Jude Thaddaeus

Life and Ministry

Jude, distinguished by Luke and John as Judas not Iscariot, is called Thaddaeus by Matthew and Mark and named Judas son of James in Luke and Acts. The Fourth Gospel preserves his single recorded question to Jesus at the Last Supper: Lord, what then has happened that you will manifest yourself to us and not to the world? The brief Epistle of Jude at the close of the New Testament is, by the earliest reading, his — addressed to the church at large and warning of intruding teachers of license. He is sent in early Syriac tradition (in the Doctrine of Addai and Eusebius's report of the same) to king Abgar V of Edessa, where he heals the king and plants the church that would become the great Syrian center of the Edessene tradition. His mission continued into the eastern reaches of Mesopotamia and Persia.

Circumstances of Death

The Western tradition, in the Passion of Simon and Jude, pairs his death with Simon's at Suanir in Persia, beaten to death with a club (the Latin tradition) or killed by an axe (the iconographic tradition). The Eastern tradition keeps him in Mesopotamia and Armenia, where he is venerated, with Bartholomew, as a founding apostle of the Armenian church. The Armenian Monastery of Saint Thaddeus (Qara Kelisa) in northwestern Iran is built over the traditional site of his martyrdom and has been a pilgrimage center since at least the seventh century. As with Simon, the consensus is that he died a martyr's death in the eastern mission; the mode is traditional.

Legacy

Jude is the apostle of the impossible — the saint to whom the desperate pray in extremity, because his name (sharing a syllable with the traitor's) was set aside in popular devotion until only those at the end of resource would invoke him. The reversal is fitting: the apostle who first carried the gospel to a king (Abgar) became the patron of the last and least. His witness is that the kingdom is for those who have nowhere left to go.