James, brother of Jesus

• 1. Introduction

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  James, the brother of Jesus, left one of the oddest physical details in all of early Christian memory. The writer Hegesippus claimed that the skin on his knees became horny, like a camel's. The cause, he said, was constant kneeling in the Temple, where James begged forgiveness for the people. Hegesippus wrote in the second century, long after the man he described was dead.

  In the New Testament, James appears only in brief glimpses. The writers who describe him disagree about almost everything else. Was he a son of Mary, a son of Joseph by an earlier marriage, or a cousin? Why did Paul travel to see him, and why did the Jerusalem church follow him? How did he die, when two early accounts give two very different endings?

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• 2. The Just One

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  Eusebius preserved a remark from Clement of Alexandria about how James earned his best-known name. The people of old, Clement said, called him the Just because of his outstanding virtue. In the same passage Clement says James was the first to be elected to the episcopal throne of the Jerusalem church. Other titles circulated too, including "James the brother of the Lord, surnamed the Just" and "James the Righteous".

  Eastern Christianity sometimes uses a bolder title, James Adelphotheos, which means James the Brother of God. The oldest surviving Christian liturgy, the Liturgy of St James, uses that epithet.

  Hegesippus wrote five books called Commentaries on the Acts of the Church. They are now lost except for quotations preserved by Eusebius. In them James is holy from his mother's womb. He drank no wine or other intoxicating liquor and ate no meat. No razor touched his head. He did not anoint himself with oil or use the bath. He wore fine linen, never wool, and he alone was permitted to enter the holy place.

  Epiphanius, in his work The Panarion, described James as a Nazirite. Writing in 374-375, Epiphanius also said that James died in virginity at the age of ninety-six.

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• 3. Pillar of Jerusalem

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  Paul tells the Galatians that after three years he went up to Jerusalem and stayed fifteen days with Cephas, his name for Peter. Of the other apostles he saw only James the Lord's brother. Fourteen years later, Paul says, he returned with Barnabas and Titus. By then James, Cephas, and John seemed to be pillars. They gave Paul and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship. Paul and his companions would go to the Gentiles, and the pillars to the circumcised. The only request was that they remember the poor.

  The Acts of the Apostles shows how James rose to that position. When Herod Agrippa persecuted the believers, Peter escaped from prison and told them to report it to James and the brethren. Then Peter went to another place. From that point James appears as the principal authority in Jerusalem.

  The church fathers disagree on how James got the job. Clement of Alexandria says Peter, James, and John did not contend for glory after the ascension and instead chose James the Just as bishop of Jerusalem. Hegesippus says only that James became head of the church after the apostles, without saying who chose him. Jerome says the apostles ordained James and that he ruled the Jerusalem church for thirty years.

  The community at Antioch was worried about whether Gentile Christians had to be circumcised to be saved. It sent Paul and Barnabas to confer with Jerusalem. At the Council of Jerusalem James spoke last, after Peter, Paul, and Barnabas. He called his statement a "decision", though the original sense is closer to "opinion". Quoting Amos 9:11-12, he sided against the requirement, as Peter had done on the strength of his own earlier revelation. James proposed that Gentile believers avoid blood, meat sacrificed to idols, and fornication. The apostles and elders agreed, and a letter carried the ruling to the other churches.

  Acts 21 shows a more awkward meeting. Paul reached Jerusalem carrying money he had raised for the faithful there, and he went in to see James with all the elders present. James insisted that Paul ritually cleanse himself at Herod's Temple. The aim was to prove his faith and to deny rumors that he taught rebellion against the Torah, a charge known as antinomianism.

  Modern historians tend to place James within Jewish Christianity. Paul stressed faith over observance of the Mosaic Law, and James is thought to have held the opposite position. Philip Schaff called him the local head of the oldest church and the leader of its most conservative wing. Scholar James D. G. Dunn proposed that Peter served as a "bridge-man" between Paul and James.

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• 4. Echoes Beyond Paul

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  The Gospel of John never mentions anyone named James. It does record Jesus's unnamed brothers traveling with him and his mother to Capernaum after the wedding at Cana. Later it states flatly that his own brothers did not believe in him.

  Mark and Matthew are more specific. Their townspeople ask, "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Judah, and Simon?" James is always listed first among the brothers, which suggests he was the eldest. The Epistle of Jude, whose author calls himself a brother of James, points the same way. The Epistle of James has been attributed to him since 253, though Dan McCartney notes that scholars now commonly disagree about its authorship.

  Fragment X of Papias, writing in the second century, speaks of "James the bishop and apostle".

  In 1 Corinthians, Paul lists the people to whom the risen Jesus appeared. First came Cephas, then the twelve, then more than five hundred brothers at once. Then, Paul says, he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all to Paul himself. Clement of Alexandria added that after the resurrection the Lord imparted knowledge to James the Just, John, and Peter, who passed it on to the rest of the apostles.

  Several apocryphal works expand on this meeting. Jerome quotes the Gospel of the Hebrews, in which James had sworn not to eat bread from the hour he drank the Lord's cup until he saw Jesus risen. The risen Jesus then called for a table and bread, broke it, and said to him, "My brother, eat your bread, for the Son of Man is risen from the dead."

  The Gospel of Thomas has the disciples ask who will lead them once Jesus departs. He answers, "No matter where you come from it is to James the Just that you shall go, for whose sake heaven and earth have come to exist." The Apocryphon of James survives in a single copy found in the Nag Hammadi library, perhaps written in Egypt in the 3rd century. It describes an appearance of the risen Christ to James and Peter that James supposedly recorded in Hebrew. A 4th-century letter falsely ascribed to Clement of Rome called him the "bishop of bishops", ruler of Jerusalem and of all the churches everywhere.

  A 2nd-century work known as the Gospel of James, or the Infancy Gospel of James, also presents itself as written by James, so that his name would lend it authority.

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• 5. A Family Question

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  The Infancy Gospel of James says Mary was betrothed to Joseph, who already had children. On that reading, James was Joseph's son from a previous marriage and therefore Jesus's stepbrother. Epiphanius, in The Panarion, gave the household in detail. Joseph's first wife bore him James, Joses, Simeon, Judah, and two daughters, with James the eldest. After she died, many years later, Joseph took Mary when he was eighty. Epiphanius said the Scriptures call them brothers of the Lord to confound opponents.

  Supporters of this view point to the scene where Jesus entrusts his mother to John, who is not suspected of being a blood relative. Jewish custom would have given that duty to Mary's other sons, if she had any. They also note that Aramaic and Hebrew tended to spell out blood relationships by circumlocution. They add that Jesus is called "the son of Mary" in his hometown, not "a son of Mary".

  A second view makes James a cousin. Aramaic, like Biblical Hebrew, has no word for cousin, and the Greek word adelphos was not limited to literal brothers. The objection is that Paul had a perfect command of Greek, which has a specific word for cousin. Yet he wrote "the brother of our Lord" in Galatians 1:19.

  Eusebius, writing around 275, reports a tradition that James was the son of Clopas, Joseph's brother. Jerome, in On Illustrious Men, instead made him the son of another Mary, the wife of Clopas and sister of the Lord's mother. His evidence was the crucifixion scene in John 19:25, where three women named Mary stand together. Proponents also note that the Synoptic writers would simply have called the mother of James and Joses the mother of Jesus if she were. In Greek she is also called "Maria", not "Mariam" or "Marias".

  A third view holds that James was a younger half-brother. R.V. Tasker and D. Hill read Matthew 1:25 as meaning Joseph "knew her not until she had brought forth her firstborn son", implying normal marital relations afterward. K. Beyer replies that the Greek phrase after a negative often implies nothing about what followed. Raymond E. Brown argues that Matthew cared only about Mary's virginity before the birth.

  Tertullian, Bonosus of Nairus, and Helvidius were among those who thought Mary had other children. Jerome answered Helvidius that "first-born" meant any child who opened the womb, with no implication of later siblings. Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and some Protestants hold Mary's perpetual virginity. The only Catholic doctrine defined on the matter is that the brothers of the Lord were not Mary's biological children.

  Other scholars offer variations. James Tabor argues that Joseph died early and childless, and that Mary then married Clopas under the Levirate law, so Clopas fathered James. John Dominic Crossan suggested James was probably Jesus's older brother. Robert Eisenman believes Luke, as a follower of Pauline Gentile Christianity, edited the family out of the Gospel record. Karl Keating counters that Mary and Joseph would not have rushed back to Jerusalem after losing the twelve-year-old Jesus if other children needed care.

  The pseudepigraphical First Apocalypse of James says James is not Jesus's earthly brother but a spiritual one. Gnostics held that James received secret knowledge before the Passion. The Second Apocalypse of James names his father as Theudas.

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• 6. Three Men Named James

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  Catholic tradition identifies James the brother of Jesus with James, son of Alphaeus, and with James the Less. Most agree he should not be confused with James, son of Zebedee, also known as James the Great. Philip Schaff thought the brother of Jesus seems to have taken the place of the Zebedee James after that man's martyrdom, around 44 AD.

  The Gospels give a trail of clues about a second James. Mark 15:40 lists Mary Magdalene, Salome, and Mary the mother of James the Younger and of Joseph. Mark 16:1 and Matthew 27:56 name Mary as the mother of a James, and Matthew adds Joseph. Catholic interpretation generally holds that this is one James, who is also the son of Alphaeus and the brother of Jesus.

  Jerome built the chain in The Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary. He argued that James the Less, called the son of a Mary who was not the Lord's mother, must be an apostle and so the son of Alphaeus. Her husband was Alphaeus, and she was the sister of the Lord's mother, the Mary of Clopas whom John names. His conclusion was that the son of Alphaeus, James the Less, and the brother of the Lord are a single person. Clopas and Alphaeus are thought to be different Greek renderings of the Aramaic name Khalphai. This is a traditional teaching, not Catholic dogma, and some biblical scholars distinguish the two.

  Lists attributed to Pseudo-Hippolytus of Rome, Dorotheus of Tyre, the Chronicon Paschale, and Dimitry of Rostov name him first of the Seventy Apostles. The Catholic Encyclopedia says "these lists are unfortunately worthless".

  Two small works ascribed to Hippolytus, On the Twelve Apostles of Christ and On the Seventy Apostles of Christ, say James son of Alphaeus preached in Jerusalem. He was stoned to death by the Jews, they say, and buried beside the temple. Most scholars consider the works spurious. Their manuscripts were lost during most of the church age and found in Greece in the 19th century. The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine carried the identification into the 13th century.

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• 7. Death at the Temple

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  Porcius Festus had died, and Lucceius Albinus, the new Roman procurator of Judea, was still on the road. Josephus, in Book 20 of his Antiquities of the Jews, says the high priest Ananus ben Ananus saw his chance. Josephus describes Ananus as bold, very insolent, and a Sadducee, a sect rigid in judging offenders.

  Ananus assembled the Sanhedrin of judges. Before them he brought "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James", along with some others. He accused them of breaking the law and delivered them to be stoned.

  Albinus held office from 62 AD to 64 AD, and his journey to Alexandria had to end by the summer of 62. That fixes the death of James at around that year. Josephus adds that the act was widely viewed as little more than judicial murder. Fair-minded people, strict in their observance of the Law, met Albinus as he entered the province and petitioned him successfully. King Agrippa II then replaced Ananus with Jesus son of Damneus.

  Modern scholarship has almost universally accepted the passage as authentic and rejected the idea of later Christian interpolation. It appears in all manuscripts, including the Greek texts. Most scholars also consider Josephus more reliable than Hegesippus, and some note he is more sympathetic to James than to Jesus.

  Hegesippus tells a very different story, set at Passover. In his account the scribes and Pharisees came to James and asked him to talk the crowds out of their errors about Jesus. They asked him to stand on the summit of the temple so all could hear him. James instead testified that Christ sits in heaven at the right hand of the Great Power and will come on the clouds of heaven.

  Dismayed, the scribes and Pharisees threw him down. The fall did not kill him. He turned, knelt, and prayed, "I beseech thee, Lord God our Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." A priest of the sons of Rechab cried out, "Cease, what do ye? The just man is praying for us." A fuller then struck James on the head with the staff he used for wringing out cloth. Hegesippus says he was buried on the spot, where a pillar in his memory still stood close by the temple.

  Clement of Alexandria likewise says James was thrown from the pinnacle and beaten to death with a club. Hegesippus is often cited for a date of 69 AD. Schaff, writing in 1904, challenged the assumption that he gives any date at all.

  Origen related that the death of James caused the Roman siege of Jerusalem, a claim missing from the existing manuscripts of Josephus. Eusebius went further. He said Josephus wrote that these things happened to the Jews "to avenge James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus, that is called the Christ".

  According to the Hegesippus account, the siege of Jerusalem by Vespasian delayed the choice of Simeon to succeed James.

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• 8. Afterlife of a Name

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  Eusebius says the Jerusalem church escaped to Pella during the siege by the future emperor Titus in 70 AD. It later returned and had a further series of Jewish bishops until the Bar Kokhba revolt in 130 AD. The city was then rebuilt as Aelia Capitolina, and the bishops who followed were Greeks.

  Church calendars still remember James, though not always on the same day. The Catholic feast of Philip the Apostle and James the Lesser was traditionally kept on the 1st of May, the anniversary of the church dedicated to them in Rome, now called the Church of the Twelve Apostles. It moved to May 3 in the current ordinary calendar. The Church of England keeps a festival with Philip on the 1st of May.

  The Eastern Orthodox Church commemorates "Apostle James the Just, brother of Our Lord" on several days. His first feast of the church year falls on October 23. Another comes on the first Sunday after the Nativity, shared with King David and Joseph the Betrothed. A third falls on January 4 among the Seventy Apostles. He is also remembered on the 26th of December, and on the 1st of December and the 25th of May for the translation and discovery of relics in 351. The Episcopal Church of the United States of America and the Lutheran Church have added October 23.

  In the November 2002 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, André Lemaire of the Sorbonne reported an ossuary inscribed "Ya'aqov bar Yosef achui d'Yeshua", meaning "James son of Joseph brother of Jesus". It belonged to a collector, Oded Golan. The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto exhibited it late that year. On the 18th of June 2003, the Israel Antiquities Authority concluded from the patina that the inscription was a modern forgery, added and aged with a chalk solution. The museum removed the ossuary.

  On the 29th of December 2004, Golan was indicted with three other men: Robert Deutsch, Shlomo Cohen, and Faiz al-Amaleh. They were accused of belonging to a forgery ring active for more than 20 years. According to the BBC, police searching Golan's apartment found a workshop with tools, materials, and half-finished antiquities. Golan denied the charges.

  On the 14th of March 2012, Golan was declared not guilty of all forgery charges. The judge stressed that the acquittal did not mean the inscription was authentic. In the judge's words, "it was not proven in any way that the words 'the brother of Jesus' necessarily refer to the 'Jesus' who appears in Christian writings".

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