The joy of Amazon, that you can browse for a book on almost any obscure subject, and usually find them led me into buying this book, simply from a trawl for books about James, the brother of Jesus. The downside is that you don’t get much of an idea about what a book is like. Just James is a serious academic book and is not really recommended to anyone who has not done some quite serious reading on the historicity of the bible.
Having said which I have been rather pleased to have understood most of it; my many years of reading - when often I think nothing is going in – has actually given me certain level of knowledge and understanding.
The book is concerned to establish James’ position as the pre-eminent member of the church in the wake of Jesus’ death, to examine the traditional claim that he was the first Bishop of Jerusalem and analyse the gospels, letters, Gnostic writings and apocrypha for James’ position within them. Like all academic books, most of the time is spent knocking down works I have never read, seen or heard of, but to my level of knowledge nothing Painter says is particularly revolutionary, though there were a couple of stories which I was unaware of.(1)
It seems fairly clear, in a historical sense anyway, that in the immediate aftermath of Jesus’ ascension there were three major characters – James, brother of the Lord and famous for his piety, together with the more familiar Peter and Paul. They represent three separate strands of early Christianity. It seems clear that James was the most Hebrew centred. He became head of the Christian sect, and focussed his energies on the ‘Mission to the Circumcised’ while there is no evidence that James ever left Jerusalem, his principal lieutenant was Peter, who did cross the Empire preaching to the Jews of the Diaspora. Paul, after much wrangling, became the leader of the ‘Mission to the Uncircumcised’, and his maverick approach to Jewish law caused rifts almost immediately.
Those who have read my article over the years will be familiar with these disputes, and others may read Acts to see some of the visible evidence of these disputes. Interesting though these political disputes in the nascent Church may be, disputes which became generally academic after the destruction of the Temple in 70CE, a book like this inevitably doesn’t ask the questions which interest me, namely James’ invisibility to most believers for the following 1900 years. My ex-brother in law (?) – my ex wife’s brother, is there a proper name for this relationship? – who went to Jesuit Grammar School and has been a regular Mass-attending Catholic for most years since was stunned to hear about the existence of James, and the other brothers and sisters of Jesus. But it is not as if the protestants have raised James’ flag, since my 20 years of free-church education left me in a similar state of ignorance.
The real problem for the church is the virginity of Mary, a concept that hadn’t even bee thought of in pre-revolution Jerusalem. Once the idea that Mary was and remained a virgin gathered acceptance, the existence of the very real, and very well known family of Jesus became a problem. This is where the academia is interesting, because you can take a text through time and see the changes that occur. References to James, the Lord’s brother, become James, who people say is the Lords brother. Commentaries start talking about Jesus’ brothers and sisters being from an earlier marriage of Joseph, and some commentators have insisted that the use of the word brother to refer to James actually means cousin….
For most of the previous 1800 years, no good Catholic could really talk about a physical, real and admired blood brother of Jesus, when the Catholic ideology had moved beyond the virginity of Mary to the immaculate conception, a nonsense for which it deserves eternal ridicule!
Quite why the Protestants haven’t rallied to James’ cause is harder to understand. In this case it is probably James’ essential Jewishness that is the problem. Like his brother, James did not teach gentiles, was probably not interested in them, and in a famous case rebuked Peter for eating with them. He was the leader of a Jewish Church, without compromise was not perhaps the leader figure Luther was looking for when he set out his protestant ideas.
So James, probably the greatest figure in the early Church, by reason of his Jewishness and his blood relationship with Jesus has been systematically written out of history by the Church that purports to be in his brother’s name. And yet the ease of finding his name in the New Testament testifies to the lateness of this development, and the fact that to the early church his piety of life, and cruel and unpardonable martyrdom, bludgeoned to death on the orders of the Sadducee high priest Caiaphas, made him the example that all good Christians were encouraged to follow.
And if you think this ironic, strange, sad and perverse then you know why I still read dry-as-dust books like this.
(1) Eusebius writes of the arrest and interrogation of the grandsons of Jude, another of Jesus’ brothers in the reign of Trajan. Allegedly the investigators were satisfied that their poverty and simplicity did not pose a threat to the Empire, despite their famous forembear