Acts 12:2

Acts 12:2. And he killed James the brother of John. After eleven years of patient noble work, the brother of John received one portion of the high reward which Salome had asked for her sons (Matthew 20:21). He was the first of the Twelve to drink of the cup of which Christ drank, and to be baptized with the baptism with which He was baptized. James the Elder, the son of Zebedee the fisherman of Galilee, and of his wife Salome, the brother of John, was marked out by the Lord early in His ministry for a chief place among the future leaders of His Church. The chosen companions of Jesus, the two sons of Zebedee, with Peter, were alone permitted to witness the raising of the little daughter of Jairus from the dead, they only were present at the mysterious Transfiguration of the Lord, they were the solitary witnesses of the agony in Gethsemane.

The name of these chosen brothers, ‘Sons of Thunder,' gives us the clue to the reason of the Master's choice. This singular name bears witness to the burning and impetuous spirit which later in John found vent in his Gospel, and still more in the thunder-voices of his Apocalypse; and with James in those bold vigorous words in which, so often during his eleven years of ministry to the churches of the Holy Land, he had caused the thunder of the Divine displeasure against hypocrisy, formalism, and darker sins than these to be heard. His burning words, backed up by the noble testimony of a saintly life, no doubt won him the proud honour among the Twelve of the first martyr crown. Chrysostom tells us that Herod, wishful to gratify the Jews, could think of no gift likely to be so acceptable to the people as the life of one so honoured and yet so dreaded. The very few words with which the writer of the ‘Acts' relates the fate of this distinguished Christian leader have been supplemented by a great mass of legendary stories, which connect the martyred apostle with Spain. These legends relate how the remains of James were translated to Compostella, and explain how it came to pass that he was adopted as the favourite saint, the hero of romance, and the protector of the chivalry of Spain. One tradition only is well supported, and we may accept it as most probably historically true. Clement of Alexandria (A.D. 195) relates it, and expressly states that the account was giver him by those who went before him. Clement relates ‘how the prosecutor of St. James was so moved by witnessing his bold confession that he declared himself a Christian on the spot; accused and accuser were therefore hurried off together, and on the road the latter begged St. James to grant him forgiveness. The apostle after a moment's hesitation kissed him, saying, “Peace be to thee,” and they were both beheaded together.

With the sword. This mode of punishment was regarded among the Jews as a disgraceful death. Various reasons have been given for the extreme brevity of the account of the martyrdom of one so eminent in the early Church. Meyer suggests that in the original plan of the writer of the ‘Acts' a third book was contemplated. The first, the ‘Gospel of St. Luke:' an Account of the Life and Teaching of the Lord; the second, the ‘Acts:' the History of the Working of Peter and Paul; the third, which was never undertaken, was to be the relation of the ‘Acts' of the other apostles. But this, though an ingenious, is a purely arbitrary supposition. Wordsworth's note here is very striking: ‘It was no part of St. Luke's plan to write a martyrology. His work is the book of their acts in life, not of their sufferings by death. He does not describe deathbeds, the martyrdom of life is what he teaches; he fixes the reader's attention on that, and thus leads us to conclude that they who live as martyrs will die as martyrs, and that the true way to die well is to live well.... Having described one martyrdom, that of St. Stephen,... he leaves his readers to infer that the same Spirit who encouraged and animated the first martyr in his death, was with the whole of the noble army of martyrs who followed him on the road of suffering to glory; he therefore will not describe the martyrdom of St. James... nor even of St. Paul.'