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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.

6. The Gospel of Thomas, logion 12.

      III.

      James: The “Brother” of Jesus?

The question of whether or not the brothers and sisters of Jesus were the biological children of Mary and Joseph has had more to do with the church’s veneration of the mother of Jesus than it has with his brothers and sisters themselves. Mary’s “perpetual virginity” is a belief that is deeply rooted in the traditions of the oldest churches. Christian piety held virginity and celibacy in high esteem from early on. How could it be, then, given the tendency to elevate perfect chastity, that the one chosen to bear the incarnate God in her womb, the holiest of all women and indeed of all humankind, would engage in sexual relations and bear other children after such a holy nativity? If Mary was the most exalted of saints, the pious assumption was that she must have been perfect in every way, especially in chastity. Her role as “the virgin mother” made her a symbol or type of the church (the church was regarded as the “mother” of the baptized and “virginal” in the purity of its faith), and with the development of Mary’s iconic status there was more even than her personal honor at stake.7

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