Clopas

Clopas (Cleopas, Cleophas) is a figure of early Christianity whose name appears in the New Testament, in the Gospel of John: beside the Cross stood "Mary of Clopas". We have no other news of his life. Our sources give no commemoration day for him. Here we set out what is said of him and how it is interpreted.

In the New Testament

The name appears in John 19:25. He is often identified with another figure of a similar name, Cleopas, one of the two disciples who met Christ on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24). The Greek manuscripts vary in the spelling of the name, both in John and in Luke, and "Clopas" in John is rendered "Cleophas" in the KJV. In the parallel passages in Matthew 27:56 and Mark, the women by the Cross are Mary Magdalene, "Mary the mother of James and Joses" and Salome, the mother of Zebedee's sons. From these parallels commentators have identified "Mary of Clopas" with Mary the mother of James, son of Alphaeus. Alphaeus was also the name of the father of the Apostle Matthew (Mark 2:14). The Aramaic name Ḥilfai or the Hebrew Ḥalfi have been proposed by various sources; Joseph Henry Thayer argued in his lexicon that dropping the Hebrew heth, which has no equivalent in Greek, and rendering it by kappa were both possible.

Interpretations

The most common interpretation is that "of Clopas" indicates the husband of this Mary and so the father of her children; some see in "of Clopas" the father of Mary. In the Gospel of Pseudo-⁠Matthew, probably written in the seventh century, Mary of Cleophas is the daughter of Cleophas and Anna; in medieval tradition Clopas is the second husband of Saint Anne and father of Mary of Clopas. Catholic and Orthodox tradition have held that Clopas is a brother of Saint Joseph and the same person as Cleopas.

Early Christian writings

Clopas also appears in early Christian writings, in Papias and Hegesippus, of the second century, as a brother of Joseph, the husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and as father of Simeon, the second bishop of Jerusalem. Eusebius of Caesarea relates in the Church History (book III, chapter 11) that, after the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70, the Christians of that city all judged Simeon, the son of Clopas, of whom the Gospel also makes mention, worthy of the episcopal throne, a cousin, as they say, of the Saviour; Hegesippus writes that Clopas was a brother of Joseph. A few modern writers, such as James Tabor, identify "Mary of Clopas" with the mother of Jesus, holding that Clopas, a brother of Joseph, became her second husband, by the levirate law; this view is not widely accepted.