Commontide
Red-Letter Day
Bishop & Martyr, Brother of Our Lord
October 23 · d. 62
also known as James the Just, James the Less, James the Brother of the Lord, James of Jerusalem
James, called the Just and known in Scripture as the Lord's brother, became the first leader of the church at Jerusalem and one of the most respected men in the city, honoured by believers and by many who did not believe alike. Paul names him among the pillars of the church, and Acts shows him presiding at the Jerusalem Council. He was killed in Jerusalem around AD 62, stoned at the order of the high priest Ananus. His feast is October 23.
James grew up in Nazareth in the household of Joseph and Mary, one who shared a home and a family table with Jesus of Nazareth. Scripture calls him "the Lord's brother," and the Gospels remember him alongside Joses, Simon, and Judas as one of the family. For years he did not believe. John's Gospel says plainly that "not even his brothers believed in him," and there is no softening that. The man who would one day govern the church in Jerusalem spent his brother's ministry on the outside of it.
Then everything changed. Paul, writing to the Corinthians of the things handed down to him "as of first importance," lists among the resurrection appearances one made to James alone, before Jesus appeared "to all the apostles." Something happened at that meeting that Scripture does not narrate but does not need to. The brother who had doubted became a believer, and more than a believer: within a few years he was leading the mother church of all Christendom, in the city where his brother had been crucified and raised.
By the time Paul went up to Jerusalem to meet the other apostles, James was already a man to be reckoned with. Paul lists him with Peter and John as one who "seemed to be pillars," and when the church faced its first great crisis, whether Gentile believers had to be circumcised and keep the law of Moses to belong to Christ, it was James who spoke the last word. The apostles and elders had argued the matter at length in Jerusalem. Peter had spoken. Paul and Barnabas had told what God was doing among the nations. Then James stood, weighed the debate against the words of the prophets, and rendered judgment: the Gentiles should not be troubled, only asked to abstain from a few things that would needlessly divide the table. The whole council followed him. A man who had once refused to believe his own brother was Lord now spoke as the church's chief pastor, and the church listened.
He was famous, even outside the church, for the way he kept the old law of Israel. Those who knew him called him "the Just," and the name held among Jews and Christians both. A later account remembered him going to the Temple so often, and kneeling so long in prayer for his people, that his knees grew hard as a camel's. Whether every detail of that memory is exact, the church that told it was answering to something everyone in Jerusalem seemed to agree on: no one prayed for that city more, or lived more carefully by its law, than James.
His care for the peace of the church did not stop at Jerusalem's gates. Years later, when Paul returned to the city, it was to James and the elders he reported all that God had done among the Gentiles, and it was James who counseled him, gently, to join four men in a purification rite at the Temple, to show the thousands of believing Jews in the city that Paul had not abandoned Moses. Paul followed the counsel. It was in the Temple, in the middle of that very rite, that the mob seized him and set in motion the arrest that would carry Paul, in chains, all the way to Rome. James's care for unity had asked a hard thing of his friend, and it cost dearly, though not from any fault of his own.
James's own death came not many years after. The Jewish historian Josephus records that the high priest Ananus, seeing a gap in Roman authority in Jerusalem, brought James before the council on a charge of breaking the law and had him condemned to be stoned. The church remembered the scene with more colour still: that the scribes and Pharisees set James on the parapet of the Temple itself and called on him, before the crowds gathered for Passover, to talk the people out of their faith in Jesus. James did the opposite. Asked about Jesus, he answered that the Son of Man was seated in heaven at the right hand of the Power, and would come again on the clouds. Many in the crowd believed him then and there. It was for that answer, not despite it, that his accusers threw him down and stoned him where he fell, and he died praying, as the church remembered it, that God would forgive the men who killed him.
James spent his whole life in service of one household: first the house of Joseph and Mary, and then the household of God, the church his brother had built and left in his charge. He doubted before he believed, and having believed, he led, and having led, he died still speaking of the Christ he had once refused. The church he shepherded did not end with him. It carried his name to the ends of the earth, and its own ancient prayers still remember him: to this day the oldest liturgy of the church in Jerusalem is called by his name. The brother who once stood outside now stands, as Scripture always meant him to, among the pillars.
How we know James is unusual among figures of his stature, because the record does not rest on Christian testimony alone. Paul's letters (written within thirty years of the events), the book of Acts, the Epistle that bears his name, and the later account of Hegesippus preserved by Eusebius all describe him from inside the church; but the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, writing without any Christian interest to serve, independently confirms both his existence and the manner of his death. Few figures this close to Jesus of Nazareth are corroborated by a source so plainly outside the faith, and the convergence is worth noting plainly.
James appears first in the Gospels as one of four brothers named alongside Jesus: "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon?" (Mark 6:3, ESV; compare Matthew 13:55). John's Gospel records that during Jesus's ministry "not even his brothers believed in him" (John 7:5, ESV), and the Gospels give no reason to think James was an exception. The turn comes with the resurrection. Paul, in the creedal formula he says he "received" and passed on to the Corinthians, lists a resurrection appearance to James by name, distinct from and prior to the appearance "to all the apostles" (1 Corinthians 15:7, ESV). Whatever passed at that meeting, Paul places it as one of the founding facts of the gospel he preached, and from that point James is a believer and, quickly, a leader.
By the time of Paul's first visit to Jerusalem after his conversion, three years on, James was prominent enough that Paul singles him out: "But I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord's brother" (Galatians 1:19, ESV). Some fourteen years later Paul names him first among the Jerusalem leadership: "James and Cephas and John, who seemed to be pillars" (Galatians 2:9, ESV). Acts confirms the picture from the other side, showing James presiding at the council convened to decide whether Gentile converts must be circumcised (Acts 15:13-21) and, later, receiving Paul's report of his Gentile mission and counseling him toward the purification rite that led to his arrest (Acts 21:17-25).
The New Testament epistle that bears his name, addressed "to the twelve tribes in the Dispersion" and marked by its insistence that faith without works is dead, its concern for the poor, and its close verbal debt to Jewish wisdom literature, has traditionally been received as his own composition, the pastoral voice of the Jerusalem church's leader writing to Jewish Christians scattered abroad. Since the late nineteenth century, some critical scholars have proposed that the letter is a later, pseudonymous work written in James's name, citing its polished Greek style and its possible engagement with debates that postdate James's lifetime; this remains a live question among scholars, and the case for James's own authorship, defended by many others on grounds including the letter's early, undeveloped ecclesiology and its silence about the Gentile controversies that dominated James's later years, has never been abandoned.
James's feast falls on October 23 in the calendar of the Episcopal Church and other Anglican provinces, commemorating his standing as the first leader of the Jerusalem church; other traditions keep his feast on different days, reflecting the varied calendars of East and West. In art he is generally shown as a bishop or elder in a plain robe, sometimes bearing a fuller's club in reference to the manner of his death, and occasionally a palm branch as a sign of martyrdom. He is patron of the dying and of those facing despair, and is invoked, along with other apostles, as a patron of hatters, on account of the traditional association of the fuller's trade with his death.
He is remembered above all as the model of a certain kind of Christian leadership: pastoral, careful of unity, unwilling to force a wedge between Jewish and Gentile believers, and respected by outsiders for the plain integrity of his life. The ancient Divine Liturgy of Saint James, still used today in some Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches (traditionally on his feast day) and standing among the oldest complete eucharistic liturgies in continuous use anywhere in Christendom, carries his name forward into the church's ongoing worship, a living link between the apostolic church he governed in Jerusalem and the church that still gathers in his memory.
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Epistle of James(Greek, 1st century)
The New Testament letter bearing James's name, addressed to Jewish Christians of the Dispersion; traditionally received as his own pastoral composition, though some modern critical scholars propose a later pseudonymous author.
Public domain: ESV at Bible Gateway
Antiquities of the Jews, Book XX, chapter 9(Greek, c. 93-94)
The brief, historically independent notice of James's death by stoning at the order of the high priest Ananus, c. AD 62; not a Christian source, and the strongest external corroboration of James's existence and death.
Public domain: Whiston translation, Perseus/University of Chicago
Ecclesiastical History, Book II, chapter 23(Greek, early 4th century (quoting 2nd-century Hegesippus))
The fullest ancient account of James's ascetic life, his titles "the Just" and Oblias, the Temple-pinnacle scene, and his martyrdom, drawn from the second-century Jewish Christian writer Hegesippus.
Public domain: Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation, New Advent
Just James: The Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition(English, 1997/1999 (Fortress Press ed.); a 2004 2nd edn. exists but has no current live retail listing)
Recommended: John Painter
The standard modern full-length study, weighing the New Testament, Hegesippus, and Josephus together carefully and respectfully; the best single book for a reader who wants the whole case laid out.
Primary sources. The essential New Testament witness is scattered across several books: Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55-56 (the family), John 7:5 (his early unbelief), 1 Corinthians 15:7 (the resurrection appearance), Galatians 1:19 and 2:9 (his standing among the "pillars"), Acts 15:13-21 (the Jerusalem Council) and 21:17-25 (his counsel to Paul), and the Epistle of James itself, all readable at Bible Gateway in the ESV. Josephus's brief, independent notice of James's death is in the Antiquities of the Jews, Book XX, chapter 9, section 1, free in William Whiston's translation at the University of Chicago's Perseus-linked archive.
Principal hagiography. Hegesippus's second-century account of James's ascetic life and martyrdom survives only as quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea in the Ecclesiastical History, Book II, chapter 23 (early fourth century, of events roughly two hundred and seventy years earlier), free at New Advent in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation.
Recommended modern biography. John Painter's Just James: The Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition (2nd edn., University of South Carolina Press, 2004) is the standard full-length modern treatment, weighing the New Testament, Hegesippus, and Josephus together with care and with respect for the believing tradition; it remains the fullest single door into the sources and stays in print.
Further reading. Richard Bauckham's Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church (T&T Clark, 1990) gives a fuller scholarly treatment of James's family and the "brothers of the Lord" question for the reader who wants to go deeper into that debate; F. F. Bruce's New Testament History situates James's Jerusalem leadership within the wider apostolic period in accessible, believing scholarship.
Online resources. The full text of Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History is at New Advent and CCEL; Josephus's complete works, including the Antiquities, are free at the University of Chicago's Perseus-linked Josephus archive.
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James's death is fixed with unusual precision for a figure of the apostolic age. Josephus, in the Antiquities of the Jews, Book XX, describes how the high priest Ananus, taking advantage of a vacancy between two Roman procurators in AD 62, convened the Sanhedrin and brought before it "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James," on a charge of transgressing the law, "and delivered [him] to be stoned," in William Whiston's standard translation. Josephus adds that this action scandalized the city's more moderate citizens, who complained to the incoming procurator and had Ananus deposed from the high priesthood as a result, a detail that situates James's death within real, dateable Judean politics rather than legend.
Hegesippus, a Jewish Christian writer of the mid-second century whose history survives only in excerpts quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Ecclesiastical History, Book II, chapter 23, offers a fuller and more devotional account, written roughly a century after the events it describes. In Kirsopp Lake's translation, Hegesippus records that James "was holy from his mother's womb; he drank no wine nor strong drink, nor did he eat flesh; no razor came upon his head; he did not anoint himself with oil, and he did not use the bath," and that "he alone was permitted to enter into the holy place; for he wore not woolen but linen garments." His knees, Hegesippus says, "became hard like those of a camel, in consequence of his constantly bending them in his worship of God, and asking forgiveness for the people." For this he was called, among believers and unbelievers alike, "the Just," and Oblias, which Hegesippus glosses as "bulwark of the people."
These particulars, a permanent Nazirite-like consecration and constant Temple access ordinarily reserved to priests, come to us from a source considerably later than James's own lifetime and coloured by the devotional interests of the second-century Jewish Christian community Hegesippus represents; no earlier Christian writing corroborates the details, though the New Testament's own picture of a leader zealous for the law and trusted across factional lines is consistent with them. Hegesippus goes on to describe the death: that scribes and Pharisees, anxious about the numbers turning to Christ, set James on the pinnacle of the Temple before the Passover crowds and asked him to restrain the people; that he answered instead by proclaiming that the Son of Man "sits in heaven at the right hand of the great Power, and is about to come upon the clouds of heaven"; that many in the crowd believed him and cried Hosanna; and that his accusers, alarmed at their own testimony, threw him down and stoned him, until one of the crowd, a fuller, finished the killing with the club he used to beat out cloth. Hegesippus records his dying prayer, "I entreat you, Lord God our Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and states that Josephus himself, whom Hegesippus cites directly, attributed the subsequent Roman siege of Jerusalem to divine judgment for James's death, a claim not found in the surviving text of Josephus as we have it.
A related question, distinct from James's authority or his death, concerns his exact family relation to Jesus. The New Testament's own language ("the Lord's brother," Galatians 1:19) is read differently across Christian traditions. Protestant readers have generally taken the term at face value, understanding James as a full or half-brother, a later son of Mary and Joseph. Catholic and Eastern Orthodox tradition, holding to the perpetual virginity of Mary, has understood James either as a cousin of Jesus (the view associated with Jerome) or as a son of Joseph from an earlier marriage prior to his betrothal to Mary (the view associated with Epiphanius and reflected in the second-century Protoevangelium of James). This is a genuine point of doctrinal difference across the traditions the church has received, not a question the historical evidence settles on its own, and it is treated here as such.
Little else beyond his death is recorded of James in the ancient sources. The convergence of an internal Christian record spanning Paul, Acts, an epistle received in his name, and a later patristic memory, together with the wholly independent notice in Josephus, gives James of Jerusalem an unusually solid claim on history among the apostolic generation.
Grant, O God, that, following the example of your apostle James the Just, kinsman of our Lord, your Church may give itself continually to prayer and to the reconciliation of all who are at variance and enmity; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12