The Gospel of Mark lists four brothers of Jesus and names James first. The Gospel of John says his brothers did not believe in him. In a letter to the church at Corinth, written decades after the crucifixion, Paul lists the people to whom the risen Christ appeared, and James is among them. By then James led the community of Jesus' followers in Jerusalem, and Paul calls him the brother of the Lord. What "brother" means here is a matter of tradition. Jerome, a fourth-century translator of the Bible, read it as cousin, and that became the usual Catholic reading; an older tradition, kept by the Orthodox churches, makes James a son of Joseph by an earlier marriage; many Protestants and historians take him as a younger son of Mary and Joseph.
The question in front of him was the one the new movement could not avoid. Its members were Jews who kept the law of Moses, and non-Jews were joining them. Did a Gentile have to be circumcised and keep the law to belong to Israel's God? Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, says that on his first visit to Jerusalem, three years after his conversion, he saw Peter and, of the other apostles, only James. Years later James, Peter and John, whom Paul calls the pillars, agreed that Paul should go to the Gentiles and they to the Jews. Then, by Paul's account, men sent from James arrived at Antioch, and Peter stopped eating with the non-Jewish believers there. The Acts of the Apostles, a history of the first churches written decades later, gives James the decision at a meeting in Jerusalem: the Gentiles were not to be burdened with the law, but asked to keep away from food offered to idols, from sexual immorality, and from blood and the meat of strangled animals. Acts also tells of Paul's last visit to him. James and the elders told Paul thousands of Jewish believers were zealous for the law, and asked him to purify himself in the Temple so that everyone could see he kept it.
One letter in the New Testament names its author as James, a servant of God, and argues that faith without deeds is dead. It says that Abraham was put right with God by what he did — the same Abraham Paul had used to show that a person is put right by faith. The letter defines true religion as caring for orphans and widows, and it attacks congregations that give the rich the good seats. From the third century on, Christian tradition has taken it to be the work of James. Many scholars judge it written in his name, around 80 to 100; others defend a date before his death. In 1522 Luther, who rested his reform on Paul, moved it to the back of his German New Testament.
His death is in the record. The Jewish historian Josephus tells that in 62, after the Roman governor Festus had died and before his successor arrived, the high priest Ananus convened a court and had James, the brother of Jesus called Christ, and some others stoned as breakers of the law. Citizens protested, and King Agrippa removed Ananus after three months in office. Most scholars accept the passage as genuine. Hegesippus, a second-century Christian writer whose account the fourth-century church historian Eusebius preserved, tells it differently. In his account James drank no wine, prayed until his knees were hard as a camel's, and was thrown from the Temple, stoned and finished with a fuller's club. The same tradition says he was called the Just for his righteousness, and Eusebius names him the first bishop of Jerusalem. In the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings of Jesus found in Egypt in 1945, the disciples ask who will lead them after him, and Jesus sends them to James the Just.