James son of Zebedee

James, son of Zebedee and brother of the evangelist John, was a Galilean fisherman called with his brother while mending nets. With Peter and John he forms the inner three who alone witness the raising of Jairus's daughter, the Transfiguration and the agony in Gethsemane. Jesus is said to have named the two brothers Boanerges, sons of thunder, a nickname the Gospel of Mark preserves without fully explaining.

He is almost always distinguished as James the Greater, or the elder, to separate him from the other James among the twelve and from James the brother of the Lord. What sets him apart historically is his death. The Acts of the Apostles reports, in a single sentence, that Herod Agrippa I had him killed with the sword, beheaded, an event usually dated to about the year 44.

That notice is significant out of proportion to its length: it is the only martyrdom of an apostle recorded in the New Testament itself, and it makes James the first of the twelve to die for the movement. Everything else told of him lies outside scripture, and one strand of it grew into one of the great cults of medieval Europe.

From the ninth century a tradition held that James had preached in Hispania before returning to Judea to die, and that his body was afterward carried back to Galicia in the far northwest of Spain. Around the reported discovery of his tomb there grew the shrine of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago being Spanish for Saint James, which became, with Rome and Jerusalem, one of the three great pilgrimage destinations of Latin Christendom. The Camino de Santiago, the network of pilgrim roads across the Pyrenees to his shrine, is walked to this day.

Historians treat the Spanish mission as legendary. It is unattested before the seventh century, sits awkwardly against the New Testament chronology of his early death, and served an evident purpose: to give the Christian kingdoms of the north an apostolic founder of their own during the long conflict with Muslim rule in the peninsula.

That conflict shaped his iconography. As Santiago Matamoros, the Moor-slayer, he was depicted on horseback riding down enemies, a martial patron invoked in the Reconquista. The figure is a medieval construction laid over a Galilean fisherman whom the book of Acts shows dying, quietly and early, under a Herodian sword.