Have you ever noticed something strange about names in the gospels?
When we encounter a new character, we are often given not one name but two: a certain Simon is ‘Simon Peter’, Mary is ‘Mary Magdalene’, and Judas is ‘Judas Iscariot.’ At first glance, these look just like surnames. But ancient Jews did not use hereditary surnames in the way we do today. So why do we find two names, rather than one?
Scholars refer to this practice as disambiguation, for a second name or appellation serves to distinguish two figures with the same name. Many of the figures in the gospels had common Jewish names in antiquity – there were many Marys, many Johns, many Judases – and a second name helped to identify who they were.1
Most commonly, the name of a father (or a ‘patronym’) would serve this purpose. So we are told that James and John are the ‘Sons of Zebedee’, and Bartimaeus is the ‘Son of Timaeus’. Another common way to disambiguate was by hometown: we might recall ‘Mary of Bethany’, ‘Simon of Cyrene’, or even ‘Jesus the Nazarene.’
Yet there is a further origin for second names – namely, the habit of giving someone a nickname or an epithet. We know that nicknames and epithets were common in the ancient world. Take for example – Plato. There were ancient debates over how Plato acquired his name, but the word Platōn means ‘broad’, so some supposed that it was because of his broad forehead – or perhaps his gymnastic physique!2
What strikes me, however, is just how often Jesus’ disciples were known by nicknames. And at least in some of these instances, these were nicknames that Jesus is said to have given them. So we have Simon ‘the Rock’ and ‘the Sons of Thunder’. But we also have James ‘the less’, Simon ‘the Zealot’, and perhaps even ‘Mary the Tower’.
In this piece, I give a whistle-stop tour of the disciples’ nicknames. I look at what they mean, how scholars assess them, and what they disclose about Jesus and his disciples. As we will come to see, the nicknames of the disciples are not mere trivia. Quite the opposite: they may take us all the way back to the origins of the Jesus movement.
Simon the ‘Rock’
First on the list is Simon ‘the Rock’. When we read the gospels, we tend to read this as Simon Peter. But this is not how any ancient Greek listener would have heard it. Peter was not a name in the ancient world! It was just a Greek word for ‘rock’. So no one ever bumped into a ‘Peter’ on the street (unless were stubbing their foot on a stone).
Some scholars have tried to find a clever literary meaning in this nickname for Peter. For example, in her work on Mark’s gospel, Mary Ann Tolbert suggests that Simon’s nickname connects to the parable of the sower, in which the seed that does not grow up has fallen on ‘rocky’ ground. In Mark, Peter is a fickle character who ends up abandoning Christ – and thus he becomes the personification of the ‘rocky’ ground.3