Biography of the Apostle James (Santiago): Life, Tradition and the Camino

The name Santiago comes from two words, Sant Iacob, because his name in Hebrew was Jacob. In their battles the Spaniards shouted: “Sant Iacob, help us.” And from repeating these two words so often, they joined them into one: Santiago, who was one of the Twelve Apostles of Christ.

He was the brother of Saint John the Evangelist. He was called the Greater, to distinguish him from the other apostle, James the Less, who was younger than he. With his parents Zebedee and Salome he lived in the city of Bethsaida, by the Sea of Galilee, where they had a small fishing business. They had workers in their service, and their financial situation was quite good, since they could be away from work for several weeks, as his brother John did when he went to spend some time at the Jordan listening to John the Baptist.

James was one of the three favorites of Jesus, together with his brother John and with Simon Peter. After witnessing the miraculous catch of fish, on hearing Jesus say to them: “From now on you will be fishers of men,” he left his nets, his father and his fishing business and went with Jesus Christ to help him in his apostolate. He witnessed all of Christ's great miracles, and with Peter and John he was one of the only ones present at the Transfiguration of the Lord and at his Prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. Why did Jesus favor him so much? Perhaps because (as Saint John Chrysostom says) he was the boldest and bravest in declaring himself a friend and follower of the Redeemer, or because he was to be the first to shed his blood for proclaiming his faith in Jesus Christ. May Jesus keep us too among his favorites.

The Gospel tells that once, while passing through a village in Samaria, the people refused to give them any food, and James and John asked Jesus to make fire rain down from heaven and burn those rude people. Christ had to rebuke them for that vengeful spirit, and reminded them that he had not come to harm anyone but to save as many people as possible. James was not a saint when he became a disciple of the Lord. Holiness would come to him little by little.

Another day James and John sent Salome, their mother, to ask Jesus to place the two of them in the first places on the day of his glory: one on his right and the other on his left. Jesus said to them: “Are you able to drink the cup of bitterness that I am about to drink?” They said to him: “Yes, we are able.” Christ added: “You will indeed drink the cup of bitterness, but to sit in the first places is not mine to grant, but those places are for those for whom my Heavenly Father has reserved them.” The other apostles were upset by this vain request from the two sons of Zebedee, but Jesus said to them all: “Whoever wants to be first must be the servant of all, following the example of the Son of Man, who did not come to be served but to serve.” Surely with this lesson from Jesus, James must have learned to be more humble.

After the Ascension of Jesus, James the Greater stood out as one of the leading figures among the group of the Apostles.

The tradition of Our Lady of the Pillar, as it emerged from documents of the 13th century preserved in the cathedral of Zaragoza, goes back to the time immediately after the Ascension of Jesus Christ, when the apostles were preaching the Gospel. It is said that James the Greater had landed on the Peninsula at the port of Cartagena, where he founded the first Spanish diocese, and from then on preached in various territories of the country. The documents state literally that James “arrived with his new disciples through Galicia and Castile, as far as Aragon, where the city of Zaragoza is located, on the banks of the Ebro. There James preached for many days and, among the many converts, chose eight men as companions, with whom he spoke by day of the kingdom of God, and at night walked along the banks to take some rest.”

On the night of January 2 of the year 40, James was with his disciples by the Ebro River when he “heard the voices of angels singing Ave María, Gratia Plena, and saw the Virgin Mother of Christ appear, standing on a marble pillar.” The Blessed Virgin, who was still living in mortal flesh, asked the Apostle to build a church there for her, with the altar around the pillar where she stood, and promised that “this place will remain until the end of time so that the power of God may work wonders and marvels through my intercession for those who implore my patronage in their needs.” The Virgin disappeared and the pillar remained there. The Apostle James and the eight witnesses of the miracle immediately began to build a church on that site and, before the church was finished, James ordained one of his disciples a priest to serve it, consecrated it and gave it the title of Santa María del Pilar, before returning to Judea. This was the first church dedicated in honor of the Blessed Virgin.

Just when James had returned to Jerusalem, King Herod Agrippa set out to put an end to the followers of Christ; the first thing he did was to have James beheaded and Peter imprisoned. Thus the son of Zebedee had the honor of being the first of the apostles to shed his blood for proclaiming the religion of the Risen Jesus.

Around the year 813, in the time of Alfonso II the Chaste, King of Asturias, a Christian hermit named Paio (Pelayo) told the Galician bishop Theodomir of Iria Flavia (Spain) that he had seen lights hovering over an uninhabited hill. They found a tomb, probably of Roman origin, containing a headless body with the head under its arm. King Alfonso ordered a church to be built over the cemetery (compositum), the origin of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela (“Saint James of the compositum”). Others maintain that the word Compostela comes from campus stellae: “field of stars,” because of the lights that danced over the cemetery.

In May 1589, Francis Drake threatened Compostela after landing at La Coruña. The Archbishop, Juan de Sanclemente, agreed with the Cathedral Chapter to hide everything of importance in it. For that reason, the remains were placed in a hiding place inside the apse of the main chapel, behind the altar. Those remains were found thirty meters deep relative to the floor in the excavations carried out in the Cathedral in 1878 and 1879 by Antonio López Ferreiro.

In those excavations, among the remains of a Roman mausoleum, a sepulchral inscription in Greek, Athanasios martyr, was found, along with the remains of three different people: two of middle age and one in the last third of life, which led to their being identified with the traditional James and his disciples Athanasius and Theodore. Nevertheless, Pope Leo XIII appointed an extraordinary Congregation to study these remains. The documents sent to Rome, however, did not satisfy him, and he sent Monsignor Agostino Caprara, Promoter of the Faith in the process, to Santiago to examine the remains on site and take statements from those involved. Caprara, however, first ordered an analysis of the alleged relic of James venerated in Pistoia, a task carried out by Doctor Chiapelli, who ruled that it was a right mastoid process with traces of clotted blood, a piece that would have been separated as a result of a beheading.

On June 8, 1884 he arrived in Santiago, and the examination established that one of the three skulls lacks a right mastoid process. The Congregation's resolution was published on July 25 of the same year, the feast day of Saint James. On November 1 of the same year, Leo XIII published the Bull Deus Omnipotens, which reviewed the history of the Sanctuary and called for new pilgrimages to Santiago to be undertaken.

In Chile the Apostle James (Santiago) is the patron of the capital city, Santiago de Chile, founded as Santiago de la Nueva Extremadura in 1541, and shares with the Virgen del Carmen the patronage of the country and has a side altar in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Santiago. The coats of arms of the city of Santiago, of the Archdiocese of Santiago and of several communes of the Metropolitan Region bear around their border eight golden shells on a blue background, representing the letters of the Apostle's name. Likewise, he is venerated in other towns and rural localities in the northern and southern parts of the country, where his feast day, July 25, is celebrated with great solemnity.

In 1056, a group from Liège (present-day Belgium) made a pilgrimage to Compostela. It was led by Herman, Count of Grez, and included monks of the Abbey of Saint-Jacques of Liège, among them Robert, who was later elected abbot of that community. The monks had one idea in mind: to bring relics of James the Greater to their monastery. They presented their request to King Ferdinand I of León and Galicia, who agreed and gave them the Apostle's right forearm. A few decades later, a monk of Saint-Jacques wrote an account of the journey as a testimony.

The relic of the Apostle James used by the Círculo de Santiago in its liturgical celebrations comes from the one preserved in the Diocese of Ghent in Belgium, certified by its bishop Msgr. Honoré Jozef Coppieters on August 25, 1934 under inscription number 2457.

On May 7, 2014 it was authenticated by the Vicar General of Ghent, Msgr. Paul Van Puyenbroeck, and by the Chancellor of the same diocese, Msgr. Ludo Collin.