Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

Bishop of Jerusalem by the apostles.”
     In fact, Jerome argues that James’s holiness and reputation among the people was so
     great that “the destruction of Jerusalem was believed to have occurred on account
     of his death.” Jerome isreferencing a tradition from Josephus, which is also remarked upon by the third-century
     Christian theologian Origen (c. 185–254 C.E .) and recorded in the
Ecclesiastical History
of Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260–c. 339 C.E .), in which Josephus claims that “these things [the Jewish Revolt and the destruction
     of Jerusalem] happened to the Jews in requital for James the Just, who was a brother
     of Jesus, known as Christ, for though he was the most Righteous of men, the Jews put
     him to death.” Commenting on this no longer extant passage of Josephus, Eusebius writes:
     “So remarkable a person must James have been, so universally esteemed for Righteousness,
     that even the most intelligent of Jews felt this was why his martyrdom was immediately
     followed by the siege of Jerusalem” (
Ecclesiastical History
2.23).
    Even the New Testament confirms James’s role as head of the Christian community: It
     is James who is usually mentioned first among the “pillars” James, Peter, and John;
     James who personally sends his emissaries to the different communities scattered in
     the Diaspora (Galatians 2:1–14); James, to whom Peter reports his activities before
     leaving Jerusalem (Acts 12:17); James who sits in charge of the “elders” when Paul
     comes to make supplication (Acts 21:18); James who is the presiding authority over
     the Apostolic Council, who speaks last during its deliberations, and whose judgment
     is final (Acts 15:13). In fact, after the Apostolic Council, the apostles disappear
     from the rest of the book of Acts. But James does not. On the contrary, it is the
     fateful dispute between James and Paul, in which James publicly shames Paul for his
     deviant teachings by demanding he make supplication at the Temple, that leads to the
     climax of the book: Paul’s arrest and extradition to Rome.
    Three centuries of early Christian and Jewish documentation, not to mention the nearly
     unanimous opinion of contemporary scholars, recognize James the brother of Jesus as
     head of the first Christian community—above Peter and the rest of the Twelve; above
     John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 20:2); far above Paul, with whom James
     repeatedly clashed. Why then has Jamesbeen almost wholly excised from the New Testament and his role in the early church
     displaced by Peter and Paul in the imaginations of most modern Christians?
    Partly it has to do with James’s very identity as the brother of Jesus. Dynasty was
     the norm for the Jews of Jesus’s time. The Jewish Herodian and Hasmonaean families,
     the high priests and the priestly aristocracies, the Pharisees, even the bandit gangs
     all practiced hereditary succession. Kinship was perhaps even more crucial for a messianic
     movement like Jesus’s, which based its legitimacy on Davidic descent. After all, if
     Jesus was a descendant of King David, then so was James; why should he not lead David’s
     community after the death of the messiah? Nor was James the sole member of Jesus’s
     family to be given authority in the early church. Jesus’s cousin Simeon, son of Clopas,
     succeeded James as head of the Jerusalem assembly, while other members of his family,
     including two grandsons of Jesus’s other brother, Judas, maintained an active leadership
     role throughout the first and second centuries of Christianity.
    By the third and fourth centuries, however, as Christianity gradually transformed
     from a heterogeneous Jewish movement with an array of sects and schisms into an institutionalized
     and rigidly orthodox imperial religion of Rome, James’s identity as Jesus’s brother
     became an obstacle to those who advocated the perpetual virginity of his mother Mary.
     A few overly clever solutions were developed to reconcile the immutable facts of Jesus’s
     family with the inflexible dogma of the church. There was, for example, the well-worn
     and thoroughly ahistorical argument that Jesus’s brothers and sisters were Joseph’s
     children from a previous marriage, or that “brother” actually meant “cousin.” But
     the end result was that James’s role in early Christianity was gradually diminished.
    At the same time that James’s influence was in decline, Peter’s was