St. James the Greater

The fisherman apostle beheaded at Jerusalem, whose traditional tomb in Spain became the goal of the Camino de Santiago

James was a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee, called from his father Zebedee's boat alongside his brother John to become one of the Twelve. The Gospels place him among the inner circle closest to Jesus, present at the Transfiguration and in the Garden of Gethsemane, and Acts records him as the first apostle put to death. Centuries later, Catholic tradition in Spain identifies his tomb at Santiago de Compostela, which became one of medieval Christendom's three great pilgrimages alongside Rome and Jerusalem.

James was the son of Zebedee, a Galilean fisherman, and the brother of John. The Gospels describe the two brothers, along with Peter and Andrew, mending or casting nets on the Sea of Galilee when Jesus called them to leave their boats and become fishers of men. Their father's trade appears to have been prosperous enough to employ hired men, and the family is remembered in the tradition as one of some local standing around Capernaum and Bethsaida.

Mark's Gospel records that Jesus gave James and John the name Boanerges, "sons of thunder," a nickname that later tradition reads as a mark of their vigor and directness. Along with Peter, the brothers formed an inner circle within the Twelve: the three alone were taken up the mountain to witness the Transfiguration, the three alone were present at the raising of Jairus's daughter, and the three alone were asked to keep watch with Jesus in Gethsemane the night before his Passion. In one Gospel episode James and John, or their mother on their behalf, ask Jesus for the places of honor at his right and left hand in his coming kingdom; when Jesus asks whether they can drink the cup he is about to drink, the brothers answer without hesitation that they are able, a promise the Church has long read as pointing toward James's own death.

That death came first among the Twelve. The Acts of the Apostles records, briefly and without embellishment, that King Herod Agrippa I had James put to the sword at Jerusalem during a persecution of the young Church, probably around the year 44. No other apostolic martyrdom is dated with as much confidence, since it rests on the plain historical notice in Acts rather than on later legend.

What Catholic Spain adds to this spare New Testament record is a tradition of translation and rediscovery. According to that tradition, James had preached in Hispania before returning to Judea, and after his martyrdom his disciples carried his body by sea to the Galician coast for burial. The place was lost to memory until the early ninth century, when a hermit's vision and the local bishop's inquiry led to the identification of a tomb near Iria Flavia. King Alfonso II had a church built over the site, and the settlement that grew up around it took the name Santiago de Compostela.

From that ninth-century beginning, the shrine drew pilgrims from across Europe in growing numbers through the Middle Ages, until the roads converging on Compostela, collectively called the Camino de Santiago, ranked with the pilgrimages to Rome and Jerusalem as one of medieval Christendom's three great journeys. The Romanesque cathedral raised over the tomb, consecrated in 1211 and enlarged in later centuries, still stands at the end of those roads, and pilgrims who complete an eligible stretch of the Camino receive the Compostela certificate that has marked the journey's end since the medieval pilgrim office first issued it.

James left no writings of his own; what endures is the pattern of his call and his death, and the road that grew up afterward. The Camino de Santiago remains one of the enduring forms of Catholic pilgrimage, walked today for reasons ranging from devotion to discernment to plain endurance, all of it converging on the tomb tradition holds to be his. Catholics keep his feast on July 25.