Lost Causes and the Authority of Scripture
Lost Causes and the Authority of Scripture
A Sermon by Kenneth Padley for the Eve of the Feast of Simon and Jude
Reading: John 14.15-26
Saint Jude, who shares tomorrow’s festival with Saint Simon, is often called the patron saint of lost causes. He has been sleighted in this way because his parents had the misfortune to give him the same first name as Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus. From the early Christian decades, this association with the betrayer has done much to diminish the reputation of the Jude whom we celebrate tonight.
Indeed, Jude’s reputation and memory have been so etiolated that anyone tasked with preaching on his festival might need a patron of lost causes! Virtually nothing can be asserted with any certainty, either about him or St Simon.
- The only words attributed to either are those which we heard this evening from Jude to Jesus in John 14.22, ‘Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?’
- The disciple listed as Jude in Luke and John’s gospels might be the same as the figure whom Mark and Matthew call Thaddaeus – but that hardly helps because our knowledge of Thaddaeus extends no further than his name.
- We do know that an early Christian called Jude wrote a short New Testament letter. However, it is unclear whether Jude the epistoler is the same as Jude the disciple because, until tarnished by the betrayer, Judas was a popular name in Palestine – of which more shortly.
- For his part, tonight’s other saint – Simon, is described as a ‘Canaanean’ in Mark and Matthew and as a ‘Zealot’ by Luke and John. Both these epithets hint that Simon was a man of feisty – maybe even revolutionary – politics, in opposition to the Roman occupiers of Palestine. But we know nothing of how these opinions influenced Simon’s behaviour. Somehow Jesus managed to hold him within a ragbag band of followers alongside at least one former collaborator, Matthew the tax collector.
- Finally, what has been written about the traditional pairing of Simon with Jude is later legend. An apocryphal Passion imagines the two men sharing a missionary journey into Persia where they so enraged the locals that Simon was hacked to death with a sword and Jude battered with a club. These mythical instruments of martyrdom often appear in iconographical representations of the two saints.
Despite this paucity of information about Simon and Jude, it was not a patron saint of lost causes who came to my aid as I sat down to write this sermon, rather a New Testament scholar called Richard Bauckham. Among the wide-ranging research which Bauckham has undertaken across a fifty-year career, some of his most provocative writing has been about the reliability of the gospel narratives as eyewitness testimony.[1] One aspect of this work has involved a study of Biblical names, drawing on earlier research by an Israeli-born historian and lexicographer called Tal Ilan.
Tal Ilan’s Lexicon of Jewish Names identifies hundreds of Jews from the time of Jesus and the centuries either side, not only from literary sources like the Bible but also from legal records and burial inscriptions. Sometimes a name is all that survives about these people, but there are enough of them for their popularity to be ranked and studied. And Tal Ilan’s list of Palestinian names can then be compared with names which occur in the New Testament. Comparing the two, Bauckham observes a very high degree of correspondence. Four out of the top five male names in Tal Ilan’s list correspond in exactly the same ranking with the New Testament: Simon, Joseph, Judas and John.
From this hitherto unavailable empirical comparison, Bauckham concludes that the names given in the New Testament to the Jesus’ immediate followers are likely to reflect actual historical figures. These names were not – cannot – have been made up retrospectively because the people who wrote the gospels lived beyond Palestine and would have chosen different names had they been inventing the characters of their stories, names that were better known in their time and place. Bauckham concludes (quote) that ‘all the evidence indicates the general authenticity of the personal names in the Gospels’.[2]
Why does this matter? Well, for Bauckham, it reinforces a wider point about the reliability of the gospels. Bauckham’s contention, based on several strands of evidence, is that the gospels reflect the testimony of eyewitnesses. To this end, he argues that the lists of the twelve disciples in Matthew, Mark, Luke and Acts, do not make sense if they are literary creations of fictional characters – precisely because Simon and Jude plus four or five others remain entirely in the shadows. Rather, Bauckham thinks that these men were recorded as no more than names because they were known within the first Christian communities. For Bauckham, the lists of disciples indicate the post-history of Jesus in the life of the Church and that the twelve disciples were the body which formulated and authorised the core collection of traditions about Jesus.[3] In other words – and counter-intuitively – the very anonymity of Simon and Jude points to the authenticity of their existence and witness.
All this is providentially timely because many churches keep this last Sunday in October as Bible Sunday, a marker in the calendar for giving thanks to God for the revelation of Holy Scripture as containing all things necessary to salvation.[4]
On the one hand, the Bible is just another ancient book – or rather a library of ancient books, 39 in Hebrew and 27 in Greek, written across the course of a thousand years. On the other hand, Christians know that the Bible is a document like no other – and indeed that it is one book because it tells one story, the story of God who makes the world, saves the world and loves the world.
Just so, on the one hand, the Bible is mere words on a page – and a rather dusty page at that. On the other hand, Christians know that these words speak of the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, and that this Word is living still, dwelling within his followers, inspiring hearts and minds in every age. Crucial to this process of ongoing inspiration is the Holy Spirit. As we heard in tonight’s second reading, the Spirit like an Advocate will abide within God’s people, leading them into truth and making Jesus known.
This is precisely the truth which the almost-invisible Simon and Jude encountered and attested in the first century and to which the Church is successor in every subsequent age. John 14.22: ‘Judas (not Iscariot) said to Jesus, “Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?”’ Answer, through the Holy Spirit, working in you and me when we read our Bibles in faith, just as he did in Simon and Jude when they walked and talked with the living Lord. Amen.
[1] Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2nd edn., 2017).
[2] Eyewitnesses, 84.
[3] Eyewitnesses, 96-97.
[4] Article VI.