Paul Vs. James - An 8-Day Study On Faith & Works By Chris BrunoSample

DAY FOUR 

The next time we see James is in Acts 12, probably about ten or twelve years after the ascension. By this time, he was not only one of the growing number of Jesus followers in Jerusalem, but he was also a recognized leader in the church. Given his close connection to Jesus, this should be expected. If he was the oldest of Jesus’ brothers, then it would have been natural for many early Christians to look to him for leadership. Yet  he had not  just inherited the role of church leader. From everything we see in the New Testament and other early Christian writings, James was a godly man, devoted to prayer. If James was a Nazarite, then he likely continued fasting and praying regularly even after he began following Jesus. The early church historian Eusebius wrote that James “used to enter the Temple alone, and be found resting on his knees and praying for forgiveness for the people, so that his knees became as hard as those of a camel because of his constant bending forward on his knees in worshipping God and begging for forgiveness for the people.” In fact, in many Christian traditions, James is known as “James the Just.”  And as we’ll see below, the epistle of James gives us a window into James’s clear devotion to Jesus and pursuit of holiness.

As James was growing in both influence and devotion to Jesus, he assumed an increasingly prominent leadership role in the church in Jerusalem. Then King Herod executed the other James (the son of Zebedee, the brother of John, who was one of the apostles during Jesus’ earthly ministry) and arrested Simon Peter, planning to kill him next (Acts 12:1–4). While Peter was waiting to be executed, God miraculously delivered him, and he made it safely out of prison to tell a group of Christians who were praying for his release about what God had done for him.

We don’t have time for that whole story, but it’s important to notice what Peter tells the crowd who had gathered to hear this story: “Tell these things to James and to the brothers” (Acts 12:17). By this time, James was recognized by Peter and the other Christians as a leader and influential elder in the church in Jerusalem. Also, in his first meeting with Peter that Paul describes in Galatians 1:18–19, he mentions James as the only other apostle that he met, and in the next chapter, he calls him one of the “pillar” apostles in Jerusalem along with Peter and John (Gal. 2:9). After the other James—who was likely a cousin of Jesus and James—was executed, Peter left Jerusalem to preach in other places in Acts 12, and John doesn’t appear in Acts after chapter 8. Like Peter, he was traveling to other places to preach the gospel. That left James as the central leader of the church in Jerusalem, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

For the next several decades, James was not only the most prominent elder in the church in Jerusalem, but also a leader among Jews scattered around the Mediterranean world. We’ll talk about this text more later, but in Galatians 2:12, Paul mentions “certain men came from James” who came to Antioch and convinced Peter and the other Jewish Christians to stop eating with Gentiles. Even though they weren’t representing James’s view, just using his name was enough to give them some clout in Antioch. More than this though, James’s influence can be seen clearly in his epistle that he sent to “the twelve tribes in the Dispersion” (James 1:1) to instruct mostly Jewish Christians how to live out their faith in Jesus.