Forbidden History - James: The Forgotten Brother of Jesus

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

In this episode, we’re joined by Tony McMahon to explore the life and legacy of James, the so-called “brother” of Jesus. Was James an early leader in the Jerusalem church whose influence shaped the foundation of Christianity, and a truly a devoted follower of Jesus? Or are there hidden texts or Gnostic writings that reveal a different James than the one we’re told about... Cast List: Tony McMahon: Former BBC news producer, author, print journalist and historian  Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. For centuries, historians have debated the life and death of James, the brother of Jesus. Though much of the world focuses on the life of his famous sibling, the story of James, who was known as James the Just, remain shrouded in mystery. Was he just another figure in Jesus' family?

Or did he play a crucial and often overlooked role in the rise of the early Christian church? For centuries, many Christians were convinced that Jesus had a bigger family, that he was one of several siblings. There's a suggestion that there was kind of hostility, a conflict between these two. James, of course, because he says

that Jesus was the Messiah. Some people think that he was thrown off a high building and others that he was stone to death, but it's certain that he was martyred for his beliefs, for his belief that Jesus, the man that he had known in life, was in fact the Son of God. In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we dig deeper into the mystery surrounding James the Just. How did a man, seemingly overshadowed, by his brother's divine status, rise to become one of the most influential leaders of the Christian movement.

And why, despite being one of the closest figures to Jesus during his lifetime, is James largely absent from the Gospels? His role left more to legend than to history. The question of whether Jesus had brothers and sisters has sparked fierce debate for centuries. Investigative historian, author and journalist Tony McMahon. We don't often think about Jesus having siblings, but according to the New Testament, Jesus had something like four brothers, so that's James, Joseph, Judas and Simon, and two sisters, but their names are not mentioned. But there's always been a lot of discussion about whether these were literally brothers, and sisters. And the reason for that, especially in the Roman Catholic Church, is the whole issue

of the Virgin Mary and Mary's virginity, that she gives birth to Jesus through the virgin birth. The Roman Catholic Church strongly believes that Mary stayed a virgin her whole life, even after giving birth to Jesus. So when the Bible mentions Jesus's brothers and sisters, Catholics typically interpret that as either step-siblings from Joseph's possible earlier marriage or just close relatives like cousins. On the other hand, many Protestant traditions take those references more literally, arguing that Jesus had actual biological siblings, James being the most well-known. This difference in interpretation has sparked a pretty big debate over the years, influencing how people understand Jesus' family and even aspects of his life story.

And many Catholics believe that she remained a virgin, so she could not have then, of course, given birth to brothers and sisters. So these are actually stepbrothers, step sisters, from another marriage, Joseph's other wives. I mean, he was an older man anyway, according to sources. Or they simply were not brothers and sisters. simply were not brothers and sisters at all. But we can then take the view that they were, which many Protestants do, for example, and that these were brothers and sisters that Jesus had,

all of them, of course, younger than him. He is the oldest of these siblings. For Protestants, the idea that Jesus had real biological siblings is clear, and it's a game changer. In the Gospels, we see mentions of Jesus' brothers and sisters, like in Mark, Chapter 6, verse 3, and Matthew, Chapter 13, verse 55, making it hard to ignore. Protestants believe these weren't just spiritual siblings or distant relatives. They were Mary and Joseph's actual children.

This, of course, goes against the Catholic belief in Mary's perpetual virginity. Instead, Protestants embrace the idea that Mary and Joseph, had a normal marriage with Jesus as their firstborn and his brother James emerging as a powerful figure in the early church. James, who's often referred to as James the Just or James the Less, is a disciple who went on to become leader of the Christian church in Jerusalem, so the church that evolved after Christ died. we have to be careful when we talk about church.

This is a community of Christians that formed in the years after Jesus dies. These early Christians were very different from what we see today. James led a Jewish Christian community that held firmly to Jewish traditions, while believing Jesus was the Messiah. This early church was centered around Jesus' teachings and communal living. Despite its humble beginnings, the Jerusalem Church became the first and most important Christian community, setting the foundation for the movement that would eventually spread across the world. They have a very simple belief. They believe that Jesus had resurrected

and that he was going to come back very soon to judge living and the dead and to overthrow the enemies of Christianity. And also it's believed that the early church would still have had a significant Jewish influence that these were, as it were, Jewish Christians, very much operating in many of the Jewish traditions. But James becomes a leader of the Christians in Jerusalem. Now there is a suggestion that James took issue with Paul, St. Paul, who writes the letters that are a big part of the New Testament. The conflict between James the Just and St. Paul, was rooted in differing visions for Christianity's future. James, as the leader of the Jerusalem Church,

believed that Jesus' message was meant to fulfill Jewish law and should remain deeply rooted in Jewish tradition. He and his followers, often called Jewish Christians, continued to observe the Torah and believed that new converts to Christianity should do the same. But what exactly was Paul preaching? And why might James have been wary of him? Paul wanted to take Christianity to the Gentiles, to the Greco-Roman world.

And in doing so, he was quite happy to ditch a lot of the Jewish law. He saw Jesus as overthrowing the Jewish law, whereas James possibly saw Jesus as somebody who had come to fulfill the Jewish law. That's an important distinction. Paul believed that Jesus had moved beyond. on the old Jewish laws. He preached that Gentiles, non-Jews, didn't need to follow Jewish customs like circumcision or dietary laws to become Christians.

Paul's mission was to take the message of Jesus to the wider world, and he wanted to open the doors of the church to all, no matter their background or traditions. It's Paul who's taking Christianity global. taking Christianity to the Gentile world and he's turning it into the global religion it is today. James is leading a church in Jerusalem that still is grounded in the Jewish roots of Christianity and is very Jerusalem focused. And there's a suggestion that there was kind of hostility, a conflict between these two. James, of course, because he says that Jesus was the son of God that Jesus was the Messiah, he eventually, of course, the Jewish community in Jerusalem turn on him,

you know, because that is heresy to Jews. Could their conflict have been about more than just theology? Perhaps suggesting a struggle over the direction and identity of the early church? You cannot call Jesus the son of God, you know, you cannot say that this man was God. I mean, this is fundamentally heretical to the Jewish community. But what became of St. Paul and James the Just? Coming up after the break. Investigative historian, author and journalist Tony McMahon.

So eventually what happened is that the high priest of the temple in Jerusalem, Ananas Ben Ananus, rules that James should be executed, basically. How that happened is debated. Some people think that he was thrown off a high building and others that he was stone to death, but it's certain that he was martyred for his beliefs, for his belief that Jesus, the man that he had known in life, was in fact the son of God. The execution of James the Just is one of the most dramatic moments in early Christian history and was a direct result of his refusal to recant his belief that Jesus was the Messiah.

For the early Jerusalem Church, losing James was a huge setback. But his courage and commitment made a lasting impression. To many, he became a symbol of unshakable faith, even in the face of death. It seems like a clear ending to his story. But what if it wasn't? What if the James, who led the Jerusalem Church, wasn't even the same James we think it was, the Brother of Jesus? The New Testament is filled with multiple figures named James, and this has sparked a fiery

debate among scholars and historians. Could the James who was thrown from the temple, the martyr who stood firm in his belief that Jesus was the Messiah, have been a different James entirely? With so many individuals named James in the early Christian movement, perhaps there's been some confusion about who this key figure really was. One of the problems with James is that we have more than one James. So often we find this for example with the various Mary's in the New Testament and the confusion about who is Mary of Bethany and who's Mary Magdalene and so on.

we have the same thing with James. So, you know, we have James the less, James the Great, James the Just. Are these people all different people? Are there overlaps and so on? So there is one view that this James that we're talking about may not have been one of the original apostles, but took the place of another James when that James was martyred years after the crucifixion. Of course, it's entirely possible that none of these people were called James, that they had another name and these names were given to them by later traditions, later scholars, later monks or whatever. But it is very confusing when you reach the New Testament to work out which James are we talking

about here. You know, you almost wish sometimes they were numbered instead. During the Middle Ages, scribes and scholars carefully wrote out manuscripts by hand. While making these copies, various spellings and mistakes would have been inevitable. Of course, there is the possibility that this also applied to the New Testament. Take all the Jameses in the New Testament, for example. It's entirely possible that some of them were given that name by these very scholars to tie different stories together or smooth over any contradictions.

But in doing so, they may have left behind a mystery we're still trying to solve. With so many Jameses, it's hard to say for sure who's who. According to many accounts, James the Just was the first to appear to Jesus after the resurrection. There is one account of the resurrection in which Jesus appears to James after the resurrection, and this is in Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians. And he says that Christ had died for our sins, he was buried, he was raised on the third day, then he appeared to the disciples, but specifically he appeared to James and then to all the apostles. But let's be clear, that's one account of the resurrection.

There are other accounts which contradict that. There's a sea of confusion, a fog of confusion around the resurrection who saw Jesus first and so on. But in one of the accounts, it is James that sees Jesus first. The account of Jesus appearing to James after the resurrection has a brief mention. in Corinthians, where Paul outlines a series of appearances by the risen Jesus, saying, Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. The nature of this encounter is unclear.

Was it a private meeting or a more public one? What is certain is that this appearance marked a dramatic turning point for James. The skeptic became a believer. And from that moment, James would go on to lead the Jerusalem Church, becoming one of the most influential figures in early Christianity. This fleeting yet pivotal moment sets the stage for James' leadership in the early Christian community. For centuries, the stories of the Bible were copied by hand and later handpicked by the

church as accepted texts. But what about the texts that didn't quite make it into the Bible? We're all used to the New Testament being the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the letters of St Paul, Acts of the Apostles and so on, ending in Revelation. But these were texts that were picked by the church over a three, four hundred year period, even longer in fact, as the accepted texts. But it goes deeper than that. Some entire Gospels were completely written out of the New Testament.

While the church decided on which texts to include, many others, including the Gnostic Gospels, were deliberately excluded. But there were other Gospels. I mean, some of these Gospels were Gnostic Gospels with a very different idea of who and what Jesus was. They, as it were kind of had Jesus as almost a purely spiritual being. Most of these Gospels were thrown out. They were not accepted by the church because they didn't fit in with the evolving teaching of the church.

These alternative texts, which offered radically different views on Jesus and his teachings, were seen as too controversial or incompatible with the Orthodox Christian narrative. Gnostic Gospels, like the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Mary, painted Jesus as a purely spiritual being, offering secret secret. knowledge to a select few. These writings were a threat to the early church's authority, so they were suppressed, their ideas buried for centuries. One of those Gospers is the Gospel of James, which is sometimes called the Proto-Evangelium of James, and this was a gospel we think it originated in the second century after Christ, sometimes called the Infancy Gospel, and, and, and

it has a very strong emphasis on the virgin birth, on Mary's virgin nature, and the idea as well of her being perpetually a virgin, that she, her virginity existed before the birth of Jesus and carried on afterwards. This gospel, though, was not accepted by the church. It was condemned, in fact, by Pope Innocent I in the year 405, but it was widely known and it was commented on by early Christian scholars like Oregon, and it was respected to a degree because it was authored by James, who was a brother of Jesus, who led the early church in Jerusalem. But for various reasons, it was not seen as being acceptable enough to the church to be included in the canon that created the New Testament. The Gospel of James was almost part of the New Testament, but its radical

ideas ultimately kept it out. This gospel offered a fascinating and controversial depiction of Mary's life, emphasizing her perpetual virginity, a concept that would later gain significant influence in certain Christian traditions. But the Church, in its quest to solidify a unified doctrine, saw this gospel as too speculative and out of step with the emerging Orthodox beliefs about Jesus and his divine mission. The Gospel of James painted a picture of Mary and the Holy Family that was too different, too focused on mystical details, and ultimately too much of a challenge to the tightly controlled narrative the Church wanted to promote.

As a result, it was left on the cutting room floor, while the texts that aligned more closely with church teachings made their way into the canon. We know that the Gospel of James wasn't the only text that was the only text that was the That challenged the official story. But what if there were a whole belief system built around hidden knowledge that the church didn't want spreading? Gnosticism. Unlike mainstream Christianity, which taught that salvation came through Jesus' death and resurrection,

Gnostics who believed that people could free themselves spiritually through this deeper, mystical knowledge, often saw the physical world as flawed. not by the true supreme God, but by a lower imperfect being called the demiurge. In their view, Jesus wasn't just a man who died for their sins, he was a divine messenger, sent to help people awaken and escape the physical world. If these secret teachings were erased from the Bible, how do scholars know this? And how have these texts survived? In 1945, a discovery was made that completely shook up what we thought we knew about early

Christianity. In the Egyptian desert near the town of Nag Hammadi, a local farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Saman was digging for fertilizer when he hit something unexpected, a sealed clay jar buried in the sand. Inside, he found 13 ancient books written on papyrus and bound in leather. These books, now known as the Nag Hammadi Library, contained more than 50 texts, many of which had been lost for nearly 1,500 years. These weren't just old manuscripts. They were Gnostic Gospels and writings, filled with ideas and teachings that didn't make it into the Bible. It's believed that they were hidden to protect them from being destroyed, since the early church had declared

Gnosticism, heretical. After the discovery, the texts were kept under wraps for a while, but eventually they were finally published in the 1970s. And they sparked huge debates and opened up a whole new view of early Christianity, one that was far more diverse and complex than anyone had realized. While the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library in 1945 was the most significant find of Gnostic texts, A small number of these writings had managed to survive through the centuries. Though they were dismissed by the church as heretical and excluded from the biblical canon,

some Gnostic Gospels had remained hidden in various libraries and archives. And even with the discovery of these hidden and rejected texts, we will likely never know the exact makeup of Jesus' family. For centuries, many Christians were convinced that, Jesus had a bigger family, that he was one of several siblings. Normally the oldest sibling, because of course Mary had to be a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus. But I think for most Christians, it seems more natural that Jesus will be part of a bigger family, that he would have brothers and sisters. It makes him more human, I suppose, to a degree. And it also gave rise to all sorts of

speculation about what happened to Jesus in his childhood because there are all these missing years in the life of Jesus from his presentation at the temple as a child through to his ministry. We've got really a missing gap of a couple of decades where who knows what happened. But I think on balance, it makes sense for Jesus to be part of a bigger family, a typical family of that time in Judea, Mary and Joseph's parents, Jesus the oldest child, brothers and sisters who loved and followed him through to his death and resurrection. James was a pivotal figure, the leader of the Jerusalem Church, a man who, like his brother, stood firm in the belief that Jesus was the Messiah. But despite his crucial role,

his story has been largely overshadowed by the main narratives that have shaped the Christian faith. Just as the Gospel of James, which offered a more mystical and humanizing view of Jesus' family, was deemed too speculative to be included in the New Testament, James' own legacy was marginalized in the very movement he helped shape. His death, martyred for his unwavering faith in Jesus, was one of the first martyrdoms in Christian history. Yet, ironically, his name would be lost to time for centuries. overshadowed by the figure of his brother.

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