James the Brother of the Lord

The Brother of the Lord

James enters the Gospels among the "brethren of the Lord." When Jesus taught in the synagogue of Nazareth, the townsfolk asked in offence, "Is not this the carpenter's son? … and his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas?" (Matthew 13:55; cf. Mark 6:3, which names the same four and speaks of sisters). John records that "neither did his brethren believe in him" (John 7:5) during the public ministry — a hard saying the tradition reads as belonging to the years before the Resurrection. That James came to faith is certain: Paul's list of the resurrection appearances includes, after Peter and the Twelve, that "he was seen of James" (1 Corinthians 15:7), and by the opening of Acts the brethren of the Lord are gathered with the apostles and the Theotokos in the upper room, awaiting the Spirit (Acts 1:14).

The exact sense of "brother" is one of the oldest questions of Christian prosopography, because it bears directly on the perpetual virginity of the Mother of God. Three constructions have been defended since antiquity, and the honesty of the record requires all three (see Disputed questions for the full analysis). The Orthodox answer — the Epiphanian view, held by the Christian East and enshrined in her calendar and hymns — is that James and the other "brethren" were children of Joseph the Betrothed by a wife who died before he was espoused to the Virgin; thus James was Joseph's son and the Lord's elder step-brother, reared in the same household, without any child being born of Mary but Christ. The Byzantine title Adelphotheos, "Brother of God," carries exactly this: brother not by nature of the Godhead, nor son of the Virgin, but of the Lord's earthly household through Joseph.

The tradition of Hegesippus, an early second-century Palestinian Christian whose memoirs Eusebius preserved, adds that James was "holy from his mother's womb": a Nazirite (Numbers 6) who drank no wine nor strong drink, ate no flesh, let no razor touch his head, took no oil and no baths, and wore linen alone. This ascetic sanctity, remembered from the first, is why the Church keeps him under the epithet "the Just" (ὁ Δίκαιος) and why the same Hegesippus called him also Oblias, interpreted "bulwark of the people."

First Bishop of Jerusalem

When the apostles scattered to their missions, James remained in the holy city as the settled head of its church. Clement of Alexandria (through Eusebius) records that "Peter, James and John, after the Ascension of the Saviour, though they had been preferred by the Lord, did not contend for the honour, but chose James the Just bishop of Jerusalem" — the son of Zebedee, Peter, and John yielding the local primacy to the Lord's brother. From that seat, for roughly thirty years, James governed the mother church, and to it Peter, delivered from prison, sent word: "Go shew these things unto James, and to the brethren" (Acts 12:17).

His authority is written across the record. When Paul went up to Jerusalem three years after his conversion, "other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord's brother" (Galatians 1:19). At the Apostolic Council (Acts 15), after Peter and Barnabas and Paul had spoken to the question whether Gentile converts must be circumcised, it was James who summed up and gave the decisive judgment — "Wherefore my sentence is, that we trouble not them which from among the Gentiles are turned to God" — grounding it in the prophet Amos and framing the apostolic decree that went out to the churches (Acts 15:13–29). Paul names him first of the three — "James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars" — as those who gave him and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship (Galatians 2:9); and it was the coming of "certain from James" to Antioch that occasioned Peter's withdrawal from the Gentile tables and Paul's rebuke of him (Galatians 2:12), a scene that shows how weightily the name of James fell even at a distance. On Paul's last visit to Jerusalem, "Paul went in with us unto James; and all the elders were present" (Acts 21:18), and it was James and the elders who counselled Paul to join in the Nazirite vow of four men and pay their charges, to show that he too "walkest orderly, and keepest the law" (Acts 21:20–24) — a portrait of James as the guarantor of a Jewish-Christian church still at home in the Temple.

Martyrdom

Two independent first- and second-century witnesses record the death of James, and the Church holds both.

Josephus, the Jewish historian, is the earliest and gives the plain fact. When the procurator Festus died in office (c. 62) and his successor Albinus had not yet reached Judea, the newly appointed high priest Ananus (Annas the Younger, a Sadducee) seized the interval: "he assembled the sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others … and delivered them to be stoned" (Antiquities 20.200). The act was judged illegal — a high priest could not convene the council or inflict death without the Roman governor — and the more equitable citizens complained to Agrippa and to Albinus, for which Ananus was deposed after three months. This notice, undisputed as to the fact, fixes James's martyrdom to about the year 62 and sets it in the lawless gap between two governors.

Hegesippus, in the memoirs preserved by Eusebius, tells the fuller and more dramatic account the Church has loved. The scribes and Pharisees, alarmed that "the Just" was drawing many to faith in Jesus as the Christ, set him at Passover on the pterygion — the pinnacle or parapet — of the Temple and bade him, before the assembled multitude, turn the people away from Jesus. Instead James cried out that Christ is the Son of Man, seated at the right hand of the Great Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven. Enraged, they threw him down from the height; he was not killed by the fall, but rose to his knees and prayed, "Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do," while they stoned him; and at the last a fuller — a launderer of cloth — struck him on the head with the club with which he beat out garments, and so he died. He was buried on the spot, by the Temple, and Hegesippus adds that "immediately Vespasian besieged them," reading the fall of Jerusalem as the sequel to the murder of the righteous man — as Origen and Eusebius report Josephus himself to have written, in a passage now judged a Christian interpolation.

The Church's iconography and hymnody hold the two accounts together: the casting-down from the Temple, the prayer for his murderers, and the club of the fuller. Hegesippus rounds the memory with the detail that gave James his most tender epithet: from his ceaseless kneeling in intercession for the people his knees had grown "hard like a camel's."

Relics and succession

James was buried where he fell, beside the Temple; Eusebius notes that his episcopal throne (cathedra) was still preserved and venerated at Jerusalem in the fourth century, a tangible link to the apostolic church. He was succeeded as second bishop of Jerusalem by Symeon the son of Clopas (April 27), a kinsman of the Lord, so that the leadership of the mother church passed within the family of Joseph. Portions of relics venerated as James's were dispersed in later centuries; in 1853 the Patriarch Hierotheos of Alexandria sent a part to Moscow, and other fragments are kept in Jerusalem and on the Holy Mountain.

The Liturgy of Saint James

To James, as first bishop and liturgist of the church of Jerusalem, the tradition ascribes the Divine Liturgy of Saint James — the oldest complete eucharistic rite to survive, and the parent from which the classical Byzantine liturgies descend. In its received form it carries later strata, but its core preserves the shape of the Jerusalem eucharist of the fourth century and earlier, described already by Cyril of Jerusalem in his Mystagogical Catecheses; the anaphora of St James is among the fullest and most ancient in Christendom, and its Cherubic Hymn — "Let all mortal flesh keep silence" (Σιγησάτω πᾶσα σὰρξ βροτεία) — has passed, through the Liturgy of the Presanctified and Western use, into the wider Church's worship. The Liturgies of St Basil the Great and St John Chrysostom, which supplanted it in ordinary Byzantine use, are in structure its heirs. The rite fell into near-disuse but was never wholly lost; it survived on the island of Zakynthos and in the Jerusalem Patriarchate, and was widely revived in the twentieth century. It is served pre-eminently on James's own feast, October 23, and in some places on the Sunday after the Nativity, keeping alive the memory of the apostle who first offered it. (The repository has as yet no dedicated liturgical entry to cross-reference; see Feast and commemoration.)

The Epistle of James

The New Testament preserves under his name the Epistle of James, the first of the "catholic" (general) epistles, addressed "to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad." It is a work of Christian wisdom in the key of the Old Testament and the Sermon on the Mount: on the testing of faith, the bridling of the tongue, the sin of partiality to the rich, and — most famously — that "faith without works is dead" (James 2:20, 26), the text long set against a one-sided reading of Paul and much debated at the Reformation. Its counsel is homely and unforgettable: "Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath" (1:19); "Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only" (1:22); and its charge to "call for the elders of the church" to anoint the sick with oil in the name of the Lord (5:14–15) is a scriptural root of the mystery of Holy Unction. The epistle's authorship was debated in the early Church — Eusebius lists it among the antilegomena, the "spoken-against" books whose canonicity was not everywhere secure, and modern scholarship divides between those who defend it as the work of James himself (or of a secretary writing his mind) and those who take it as a later composition issued under his authority; the Church received it as canonical and apostolic.

The Protevangelium of James

Distinct from the canonical epistle, and expressly pseudepigraphal, is the so-called Protoevangelium of James (the Protevangelion, or "Book of James") — a mid-second-century infancy narrative that falsely presents itself as written by James, "the son of Joseph." It is not received as scripture and its attribution to the apostle is a literary fiction of its unknown author. Yet it is of great importance for Orthodox tradition and liturgy: it is the principal source of the received accounts of the Theotokos's parents Joachim and Anna, of her miraculous birth and Entry into the Temple, and of the espousal of the aged widower Joseph — and it is the earliest witness to the Epiphanian view of the brethren, making them Joseph's sons by a first marriage. The Church has drawn freely on its pious traditions for the feasts of the Mother of God while never treating it as canonical, and it is recorded here as what it is: an ancient and influential but pseudonymous work.