SIMEONE, saint. — “A just and devout man, who awaited the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him” (Lk. 2:25). He had received the promise that he would not die before seeing “the Lord’s Christ.” He recognized him in the child Jesus presented in the Temple, Nunc dimittis (v.), and foretold his destiny (Lk. 2:25–35).
According to the apocryphal Protoevangelium of James (chap. 24), he would have been a priest; indeed, according to the legendary Gospel of Nicodemus, he would have been sacerdos magnus, the father of Carinus and Leucius, who would later have been raised from the dead by Jesus. But from the context of St. Luke it does not appear that S. was a priest. According to the Pseudo-Matthew (15:2), S. would have been 112 years old when he received the child Jesus “upon his pallium”; according to the Laurentian manuscript of this apocryphal work, the old man, who could barely stand upright, as soon as he received the Child “ran to the altar of the Temple of the Lord,” because “senex puerum portabat, puer autem senem regebat.” Some, following Wettstein, Zahn, and Plummer, identify S. with rabbân S., son of Hillèl and father of Gamaliel I (cf. Acts 5:34). Since, however, this rabbân was still alive in A.D. 13, whereas the S. of Lk. 2 seems to have died shortly after the presentation of Jesus in the Temple, the identification is highly debatable. H. L. Strack and P. Billerbeck (Komm., II, Munich 1924, p. 124) reject this and other identifications. In the Roman Martyrology St. S. is commemorated on 8 October; in the Byzantine liturgy, on 13 February. His relics are said to have been transported in the sixth century to Constantinople and in 1243 to Zara, where they are venerated in a precious silver reliquary (cf. Illustrazione vatic., 1932, pp. 107–10).