James the Just

Life and Ministry

James was the brother of the Lord — whether by Joseph's prior marriage (Eastern tradition), by Mary and Joseph after Jesus's birth (Protestant majority view), or by close kinship (Western tradition) — and during Jesus's ministry he did not believe. After the resurrection the risen Christ appeared to him personally, as Paul records in 1 Corinthians 15, and from that moment until his death thirty years later he led the Jerusalem church. He presided at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, settled the question of Gentile circumcision with the verdict that Gentiles need not become Jews to follow the Jewish Messiah, and wrote the New Testament epistle that bears his name — a sermon on the kind of faith that proves itself in works.

Circumstances of Death

The eyewitness Hegesippus, preserved by Eusebius, reports that during a vacancy between Roman procurators in AD 62 the high priest Ananus took advantage of the gap in imperial oversight to convene a Sanhedrin against James. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing decades later, independently confirms the date and the high priest's overreach. Hegesippus describes James being thrown from the pinnacle of the Temple, surviving the fall, kneeling to pray for his attackers, and then being beaten to death with a fuller's club while he prayed. His knees, Hegesippus writes, had grown calloused like a camel's from constant prayer.

Legacy

James gave the early church its model of a Jewish-Christian leader who held the faith without abandoning the law, and his epistle gave it the warning text against a faith that does not work. Josephus records that the destruction of Jerusalem eight years after his death was widely understood by contemporary Jews as divine judgment for the murder of "James the Just." His appellation — "the Just" — is what the Jewish people called him while he lived.