Saint Jude Thaddeus

The Gospels name two men called Judas among the Twelve, and the Church has long taken care to tell them apart. The betrayer is Judas Iscariot. The other, called Judas of James in the Gospel of Luke and in the Acts of the Apostles, is generally identified with Thaddeus, so that the lists of the Twelve give him as either Judas or Thaddeus. His Hebrew name is Judah, a common one among Jews of the time, and English translators are thought to have shortened it to Jude to set him apart from the betrayer.

The Gospel of John gives him his one moment of speech. At the Last Supper Judas, not the Iscariot, asks Jesus how it is that he will show himself to the disciples and not to the world. Jesus answers that anyone who loves him will keep his word, that the Father will love that person, and that he and the Father will come and make their home with him.

Pious tradition makes Jude a cousin of Jesus and a brother of the apostle James the Less, and some identify him with the Jude who wrote the New Testament letter that bears that name and whose author calls himself the brother of James. The identification is disputed, and the New Testament says little about his life. Later traditions say he preached beyond Palestine and died a martyr, but the details vary and cannot be confirmed. Shrines that claim his relics lie in places as far apart as Iran, Rome, Reims, and Toulouse.

The Armenian Apostolic Church honors Thaddeus, together with Bartholomew, as its patron saints, and a monastery in northwestern Iran bears his name. In the Catholic Church he is invoked in desperate cases and lost causes, and his feast on 28 October is shared with Simon, called the Zealot.

Saint Jude Thaddeus, pray for us.