Simon the Zealot or Simon the Canaanite or Simon the Canaanean was one of the most obscure among the apostles of Jesus. A few pseudepigraphical writings were connected to him, but Saint Jerome does not include him in De viris illustribus written between 392 and 393 AD.
The name Simon occurs in all of the Synoptic Gospels and the Book of Acts each time there is a list of apostles, without further details (Luke 6:14-16):
To distinguish him from Simon Peter he is called Kananaios or Kananites, depending on the manuscript (Matthew 10:4 Mark 3:18), and in the list of apostles in Luke 6:15, repeated in Acts 1:13, Zelotes, the “Zealot”. Both Kananaios and Kananites derive from the Hebrew word קנאי qanai, meaning zealous, although Jerome and others mistook the word to signify the apostle was from the town of קנה Cana, in which case his epithet would have been “Kanaios”, or even from the region of כנען Canaan. As such, the translation of the word as “the Cananite” or “the Canaanite” is traditional and without contemporary extra-canonic parallel.
Robert Eisenman has pointed out his contemporary talmudic references to Zealots as kanna’im “but not really as a group—rather as avenging priests in the Temple”. Eisenman’s broader conclusions, that the zealot element in the original apostle group was disguised and overwritten to make it support the assimilative Pauline Christianity of the Gentiles, are more controversial. John P. Meier argues that the term “Zealot” is a mistranslation and in the context of the Gospels means “zealous” or “religious” (in this case, for keeping the Law of Moses), as the Zealot movement apparently did not exist until 30 to 40 years after the events of the Gospels. However, neither Brandon nor Hengel support this view.
