Scholarly consensus
James, called in the New Testament “the brother of the Lord”, led the Jerusalem community of Jesus’s followers from the 40s until his death in 62 CE. He is the most important figure of the first Christian generation about whom the New Testament says least, and what it says comes mostly from Paul of Tarsus, who did not get on with him. This page gathers the evidence.
Who he was
Mark 6:3 names four brothers of Jesus, James first among them, and sisters. In the gospels the family does not follow him (Mark 3:21, 31-35; John 7:5). After the crucifixion James is suddenly a leader. Paul of Tarsus says the risen Jesus “appeared to James” (1 Corinthians 15:7), lists him with Cephas and John as the “acknowledged pillars” of the Jerusalem church (Galatians 2:9), and names him, in that list, first. On his first visit to Jerusalem Paul of Tarsus saw no one but Cephas and “James the Lord’s brother” (Galatians 1:19). In Acts, James presides over the council of chapter 15 and delivers its verdict (15:13-21), receives Paul of Tarsus on his last visit (21:18), and is the man to whom Peter sends word on leaving prison (12:17). Later tradition made him the first bishop of Jerusalem.
The men from James
Galatians 2:11-13: “when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. And the other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray.” Three things stand out. James had authority enough to send envoys to another city and have Peter obey them. His position was that Jewish believers should keep the food laws even at table with gentile believers. And Paul of Tarsus lost the argument at Antioch: he does not say that Peter or Barnabas came round, and he never mentions Antioch as his base again.
Acts 21
On Paul of Tarsus’s final visit to Jerusalem, Acts has James and the elders say: “You see, brother, how many thousands of believers there are among the Jews, and they are all zealous for the law. They have been told about you that you teach all the Jews living among the gentiles to forsake Moses, and that you tell them not to circumcise their children or observe the customs. What then is to be done?” (21:20-22). They ask him to pay for the vows of four men and to purify himself in the Temple, “so all will know that there is nothing in what they have been told about you, but that you yourself observe and guard the law” (21:24). Paul of Tarsus complies. The passage, written by an author friendly to him, shows that the Jerusalem church was entirely law-observant twenty-five years after the crucifixion, that it had heard what Paul of Tarsus taught, and that its leaders required him to demonstrate in public that the report was false.
The letter of James
The New Testament letter of James, whoever wrote it, preserves the voice of this wing of the movement. “Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (2:17). “You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (2:24). “Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it” (2:10). The letter takes up Paul of Tarsus’s own example, Abraham, and draws the opposite conclusion from it (2:21-23; compare Romans 4:1-3). Martin Luther, who understood the disagreement, called it “an epistle of straw”.
His death
Josephus, writing about 93 CE, records that in 62 CE, between the death of one Roman governor and the arrival of the next, the high priest Ananus “convened the judges of the Sanhedrin and brought before them a man named James, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, and certain others. He accused them of having transgressed the law and delivered them up to be stoned” (Antiquities 20.200). The fair-minded citizens, Josephus adds, protested to the king, and Ananus was deposed. This is the earliest non-Christian reference to Jesus, and it is a reference to his brother, put to death as a Jew by the Jewish authorities. Hegesippus, a second-century Jewish Christian quoted by Eusebius, says James was called “the Just”, drank no wine, ate no meat, wore linen, prayed in the Temple so long that his knees grew hard as a camel’s, and was thrown from the Temple parapet and clubbed to death (Ecclesiastical History 2.23). The details are legend; the portrait of a strictly observant Jew is consistent with everything else.
Why it matters here
The question this website asks of the first community is what the men who knew ʿĪsā ibn Maryam believed, as against what Paul of Tarsus, who did not, taught. James is the answer. His brother led the community; he kept the law and expected other Jews who followed Jesus to keep it; he sent men to Antioch to enforce it; his church required Paul of Tarsus to prove he was not teaching Jews to abandon Moses; and the letter under his name denies justification by faith alone in so many words. If the Injīl was what Jesus taught his own people, the community under his brother is the nearest witness to it that survives, and that community did not preach the gospel of Paul of Tarsus. The Qur’an’s ʿĪsā, who confirmed the Torah (3:50), would have been at home in James’s Jerusalem. See the Ebionites for what became of that community.
Sources
- Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.197-203.
- Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23, for Hegesippus.
- Richard Bauckham, Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church.
- John Painter, Just James: The Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition.
- Bruce Chilton and Jacob Neusner (eds.), The Brother of Jesus: James the Just and His Mission.