[Master Answer Logo]
Question

What are the names of the twelve apostles?

Answer

The individual that the Gospel of John names as Nathanael is traditionally identified as the same person that the Synoptic Gospels call Bartholomew, and most would agree that the sons of Zebedee is likely to be a reference to James the Great and John, while Judas (not Iscariot) probably refers to Thaddaeus, also known as St. Jude. Noticeably missing from the Gospel of John are James the Less, Matthew, and Simon the Canaanite/Zealot. James the Just was, according to the Book of Acts, the leader of the Jerusalem church, and Matthew is noticeably the most Jewish of the Gospels, and it may be the case that the author of John deliberately left out these two figures for a motive opposed to Jewish Christianity. By the second century, the presence of two Simons in the list of the Synoptic Gospels allowed a case to be made for Simon Magus being the other of the Simons, and hence one of the twelve apostles; and it may have been for this reason that John left the other Simon out. The second Simon may also have been Simeon of Jerusalem, the second leader of the Jerusalem church, after James.

— Source: Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org)