SIMEON, Saint. - "A righteous and devout man, who was awaiting the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him" (Lk. 2:25). He had been promised that he would not die before seeing "the Christ of the Lord." He recognized him in the child Jesus presented at the Temple, uttered the Nunc dimittis (v.), and foretold his destiny (Lk. 2:25-35).
According to the apocryphal Protoevangelium of James (ch. 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 be raised by Jesus. But from the context of St. Luke it does not appear that S. was a priest. According to Pseudo-Matthew (15:2), S. would have been 112 years old when he received the child Jesus "on his pallium"; according to the Laurentian codex of this apocryphon, the old man, who could scarcely stand, 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, with Wettstein, Zahn, and Plummer, identify S. with the rabban S., son of Hillel and father of Gamaliel I (cf. Acts 5:34). Since, however, this rabban was still alive in A.D. 13, whereas the S. of Lk. 2 seems to have died shortly after the presentation of Jesus at the Temple, the identification is highly questionable. H. L. Strack and P. Billerbeck (Komm., II, Munich 1924, p. 124) rule out this and other identifications. In the Roman Martyrology St. S. is commemorated on Oct. 8, in the Byzantine liturgy on Feb. 13. His relics would have been transported in the 6th century to Constantinople and in 1243 to Zara, where they are venerated in a precious silver reliquary (cf. Illustrazione vatic., 1932, pp. 107-10).
Bibliography3 works
Pietro De Ambroggi