Holy Apostle James, Son of Zebedee

James was the son of Zebedee, a Galilean fisherman of considerable means with hired servants, and of Salome, who was, the tradition holds, a kinswoman of the Lord. With his younger brother John he was a partner of Simon Peter in the fishing trade, and was mending nets in the boat with his father when the Lord called the brothers, and they left both nets and father and followed.

He was numbered among the three closest disciples: with Peter and John he alone was admitted to the raising of Jairus's daughter, to the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, and to the agony in the garden of Gethsemane. The Lord named the two brothers together Boanerges, 'sons of thunder,' perhaps for the fervor which once asked to call down fire on a Samaritan village.

Once their mother, with the brothers beside her, asked the Lord that they might sit on either side of him in his kingdom. The Lord turned to them and asked whether they could drink the cup he was to drink. They said they could. The Lord answered that they would indeed drink it; and so it proved.

Around the year forty-four, King Herod Agrippa I, the grandson of Herod the Great, sought favor with his Jewish subjects by turning against the new community at Jerusalem. He laid hold of James and had him beheaded with the sword. He was the first of the Twelve to die for the Faith, and his martyrdom is recorded in the twelfth chapter of the Book of Acts, the only such record of an apostle's death in the New Testament.

Eusebius preserves a tradition that the officer who led James to execution was so moved by his bearing on the way that he confessed Christ on the spot and was beheaded with him. The Church keeps James's memory on the thirtieth of April; his relics, after long translations, came to rest at Santiago de Compostela in Spain, one of the great pilgrimage shrines of the medieval and modern world.