APOSTLE JAMES

On November 5, the Julian calendar churches honor the memory of the Holy Apostle James, Brother of the Lord. The Apostle is highly revered in the Orthodox Tradition. The liturgy in his name is celebrated annually on the day of his memory. The Epistle of James is read during the sacrament of unction. At the dismissal of unction, it is obligatory to mention the Apostle as the First Bishop of Jerusalem, with whose name the description of the sacrament in the New Testament text is associated.

James had extraordinary authority in the apostolic community. He led the Jerusalem Church after Pentecost until 62, when he was killed by order of the high priest Annas II. The latter decided in this way to behead the apostolic community, taking advantage of the anarchy in the Roman government of Palestine caused by the death of the procurator Festus and the anticipation of the arrival of his successor, who was a man named Albinus.

According to Tradition, James the Righteous, as Jacob was called by the first Christians for his wisdom and piety, was thrown from the roof of the temple and finished off by blows from the crowd.

It was James who played the key role in recognizing the apostolic mission of Paul, as well as in the agreement of the Apostolic Council to allow pagan Christians not to observe the Law of Moses (Acts 15: 1-35).

It is very important to know that Tradition has not preserved exact information about what this special brotherhood of Jacob with the Lord Jesus means. Was he the son of St. Joseph his first marriage, the son of one of the Virgin Mary’s cousins, simply a relative of the Lord, or a brother in spirit and friendship with the Saviour.

It is also important that the ancient Fathers of the Church do not have a common opinion about whether James was one of the twelve Apostles, or an Apostle of the Seventy. So, Irenaeus of Lyons, Clement of Alexandria, Athanasius the Great and others believed that James the Brother and James, the Son of Alphaeus were one and the same person, while Eusebius of Caesarea, Chrysostom and, in the later period of his life, Jerome, distinguished between these two Apostles, and Jacob the Righteous was believed to be one of the seventy. Subsequently, the first opinion began to prevail in the West of the Christian world, and the second in the Orthodox East.