St. James the Elder

James the Great, also called James the Elder and James son of Zebedee (to distinguish him from James son of Alphaeus and from James the brother of the Lord), was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus. He was the son of Zebedee, a Galilean fisherman, and of Salome, who appears in the Gospels among the women who followed Jesus. His younger brother was John the Apostle. The family worked the Sea of Galilee in partnership with Simon Peter and Andrew. The Synoptic Gospels recount that Jesus called James and John while they were in their boat mending nets; they left their father and the hired men and followed him. Jesus gave the brothers the Aramaic nickname Boanerges, Sons of Thunder, which later commentators have connected with their ardent and sometimes impetuous temperament. That character is illustrated when they asked whether they should call down fire on a Samaritan village that refused to receive Jesus, and when they, or their mother on their behalf, requested the seats at his right and left in the kingdom.

Together with Peter and John, James belonged to an inner group among the Twelve. The Gospels present these three as witnesses of events from which the other apostles were excluded: the raising of the daughter of Jairus, the Transfiguration, and the agony of Jesus in Gethsemane. After the resurrection, James appears in the New Testament chiefly in the Acts of the Apostles, listed among those who persevered in prayer in Jerusalem after the Ascension. The same book records that he became the first of the Twelve to die as a martyr. During a persecution initiated by Herod Agrippa I, James was seized and killed with the sword. The episode is placed in the early 40s of the first century, generally in the year 44, shortly before Agrippa’s own death as reported by Acts and by Josephus. The New Testament gives no further details of the execution and does not mention any missionary journey outside Palestine. James is thus the only apostle whose martyrdom is explicitly narrated in canonical Scripture.

A much later body of tradition, which became central to the religious identity of medieval Spain, held that James had preached the Gospel in Hispania before returning to Judea to be martyred. According to these legends, his disciples placed his body in a boat that was guided to the coast of Galicia, where he was buried. In the early ninth century a tomb believed to be his was reported at the site that became Santiago de Compostela. From that time the shrine grew into one of the three great pilgrimage destinations of Western Christendom, alongside Jerusalem and Rome. The Camino de Santiago, the network of routes leading to Compostela, drew countless medieval pilgrims and remains a major pilgrimage. Critical historians note that there is no contemporary or even early evidence that James evangelized Spain; the tradition is not clearly attested before the seventh century and is difficult to reconcile with his early death in Jerusalem. The cult of Santiago nonetheless became a defining feature of Spanish Catholicism, including the later medieval image of Santiago Matamoros (Saint James the Moor-slayer), a martial depiction connected with the Reconquista rather than with first-century history. Relics associated with him have also been claimed in Jerusalem, notably at the Armenian Cathedral of Saint James.

James has been venerated as a saint from the earliest Christian centuries, without a formal process of canonization of the later Roman type. His principal feast in the Latin Church falls on 25 July; Eastern churches commemorate him on other dates, including 30 April. He is the patron saint of Spain and of Galicia, and he is also invoked as patron of Guatemala, Nicaragua, and numerous towns and dioceses named Santiago or Saint James. Because of the Compostela pilgrimage he is the patron of pilgrims. Guilds and professions that adopted him include knights (especially the medieval Order of Santiago), laborers, veterinarians, pharmacists, and hatmakers; he has also been invoked against rheumatism. In art he is commonly shown as an apostle with a book or staff, as a pilgrim wearing a cloak and broad hat and bearing the scallop shell that became the badge of Compostela pilgrims, or, in Spanish contexts, as a mounted knight.