The Mother Church

The church of Jerusalem, born of the Spirit at Pentecost, is honored in Orthodox tradition as the mother of all the churches — the first community of the faithful, from which the Gospel went out into the world. Over this church, largely Jewish-Christian in its life and worship, James the Just presided as its first bishop until his martyrdom, winning by his righteousness the respect even of non-Christian Jews. This file treats the Jerusalem community itself: its origin, its primacy of honor, James’s governance of it, and its end in the flight to Pella and the succession of Symeon.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

Born at Pentecost

The Jerusalem church is the first church. It comes into being on the day of Pentecost, when the promised Spirit descends upon the gathered disciples and Peter’s preaching adds “about three thousand souls” in a single day (Acts 2:1–41). From that first community Acts draws its portrait of the apostolic life: the believers “continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers,” held their goods in common, and worshipped “with one accord in the temple” (Acts 2:42–46). Every later church is, in a real sense, a daughter of this one. The Gospel does not begin at Rome or Antioch or Alexandria but at Jerusalem, and it is from Jerusalem that the apostles are sent: the risen Lord commands them to be his witnesses “in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8). The center of the mission is the holy city.

The Primacy of Honor

This priority in time grounds a primacy of honor that the early Church never forgot. The prophets had foreseen that the word of the Lord would go out from Zion: “out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem” (Isa. 2:3). The Church read this as fulfilled in the Pentecost mission, and so could speak of Jerusalem as the mother of all the churches — not the greatest in size or in later administrative rank, but the first in dignity as the place of the Lord’s death and resurrection and of the Spirit’s outpouring. When the order of the sees was later codified, Nicaea took care to preserve “the ancient custom” and the honor due to Jerusalem, then Aelia (First Ecumenical Council, Nicaea 325, Canon 7), and the fourth Ecumenical Council at last raised it to patriarchal rank (Chalcedon 451). But beneath all such canonical adjustments lay the older and simpler fact: that here the Church first gathered, and that the see founded by the Lord’s own brother held a place of unique reverence among the apostolic churches (see Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem).

James Presiding

Over this mother church James the Just presided. The book of Acts shows his governance at its two decisive moments. At the great assembly that gathered to settle whether Gentile converts must be circumcised, it is James who, after Peter and Paul and Barnabas have spoken, rises to give the binding judgment: “Wherefore my sentence is, that we trouble not them, which from among the Gentiles are turned to God” (Acts 15:13, 19). The decision of the mother church on the most pressing question of the apostolic age is pronounced by James (the council itself is treated in its own section; see The Council of Jerusalem). Years later, when Paul returns to Jerusalem for the last time, he comes directly to James, and “all the elders were present” (Acts 21:18) — the presiding bishop and his presbytery receiving the apostle of the Gentiles and counseling him on how to conduct himself before the zealous believers of the city. In both scenes James is the settled head of the community, the one in whom its unity and its decisions are focused (on the office itself, see The Throne of Jerusalem).

A Jewish-Christian Church and Its Bridge to the Nations

The community James governed was, in its character and instincts, profoundly Jewish. Its members continued to frequent the Temple, to observe the Law, and to live as faithful Jews who confessed Jesus as the Christ; Acts notes that even at the time of Paul’s last visit there were “many thousands of Jews… which believe; and they are all zealous of the law” (Acts 21:20). James himself stood at the head of this Law-observant Christianity, and his particular vocation was to hold it in communion with the expanding Gentile mission of Paul without rupture. His judgment at the council is precisely a bridging judgment: the Gentiles are not to be burdened with circumcision and the whole Law, yet they are asked to abstain from a few things “that they may keep peace with the Jewish-Christian conscience and with the Law read in the synagogues” (Acts 15:19–21). It is James who keeps the two wings of the apostolic Church — the church of the circumcision at Jerusalem and the church of the nations — from flying apart. This bridging role is the deepest meaning of his governance of the mother church.

Righteous Even in the Eyes of His People

So conspicuous was James’s piety that he commanded respect far beyond the believing community. Hegesippus, the second-century Jewish-Christian writer whose memoirs Eusebius preserves, reports that James “was holy from his mother’s womb,” drank no wine and ate no flesh, and “was in the habit of entering alone into the temple, and was frequently found upon his knees begging forgiveness for the people, so that his knees became hard like those of a camel” — wherefore “he was called the Just (Dikaios)” (Hegesippus, quoted in Eusebius, HE 2.23; trans. NPNF II/1). Hegesippus adds that on account of his surpassing righteousness even the non-Christian Jews held him in honor, so that his name became a byword for justice in the city. This reputation is not incidental to his episcopate; it is the very ground of his authority over a Jewish-Christian church and of his standing as mediator between it and the wider Jewish world. (The fuller account of James’s righteousness, and the circumstances of his death, belong to the section on his martyrdom; see The Martyrdom; Hegesippus and Josephus.)

The End of the Mother Church: Pella and Symeon

The Jerusalem church of James did not long survive him. After his martyrdom — by the traditional reckoning shortly before the Jewish revolt — and as the Roman war approached, the Christian community is said to have abandoned the doomed city. Eusebius reports that “the people of the church in Jerusalem had been commanded by a revelation… to leave the city and to dwell in a certain town of Perea called Pella,” and that the believers withdrew there before the catastrophe of AD 70 (Eusebius, HE 3.5; trans. NPNF II/1). [Disputed: the historicity of the Pella flight is contested. Eusebius (*HE* 3.5) and later Epiphanius (*Panarion* 29.7; *On Weights and Measures* 15) attest a pre-war migration to Pella, but some modern scholars — notably S. G. F. Brandon, *The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church* (London: SPCK, 1951) — argue the tradition is an apologetic construction and doubt that the Jerusalem community fled intact; others (e.g. Bauckham, 1990) defend a historical core.] Whatever the precise course of events, the leadership of the kinsmen of the Lord continued. Eusebius records, on the authority of Hegesippus, that after the martyrdom of James the surviving apostles and the Lord’s relatives “all with one consent pronounced Symeon the son of Clopas… worthy of the episcopal throne,” so that Symeon, a cousin of the Saviour, became the second bishop of Jerusalem (Eusebius, HE 3.11; 4.22, citing Hegesippus; trans. NPNF II/1). The mother church thus passed, through the upheaval of the war, from one kinsman of the Lord to another — the office of James continuing in the succession that began with him (see The Throne of Jerusalem; on the Church of this period, Pre-Schism Church).

References

Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History (HE). Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. New York, 1890. (2.23: Hegesippus on James’s righteousness, asceticism, and the name “the Just”; 3.5: the flight to Pella; 3.11 and 4.22: the election of Symeon son of Clopas as the second bishop, citing Hegesippus.)
Epiphanius of Salamis. Panarion 29.7; On Weights and Measures 15. (The Pella tradition.)
Brandon, S. G. F. The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church. London: SPCK, 1951. (The case against the historicity of the Pella flight.)
Bauckham, Richard. Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990. (The Jewish-Christian Jerusalem church, the kinsmen of the Lord, and a defense of the Pella tradition’s historical core.)
Schaff, Philip. History of the Christian Church, Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1882. (Jerusalem as the mother church and James’s mediating episcopate.)
The Holy Bible, Authorized (King James) Version. (Acts 1:8; 2:1–46; 15:13–21; 21:18–20; Isaiah 2:3.)