Saint James the Greater

James and his brother John were fishermen on the Sea of Galilee, the sons of Zebedee and of Salome. They were mending their nets in their father’s boat when Jesus called them, and “they forthwith left their nets and father, and followed him” (Matthew 4). He is called “the Greater” to tell him apart from the other Apostle James, the son of Alpheus.

With Peter and John he belonged to the inner circle of the Twelve. The three alone saw Jesus raise the daughter of Jairus, saw him transfigured on the mountain, and were close to him in his agony in Gethsemane. The brothers had fiery tempers, and Jesus nicknamed them Boanerges, “sons of thunder” (Mark 3). When their mother asked that they might sit at his right and left in his kingdom, Jesus asked them, “Can you drink the chalice that I shall drink?” “We can,” they said (Matthew 20).

James drank it first. Around the year 44 King Herod Agrippa I “killed James the brother of John with the sword” (Acts 12). He was the first of the Twelve to be martyred, and the only one whose death is recorded in the New Testament.

A tradition dating from the early Middle Ages holds that James had preached in Spain and that his body was brought there after his death. His tomb at Santiago de Compostela in Galicia became, after Rome and Jerusalem, the greatest place of pilgrimage in Christendom. The pilgrims’ road to it, the Camino de Santiago, is walked by hundreds of thousands of people every year, and the scallop shell they wear is his emblem.