synaxaria give him about forty years, which fits an accession in the sixties and a martyrdom in 107. He is the third figure, after James and the apostles themselves, in the roll of the fifteen bishops of Jerusalem down to Hadrian whom Eusebius lists, all of them, he insists, Hebrews and of the circumcision, receiving the knowledge of Christ in purity: James, Simeon, Justus, Zacchaeus, Tobias, Benjamin, John, Matthias, Philip, Seneca, Justus, Levi, Ephres, Joseph, Judas. Simeon is second in that list, and the only one of the fifteen after James of whom any story at all survives.

The flight to Pella and the fall of the city

The years of Simeon's episcopate were the years in which the Judea of the New Testament was destroyed. Eusebius records that before the war closed upon the city, the Christians of Jerusalem departed, being commanded by an oracle given through revelation to approved men among them, and settled in a town of Peraea called Pella, beyond the Jordan in the Decapolis; and that the judgement of God then overtook the men who had risen against Christ and His apostles, blotting out that generation of the impious from among men. Epiphanius of Salamis, writing later, knows the same tradition and adds that the community afterwards returned to the ruined city.

The Church's memory places Simeon at the head of that exodus, and the chronology of a forty-year episcopate requires it: the bishop who had received the flock from James led it out of the doomed city, kept it together in exile beyond the Jordan while Titus levelled the Temple in August of the year 70, and brought it back to encamp among the ruins. Whether he was already bishop when the flight took place is, however, a real question, since Eusebius's own narrative sets his election after the capture of the city (see Disputed questions). What is not in doubt is that Simeon presided over the Jerusalem church in the generation that had to learn to be the Church without the Temple, and that the community he governed was still a Hebrew community, keeping the Law, worshipping Christ, and living in the shadow of both the synagogue and Rome.

Hegesippus adds one further note about these years that shows the internal cost of the change. So long as the sacred choir of the apostles and the generation that had heard the wisdom of God with its own ears remained, the Church, he says, continued a virgin, uncorrupted; and it was only after Simeon's own martyrdom that a certain Thebouthis, because he had not been made bishop in his place, began to corrupt her — drawing his errors, Hegesippus says, out of the seven sects that already divided the Jewish people. Simeon's long life is thus, for the earliest historian of the Church, the boundary between the age of apostolic purity and the age of the heresies.

The desposynoi and the search for the seed of David

The kinsmen of the Lord were dangerous men to be, because they were of the house of David, and Rome had learned to fear a Jewish messianic pretender. Hegesippus records two imperial inquisitions into David's line, and Simeon fell in the second.

Under Domitian (81–96) the emperor ordered the execution of all who were of David's family, and the grandsons of Jude, called the brother of the Lord according to the flesh, were informed against and brought before him. Asked whether they were of David's line, they admitted it; asked what property and money they had, they answered that between them they owned nine thousand denarii' worth of land — thirty-nine plethra — from which they paid their taxes and which they worked with their own hands, and they held out their hands to show the calluses of labour. Asked concerning the Christ and His kingdom, of what sort it was and when and where it would appear, they answered that it was not of this world nor earthly, but heavenly and angelic, and that it would come at the end of the age, when Christ should come in glory to judge the living and the dead and to render to each according to his works. At this Domitian despised them as simpletons, dismissed them, and by decree stopped the persecution against the Church. The two came home and, Hegesippus says, ruled churches as being at once witnesses and of the Lord's family, and lived on in peace until the reign of Trajan.

This is one of the most extraordinary scenes surviving from the sub-apostolic Church: the emperor of Rome interrogating two Galilean peasant-farmers about the eschatology of the Kingdom, and letting them go. It is also the immediate background of Simeon's own end, for it shows both what the Romans were looking for and how the desposynoi stood in the Palestinian churches at the turn of the century.

Martyrdom under Trajan

In the reign of Trajan (98–117) certain of the heretics — Hegesippus's word, and he means the Jewish-Christian and Jewish sectaries whose rise he has just described — laid information against Simeon before Atticus, the consularis (ὑπατικός) charged with Judea. The accusation was twofold and shrewdly framed to make him a political danger and a religious offender at once: that he was of the family of David, and that he was a Christian. Hegesippus adds, with grim satisfaction, that his accusers were themselves hunted down for the same crime of Davidic descent, being of the royal tribe of Judah.

Simeon was tortured for many days, and neither age nor pain would move him; the proconsul and his attendants were astonished, Hegesippus says, that a man of one hundred and twenty years could endure so much. He was condemned at last to be crucified, and so he died — the kinsman of the Lord perfected in the Lord's own death. Eusebius's Chronicle places the martyrdom in the tenth year of Trajan, that is AD 107, and this is the date the Byzantine calendar has kept.

The Church has always felt the fitness of the manner of his death, and her hymns say little else about it. The synaxarion couplet for the day plays on the double sense of the Greek: Ἀδελφὰ πάσχεις, Συμεών, τῷ Κυρίῳ, / Ξύλῳ κρεμασθείς, ὡς ἀδελφὸς Κυρίου — "Thou sufferest, Simeon, in brotherly wise with the Lord, hanged upon the tree as the Lord's own brother"; and the kontakion says simply that, having led his flock well to the heavenly fold, "thou wast crucified for Christ, imitating His divine Passion."

Veneration and later memory

Simeon's cult is old and universal in the East, but it never acquired a body of legend: what the synaxaria have is what Hegesippus gave, condensed. The Greek Menaion heads the day "Memory of the holy hieromartyr Simeon, bishop of Jerusalem, kinsman of the Lord" (Μνήμη τοῦ Ἁγίου Ἱερομάρτυρος Συμεών, Ἐπισκόπου Ἱεροσολύμων, συγγενοῦς τοῦ Κυρίου) and appoints a full office with a canon in Tone 4. In the Slavonic tradition, followed by the OCA, he is styled "Apostle of the Seventy and hieromartyr Simeon of Jerusalem, kinsman of the Lord." He has no relics widely venerated and no great shrine; his monument is the episcopal list of Jerusalem, in which he stands second, and the Church's memory of a bishop who kept the faith of the mother city intact across the ruin of the Temple and into the second century.

For the Antiochian tradition Simeon has a particular interest, because his episcopate is exactly contemporary with the earliest generations of the see of Antioch — his death in 107 falls in the same years as the martyrdom of Ignatius the God-bearer, third bishop of Antioch, and the two hierarchs together mark the passage of the Syrian and Palestinian churches out of the apostolic age.