Leadership of the Jerusalem Church
James emerged as the principal authority in the Jerusalem church from the time the Apostle Peter left the city following Herod Agrippa's attempt on his life. The Apostle Paul identified him as one of the three 'pillars' of the Church alongside Peter and John (Gal 2:9), knew him personally (Gal 1:19), and consulted him upon arriving in Jerusalem (Acts 21:18).
His tenure was long: Jerome wrote that James 'ruled the church of Jerusalem thirty years,' and the sources credit him with bringing many of his fellow Jews to the Christian faith. He was succeeded as bishop by Simeon.
The Council of Jerusalem
At the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15:13-21), James spoke last, after Peter, Paul, and Barnabas, and his word proved decisive on the question of whether Gentile converts must be circumcised. He advocated against requiring circumcision while proposing that Gentile Christians abstain from blood and from meat sacrificed to idols. The Orthodox tradition remembers this as the moment at which his judgment settled a defining question of early Christian practice.
Ascetic Life
Early sources, particularly Hegesippus as quoted by Eusebius, portray James as extraordinarily ascetic. According to that account he drank no wine or other intoxicating liquor and ate no flesh; no razor came upon his head; he did not anoint himself with oil or use the bath; and he wore only fine linen rather than wool. He alone, the account adds, was permitted to enter the holy place.
Hegesippus further relates that James was constantly in the temple, found kneeling and begging forgiveness for the people, so that the skin of his knees became hardened like a camel's. Epiphanius characterized him as a Nazirite.
Martyrdom and the Two Accounts
The historian Josephus records, in the Antiquities of the Jews (20.9.1), that James was killed around AD 62: the High Priest Ananus ben Ananus exploited the gap between the death of the procurator Festus and the arrival of his successor Albinus, convened the Sanhedrin, brought 'the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James,' before it, and had him delivered to be stoned.
Hegesippus preserves a divergent and more elaborate account in which James was thrown from the pinnacle of the Temple, then stoned, and finally struck with a fuller's club while he prayed for his killers. By the Orthodox account, Jewish leaders brought him to the Temple roof and questioned him about Jesus; when he bore witness that Christ is the Messiah, they cast him down, and though gravely injured by the fall and the stoning he prayed for his attackers before dying. Modern scholars regard Josephus's date of AD 62 and his account of death by stoning as the more historically reliable.
The Liturgy and the Epistle
The oldest surviving Christian liturgy, the Liturgy of St James, carries his name and influenced later Byzantine liturgies. Philip Schaff observed that it raises him to 'the brother of the very God' — the epithet Adelphotheos by which he is known in the East.
The canonical Epistle of James in the New Testament is traditionally attributed to him.
Relics and Commemoration
In 1853 Patriarch Hierotheos sent relics of the saint to Moscow. Beyond his principal feast on October 23, James is commemorated on the first Sunday after the Nativity together with King David and Joseph the Betrothed, on January 4 among the Seventy Apostles, and on December 26 within the Synaxis of the Mother of God; translations of his relics are noted on December 1 and May 25.
