by Tom Bissell
There can be little doubt the letter wends back to James the brother of Jesus traditionally, whether as something James wrote himself or something written in his name by a follower. The latter is almost certainly the case, as James 5:6 (“You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you”) seems to contain an allusion to James the brother of Jesus’s death. No scholar can be sure of its date of composition. Although Irenaeus quoted it around 180, it was not actually mentioned by name until the third century, by Origen.
Philip has no New Testament texts attributed to him, but his adventures in the Apocrypha are a highly entertaining mix of torture, magic, seismology, and interspecies encounter. The Acts of Philip, written sometime between the fourth and the sixth centuries, belongs to a group of writings that seem based on vague historical traditions enriched by forceful portrayals of the apostles as unparalleled thaumaturges. Acts such as Philip’s owe as much to Christian doctrine, which they try to endorse, as they do to the raw material of Eastern and Mediterranean mythology, which they shamelessly exploit.
Philip’s Acts does not exist in any complete edition and seems cobbled together from at least three separate bundles of Philip material. Much of it appears to have been inspired by other noncanonical Acts (it contains a prayer also found in The Acts of John, for instance), but it establishes the basic chronology of Philip’s traditional story: leaving Galilee for Athens, journeying in the “land of the Parthians,” healing various people, meeting a leopard and a baby goat with Bartholomew, and finally arriving in Hierapolis. In due course, Philip and Bartholomew meet Nicanora, the Jewish wife of the local governor. When they pray for her, “her tyrant husband came” and “dragged her by the hair and threatened to kill her.” Philip and Bartholomew are then “arrested, scourged, and dragged to the temple.”
Philip wonders aloud if he should call down fire from Heaven to destroy their torturers, but Jesus appears and rebukes his apostle, calling Philip “unforgiving and wrathful” and promising that he “shall indeed die in glory and be taken by angels to paradise.” Jesus then proceeds to rescue the seven thousand pagan souls Philip had earlier exterminated in a fit of pique. A remorseful Philip, still hanging by his pierced ankles, instructs his friends to build “a church in the place where I die, and let the leopard and the baby goat be there.”
Philip gets truncated treatment in Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, though Jacobus does argue, using Jerome as his evidence, that Philip the apostle and Philip the Evangelist were different men. Working off his usual assortment of ancient sources and traditions, Jacobus writes that the apostle Philip preached “through Scythia” for two decades, before doing battle with some pagans’ dragon god. Philip commands the dragon “to a desert place” before raising from the dead all the dragon’s victims. Philip then travels “to the city of Hierapolis in Asia,” where he “put down the heresy of the Ebionites, who taught that the body assumed by Christ was only a phantom.” With him in Hierapolis, Jacobus writes, are two daughters, “dedicated virgins both of them.”
The bishop of Ephesus, Polycrates, writing around 185, noted that in “Asia great luminaries sleep…such as Philip, one of the twelve apostles, who sleeps in Hierapolis with two of his daughters, who remained unmarried to the end of their days, while his other daughter lived in the Holy Spirit and rests in Ephesus.” Philip’s original Hierapolitan tomb, now a ruin in modern-day Turkey, is today fully excavated. An ancient-world healing spa known for its Niagaracally massive waterfall, Hierapolis was ruled by Romans but culturally Greek. Ephesus was within easy traveling distance of Hierapolis, and there the apostle John is supposed to have established a Christian enclave similar to that which Philip founded in Hierapolis. Because the Gospel According to John mentions Philip so prominently, the notion that these two old friends were close to each other was apparently so appealing that many of the church fathers later expanded on it. In other words, the traditions associated with Philip are the likely result of sentiment braided together with some dimly recalled history. Hierapolis was supposedly home to an active snake cult, for example, and this may explain Philip’s apocryphally widespread encounters with dragons.
VII.
The death of James the brother of Jesus is different from that of Philip. For one, his existence is a near historical certainty. For two, the tradition of where and when he died is roughly reliable. Beyond these two facts lies a rain forest teeming with postulation.
The earliest mention of James the brother of Jesus outside Paul’s letters comes from the first-century historian Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities, in which James is described as “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ.” An earlier mention of Jesus by Josephus claims “he was a doer of wonderful works” and that he “appeared” to his disciples “alive again [on] the third day.” Most scholars consider these Josephus passages about Jesus the product of later Christian interpolations. (The earliest copy we have of Josephus’s Antiquities is from the eleventh century, giving Christians nearly a thousand years to alter the text beyond the parameters of scholarly detection.) No Christian apologist cited the passage until the fourth century, and when Origen, in the mid-third century, discussed Josephus, he noted that Josephus “did not believe in Jesus as Christ.” Then again, “Christ,” to someone of Josephus’s time and placement, would have had nothing in common with the version of the word used even a few decades later. If the passage is genuine, it could merely indicate that Josephus regarded Jesus as an anointed one favored by God.
Josephus’s mention of James the brother of Jesus is less controversial, and most scholars believe that much of the passage is genuinely Josephus’s. In it, Josephus writes of Ananus ben Ananus, the Temple high priest and Sadducee whose brief rule in 62 was marked by one fateful decision. While the new Roman procurator was on his way to Jerusalem from Alexandria to report for duty, Ananus “thought he had now a proper opportunity” to display his authority. He thus “assembled the Sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Christ, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned.” In other words, something transpired among the Temple authorities, dramatically affecting their view of Jewish Christians and James the brother of Jesus. Unfortunately, Josephus does not tell us why James was suddenly regarded as a breaker of the Law or reveal the names or religious affiliation of the “others” executed alongside him. After James’s death, “those who were considered most…strict in their observance of the Law”—almost certainly a reference to the Pharisees—“were most indignant.”*8
Later writers would depart considerably from the portrait of James’s death as drawn by Josephus, though they were clearly aware of it. According to Eusebius, after Paul’s arrest by the Romans (which Acts describes) the Jews “turned their attention to James the Lord’s brother.” Eusebius mentioned Clement of Alexandria’s brief account of James’s murder (“the Righteous One…was cast down from the Pinnacle of the Temple and beaten to death with a laundryman’s club”) but quoted at length “the most detailed account,” provided by Hegesippus. In this version, it is Passover, an annual source of unrest and administrative headaches for the Temple as well as the Roman authorities. Among the Jews, Hegesippus noted, were a number of sects with differing views of Jesus, as well as an anti-Christian “uproar” among the “Scribes and Pharisees.” To lower tensions in the city, the Temple authorities sought the assistance of a most unlikely candidate: James the brother of Jesus.
James, Hegesippus tells us, obeyed the scribes and Pharisees and assumed his perch on the Temple parapet. The authorities publicly assembled to ask the man they addressed as the “Righteous one” what was meant “by the ‘door of Jesus.’ ” James replied, “Why do you question me about the Son of Man? I tell you, He is sitting in heaven at the right hand of the Great Power, and He will come on the clouds of heaven.” This was obviously not what the authorities were expecting. As the crowd shouted hosa
nnas, the scribes and the Pharisees conferred. Their conclusion? “We have made a bad mistake.” They threw James from the parapet, thus fulfilling, at least in Hegesippus’s mind, a prophecy found in Isaiah. Then they began to stone James. While some in the crowd cried out in distress at the sight of the Righteous one’s bloody stoning, “a fuller”—that is, one of many laundrymen who used blunt wooden clubs to beat garments clean, and whose vats have been located by archaeologists as being not far from where the James of legend would have landed—“took the club which he used to beat out the clothes, and brought it down on the head of the Righteous one.”
One does not need much knowledge of the history of these times to recognize the patently bizarre notion that the Temple authorities would seek out the brother of Jesus to dampen Jerusalemites’ enthusiasm for him. In Josephus’s earlier and more straightforward account, James’s death came about due to some presumably intra-Jewish schism; Hegesippus’s version seems to be a Christianized retelling and might have derived from the Jewish Christian devotion to preserving tales of James’s unparalleled righteousness.
Eusebius, in his retelling of James’s death, indicated that the “more intelligent Jews” of his acquaintance accepted the Roman destruction of the Temple a few years later as an act of divine vengeance for its people’s treatment of James, which view he also attributed to Josephus; Origen twice made a similar attribution, though his own view was that the destruction of Jerusalem “was on account of Jesus the Christ of God.” Yet the relevant passages are lacking from all extant copies of Josephus. These passages might have been the result of Christian editorial meddling that was later abandoned as James receded from prominence in early Christian history. Needless to say, the death of James was obviously never going to be widely accepted by Christians as an explanation for the destruction of Jerusalem. What that would implicitly suggest about the relative importance of Jesus and James was simply too confounding for Christians to contemplate.
James the brother of Jesus was once important enough to have caused some to wonder whether a city was destroyed by God to avenge him. By the time the New Testament had achieved literary fixity, he was both diminished to Jesus’s cousin and linked, humiliatingly, to a man called “the little.”
VIII.
A marble whirlpool of stairs in front of the altar of the Church of the Holy Apostles led down into the confessio, also known as the Well of the Martyrs. The sign above the stairs read, TOMBA DEI SANTI APOSTOLI FILIPPO E GIACOMO.
According to one legend, Pope John III (561–574) requested Philip’s remains from the Christians of Hierapolis. This conflicts with one tradition that indicates Philip’s and James’s remains were already in Rome as of 560, the supposed date of the Church of the Holy Apostles’ dedication, and another that places them in Constantinople as of 572. Further complicating matters, the Armenian Church in Jerusalem has never relinquished what it claims to be its relics of James. These can be found today in the Cathedral of Saint James on Mount Zion. According to the Armenian tradition, James’s initial resting place was in a tomb on the Mount of Olives that James had purchased and constructed for himself. When this tomb was destroyed in the fourth century, Armenian priests ferried James’s body to Mount Zion, where James was believed to have lived, and a cathedral was built up around the ruins of his ancient home. According to Armenians, the relics they today venerate are the arm and the finger of James the Lesser, whom they regard as James son of Alphaeus and the cousin of Jesus. They also claim to possess the “throne” of James, mentioned by Eusebius, but it was obviously built much later than the first century. To make already extremely confusing matters more confusing, next to the altar is the resting place of what the Armenians claim to be the head of James son of Zebedee, who was supposedly beheaded in Jerusalem in the early 40s. When I politely asked the Armenian brothers of the Cathedral of Saint James—whose namesake they know as Surp Hagop—for clarification on these matters, all I received were some vividly incurious stares.
In 2002, an ossuary dating from the first century surfaced in Israel. It bore the inscription YAKOV BAR YOSEF AHUI D’YESHUA, “James son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” While a number of scholars initially vouchsafed the ossuary’s authenticity, in 2003 the Israel Antiquities Authority issued a report that claimed the ossuary was genuine but its inscription was not. The IAA has declined to provide specific reasons for its decision, and scholars who maintain their belief in its authenticity are equal in number to those who doubt it. It is unlikely the matter will be satisfactorily resolved.
The Roman crypt Philip and James today quietly occupy was refurbished between 1869 and 1871, shortly after a renovation of the church uncovered the original confessio. While their remains had long been believed to be beneath the church, various reconstructions had blocked off access to the crypt. And so, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the supposed remains of Philip and James were gazed upon by Christians for the first time in four hundred years. During the restoration of the Well of the Martyrs, much of the foundation of the original sixth-century church had been preserved, and artisans were brought in to cover the well’s walls with tempera-paint images that resembled the ancient Christian art found in Rome’s outlying catacombs of Calixtus and Domitilla.
After walking down handsome Renaissance-era stairs into a hive-like simulation of premodern Christianity, I marveled at how faithfully approximated these motifs were. The images (peacocks, fish, palms, scenes of unadorned human figures enjoying table fellowship) were bold in their primitivism, the colors (red, blue, a little yellow, some brown) starkly limited, the interstitial design elements (clean straight lines, grape bundles, chalices) unobtrusive and sparse. The well was arranged in a circular, twist-about fashion, lined with small tomb niches for other, less celebrated martyrs. At the base of the stairs was the tomb of Philip and James, both men of contested identity, one of whom might have prayed in the Jewish Temple for years after the death of Jesus and one of whom might have spread the faith beyond its Jewish rootstock. Given what we know about the debates of early Christianity, and where the traditions associated with Philip and James would have placed them in those debates, it may well be that the traditional versions of these two men would have had little to say to each other at civilized decibels. Two thousand years later, that did not matter. They were together now in undying apostleship.
A young man sat in one of two plastic-backed chairs before the tomb. He was reading his Bible. At the sound of my approaching footfalls, he half turned to me but quickly resumed his reading. He was one of those young men you could not imagine having ever been a boy. His thinning hair was some indeterminate color between brown and blond. His jeans were the bright clean blue of open ocean, and his spotless white shirt was buttoned up to his Adam’s apple. He was reading the King James: Acts of the Apostles. He did not stir as I sat down next to him.
There was no door into the tomb of Philip and James. I could look inside only through a small grate’s iron lattice. On either side of the grate were faded tempera paintings labeled JACOBUS and PHILIPPUS, the former carrying a homely sack and the latter holding what looked to be a basket of fish. Below the grate was a small kneeler cushioned by two red pillows. The area behind the grate was spacious, though the sarcophagus that held the apostles’ remains was as small as a love seat and cruder than I had been expecting. Chiseled into the sarcophagus were equally crude images of Philip and James helping Jesus feed the five thousand, both gesturing in amazement at the baskets of bread and fish while Jesus stands between them.
Although the young man’s lips moved as he read his Bible (the effect was meditative rather than remedial), he made no sound. He had obviously come here to pray and reflect. I had not. I found here only sawhorses on which to prop this man’s faith and skeptically saw away. To me, a miracle was nothing more than a storytelling enhancement of the sort that naturally occurred within all oral traditions. And yet the feeding of the five thousand was such a seductive miracle. Many of the New Testament�
�s other miracles—raisings of the dead, demons thrown from men to swine, healed paralytics—spoke of imaginations as limited by superstition as they were defined by it. But in the feeding of the five thousand, without a doubt my favorite Christian miracle, something else could be detected.
“Make the people sit down,” Jesus tells Andrew in the Gospel According to John. There was, John’s author tells us, “a great deal of grass in the place for people to sit.” This is an unusually tactile detail, as are the words John uses for the food Jesus miraculously multiplies. Mark, for instance, refers merely to “five loaves” and “two fish.” John, however, mentions that the bread was “barley loaves,” and the word he uses for “fish” is, in Greek, “smoked fish.” While the other gospels tell the story in passed-on, seemingly secondhand terms, John’s description of the feeding of the five thousand contains seemingly unmistakable reported details.
I could imagine a hot day. I could imagine a number of curious people spontaneously following a young man of great wisdom, a young man rumored to wield power over the mysterious afflictions they saw every day in their villages. They are not sure where they are going, and once the young man stops to speak, they find themselves on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, the nearest town now very far away. Many are feeling hunger pangs, uncertain of why they have come so far. What will they do? One of the young man’s friends arrives, unexpectedly bearing food. The people are happy and relieved, and among them talk circulates of the surprising tenderness with which the wise young man hands out victuals to the people, few of whom he knows well.