James, son of Alphaeus, is one of the most shadowy of the twelve. He appears only in the four lists of the apostles and nowhere else in the New Testament; not a word or a deed is recorded of him. Even his patronymic serves mainly to distinguish him from James the Greater, the son of Zebedee.
His obscurity is compounded by one of the classic tangles of New Testament study, the problem of the three Jameses. Besides James the son of Zebedee and James the son of Alphaeus, the Gospels speak of James the brother of the Lord, who was not one of the twelve but became the leader of the Jerusalem church, and Mark mentions a James the Less, or the younger, son of a Mary at the crucifixion.
Whether these are two men, three, or four has never been settled. A long Western tradition, followed by Jerome, merged James the son of Alphaeus with James the brother of the Lord and with James the Less into a single figure, partly to protect the doctrine that Jesus had no full brothers. The Eastern churches generally kept the son of Alphaeus and the brother of the Lord apart. The merging is a theological solution to a textual difficulty rather than a datum of history.