Holy Apostle James, Brother of the Lord

Era

First century, died about AD 62

Region

Nazareth and Jerusalem

Category

Apostle, first bishop of Jerusalem, and martyr

Principal feast for this profile

October 23

About 6 minutes to read Sources listed at the end

Jump to The Brother Who Did Not Believe The Man in the Chair at Jerusalem Where the Record Comes From Why the Church Remembers Him What His Life Asks of Us

The Brother Who Did Not Believe

The crowd at Nazareth names him. Is this not the carpenter’s son? Is not His mother called Mary, and His brothers James, Joses, Simon and Judas? They say it to dismiss Jesus — everyone knows this family — and in doing so they hand us the only glimpse of James before the Resurrection.

The other glimpse is harsher. John’s Gospel says, without softening it, that His brothers did not believe in Him. Whatever James later became, he did not begin as a disciple. He watched the whole ministry from inside the family and was not convinced.

Then Paul, listing the appearances of the risen Christ, writes four words that change everything and explain nothing: then He appeared to James. No scene, no dialogue, no account of what was said. The next time we meet him, he is leading the church in Jerusalem.

The Man in the Chair at Jerusalem

Acts shows it rather than announces it. Peter, freed from prison in the night, tells the gathered believers to report what has happened to James and to the brethren — and leaves the city. At the council over whether Gentile converts must keep the Law, it is James who speaks last and gives the ruling. When Paul comes to Jerusalem for the final time, it is to James that he goes, with all the elders present.

Paul’s own letters say the same from the other side. He met none of the other apostles except James the Lord’s brother. He names the pillars of the Jerusalem church: James, Cephas, John — James first.

Galatians also preserves a harder moment. Men from James came to Antioch, and Peter withdrew from eating with Gentile believers, and Paul rebuked him to his face. Paul does not say whether James sent them with that intention. The New Testament does not always tidy up after itself, and this site is not going to tidy up for it.

Where the Record Comes From

The question of “brother.” Three explanations have been held, and it is worth setting them out plainly because Christians argue about this and often do not know what the other side actually says.

The Orthodox position, associated with Epiphanius in the fourth century and already present in the second-century Protoevangelium of James, is that James and the others were children of Joseph by an earlier marriage — Christ’s older stepbrothers. It takes the word brothers at face value as real sons of Joseph, and preserves the perpetual virginity of the Theotokos.

The Latin position, argued forcefully by Jerome against Helvidius around 383 and standard in Roman Catholicism, makes them cousins, reading brother as the looser kinship term it can be in Semitic usage, and identifying James the Just with James son of Alphaeus among the Twelve.

The third position, which Jerome was writing against and which most modern secular and Protestant scholars find the most natural reading, is that they were later children of Joseph and Mary.

None of the three is stated in Scripture. All three are constructions built to reconcile the plain word brothers with commitments held on other grounds. The Orthodox Church holds the first, and this site is Orthodox — but a reader deserves to know that it is a position among positions and not a verse.

The death. Here there are two accounts, and they do not match.

Josephus, in the Antiquities, writing around AD 93: the procurator Festus had died, his replacement Albinus was still on the road, and the new high priest Ananus used the gap. He convened the Sanhedrin, brought before it the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others, accused them of breaking the Law, and had them stoned. The most equitable citizens of the city were appalled, complained to Albinus and to King Agrippa, and Ananus was deposed after three months. The passage sits inside an ordinary administrative narrative, uses a phrase no Christian scribe needed to insert, and is accepted by close to a scholarly consensus as genuine Josephus. It gives us a date of about AD 62 and a method.

Hegesippus, a second-century Jewish Christian preserved by Eusebius, tells it very differently. Here James is the Just, an ascetic who drank no wine, never cut his hair, wore only linen, and whose knees were calloused like a camel’s from kneeling. At Passover the authorities set him on the pinnacle of the temple and demand he denounce Jesus before the crowd; he proclaims instead that Jesus is the Son of Man at the right hand of Power; they throw him down, begin to stone him, and a fuller finishes him with the club used for beating cloth, while James kneels and prays for them.

It is a magnificent story and it is shaped. The pinnacle echoes the temptation in the wilderness; the dying prayer echoes both Christ’s and Stephen’s; Eusebius places it just before the siege of Jerusalem, which does not fit AD 62 at all. Read Josephus for the fact and the date. Read Hegesippus for what the Church of the second century had come to feel about him.

The Liturgy of St James. It bears his name and tradition says he received it from Christ. What can actually be said: it is among the oldest complete eucharistic rites still occasionally served, its shape belongs to Jerusalem, and the scholarly consensus dates the form we have to the late fourth or early fifth century, with one influential theory attributing much of its shaping to Cyril of Jerusalem around 370. Some of its liturgical DNA may well be much older. His personal authorship is a devotional claim, not a historical one.

The Protoevangelium of James. A second-century apocryphon, not by James, never canonical, and containing errors about Jewish law and Palestinian geography that mark it as later and probably not Palestinian. It is nevertheless the source of a great deal that Orthodox Christians take for granted: the names Joachim and Anna, the Theotokos’s childhood in the temple, and the feasts of her Nativity and Entrance. The Church has kept what it found true in it without pretending it is history or Scripture, and that is worth understanding rather than being scandalised by.

The Epistle of James. It identifies its author only as James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ. It does not say the brother of the Lord; that identification is an inference. Whether the Jerusalem leader wrote its polished Greek is a genuinely open question — defenders propose a secretary or a later compilation of his teaching — and it should be described as open.

Why the Church Remembers Him

Because of the four words in 1 Corinthians. A man who had lived in the same house and had not believed met his brother alive after the execution, and afterwards led the mother church of the world until they killed him for it.

And because of what he did with the office. The council at Jerusalem was the first time the Church had to decide whether the Gospel belonged to more than one nation. James, the most Jewish figure in the New Testament — the one his own city called the Just — was the one who ruled that Gentiles should not be burdened. He is commemorated with Joseph the Betrothed and King David on the Sunday after the Nativity, as one of the people bound by blood to the Incarnation.

What His Life Asks of Us

That nearness is not the same as faith, and that neither is the end of the story. James had the most access to Christ that any human being except His mother ever had, and it did not convert him. Something else did, later.

Which cuts both ways. It should unsettle anyone who assumes that proximity to holy things is the same as belief. It should also encourage anyone who has watched someone close to them remain unmoved for years.

Holy Apostle James, Brother of the Lord, pray to Christ our God for those who have been near Him a long time and have not yet believed.

A note. These lives are written to introduce, not to direct. Ascetic feats described here belong to particular people under obedience, not to a method anyone should take up alone. Anything touching your own rule of prayer or fasting belongs with your priest or spiritual father.

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