LIVES OF THE SAINTS

These all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with His brothers.

Acts 1:14

St. James, Son of Alphaeus

James the son of Alphaeus is among the quietest of the Twelve. He is named in all four New Testament lists of the apostles, so we know he was there, among the closest followers of Christ, from the calling to the Ascension; yet the Gospels give him no scene of his own, no recorded word, no miracle. He is sometimes called James the Less, a name meant only to distinguish him from James the son of Zebedee and from James the Brother of the Lord, who led the Church in Jerusalem and wrote the epistle. The three Jameses of the early Church are easily confused, and the tradition has distinguished them in different ways over the centuries; what belongs to this James for certain is his place among the Twelve and his silence within it.

That silence is not nothing. The Church has always understood that most discipleship resembles his more than Peter's. He waited in the upper room with the Theotokos and the others through the days between the Ascension and Pentecost, and he received the same Spirit and was sent out under the same commission as the apostles whose words and deaths are remembered in detail. Tradition holds that he carried the Gospel into Syria and Egypt and was martyred there, crucified in some accounts and stoned in others, for a faith he had kept without display from the beginning.

His hymn calls him a fisherman who caught whole nations, and the little the Church can say of him is exactly what it most needs to say of its own hidden saints: that they were faithful, that they remained, that they were present when it mattered and did not leave, and that this is itself a life worthy of the name apostle.

In the icon he is shown as a bearded man holding a scroll, scarcely to be told at a glance from his more famous brothers in the Twelve. He is the patron of the faithful who are never singled out, whose whole witness is that they were there, and remained, to the end.