Who was James, the brother of Jesus?

A brother who did not believe

Mark names four brothers of Jesus and puts James first, along with sisters he does not name (Mark 6:3). James is the Greek form of Jacob, the patriarch’s name. During the ministry the family keeps its distance. Once his mother and brothers stand outside a packed house calling for him, and Jesus answers that whoever does God’s will is his brother, his sister and his mother (Mark 3:31–35). At the Feast of Booths his brothers needle him to go to Judea and show himself to the world, and John adds a blunt line.

For even his brothers didn’t believe in him.

The turn

Something changed. Among the appearances Paul says he received as tradition, one is to James by name: “Then he appeared to James” (1 Corinthians 15:7). By Pentecost the brothers are praying with the disciples in Jerusalem (Acts 1:14). When Paul came to Jerusalem about three years after his own turn, he met two leaders.

But of the other apostles I saw no one except James, the Lord’s brother.

Leader in Jerusalem

Within a few years James is in charge. Peter, freed from prison, says “Tell these things to James” before leaving the city (Acts 12:17). Paul names “James and Cephas and John” as the pillars, in that order (Galatians 2:9). At the meeting around AD 49 on whether Gentile believers must be circumcised, James gives the ruling: “my judgment is that we don’t trouble those from among the Gentiles who turn to God” (Acts 15:19). Yet he kept close to Jewish practice, and when “some people came from James” to Antioch, Peter stopped eating with Gentiles (Galatians 2:12). Later Christians called him James the Just. The letter of James, which tradition assigns to him, insists that faith without works is dead (James 2:17); scholars debate whether he wrote it, and Martin Luther called it an epistle of straw.

He is not James son of Zebedee, the fisherman Herod Agrippa I put to the sword around AD 44 (Acts 12:2).

His death

Josephus tells the end (Antiquities 20.197–203). In AD 62 the Roman governor Festus died, and before his successor Albinus arrived, the new high priest Ananus, a son of the Annas of the Gospels, called the council and had James, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, stoned with some others as lawbreakers. Fair-minded citizens of Jerusalem protested, and King Agrippa II removed Ananus after three months in office. A second-century Christian, Hegesippus, quoted by Eusebius, tells a more dramatic story: James, his knees as hard as a camel’s from praying in the Temple, thrown from its pinnacle, stoned, and finished with a fuller’s club (Church History 2.23). Most historians prefer Josephus.

Brother, cousin or stepbrother?

• Most Protestants read “brother” plainly: a younger son of Mary and Joseph.
• The Orthodox follow a tradition found in the second-century Protoevangelium of James and in Epiphanius: a son of Joseph by an earlier marriage.
• Catholics often follow Jerome, who argued around 383 that the brothers were cousins, since Hebrew and Aramaic used “brother” for close kin.

In 2002 a limestone bone box inscribed “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” made headlines. The Israel Antiquities Authority called the inscription a modern forgery in 2003. A trial of its owner ended in 2012 without a forgery conviction, and without settling whether the words are genuine; most scholars remain doubtful.