James son of Alphaeus

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.

Because the Western church so often identified James the son of Alphaeus with James the Just, the brother of the Lord and first leader of the Jerusalem community, much of what is said about the apostle is really borrowed from that far better-attested figure. James the Just is described by the Jewish historian Josephus, who reports his execution in Jerusalem around the year 62 on the order of the high priest Ananus, and by later Christian writers who made him a model of ascetic piety, called the Just and, in one tradition, thrown from the pinnacle of the Temple.

Where the son of Alphaeus is treated as a distinct man, the traditions are thin and divergent, sending him to preach in various regions and giving him a martyr's death, often by being clubbed or sawn, with little that is early or firm behind it.

In the Western liturgical calendar he is commemorated together with the apostle Philip, and iconography sometimes gives him a fuller's club as the instrument of his death, an attribute inherited, once again, from the story of James the Just. The one certainty is the least satisfying: a name on the roll of the twelve, and behind it a man about whom the sources genuinely disagree even as to who he was.