V - THE EXERCISE OF AUTHORITY

Summary

St James and his position

We have already spent much time on the Jerusalem conference and letter, and its sequel. But there remain some points which concern our subject too closely to be passed over. First, about St James. This is the second of the three occasions on which his name appears in the Acts. When St Peter was released by the angel from prison, after the martyrdom of the Apostle James the brother of John, he said to the disciples assembled in the house of John Mark “Tell these things to James and to the brethren” (xii. 17). He must then have already been in some manner prominent among the disciples. As the chief among the Lord's own brethren, and one to whom the Lord vouchsafed a separate appearance after the Resurrection (1 Cor. xv. 7), doubtless the appearance to which the well-known story in the Gospel according to the Hebrews refers (Lightfoot, Gal. 265), and, if so, at which his unbelief probably came to an end, he would evidently be held in a peculiar kind of respect in the infant Ecclesia. St Paul alone speaks of him as an Apostle (Gal. i. 19: and probably by implication 1 Cor. xv. 7), and the contexts seem to me distinctly to exclude that looser sense of the term referred to before by which mere ‘Apostles of Ecclesiae’ were meant, while it is hardly less clear that he did not anticipate the later theory which made him to have been from the first one of the Twelve.