The Acts of the Apostles opens in Jerusalem, in an upper room, with a company of about a hundred and twenty. Within a few chapters they have become thousands, and the writer describes their life in words any reader of the historian will recognize: they held all things in common, sold their possessions and goods and gave to each as any had need, went to the temple together every day, and broke bread in their homes with glad and simple hearts. They called themselves the Way. Their neighbors called them the Nazarenes. And within a few years the man at their head was not Peter, nor any of the twelve, but the teacher's own brother.
This page is about him and about the family that led the first community after him. Of all the people the fellowship calls Nazarenes, they are the best attested, and the nearest to the source.
The Brother of the Lord
The gospel of Mark names four brothers of Jesus, James first among them, and says the family once came to take him home because people were saying he was out of his mind. The gospel of John says flatly that his brothers did not believe in him. Something changed. Paul, writing within twenty-five years of the crucifixion, lists among those to whom the risen Lord appeared: then he appeared to James. By the time Paul went up to Jerusalem, James the Lord's brother was one of the three pillars of the community, and soon he was its head.
The Gospel of the Hebrews, which the Jewish believers read and of which only fragments survive, tells the story of that appearance as Paul does not. James, it says, had sworn that he would not eat bread from the hour he drank the cup of the Lord until he should see him risen from among those who sleep. And the Lord came to him, and took bread, and blessed it and broke it and gave it to James the Just, and said to him: my brother, eat your bread, for the Son of Man is risen. The fellowship has read that fragment aloud at many evening tables. It is the most domestic of all the resurrection stories: a brother who would not eat, and a brother who came back to make him.
The Just
A chronicler of the second century, himself a Jewish believer, wrote down what the church of Jerusalem remembered of its first leader, and the first historian of the church preserved his words. James, he says, was holy from his mother's womb. He drank no wine or strong drink and ate no flesh. No razor came upon his head. He did not anoint himself with oil. He wore no wool, only linen. He went alone into the sanctuary and was found there on his knees, asking forgiveness for the people, so often and so long that his knees grew hard like a camel's. Because of his exceeding righteousness he was called the Just, and Oblias, which means bulwark of the people.
A student who has read the history pages will hear the echoes at once. No razor, no wine: the vow of the Nazirite, kept from birth like Samson's and John's. No flesh: the refusal the bishop attributed to the Nasaraeans and the tradition attributes to the northern branch. No oil: the historian says the Essenes held oil to be a defilement and kept their skin dry. Linen only: the white garment of the Essene meal and of the priest at the altar. The portrait is of a man who lived, in the middle of Jerusalem, very much as the holy ones lived by the Dead Sea.
The fellowship must add its cautions. The chronicler wrote a century after James died, and his portrait is a saint's portrait, polished by love. Some details are hard to credit as they stand; no one but the high priest entered the inner sanctuary, and the chronicler may mean only the courts of the temple. One detail does not fit the Essenes at all: he says James did not bathe, where the Essenes bathed daily. Perhaps he meant the Greek bathhouse with its oils and idleness, not the ritual pool; we do not know. But even a polished portrait shows what its makers valued. The Jewish believers remembered their first leader as a Nazirite, a man of linen and of prayer, whose holiness was his authority.
James and Paul
The Acts tells of a council in Jerusalem at which the question was put: must the Gentiles who come to the Way keep the Law of Moses? It is James who gives the judgment. They need not be circumcised; let them abstain only from what has been offered to idols, from unchastity, from what has been strangled, and from blood. It is a generous ruling and a Jewish one, modeled on the old laws for the stranger who dwells in the land.
But the peace was uneasy. Paul writes of men who came from James to Antioch, at whose arrival Peter stopped eating with the Gentiles. And the Acts tells how, when Paul came up to Jerusalem for the last time, James said to him: you see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews who have believed, and they are all zealous for the Law, and they have been told that you teach the Jews of the nations to forsake Moses. So James asked Paul to join four men who were under a vow, to purify himself with them and pay the cost of shaving their heads, so that all would know he walked in the Law. It was a Nazirite vow. Paul did as James asked, and was seized in the temple a few days later, and was accused before the governor of being a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes.
The later Jewish believers, the Ebionites among them, came to reject Paul as an apostate from the Law. The later church came to forget James, or to remember him only as a name in a list of bishops. The fellowship holds both men in honor and thinks the quarrel between them was a quarrel within a family, the kind in which both parties are partly right and both are certain they are wholly so.
The Death of the Just
The historian, who was then a young man of a priestly family in Judea, records how it ended. In the year 62 of the common era the Roman governor died in office, and before his successor arrived the high priest Ananus, a bold man and a Sadducee, convened the council and brought before it the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ, whose name was James, and certain others. He accused them of breaking the Law and had them stoned. Those in the city who were most fair-minded and most strict in the Law were offended, and complained to the new governor and the king, and Ananus was removed after only three months. Most readers, even skeptical ones, accept this brief passage of the historian as genuine.
The chronicler tells it differently and at greater length: James set on the pinnacle of the temple and asked to turn the people from Jesus, testifying to him instead; cast down; stoned; praying for his killers as his brother had; finished with a fuller's club. And immediately after, the chronicler says, Vespasian besieged the city. The church of Jerusalem believed that the city fell because the Just was no longer there to pray for it.
Some modern writers have proposed that James was the Teacher of Righteousness of the scrolls, and the high priest who killed him the Wicked Priest. The fellowship records the proposal and does not hold it. Most of the scrolls that speak of the Teacher were copied before James was born, and the resemblance, though real, is the resemblance of two just men opposed by the same kind of priest, which history has produced more than once.
The Family After James
After the death of James, the first historian of the church says, the apostles and disciples who remained, and those who were of the Lord's family by blood, gathered and chose Simeon son of Clopas, a cousin of the Lord, to lead the community. Simeon is said to have led it through the war and long after, and to have been crucified under the emperor Trajan at a very great age.
A Christian scholar of the third century adds that the Lord's relatives were known as the people of the master, and that they came from the Jewish villages of Nazara and Kokaba and traveled through the land, keeping and explaining the family's genealogy. And the chronicler tells a story the fellowship loves. The emperor Domitian, fearing the line of David, had two grandsons of Jude, the Lord's brother, brought before him. He asked how much property they had. Between them, they said, a small farm, which they worked themselves and from which they paid their taxes; and they showed him their hands, hard and calloused from the plough. He asked them about the kingdom of Christ, and they said it was not of this world but heavenly and would come at the end of the age. The emperor despised them as simple men and let them go, and they returned and led the churches as witnesses and as members of the family.
Fifteen leaders of the community of Jerusalem, the first historian of the church says, were of Jewish birth, until the second war with Rome in the reign of Hadrian. After that the city was refounded under a Roman name, Jews were forbidden to enter it, and the church there was led by Gentiles. The family of the Lord passes out of history with that war, somewhere in the villages east of the Jordan.
What the Fellowship Takes from James
The letter that bears his name may or may not have been written by him, but it was written in his spirit, and the fellowship reads it as something close to a Rule for householders. Pure religion, it says, is to visit orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world. Let every one be quick to hear, slow to speak. The tongue is a fire. Faith without works is dead. Do not swear, neither by heaven nor by earth, but let your yes be yes and your no be no; the historian says the same of the Essenes, who held an oath worse than perjury. And the prayer of a righteous one has great power: Elijah was a man like us, and he prayed, and the heavens gave rain.
From the chronicler's portrait we take the knees of the camel. The fellowship's practices are mostly for the student's own soul. James knelt for the people. We suggest that at the Evening Watch, after the examination, the student spend one minute as James spent his hours: asking, for someone else, the forgiveness they cannot or will not ask for themselves. It is the smallest thing on this site. Some of us think it is the most important.