Theopedia

James, brother of Jesus

Overview

James was called “the Lord’s brother” (Gal. 1:19) and appears simply as “James” in Acts 12:17, 15:13, and 21:18, where he leads the Jerusalem church.1 Paul named him alongside Peter (“Cephas”) and John as one of the church’s three “pillars” (Gal. 2:9).2 He is held by most interpreters to be the author of the New Testament Epistle of James, and according to Josephus was stoned to death in Jerusalem around AD 62 at the order of the high priest Ananus.3

Life and Ministry

Interpreters have long disputed exactly how James was related to Jesus. The Gospels list him among Jesus’s “brothers,” alongside Joses, Simon, and Judas (Matt. 13:55; Mark 6:3), and three views have historically accounted for what that word means: Jerome held that the “brothers” were cousins; Epiphanius held they were Joseph’s sons from an earlier marriage, making them Jesus’s stepbrothers; and Helvidius held that they were the natural children of Joseph and Mary.4 Herman Bavinck judged the underlying question, whether Mary bore other children, “dogmatically of secondary importance,” since the virgin birth’s significance rests on the miracle of Christ’s conception rather than on Mary’s status afterward.4 A separate dispute is whether this James was also James the son of Alphaeus, one of the Twelve; the question, in Elijah Porter Barrows’s summary, “turns very much on the interpretation of the words ‘brother,’ and ‘brethren’ and ‘sisters’” in the Gospel passages, whether they are read literally or as a broader term for kindred.5

Whichever view is taken, the James who appears through Acts as the Jerusalem church’s leading figure is, in Barrows’s judgment, “beyond all reasonable doubt” the same man who gave the decisive word at the Jerusalem council (Acts 15:13-21) and wrote the epistle bearing his name.5 Luke never assigns James a title in Acts, a reticence Alexander Strauch connects to Jesus’s own warning against status-seeking titles (Matt. 23:8); James introduced himself in his own letter only as “a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ” (James 1:1).6 Galatians 1:19 and Acts 9:27 nonetheless “seem to classify James as an apostle,” and he was counted, alongside Peter and John, as one of the church’s “pillars” (Gal. 2:9).6 At the Jerusalem council, called to settle whether Gentile converts had to keep the law of Moses, James spoke last and delivered the council’s ruling. Strauch, quoting J. A. Motyer, cautions that speaking last “does not mean that he ‘had the last word’” over the assembled apostles and elders.6 James’s continued standing appears later in Acts, where Paul reports to James and “all the elders” on his return to Jerusalem (Acts 21:18-25), and where Jude, writing his own letter, identifies himself simply as “brother of James” (Jude 1).6

James was killed in Jerusalem in the gap between two Roman procurators, Festus and Albinus. Josephus records that the high priest Ananus used the interval to convene the Sanhedrin and try James along with several others:

He assembled the sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others, [or, some of his companions]; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned.3

Josephus reports that Ananus’s action was widely condemned as illegal even among the Jews of Jerusalem, and cost him the high priesthood.3 The traditional date for James’s death is AD 62, though William Ramsay argued for AD 61, correlating the early historian Hegesippus’s report that the killing took place at Passover with the Hieronymian Martyrology’s date of 25 March, which fell the day after Passover in AD 61 but not in the neighboring years.7

Theological Contribution

James is credited with the New Testament epistle addressed “to the twelve tribes in the Dispersion” (James 1:1), written, on Barrows’s reckoning, from Jerusalem to Jewish Christians scattered outside Palestine.8 Its canonical standing was not immediately universal: Eusebius listed it among the books that were “disputed, but known nevertheless to many,” though Barrows notes that Eusebius elsewhere quotes James as “the holy apostle” and treats his words as “Scripture.”9 The epistle’s reception broadened over the fourth century and was universal in both the Eastern and Western churches by the fifth.9

The epistle’s teaching that “faith without works is dead” (James 2:26) has often been read against Paul’s teaching that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law (Rom. 3:28), but Barrows treats the two as addressing different questions rather than contradicting one another: “the faith without works which [James] condemns as dead is one of mere empty notions, an inoperative belief about Christ instead of that hearty trust in him which brings the heart and life into subjection to his authority. In a word, Paul condemns, as dead, works without faith; James, faith without works.”10

Historical Significance

James’s standing as one of the church’s three “pillars” (Gal. 2:9) later entered a different argument: Rome’s claim to primacy. John Calvin invoked the same verse against that claim: if a church’s rank followed the dignity of its founder, “Paul names three individuals who seemed to be pillars, viz. James, Peter, and John,” so Jerusalem and Ephesus, not only Rome, would have to rank among the leading sees, which history never granted them.2 Later church tradition went further than the New Testament’s own language, with Eusebius describing James as the man “to whom the throne of the episcopacy in Jerusalem had been entrusted by the Apostles.”11 Strauch argues this and the related claim that James functioned as a sole ruling bishop, with the Jerusalem elders as his clergy, go beyond what Acts itself shows: Acts 15 and 21 depict James acting alongside a plural body of elders, not ruling over them alone, though James did hold what Strauch calls “a unique status” that may have combined apostolic and eldership standing.6

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality,” n. 87: “the position of honor held by James, the Lord’s brother, in the church of Jerusalem (Acts 12:17; 15:13; 21:18; Gal. 1:19; 2:9).” ↩

  2. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-46), book 4, chap. 6, “Of the Primacy of the Romish See,” sec. 13. ↩ ↩2

  3. Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.1, trans. William Whiston. Josephus’s works are not held in the Theopedia Library; quoted from the public-domain Whiston translation as a primary source. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father.” ↩ ↩2

  5. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), chap. 31, “The Catholic Epistles,” 487-488. ↩ ↩2

  6. Alexander Strauch, Biblical Eldership: Restoring the Eldership to Its Rightful Place in the Local Church, 4th ed. (Littleton, CO: Lewis and Roth Publishers, 2017), chap. 6, “Acts 11:30, First Jewish Christian Elders,” 79-88. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  7. William M. Ramsay, “The Pauline Chronology,” in Pauline and Other Studies in Early Christian History (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1906), 358-359. ↩

  8. Barrows, Companion to the Bible, 489. ↩

  9. Barrows, Companion to the Bible, 489-490. ↩ ↩2

  10. Barrows, Companion to the Bible, chap. 34, “The Scope of a Book,” 529. ↩

  11. Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, Books 1-5, ed. and trans. Roy Joseph Deferrari, vol. 19 of The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1953), 124-128, quoted in Strauch, Biblical Eldership, endnotes to chap. 6, n. 16. ↩