James the Son of Zebedee

Origins and family

James was a Galilean fisherman, the son of Zebedee and of Salome. His father's boat worked the Sea of Galilee (also called Tiberias, and Gennesaret) in partnership with Simon Peter and his brother Andrew (Luke 5:10); St Mark's notice that Zebedee was left in the boat "with the hired servants" (Mark 1:20) suggests a household of some substance rather than destitution, and the Fourth Gospel's remark that one disciple was "known unto the high priest" (John 18:15) has long been read as pointing to connections of the same family in Jerusalem.

His mother is named Salome in Mark 15:40 and identified in Matthew as "the mother of Zebedee's children" (Matt 27:56); she followed Christ, ministered to Him of her substance, stood by the Cross, and came with spices to the tomb, and she is honoured among the myrrhbearing women. Orthodox tradition, following the ancient reading that makes Salome a daughter of Joseph the Betrothed by his first marriage, therefore reckons James and John as kinsmen of the Lord according to the flesh — a genealogy that also helps to explain Salome's boldness in asking a place for her sons in the Kingdom.

James is always named before John in the Gospel lists of the Twelve (Matt 10:2; Mark 3:17; Luke 6:14; Acts 1:13), which is the reason he is called in the West "James the Greater" or "the Elder" — not for any pre-eminence of sanctity but because he was the elder brother, and because the naming had to distinguish him from James the son of Alphaeus, who stands ninth in the same lists.

The calling by the sea

The Synoptics place his call at the very beginning of the Lord's Galilean ministry. Walking by the sea, Christ had already called Peter and Andrew; "and going on from thence, he saw other two brethren, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in a ship with Zebedee their father, mending their nets; and he called them. And they immediately left the ship and their father, and followed him" (Matt 4:21–22). St Luke sets the same event after the miraculous draught of fishes, when the nets broke and the boats began to sink, and Peter's partners — "James and John, the sons of Zebedee" — were struck with the same amazement and left all (Luke 5:8–11). The hymnography of April 30 fastens on precisely this: that James "passed by the love of his kindred" and followed straightway, and that the reward of that abandonment was to see the uncreated light on Tabor.

Among the inner three

Of the Twelve, three are repeatedly separated out — Peter, James and John — and James is of that number at each of the three decisive openings of the Lord's glory and of His passion:

• at the raising of the daughter of Jairus, when Christ "suffered no man to follow him, save Peter, and James, and John the brother of James" (Mark 5:37) into the house of mourning, and gave the child back alive;
• at the Transfiguration, when He "taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart" (Matt 17:1), and was changed before them, and they heard the Father's voice out of the cloud;
• in Gethsemane, when He took "Peter and the two sons of Zebedee" a stone's cast from the rest, and began to be sorrowful, and asked them to watch with Him (Matt 26:37).

With Peter, John and Andrew he also asked the question on the Mount of Olives that drew forth the Lord's discourse on the last things (Mark 13:3), and he is among the seven at the Sea of Tiberias to whom the risen Christ appeared at the third showing, when the net was filled and the coals were laid on the shore (John 21:2). After the Ascension he is in the upper room at Jerusalem, named third in the roll of Acts 1:13, and he received the Spirit in tongues of fire at Pentecost.

"Sons of thunder"

St Mark alone preserves the surname: "James the son of Zebedee, and John the brother of James; and he surnamed them Boanerges, which is, The sons of thunder" (Mark 3:17). The word is a Greek transcription of a Semitic phrase (commonly explained from benê regesh or benê ragshâ, sons of tumult or of thunder), and the Gospels supply the temperament that earned it. When a Samaritan village would not receive the Lord on His way to Jerusalem, "his disciples James and John" said, "Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them?" — and were rebuked (Luke 9:54–55). The Fathers read the surname in two directions at once: as a rebuke of a zeal not yet tempered by the Spirit, and as a prophecy of the voice that would afterwards go out to the ends of the earth, thundering the Gospel — John in his theology of the Word, James in the swiftness of his blood.

To the same fire belongs the request for the two thrones. Matthew places it in the mouth of their mother Salome, Mark in the mouth of the brothers themselves: that they might sit on His right hand and on His left in His glory. The Lord answered, "Ye know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink of the cup that I drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" They said, "We are able." And He said, "Ye shall indeed drink of the cup that I drink of" (Mark 10:35–40; Matt 20:20–23). The Church has always read that word as fulfilled twice over, and differently: James by the martyrdom of blood, dying first of all the apostles; John by the long martyrdom of witness, exile and old age, dying last.

Preaching

The canonical record says nothing of James's labours between Pentecost and his death, a silence of perhaps a dozen years. The synaxaria fill it soberly: he preached in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and in the regions round about, and returned to Jerusalem to confess Christ openly before the rulers of the people, which is what brought him to the sword.

Two further traditions attach to this period, of unequal weight. The first is the apocryphal contest with the magician Hermogenes and his disciple Philetus, which comes from the Latin Passion of St James of the Pseudo-Abdias collection of apostolic histories: Philetus, sent to refute the apostle, was convinced by him instead; Hermogenes' demons proved powerless and were bound; the magician burned his books of magic, was baptised, and became a disciple. This episode passed from the Latin passio into several recensions of the Greek and Slavonic synaxaria and is carried in the lives printed by the modern jurisdictional calendars, but it is not attested in any early Eastern source and is best read as edifying legend. The second is the tradition of a mission to Spain, treated below.

Martyrdom under Herod Agrippa I

Acts 12 gives the fact in one sentence, without drama: "Now about that time Herod the king stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the church. And he killed James the brother of John with the sword" (Acts 12:1–2). The Herod in question is Agrippa I, grandson of Herod the Great, whom Caligula and then Claudius had made king over the whole of his grandfather's territory, and who courted the Jerusalem establishment by a display of strictness in the Law. The killing pleased the leaders of the people, and Agrippa followed it by arresting Peter during the days of unleavened bread, intending the same end — from which Peter was delivered by the angel in the night. Since Agrippa died in the summer of 44 (Acts 12:20–23; Josephus, Antiquities XIX), James's death falls within a year or two before that, and the year 44 is the date the calendars give. Execution "with the sword" means beheading, the swifter Roman penalty; James is thus both the first of the Twelve to die a martyr and the only apostle whose martyrdom is narrated in Scripture. (The protomartyr of the whole Church, Stephen, was a deacon, not one of the Twelve.)

One precious detail survives outside the New Testament. Clement of Alexandria, in the seventh book of his lost Hypotyposes, told a story that Eusebius preserved in his Church History (II.9.2–3): the man who had led James to the tribunal, hearing him bear witness, was so moved that he confessed himself a Christian on the spot, and was led away to die with him; and on the road he begged the apostle's forgiveness, and James, after a moment's silence, said, "Peace be to thee," and kissed him — and so the two were beheaded together. Eusebius introduces the account as a tradition Clement had received from his elders. Later hagiography gave the accuser the name Josiah (Josias), which the early witnesses do not supply.

Relics, Compostela, and the Spanish tradition

The Eastern tradition knows James's grave at Jerusalem, where he suffered; the Cathedral of St James in the Armenian Quarter of the Old City — the seat of the Armenian Patriarchate — is built on the traditional site of his beheading and is held to enshrine his head.

The Western story is different in kind, and is honestly to be described as a later development of the Latin West, not as part of the apostolic record:

• The earliest text to assign James a Spanish mission is the Latin Breviarium Apostolorum, a short list of the apostles and their provinces of the late sixth or seventh century, which gives him "Spain and the western places." A similar notice stands in the De ortu et obitu patrum ascribed to Isidore of Seville (†636), where it may well be an interpolation. The older apostolic lists of the East — those circulating under the names of Hippolytus and of Dorotheus — say nothing of Spain, and no Greek synaxarion of April 30 mentions it.
• The claim that his body lay in Galicia arises in the early ninth century. About 820–830, in the reign of Alfonso II of Asturias and under Bishop Theodemir of Iria Flavia, a tomb was identified at the place afterwards called Compostela and declared to be the apostle's. A church was built over it, then a greater one; Theodemir's own inscribed tombstone was recovered on the site in 1955, which confirms the ninth-century activity without confirming what was found.
• The translatio legend — that after the beheading his disciples carried the body by sea from Jaffa to Galicia in a rudderless (later, a stone) boat, and buried it after dealings with a pagan queen "Lupa" — is a growth of the ninth to twelfth centuries, gathered up with the pilgrim's guide, the miracle collection and the liturgy in the Liber Sancti Jacobi (Codex Calixtinus, c. 1140).
• Santiago Matamoros, "the Moor-slayer," the apostle on a white horse at the legendary battle of Clavijo, belongs later still: the battle is unhistorical, and its earliest document, the Privilegio de los Votos, is a twelfth-century forgery. The image served the Reconquista and has no counterpart whatever in Orthodox iconography or hymnography.

What is beyond dispute is the scale of what grew from Compostela: from the eleventh century the Camino de Santiago was, with Rome and Jerusalem, one of the three great pilgrimages of Christendom, and the scallop shell picked up on the Galician shore became the badge of the pilgrim as such. An Orthodox account can honour that piety, and honour the apostle whom it honours, while declining to convert a medieval Iberian cultus into first-century history.