Apostle

by Tom Bissell

  I paged dumbly through these offerings for a while. Then I looked up and asked Father Dario how exactly Philip and James were venerated today.

  Father Dario nodded. “The third of May is their feast day.”

  This was not quite my question. “How,” I asked, “were Philip and James different from the other apostles? What specifically marked their cult?”

  Father Dario smiled impatiently. He was about to speak when there came a soft, barely discernible knock on his office door. Father Dario rose to answer it. An impressively pregnant woman, smiling apologetically and wearing coveralls and a winter coat, walked into the room. Her son, no older than ten and wearing a ragged red jacket that he was in the process of unzipping, followed her in. Both were black-haired and cola colored—South American, possibly. Father Dario welcomed the pair with enthusiasm, after which they stood next to me. “This is my son,” the woman said to me, in Spanish-accented English. “Hello,” the boy said. She was carrying a white grocery bag stretched tight around a long submarine of bread. Two things seemed clear: she was poor, and she was here for something.

  “One moment,” Father Dario said to me. I threw up my hands obligingly. He then turned to the woman and spoke in Italian, which she answered in a series of halting sìs and nos.

  When they finished talking, the woman and her son did not leave. Father Dario nevertheless returned his attention to me. “I am disappointed,” he said, “in the devotion of the following of these saints here. There is not a great following for them. This is a general Catholic crisis. It has happened to the cults of the saints in general. All of them.” He frowned. “Saints today, I think, are in movies and politics. Beautiful men for beautiful women. Those are our saints now.”

  The boy walked past Father Dario’s desk and stopped at the wheeled garment rack, from which a dozen priestly vestments hung. The boy reverently touched them, as though pondering a possible priestly future for himself. The woman looked at Father Dario for his reaction. Father Dario’s impassive face had a morbid cheddar hue in the light of his desk lamp. No one said anything for several seconds.

  “Which of the two apostles is more celebrated here?” I asked Father Dario at last.

  Father Dario debuted a new, beetle-browed expression. It said, I have more pressing work to do than this. “I’m sorry. What is your question?”

  I repeated it.

  “Philip is more known,” he said. “It was Philip who assisted Christ during the miracle of the loaves and fishes and Philip who said, ‘Show us the Father.’ Saint James is the author of the Letter of James. Have you read it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

  “Then you know its most famous quote: ‘Faith without works is dead.’ ” Now his face softened, as though nothing more needed to be said of Philip and James. The woman, aware that some rare and valuable point had been made, grinned and nodded. The boy was still gently touching Father Dario’s vestments.

  II.

  Philip and James son of Alphaeus are unusually elusive figures in early Christianity. The former might or might not have been the first apostle to make a non-Semitic Christian convert, while the latter might or might not have been the brother of Jesus. Yet both slip like sand through the fingers of identification. This can, in part, be blamed on the Acts of the Apostles, a book that obscures so many questions, from the precise nature of the forces that drove apart the first community of Christians to why James son of Zebedee was executed to why exactly Paul was accosted in Jerusalem and apprehended by the Romans. The years Acts attempts to cover—roughly, 33 to 60—were momentous ones for the region, the faiths the region birthed, the rulers who held it subject, and the people who called it home. One would hardly gather this from the text of Acts. Using Acts to determine certain events in early Christian history, one scholar has written, is “the path to bewilderment.”

  For instance, Aretas IV, the king of the Nabataeans, crushed the forces of Herod Antipas, the tetrarch*1 of Galilee, in 36 CE. Pontius Pilate quashed a prophet-led Samaritan uprising in 37 CE, which ultimately led to his dismissal and return to Rome. The same year saw Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest at the time of Jesus’s execution, lose his long-held office, and Tiberius, emperor of Rome since 14 CE, die of natural causes, only to be replaced by the mad Gaius Caligula, whose move to build a statue of himself in Jerusalem set off some of the most determined opposition the Romans had yet encountered in Judaea. In 39, the floundering Herod Antipas, who had beheaded John the Baptist and (according to Luke) mocked Jesus at his trial, was deposed by Gaius and exiled to Gaul. Incredibly, these years were relatively calm ones for the region.

  By the mid-40s, however, Roman Palestine had been brought to a boil. A mysterious Jewish prophet named Theudas stepped forth around 45 CE to attract several thousand followers, to whom he promised he would part the Jordan River. While en route to the Jordan, Theudas was captured by Roman horsemen and swiftly beheaded. During one of the first Passovers of Ventidius Cumanus’s procuratorship of Judaea (which lasted from 48 to 52), a Roman soldier, according to Josephus, “pulled up his garment and bent over indecently, turning his backside toward the Jews and making a noise as indecent as his attitude.” This act—maybe the most politically significant mooning in human history—led to a demonstration and, later, a riot in which hundreds, if not thousands, of Jews were trampled to death. (Josephus tells us thirty thousand Jews died in the riot. As with virtually all of Josephus’s numbers—as when he overestimates the height of Mount Tabor by a factor of twenty—this is probably a gross exaggeration.) Shortly thereafter, Jewish bandits robbed a Roman slave in the countryside outside Jerusalem; Cumanus ordered his troops, again according to Josephus, to arrest the inhabitants of all neighboring villages and bring them to his headquarters. In one village, “a soldier found a copy of the sacred Law, tore it in two, and threw it on to the fire” in full view of many hostile Jews. A second large-scale demonstration resulted, during which Cumanus showed some restraint. This was followed by a Jewish-Samaritan guerrilla war in which Cumanus openly sided with the Samaritans, a misadventure that led to Cumanus’s recall to Rome and, after some high-level intrigue, banishment. Finally, in 59, the seventy-eight-year-long renovation of the Second Temple, begun under Herod the Great, was completed. The Temple was instantly regarded as one of the most glorious buildings in the world.

  Most of these historical events do not find their way into Acts. While Acts does mention Theudas (“Theudas rose up, claiming to be somebody, and a number of men, about four thousand, joined him; but he was killed”), it is an extremely awkward passage, because the author of Acts seems to regard Theudas as someone who lived long ago. A famine that left greater Judaea devastated merits a single mention, and an Egyptian prophet who persuaded several thousand Jerusalemites to follow him to the Mount of Olives is obliquely mentioned when Paul is confused for him.

  From this we can see that secular and Christian histories of New Testament times are incomplete mirrors in which occasional glints of one appear in the other. What has been lost within these incomplete reflections has distinct bearing on the problematical identities of both Philip and James son of Alphaeus.

  III.

  James son of Alphaeus appears in the apostle lists of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and Acts. Mark 15:40, however, also contains a reference to a man literally called “James the little.” While nothing in Mark suggests James the little is the same person as James son of Alphaeus, much less an apostle, Christian tradition has long identified James the little as James son of Alphaeus. Because most translations render Mark’s “the little” as “the less,” “the lesser,” or “the younger,” ancient and modern interpreters alike have understood Mark’s diminutive as a way to distinguish James son of Alphaeus from the more prominent apostle James son of Zebedee, the brother of the apostle John, traditionally known as James the Greater.

  Mark tells us James the little had a mother named Mary and a brother named Joses. Jesus, as well, had a mother named Mary and, accor
ding to Matthew 13:56 and Mark 6:3, brothers named James, Joses, Simon, and Judas. During the crucifixion of Jesus, Mark 15:40, Matthew 27:55, and John 19:25 place a number of women at the scene, several of whom are named Mary. In Mark and Matthew, the women are “looking on from a distance,” while in John they are “near the cross of Jesus.” Mark mentions as present any number of women, among them “Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the [little] and of Joses, and Salome.” In Mark’s account, then, there is no stated presence of Mary the mother of Jesus. Matthew, on the other hand, names among the women “Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee.” Again, no explicit mention of Mary the mother of Jesus. In John, they are “[Jesus’s] mother”—John never names this woman as Mary—“and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.” John does not appear to know Jesus’s mother’s name, for if he did, he probably would not have reported her sister’s name as Mary.*2 Traditionally, “Mary the wife of Clopas” has been identified as the mother of James son of Alphaeus, the logic being that Clopas and Alphaeus are different transliterations of the Hebrew name Halphai or Chalpai. Today, however, most scholars reject this potential solution to James son of Alphaeus’s supremely confusing, highly speculative identity.

  In three of the four gospels, we are told Jesus had a mother named Mary. We are told a certain James had a mother named Mary. We are told Jesus had a brother named Joses. We are told a certain James had a brother named Joses. We are told Jesus had a brother named James. In New Testament times, a relatively small number of names were in cultural circulation, and these were all common ones. It is nevertheless odd that virtually every time this James is mentioned in the gospels, a flock of Marys and Joseses swoops in on him—so odd that some scholars regard “James son of Alphaeus” as the composite result of a complicated editorial (and doctrinal) process by which James the brother of Jesus, whose prominence in early Christian history is indisputable, was overwritten and replaced by an apostle notable only for his obscurity.

  Confusion between James son of Alphaeus and James the brother of Jesus is almost as old as Christianity itself. That James the brother of Jesus was the leader of the Jerusalem church—and, thus, early Christianity itself—there can be no doubt. Paul’s letter to the Galatians and the Acts of the Apostles both attest to this fact, though obliquely, as do numerous early extra-scriptural traditions, in which James the brother of Jesus is usually referred to as James the Just or James the Righteous. Despite this, the New Testament withholds from James the brother of Jesus any formal recognition of leadership.

  Many of the earliest church fathers, however they regarded James’s identity, did not question the idea that Jesus had brothers. The gospels mention them, as does Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians. Tertullian, too, assumed the “brothers of the Lord” were his blood siblings. But other church fathers saw things differently. Ignatius of Antioch, writing around the turn of the first century, was among the first to argue for Mary’s perpetual virginity. By the late second century, the notion that Jesus had blood brothers declined as asceticism and celibacy gained importance in the early church. By the fourth century, it was doomed outright when Mary’s perpetual virginity—which denied her having ever enjoyed sexual relations—grew closer to becoming actual Christian doctrine, despite clear biblical evidence against it: Matthew notes that Joseph “had no marital relations with [Mary] until she had borne a son.” Modern Christians theologically committed to the concept of Mary’s virginity explain this passage away by debating the types of intentionality in orbit around the word “until.” But as the scholar John Painter points out, this passage surely would not have been written in such a way by any writer “who wished to maintain that Mary remained a virgin even after the birth of Jesus.”

  A second-century apocryphal work known since the sixteenth century as the Protoevangelium of James, which is a kind of conflation of Matthew and Luke’s nativity stories with several eccentric additions (such as a midwife personally inspecting Mary’s hymen), made an influentially early case that Mary was forever ignorant of matters of the flesh. Its purported author, who presents himself as Jesus’s stepbrother James, argues that Joseph was an elderly widower when he met Mary and that his sons, James included, were the children of his dead wife.

  The Protoevangelium exists today in over a hundred Greek manuscripts. That so many manuscripts survived helps establish its ancient popularity, which was bolstered by the fourth-century bishop Epiphanius, who championed the “stepbrother solution” to explain the presence of James and the rest of Jesus’s brothers in the gospel tradition. The stepbrother solution today remains the predominant Eastern Orthodox position on the issue of Jesus’s kin. Yet the Protoevangelium fell out of favor in the Western church when Jerome, later in the fourth century, argued that Mary the mother of Jesus had a sister named, yes, Mary, who had a son, James, and that Jesus’s brothers were in fact his cousins. Not a single aspect of Jerome’s deduction had a scriptural or traditional basis.

  Thanks to Jerome, the stepbrother solution provided by the Protoevangelium was no longer needed in the Western church. All were cousins, and from there many in the Catholic and, later, Armenian Churches accepted that James son of Alphaeus, “James the little,” and James the brother of Jesus were the same person, which is to say the cousin of Jesus. After this was established, as John Painter writes, “James ceased to be a point of focus or concern in any Western tradition.” Today many Catholics distinguish James son of Alphaeus from James the brother of Jesus, but not very stridently: the available evidence is confusing enough to baffle the most dogged New Testament detective.

  In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul mentions James the brother of Jesus, noting that the risen Jesus “appeared to James, then to all the apostles.” That Paul knew of a tradition in which Jesus graced James with a postresurrection appearance means this tradition ranks among the earliest elements of Jesus’s resurrection story. While the New Testament contains no Jesus appearance to James, various other early Christian texts dramatized the scene. Jerome cited one such passage from a now-lost work known as The Gospel of the Hebrews. Other traditions appear to have tried to negate Jesus’s appearance to James, including John’s gospel, which tells us, “For not even [Jesus’s] brothers believed in him.” (Yet the author of John’s gospel also mentions something, on two occasions, that no other evangelist does, which is that Jesus’s brothers occasionally traveled with him and the disciples.)

  James the brother of Jesus was the central figure of Jerusalem Christianity and one of the central figures in all of Christianity for the first three decades of the faith’s existence—and the only member of Jesus’s circle to make an appearance in any contemporaneous extra-biblical literature. Yet James’s role in the early church was “almost obliterated from the consciousness” of Christianity, in the words of John Painter. This diminishment would have real consequences for how the later Gentile Christian church would come to understand its history and relationship to Judaism.

  Hegesippus, an apparent Jewish Christian who wrote around 170 CE and whose multiple works are lost but for some scattered citations, noted “there were many Jameses” among the first group of Christians, but he singled out James the brother of Jesus as “holy from his birth.” In Hegesippus’s account, James never drank wine, never shaved, was a vegetarian, and wore exclusively linen garments. James was supposedly allowed access to the Temple after the death of Jesus, meaning he was still in the graces of the religious authorities. Moreover, both Eusebius and Clement of Alexandria were familiar with traditions that honored James as Jerusalem’s first bishop, and later strains of Jewish Christian thinking, contained in apocryphal works such as The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of the Hebrews, The First Apocalypse of James, and the Pseudo-Clementine literature, would all remember James’s leadership of the Jerusalem church.

  Now, if the fraternal successor to Jesus pursued Jewish rather than Gentile Christia
nity, and did so because he believed it was what his brother would have wanted, Gentile Christianity could reasonably be viewed as anything from an accident to a mistake. Supporting this view is the fact that Christianity began Jewish and remained predominantly Jewish for several years following the death of Jesus. While the first Jewish Christians might not have been beloved by their fellow Jews, the evidence, contained within Acts and elsewhere, suggests they were initially tolerated by them, if occasionally chastised. (Not until the early second century is there definitive evidence that Jews looked upon all Jewish Christians as apostates.) James, however, presents a different case. Not only did the Jews of Jerusalem tolerate James, but the evidence indicates that many accepted and venerated him—for decades.

  From the perspective of Gentile Christianity, obscuring James’s prominence and the existence of Jesus’s brothers eventually became emotionally necessary, as any acknowledgment of Jewish Christianity’s legitimacy seriously compromised Gentile Christianity’s assumed preeminence. To illustrate this, we need look no further than Melito, the mid-second-century bishop of Sardis, who referred to Jesus as “him whom the Gentiles worshipped and uncircumcised men admired,” which was certainly not the case during Jesus’s lifetime. In the third century, Hippolytus of Rome could transmit details about James son of Alphaeus’s life and death without having any idea he was possibly discussing James the brother of Jesus. By the fourth century, Eusebius was arguing that Jesus had not “received physical chrism from the Jews,” and thus was not Jewish.

  Modern scholars of faith are more polite than Eusebius, but many are no more willing to contemplate the ramifications of James’s relationship to Jesus, Christianity, and Judaism. The believing scholar Paul Barnett, in discussing Acts, notes that by 49 “James is clearly the leader…as he remains when we see him again in the late 50s.” However, “there is no reason to believe that he shaped the understanding of the earliest Jerusalem disciples. According to the book of Acts, the teaching of Peter was critical in this regard.” But how could James have led the Jerusalem church for decades and not shaped the religious understanding of that community? One wonders if conservative scholars fear answering this question precisely because of how the historical James might have shaped the first community of Christians.