James, son of Zebedee

This article concerns James the son of Zebedee, sometimes called James the Greater to distinguish him from James son of Alphaeus and from James the brother of Jesus (head of the Jerusalem church and author of the New Testament epistle). James and his younger brother John were partners with Simon Peter in a Galilean fishing business operated out of Capernaum, and were called together from their nets early in Jesus’s ministry (Mar.1.19–20). Jesus nicknamed the brothers Boanerges, “sons of thunder” (Mar.3.17). With Peter and John, James belonged to the inner circle of three taken further than the rest at the raising of Jairus’s daughter (Mar.5.37), the Transfiguration (Mar.9.2), and Gethsemane (Mar.14.33). The brothers (or, in Matthew, their mother) asked for the seats at Jesus’s right and left in glory and were warned that they would drink his cup of suffering (Mar.10.35–40). James was the first of the Twelve to do so: c. AD 44 Herod Agrippa I, in the brief year he ruled all of Palestine, had him put to the sword — beheaded — in Jerusalem (Act.12.1–2). The medieval tradition of a mission to Spain and burial at what became Santiago de Compostela has no first-millennium support and is generally treated as legend.