James the Great

• 1. Introduction

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  James the Great, one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus, is the reason 327,378 people registered in 2018 as having finished a long walk across northern Spain. Each of them had covered at least the final 100 km on foot, or 200 km by bicycle, to earn a certificate called a Compostela. Their destination was Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, where tradition says his remains lie. Spain also honors him as its patron saint.

  He lived and died in the lands of the Bible, far from any Spanish road. So how does an apostle from the Holy Land end up as the saint of a peninsula at the far edge of Europe? What does the New Testament actually tell us about the man? And how did a single burial story grow into a pilgrimage that still draws crowds? The answers begin with a family by a lake.

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• 2. Sons of Thunder

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  Zebedee and Salome raised James in a family of Jewish fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. Salome was a sister of Mary, the mother of Jesus, which made James a cousin of Jesus. His brother was John the Apostle. The Synoptic Gospels describe the two brothers by the seashore, getting ready to fish with their father, when Jesus called them to follow him.

  The title the Greater separates him from another apostle named James, called the Lesser. Here greater means older or taller. It does not mean more important.

  Among the Twelve, James, John and Peter formed an informal trio. Jesus allowed only these three to be present for the raising of Jairus' daughter, the transfiguration, and his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane.

  The brothers could also be bold. James and John, or in another tradition their mother, asked Jesus for seats on his right and left in his glory. Jesus asked whether they were ready to drink from the cup he was about to drink. He added that the honor was not even his to grant. The other apostles were annoyed with the pair.

  On another occasion the brothers wanted to call down fire on a Samaritan town. Jesus rebuked them for that too. The nickname Boanerges, meaning Sons of Thunder, stuck to both men. One modern writer would later point to that fiery temper as a possible clue to how James met his death.

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• 3. The Sword of Herod

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  The Acts of the Apostles disposes of James in a single line. It says that "Herod the king" had him executed "by the sword." The king is usually identified as Herod Agrippa. According to the New Testament, this made James the second apostle to die, after Judas Iscariot, and the first to be martyred.

  The writer Henry Alford suggests that James was probably beheaded. Another writer, Nixon, suggests that his fiery temper may have triggered the execution. The text itself gives no reason.

  F. F. Bruce set this death beside the story of the liberation of Saint Peter in the same book. Peter escaped while James died. Bruce called the idea that "James should die while Peter should escape" a "mystery of divine providence."

  In Jerusalem, the Armenian Apostolic Cathedral of St. James stands in the Armenian Quarter. Within it, the Chapel of Saint James the Great, to the left of the sanctuary, is the traditional place of his martyrdom. His head is believed to lie beneath the altar. A piece of red marble marks the spot, and six votive lamps surround it.

  The head stays in Jerusalem in that tradition. A very different story sends the rest of him across the sea.

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• 4. A Body Adrift

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  The 12th century Historia Compostelana, commissioned by Diego Gelmírez, records the legend as people at Compostela understood it in his day. Two claims sit at its center. First, James preached the gospel in Hispania as well as in the Holy Land. Second, after his martyrdom his followers carried his body by sea to Hispania, landing at Padrón on the Galician coast, and then overland to its burial at Santiago de Compostela.

  The preaching trip begins in Sardinia. From there James sailed from Cartagena and started to spread the gospel. Local tradition says that on the 2nd of January AD 40, the Virgin Mary appeared to him on the bank of the Ebro River at Caesaraugusta. She stood upon a pillar. That pillar is kept and venerated in the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar in Zaragoza.

  The voyage of the body is a string of miracles. Angels took up the decapitated body. It sailed in a rudderless, unattended boat to Iria Flavia. There a massive rock closed around it.

  The disciples Theodore and Athanasius arrived and asked Queen Lupa for a place to bury him. The Codex Calixtinus tells what followed. Lupa decided to trick them and sent them to the governor of Duio, hoping they would be killed. Sensing a trap, the disciples escaped and returned to her.

  Lupa tried again. She sent them to Pico Sacro, the Sacred Peak, to fetch two of her oxen to haul the building material for a tomb. She did not warn them that the mountain hid a cave leading to hell, guarded by a dragon. The holy cross protected the disciples and tamed the bulls. Lupa saw the miracle, converted to Christianity, and helped build the apostle's tomb in Libredon.

  Libredon is where the Compostela tradition later placed a famous discovery.

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• 5. Road to Compostela

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  Compostela tradition places the discovery of the relics in the 9th century. A man named Pelayo found them in the Libredon forest, in the days of Bishop Theodemir and King Alfonso II. These traditions became the basis for a pilgrimage route that began to take shape in that same century. The shrine to James at Santiago de Compostela soon became famous across the Christian world.

  The Way of St. James is not one road but a network of routes crossing Western Europe. All of them arrive at Santiago de Compostela through northern Spain. From the Early Middle Ages onward it has been the most popular pilgrimage for Western European Catholics. Its modern revival owes much to Walter Starkie's 1957 book, The Road to Santiago. The Pilgrims of St. James.

  The name Santiago is itself a piece of language history. It evolved from the Latin Sancti Iacobi, meaning the church or sanctuary of Saint James. In Portuguese the name became Tiago, once spelled Thiago and still common as a first name. Its relatives Diego and Diogo come from the same root.

  Some years are special at the shrine. When the 25th of July falls on a Sunday, the year is a Jacobean Holy Year, and a special east door of Santiago Cathedral is opened for entrance. Holy Years follow a 6-5-6-11 pattern. If the last year of a century is not a leap year, the gap can stretch to 7 or 12 years.

  The crowds show the effect. In the 2004 Holy Year, 179,944 pilgrims were received at Compostela. In 2010 the number rose to 272,412. The most recent Holy Year was 2021, and the next is due in 2027.

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• 6. Moor-Slayer and the Order

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  "¡Santiago, y cierra, España!" was the battle cry of medieval Spanish Christian armies. It means "St. James and strike for Spain." Behind it stands an even later tradition. In that story, James appeared miraculously to fight alongside the Christian army at the legendary battle of Clavijo. From then on he was called Santiago Matamoros, Saint James the Moor-slayer.

  Miguel de Cervantes echoed the idea in Don Quixote. His hero explains that "the great knight of the russet cross was given by God to Spain as patron and protector."

  In the 12th century the military Order of Santiago was founded in Spain, named after Saint Tiago, or Saint James. Its purpose was to fight the Moors. As happened with other orders of chivalry, membership later became a mark of honor.

  The knights had a cross and a sword. The pilgrims who walked to his shrine carried a far humbler badge.

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• 7. Shell and Calendar

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  The scallop shell, sometimes called the cockle shell, became James' emblem, and pilgrims to his shrine often wore it on their hats or clothes. Language still remembers the link. The French term for a scallop is coquille St. Jacques, meaning the cockle of Saint Jacob. The German word is Jakobsmuschel, or Jacob's mussel, and the Dutch is Jacobsschelp. In Danish the word is Ibskal, where Ib is a Danish version of Jakob and skal means shell.

  The feast day of St. James falls on the 25th of July in the liturgical calendars of the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, True Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran churches, along with certain other Protestant churches. The traditional reason is the belief that he was martyred on that date in the year 44 AD. Some historians argue instead that the 25th of July was chosen to coincide with the feast day of Saint Christopher. The same date is the National Day of Galicia, whose patron saint is James.

  The Orthodox calendar adds two more commemorations. One is on the 30th of April. For churches that follow the Julian Calendar, that day currently falls on the 13th of May in the modern Gregorian Calendar. The other is on the 30th of June, the Synaxis of the Apostles.

  Far from Galicia, a teaching that dates to 1829 gives him a very different role.

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• 8. Beyond Spain

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  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that in 1829 the Apostles James, Peter and John appeared as heavenly messengers to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery. They conferred the Melchizedek priesthood authority of apostolic succession. By this teaching, that authority exists on earth exclusively within the church's own organization.

  The visit came sometime after the 15th of May 1829. On that date, John the Baptist similarly appeared to Smith and Cowdery and conferred the Aaronic, or lesser, priesthood. He told them he acted under the direction of James, Peter and John.

  In Islam, the Quranic account of the disciples of Jesus gives no names, no number and no detailed accounts of their lives. Muslim exegesis, however, more or less agrees with the New Testament list. It says the disciples included Peter, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, Andrew, James, Jude, John and Simon the Zealot.

  In that list James sits between Andrew and Jude, one of ten names with no story attached. The Spanish roads, the shells and the battle cry belong only to the Christian tradition that remembered him.

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