the gentiles turning to God, but rather to write them, telling them to abstain from the pollutions of idols, and from whoring, and from anything strangled, and from blood. For Moses has men who preach him in every city, being read aloud in the synagogue every Sabbath since the times of generations long past.” (Acts 15:13–21; cf. Amos 9:11–12; emphasis mine)
We see James once more in the book of Acts, right before the arrest of Paul in Jerusalem. Paul had sought him out and followed his and the other elders’ instructions, which were intended to mollify those who regarded Paul as an apostate from Judaism (Acts 21:18–26). It was to no avail, and Paul was taken into custody, nearly losing his life in the violent altercation that ensued. But on both occasions in Acts—the council of chapter 15 and the advising of Paul in chapter 21—we see James as both the preeminent figure in the mother church, one whose wisdom and pragmatism are manifest and respected, and as the mediating influence between Paul’s mission and the original Jewish Christian fellowship based in Jerusalem.
The Jewish historian Josephus tells of James’s execution (Antiquities XX, 9, 1), which occurred between the time of the Roman procurator Felix’s death and the coming of his successor, Albinus, to fill his empty post (i.e., sometime in the middle of the year 62). James’s martyrdom was a blow to the Jerusalem community from which it never fully recovered. He and others (apparently Jewish Christians), Josephus tells us, were arraigned before the High Priest Hanan ben Hanan and the Sanhedrin, who, taking advantage of the Roman procurator’s empty office, found them guilty, possibly of “transgression of the Law,” and ordered them stoned to death. Hegesippus, writing sometime circa 180, elaborates on the story (Eusebius, History, II, 23). In the latter account, the religious leaders during Passover implore James—who is acknowledged by them to be a “righteous one”—to declare to the crowd from the parapet of the Temple “that they must not go astray as regards Jesus.” James boldly declares the opposite and is thrown from the parapet in retribution, whereupon he is stoned and finally dispatched by a fuller with a club. Of the two versions, Josephus’s less sensational telling is obviously the more plausible.
Hegesippus, inaccurate though he may be, nevertheless shows us how highly regarded James became in the following generations of Jewish Christianity. His description of an ascetical, devout, even priestly James is almost certainly an exaggeration, but it may also contain some dim memories of the actual man:
[E]veryone from the Lord’s time till our own has called [him] the Righteous . . . . [H]e drank no wine or intoxicating liquor and ate no animal food; no razor came near his head; he did not smear himself with oil, and took no baths [cf. Num 6:1–21]. He alone was permitted to enter the Holy Place, for his garments were not of wool but of linen. He used to enter the Sanctuary alone, and was often found on his knees beseeching forgiveness for the people, so that his knees grew hard like a camel’s from his continually bending them in worship of God and beseeching forgiveness for the people . . .
We may well believe that James, called “the Just” or “the Righteous (One),” was a man of continual prayer, concerned for his people, abstemious, and possibly “priestly” in his demeanor and even attire. That these were aspects of the serious and devout character of the historical person seems likely, even if Hegesippus can be accused of embroidering some of the facts.
As the gulf between the imperial church and the later Jewish Christian “sects” widened, the memory of the authority of James became an anchor for the latter. No such high estimation of him seems to have lingered among the former. The third- or fourth-century Jewish-Christian Homilies of Clement contain two spurious letters addressed to James, one purporting to be from Peter and the other from Clement, bishop of Rome. In them we can see how exalted a figure he had become for the non- (anti-)Pauline churches of Jewish lineage. Respectively, they address James as “the lord and bishop of the holy Church, under the Father of all, through Jesus Christ,” and “the lord, and the bishop of bishops, who rules Jerusalem, the holy church of the Hebrews, and the churches everywhere . . .”5 James has assumed in the imagination of the writer of this pseudepigraphical work, in other words, the position of a “pope,” a final authority and governor of all churches.
Perhaps even more remarkably we find in as early a work as The Gospel of Thomas this striking logion:
The followers said to Jesus, “We know that you are going to leave us. Who will be our leader?” Jesus said to them, “No matter where you are, you are to go to James the Just, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being.”6
In Jewish literature, the phrase “for whom heaven and earth came into being” is hyperbole, an expression of high praise. On the lips of Jesus, however, it is in this instance highest praise, because here Jesus is personally deputing James as his vicar. Given that this Gospel, and thus this logion, may well be a first- or second-century text, what we have here is an early testimony to the central position James was understood to occupy in the church.
To summarize, then, what we have before us is a sketchy portrait of James, but a suggestive one. He was a devout man throughout his life, so much so that he was known as “the Righteous” or “the Just.” He may have been a follower of—or at least inspired by—John the Baptist. Like the Baptist, he gained a reputation for self-discipline, adopting, it seems, traits of the Nazarite vow on a protracted basis (see Num 6:1–21). During at least much of his brother’s ministry, he and the other brothers were not followers of Jesus. But, at some point, either not long before Jesus’ death or—more likely—after his experience of the risen Lord, James was numbered among the most important witnesses of the resurrection. After the departure of Peter from Jerusalem, James assumed the primacy of the mother church, and became renowned for his wisdom, holiness, and common sense. Even Peter and Paul deferred to him, and it was to James that Paul came for guidance just before his arrest. Finally, in 62, James was put to death, probably by stoning.
Two questions remain: First, in what sense was James “the brother” of Jesus? And, second, was James of Jerusalem truly the author of the epistle that bears his name?
1. Later traditions name the two sisters. The apocryphal fourth/fifth-century History of Joseph the Carpenter calls them Assia and Lydia, while the fourth-century church father and (cantankerous) apologist Epiphanius names them Mary and Salome (Panarion 78, 8; Ancoratus 60).
2. Fragments of this Jewish-Christian Gospel are all that are extant. This particular fragment is quoted by Jerome in his work, Against Pelagius, 3, 2. (See Edgar Hennecke, New Testament Apocrypha, Vol. One: Gospels and Related Writings, edited by Wilhelm Schneemelcher [English translation edited by R. McL. Wilson] [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963], 146–47.)
3. The five historical books of Hegesippus are lost to us, and what we have of them are what has been preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea in his History of the Church. I am quoting from Williamson’s smooth, readable translation of Eusebius. (Eusebius, The History of the Church, translated by G. A. Williamson; rev. ed. with a New Introduction by Andrew Louth (London: Penguin, 1989), 59.)
4. This fragment comes from Jerome’s De Viris Illustribus (a collection of short biographies, of which this is the second), in which Jerome cites Origen. (See Hennecke, New Testament Apocrypha, 165.)
5. The Clementine Homilies, “The Epistle of Peter to James” and “The Epistle of Clement to James”; from Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 8 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999), 215 and 218.
