The Twelve Apostles
“Now He climbs up on the mountain and calls those He Himself wanted, and they came to Him. He appointed twelve (…), so that they might be with Him and He might send them to proclaim the Good News, and to have power to drive out demons. And He appointed the Twelve: to Simon He gave the name Peter; to Jacob and his brother John, the sons of Zebedee, He gave the name Boanerges, which is Sons of Thunder; and Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, Jacob the son of Alphaeus, Thaddeus, Simon the Zealot; and Judah from Kriot, who also betrayed Him.“
Mark 3: 13-19
“Then they cast lots for them, and the lot fell upon Matthias; and he was added to the eleven emissaries.“
Acts 1: 26
Today, on the 11th May, two of these Twelve, Saints Philip the Apostle and James the Less, are remembered.
Saint Philip the Apostle
“The next day, Yeshua decided to go to the Galilee. He finds Philip and says to him, ‘Follow Me!‘ Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the same town as Andrew and Peter. Philip finds Nathanael and tells him, ‘We‘ve found the One that Moses in the Torah, and also the prophets, wrote about – Yeshua of Natzeret, the son of Joseph!‘
John 1: 43-46
‘Natzaret!‘ Nathanael answered. ‘Can anything good come from there?‘ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.‘“
When Philip enthusiastically professes the hope that he has found the awaited Messiah to invite his friend Nathanael (who is often identified to be the same person as the apostle Saint Bartholomew) to come along, he uses the very same words Yeshua said before to the brothers Andrew and Simon Peter: Come and see. He has learned quickly, it seems, to be an apostle – a messenger – of His Master…
“Philippus, the Latin form of Philip, can be interpreted as os lampadis, mouth of a lamp, or as os manuum, mouth of hands; or it is composed of philos, which means love, and yper, above. The apostle is called mouth of a lamp because of his luminous preaching, mouth of hands because of his tireless work, and lover of the things above because of his heavenly contemplation.“
Jacobus de Voragine: The Golden Legend. Readings on the Saints, Princeton University Press 1993, p. 267
And then again, he is as slow as everybody else when it comes to understanding who Jesus is:
“Philip said to Him, ‘Master, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.‘
John 14: 8-9
Yeshua said to him, ‘Have I been with you for so long a time and you haven‘t come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father. (…).‘“
Philip, we just read, was from Bethsaida, a town of fishermen on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. Bethsaida literally means “house of fishing / hunting“. Philip‘s Greek name and the following passage from the gospel of John indicate that he spoke also Greek and knew Jews from Greece. So maybe he had family connections to the Jewish community in the Greek diaspora. To the three great festivals (Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot), Jewish people would come as pilgrims to Jerusalem from all over the Roman empire.
“Now there were some Greeks among those who were going up to worship at the feast. These came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in the Galilee. ‘Sir‘, they said, ‘we want to see Yeshua.‘ Philip comes and tells Andrew; Andrew and Philip come and tell Yeshua.“
John 12: 20-22
In the Legenda Aurea we are told that Saint Philip preached the gospel “throughout Scythia for twenty years“ (ibid. p. 267). Where is Scythia?
In the most general sense, Scythia refers to a region in central Asia. When you look at the map below, you see that it covers the Balkan regions, areas around the Black and the Caspian Sea, parts of modern-day Russia and the hill countries up to India (modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan).
Yet as a province of the Roman empire, the Provincia Scythia Minor, it denotes only a certain much smaller region located at the Black Sea, today part of Bulgaria and Romania, so really just a certain part of the Balkans. So it seems likely that there or nearby, “on the shores of the wild Ocean“ (ibid. p. 267), as the Legenda Aurea reports quoting Saint Isidore, was Philip‘s missionary territory.
Saint Philip the Apostle died at Hierapolis, modern-day Turkey, in the year 80, being crucified like his Master:
“The apostle went to the city of Hierapolis in Asia and there put down the heresy of the Ebionites, who taught that the body assumed by Christ was only a phantom. There with him were his two daughters, dedicated virgins both of them, through whom the Lord converted many to the faith.
Jacobus de Voragine: The Golden Legend. Readings on the Saints, Princeton University Press 1993, p. 267
Seven days before his death Philip convoked the bishops and priests and said to them: ‘The Lord has granted me these seven days so that I might give you good counsel.‘ He was then eighty-seven years old. The infidels seized him, and like his Master whom he had preached, he was nailed to a cross, and so migrated to the Lord and happily finished his life.
Isidore, in his book On the Life, Birth, and Death of the Saints, writes of Philip as follows: ‘Philip the Galilean preached Christ and led the barbarian peoples who lived in darkness on the shores of the wild Ocean, to the light of knowledge and the haven of the faith. At the end he was crucified and stoned at Hierapolis, a town in the province of Phyrgia. He died and reposes there together with his daughters.‘ This from Isidore.“
He is often mixed up with Philip the Deacon, the man about whom we read in the book of Acts that he preached in Samaria, and that he baptized the Ethiopian Jew in service of the queen of the Ethiopians who “had traveled to Jerusalem to worship“ (Acts 8: 27), and had been reading in the book of Isaiah the prophet on his way home.
Saint James the Less, the first bishop of Jerusalem
Speaking about mistaking someone for someone else because they bear the same name: It easily happens that one confuses the two Jacobs, the two Jameses, among the Twelve Apostles. In order to tell them apart one is often called “James the Greater“: This is the son of Zebedee, the brother of Saint John the Apostle, and the one who, according to tradition, preached on the Iberian peninsula, his remains resting at Santiago de Compostela (“Jacob of the field of stars“), northern Spain. There are miraculous stories about how his remains got transferred there, as his actual place of martyrdom and death was Jerusalem. There he was killed in the year 44:
“Now at that time Herod the king seized some from Messiah‘s community to do them harm. He had Jacob, John‘s brother, put to death with the sword.“
Acts 12: 1-2
The other James is often referred to as “James the Less“ – or “James the Just“, or “the son of Alpheus“. Saint Jude Thaddeus introduces himself in his epistle as the “brother of Jacob“ (Jude 1: 1), and the one he points to is this very James the Less.
It can be a bit challenging to reconstruct “whom belongs to whom“ and is “whom‘s son or brother (relative)“ based on the brief pieces of information we are given about the apostles‘ and other disciples’ origin and family context in the Four Gospels. But, combined with writings of the early Church Fathers, it is possible, as the Catholic theologian Brant Pitre shows in his little tutorial The “Brothers“ of Jesus: A Fresh Look at the Evidence, which is publicly available on his YouTube-Channel Catholic Productions.
A convincing and traditional reconstruction is to view Alpheus as being the same man as Clopas, seeing Clopas as the Greek transliteration of the Aramaic name. This man had a wife called Mary (“Mary of Clopas“, a woman who was also present at Christ‘s cruxifixion and at the tomb on the morning of Christ‘s resurrection), and he was a close blood relative of Saint Joseph. With his wife he had four sons which are all named in the New Testament: James (Jacob), Joseph, Simon, and Jude (Thaddeus).
According to Saint Jerome, Mary, the mother of these four brothers, was also a blood relative of the Blessed Virgin Mary, maybe a cousin of the Blessed Virgin for example. This is also indicated by carefully piecing together the respective information as provided in the Four Gospels. And it could explain why we find, in the Legenda Aurea, the claim being made that James the Just had a strong physical resemblance to Jesus.
Now this James, the son of Alpheus (Clopas) and Mary of Clopas, is also the author of the epistle of James in the New Testament (“Jacob, a slave of God and of the Lord Yeshua the Messiah, to the twelve tribes in the Diaspora“ (Jas 1: 1)), and he is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles as a preeminent leader of the early Church alongside Saint Peter. At the first Church Council ever held, concerning the issue whether the ceromonial law of Moses is binding on the newly converted Gentiles, it is first Saint Peter who gives a speech arguing for not demanding of the Gentiles to be circumcised, and then later Saint James speaks up:
“Therefore, I judge not to trouble those from among the Gentiles who are turning to God – but to write to them to abstain from the contamination of idols, and from sexual immorality, and from what is strangled, and from blood.“
Acts 15: 19-20
In fact, Saint James was the first bishop of Jerusalem, according to Eusebius‘ Church History appointed as such by Saint Peter and the sons of Zebedee, Saint James the Greater and Saint John. We see him in his role as bishop in chapter 21 of the book of Acts: Saint Luke, the author of Acts, accompanying Saint Paul, describes how they go up to Jerusalem where “the brothers and sisters welcomed (them) gladly“ (Acts 21: 17):
“On the next day, Paul went in with us to Jacob; all the elders were present.“
Acts 21: 18, Tree of Life Translation
“The next day, Paul accompanied us on a visit to James, and all the presbyters were present.“
Acts 21: 18, New American Bible Revised Edition
On this occasion, Jacob and the Jerusalem community bring to Saint Paul‘s attention that “many myriads“ of Jewish people who “are all zealous for the Torah“ have believed (Acts 21: 20), and that they have been told that Saint Paul is the one teaching “all the Jewish people among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or to walk according to the customs“ (Acts 20: 21). And they advise Saint Paul to take a Nazarite vow according to the law of Moses so that “all will realize there is nothing to the things they have been told about you, but that you yourself walk in an orderly manner, keeping the Torah“ (Acts 20: 24). Saint Paul obeys.
From this little story we see that Saint James the Just was of the opinion that while Gentiles were not obliged to keep the ceremonial law of Moses, the Jewish people still were called to practice all the commandments of the Torah. It seems that there was at times a bit of a conflict on this issue of Torah observance between Saint Paul and Saint James:
“Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus with me. Because of a revelation, I went up and presented to them the Good News that I proclaim among the Gentiles. (…) they saw that I had been entrusted with the Good News for the uncircumcised just as Peter was for the circumcised. (For the same God who was at work in Peter as an emissary to the Jews, also was at work in me as an emissary to the Gentiles.) Realizing the favor that had been given to me, Jacob and Peter and John – who are the recognized pillars – shook hands in partnership with Barnabas and me, so that we would go to the Gentiles and they to the Jews. (…) But when Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong – for before certain people came from Jacob, he regularly ate with the Gentiles; but when they came, he began to withdraw and separate himself, fearing those from the circumcision. And the rest of the Jews joined him in hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was carried away with their hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not walking in line with the truth of the Good News, I said to Peter in front of everyone, ‘If you – being a Jew – live like the Gentiles and not like the Jews, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?‘ We are Jews by birth and not sinners from among the Gentiles. Yet we know that a person is set right not by deeds based on Torah, but rather through putting trust in Messiah Yeshua.“
Galatians 2: 1-16
Saint Paul‘s conversion took place in the year 36. In this passage from the epistle to the Church at Galatia he describes going up to Jerusalem “fourteen years later“ (Gal 2: 1), in the year 50, the year of the Jerusalem Council mentioned before. Therefore, certainly the James mentioned here by Saint Paul is James the Just, and not James the Greater who had already been killed in the year 44.
According to Saint Hegesippus, a Jewish Christian living from 110 to 180, and Saint Jerome, James the Just was living as a Nazarite – as a man totally consecrated to God – himself: a virgin all his life, drinking no wine and eating no meat.
“(…) His clothing consisted of a linen garment. He knelt so often in prayer that his knees were calloused like the soles of his feet. For this ceaseless and surpassing righteousness he was called the Just and Abba, which is interpreted to mean the stronghold of the people and righteousness. (…)“
Jacobus de Voragine: The Golden Legend. Readings on the Saints, Princeton University Press 1993, p. 271
This is Jacobus de Voragine quoting Saint Hegesippus. He takes the description of Saint James‘ martyrdom from the same source:
“Hegesippus reports (…) that the Jews came together to him and said: ‘We pray you, call the people back, because they are wrong about Jesus, thinking that he is the Christ! We beg you therefore to speak to all these people, who are coming for the day of the Pasch, and to disabuse them about Jesus. We will all comply with what you say, and we, together with the people, will testify that you are a righteous man and that you are no respecter of persons.‘ They stood him therefore on the pinnacle of the Temple and shouted: ‘Most righteous of men, to whom we all owe deference, the people are wrong in following Jesus who was crucified! Tell us plainly what you think about him!‘ James responded: ‘Why do you question me about the Son of man? Behold, he is seated in the heavens at the right of the sovereign Power, and he will come to judge the living and the dead!‘ The Christians rejoiced at hearing this and listened to him gladly. The Pharisees and the Scribes said to each other: ‘We made a mistake in allowing him to give such testimony to Jesus! Now let us go up and throw him down! That will frighten this crowd and they won‘t dare believe what he said!‘ Then all together, and as loudly as they could, they shouted: ‘Oh! Oh! The just man has erred!‘
Jacobus de Voragine: The Golden Legend. Readings on the Saints, Princeton University Press, p. 272
Then they went up and threw him down, and came down again and began to stone him, saying: ‘Let us stone James the Just!‘ But James, though beaten to the ground, not only could not die but even turned over, raised himself to his knees, and said: ‘I pray you, Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do!‘ At this, one of the priests, of the sons of Rahab, exclaimed: ‘Stop! What are you doing? This just man whom you‘re stoning is praying for you!‘ But one of the others snatched up a fuller‘s club, aimed a heavy blow at James‘s head, and split his skull. That is how Hegesippus describes the martyrdom. James migrated to the Lord under Nero, who began to reign in the year of the Lord 57. He was buried there beside the Temple.“
Combined with some information provided by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37-100) in the twentieth book of the Antiquities of the Jews, the year of Saint James the Just‘s martyrdom can be dated as the year 62. In fact, Josephus mentions the killing of Saint James. According to his account the one pulling the strings behind the murder was the high priest Ananus, “of the sect of the Sadducees, who are very rigid in judging offenders, above all the rest of the Jews“, and his remark that “as for those who seemed the most equitable of the citizens, and such as were the most uneasy at the breach of the laws, they disliked what was done“ (ibid. Book 20, ch. 9,1) points to the quite respected position of Saint James among the Jewish people of Jerusalem.
Eusebius states that, following the martyrdom of Saint James,
“(…) those of the apostles and disciples of the Lord that were still living came together from all directions with those that were related to the Lord according to the flesh (for the majority of them also were still alive) to take counsel as to who was worthy to succeed James. They all with one consent pronounced Symeon, the son of Clopas, of whom the Gospel also makes mention; to be worthy of the episcopal throne of that parish. He was a cousin, as they say, of the Saviour. For Hegesippus records that Clopas was a brother of Joseph.“
Eusebius of Caesarea: Church History, Book III, Chapter 11
James‘ brother Simon (or Simeon), then, was the second bishop of Jerusalem, shepherding the community during the time of the first Jewish-Roman war (66-73) and the destruction of the Second Temple. Eusebius and Saint Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis, Cyprus, in the 4th century, relate that Saint Simon of Jerusalem led the community to Pella, a site in the Jordan Valley 27 km south of the Sea of Galilee, before the siege of Jerusalem after Christ had told them to flee there in a vision.
According to Saint Epiphanius, a part of the community later returned to Jerusalem, and through Eusebius it is reported that Saint Simon suffered martyrdom there in Jerusalem in the early 2nd century.
But back to Saint James the Just, the first bishop of Jerusalem: We can certainly learn more about him by studying his letter “to the twelve tribes in the Diaspora“ (Jas 1: 1). Here are just a few excerpts – first of all, inspired by the Holy Spirit, teaching truth, and secondly able to hint at the personality and the way of life of the son of Clopas and Mary, and blood relative of both Saint Joseph and the Blessed Virgin:
“Consider it all joy, my brothers, when you encounter various trials, for you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. And let perseverance be perfect, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.“
James 1: 2-4; New American Bible Revised Edition
“Blessed is the man who perseveres in temptation, for when he has been proved he will receive the crown of life that he promised to those who love him.“
James 1: 13; New American Bible Revised Edition
“(…) all good giving and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no alteration or shadow caused by change. He willed us to give birth by the word of truth that we may be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.“
James 1: 17-18; New American Bible Revised Edition
“But the one who peers into the perfect law of freedom and perseveres, and is not a hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, such a one shall be blessed in what he does.“
James 1: 25; New American Bible Revised Edition
“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world.“
James 1: 27; New American Bible Revised Edition
“However, if you fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself‘, you are doing well.“
James 2: 8; New American Bible Revised Edition
“So also faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead. (…) You believe that God is one. You do well. Even the demons believe that and tremble. (…) Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works. (…) See how a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. (…) For just as a body without a spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.“
James 2: 17-26; New American Bible Revised Edition
“Who among you is wise and understanding? Let him show his works by a good life in the humility that comes from wisdom.“
James 3: 13; New American Bible Revised Edition
“Do you not know that to be a lover of the world means enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wants to be a lover of the world makes himself an enemy of God.“
James 4: 4; New American Bible Revised Edition
“So submit yourselves to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you of two minds.“
James 4: 7-8; New American Bible Revised Edition
“Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You too must be patient. Make your hearts firm, because the coming of the Lord is at hand.“
James 5: 7-8; New American Bible Revised Edition
“Is anyone among you suffering? He should pray. Is anyone in good spirits? He should sing praise. Is anyone among you sick? He should summon the presbyters of the church, and they should pray over him and anoint (him) with oil in the name of the Lord, and the prayer of faith will save the sick person, and the Lord will raise him up. If he has committed any sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The fervent prayer of a righteous person is very powerful.“
James 5: 13-16; New American Bible Revised Edition
Saints Philip and James, pray for us!