by a personal appearance of Christ.^322 It is more fully reported in an interesting fragment of the,
"Gospel according to the Hebrews" (one of the oldest and least fabulous of the apocryphal Gospels),
which shows the sincerity and earnestness of James even before his conversion.^323 He had sworn,
we are here told, "that he would not eat bread from that hour wherein the Lord had drunk the cup
[of his passion]^324 until he should see him rising from the dead." The Lord appeared to him and
communed with him, giving bread to James the Just and saying: "My brother, eat thy bread, for
the Son of man is risen from them that sleep."
In the Acts and in the Epistle to the Galatians, James appears as the most conservative of
the Jewish converts, at the head of the extreme right wing; yet recognizing Paul as the apostle of
the Gentiles, giving him the right hand of fellowship, as Paul himself reports, and unwilling to
impose upon the Gentile Christians the yoke of circumcision. He must therefore not be identified
with the heretical Judaizers (the forerunners of the Ebionites), who hated and opposed Paul, and
made circumcision a condition of justification and church membership. He presided at the Council
of Jerusalem and proposed the compromise which saved a split in the church. He probably prepared
the synodical letter which agrees with his style and has the same greeting formula peculiar to him.^325
He was an honest, conscientious, eminently practical, conciliatory Jewish Christian saint,
the right man in the right place and at the right time, although contracted in his mental vision as in
his local sphere of labor.
From an incidental remark of Paul we may infer that James, like Peter and the other brothers
of the Lord, was married.^326
The mission of James was evidently to stand in the breach between the synagogue and the
church, and to lead the disciples of Moses gently to Christ. He was the only man that could do it
in that critical time of the approaching judgment of the holy city. As long as there was any hope
of a conversion of the Jews as a nation, he prayed for it and made the transition as easy as possible.
When that hope vanished his mission was fulfilled.
According to Josephus he was, at the instigation of the younger Ananus, the high priest, of
the sect of the Sadducees, whom he calls "the most unmerciful of all the Jews in the execution of
judgment," stoned to death with some others, as "breakers of the law," i.e. Christians, in the interval
between the procuratorship of Festus and that of Albinus, that is, in the year 63. The Jewish historian
adds that this act of injustice created great indignation among those most devoted to the law (the
Pharisees), and that they induced Albinus and King Agrippa to depose Ananus (a son of the Annas(^322) 1 Cor. 15:7: ἔπειτα ὤφθη Ἰακωβῳ.
(^323) The fragment is preserved by Jerome, De vir. ill. cap. 2. Comp. Hilgenfeld, Nov. Test. extra can. rec. IV. 17 and 29; and
Nicholson, The Gospel according to the Hebrews (1879), pp. 63 sqq.
(^324) I follow here with Credner and Lightfoot the reading Dominus forDomini, corresponding to the Greek translation, which
reads ὁ κύριος,and with the context, which points to the Lord’s death rather than the Lord’s Supper as the starting-point of the
vow. See Lightfoot, Ep. to the Gal., p. 266. If we read "hora qu biberat calicemDomini,"the author of the Gospel of the Hebrews
must have assumed either that James was one with James of Alphaeus, or that the Lord’s Supper was not confined to the twelve
apostles. Neither of these is probable. James is immediately afterwards called " the Just."Gregory of Tours (Histor. Francorum,
I. 21), relating this story, adds, in accordance with the Greek tradition: "Hic est Jacobus Justus, quem fratrem Domini nuncupant,
pro eo quod Josephi fuerit filius ex alia uxore progenitus."See Nicholson, p.
(^325) "Greeting,"χαίρειν, Acts 15:23, and James 1:1, instead of the specific Christian χάρις καὶ εἰρήνη.
(^326) 1 Cor. 9:5.
A.D. 1-100.