The Throne of Jerusalem

The early Church remembers James the Just, the Brother of the Lord, as the first bishop of Jerusalem — the one to whom Peter, James the son of Zebedee, and John entrusted the episcopal seat of the mother city, and whose name stands at the head of every list of Jerusalem’s bishops. Eusebius records that the very throne of James was preserved and venerated at Jerusalem in his own day. This file sets out the office: James as episkopos, the prototypical “first bishop,” and the root of the Jerusalem church’s claim to apostolic foundation.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

“He Received the Throne of Jerusalem”

The earliest connected witness to James’s office is Eusebius of Caesarea, who opens the second book of his Ecclesiastical History by turning from the events of the Gospels to the constitution of the Church after the Ascension. There he states plainly that “James, who was called the brother of the Lord… was the first that was elected to the episcopal seat of the church in Jerusalem” — that he “received the throne (thronos) of the church of Jerusalem” (Eusebius, HE 2.1; trans. NPNF II/1). The word Eusebius uses, thronos, is the ordinary Greek term for a bishop’s cathedra, the seat from which he governs and teaches; to “receive the throne” is to be made the bishop of a particular church. For Eusebius, then, the Jerusalem episcopate does not begin with some later figure but with the Lord’s own kinsman, in the first generation, before the dispersion of the apostles.

Eusebius does not assert this on his own authority alone. He grounds it in the lost Hypotyposes of Clement of Alexandria, whom he quotes directly: “Peter and James and John after the ascension of our Saviour, as if also preferred by our Lord, strove not after honor, but chose James the Just bishop of Jerusalem” (Clement of Alexandria, Hypotyposes Book 6, quoted in Eusebius, HE 2.1; trans. NPNF II/1). The notice is striking precisely for whom it names: not lesser men, but the three apostles who form the inner circle of the Gospels — Peter, John, and James the son of Zebedee. These, Clement says, though they might themselves have claimed the dignity, did not contend for it but together set James the Just over the church of the holy city. The episcopate of James is thus presented not as a self-appointment but as a conferral by the chief of the apostles — the act by which the mother church received its first bishop.

The Throne Preserved and Venerated

Eusebius returns to the throne of James once more, and this time as a material object surviving into his own fourth-century lifetime. Describing the church of Jerusalem and its succession of bishops, he writes that “the throne of James, who first received the episcopate of the church at Jerusalem from the Saviour himself and the apostles, and who, as the divine records show, was called a brother of Christ, has been preserved until now; the brethren who have followed him in succession there exhibiting clearly to all the reverence which both those of old times and those of our own day maintained and maintain for holy men on account of their piety” (Eusebius, HE 7.19; trans. NPNF II/1). The cathedra of the first bishop, in other words, was still shown and honored at Jerusalem in the early 300s, and Eusebius adduces its continued veneration as evidence of the unbroken reverence of the local church for its founder. Whatever the physical history of the object, the notice testifies to a settled fourth-century memory: that the Jerusalem episcopate possessed, as its most ancient relic, the seat of James, and that this seat was the visible token of the church’s apostolic foundation. The “throne of James” thus becomes the enduring symbol of the Jerusalem church’s claim to descend, by direct succession, from the Lord’s own brother.

The Evidence of Acts

The patristic memory rests on a foundation already visible in the New Testament, where, without ever being given a title, James is shown exercising precisely the leadership Eusebius later describes. When Peter is delivered from prison and departs Jerusalem, he leaves a single instruction for the brethren: “Tell these things unto James, and to the brethren” (Acts 12:17). The phrasing is telling. James is singled out by name as the one to whom the news must be reported, set apart even from “the brethren” generally — the man who must be informed because he is the one who governs in the apostles’ absence. By the time Paul makes his last visit to Jerusalem, this position has hardened into a recognized office: “Paul went in with us unto James; and all the elders were present” (Acts 21:18). The scene is unmistakably that of a presiding bishop surrounded by his presbytery: James receives the apostle to the Gentiles, and the elders of the city assemble in his presence to hear Paul’s report. The same picture stands behind the Council of Jerusalem, where it is James who pronounces the decisive judgment that closes the debate (Acts 15:13–21) — though the council and its decree belong to their own section (see The Council of Jerusalem; The Apostolic Decree). Acts, then, while it never calls James a bishop, depicts him doing what a bishop does: governing the mother church, receiving its visitors, and presiding over its elders.

The Head of the Succession-List

The clearest measure of how the early Church reckoned James’s office is the place his name holds in the episcopal succession of Jerusalem. When Eusebius sets out the line of Jerusalem’s bishops, the list does not begin with an apostle sent from elsewhere or with some appointee of a later decade; it begins with James himself. After recounting his martyrdom, Eusebius writes that the survivors of the apostles, together with the Lord’s kinsmen, gathered and “all with one consent pronounced Symeon the son of Clopas… worthy of the episcopal throne of that parish,” so that Symeon was made “the second bishop of the church of Jerusalem” (Eusebius, HE 4.22, citing Hegesippus; trans. NPNF II/1). That Symeon is reckoned second presupposes that James is reckoned first. Eusebius’s enumeration of the early Jerusalem succession confirms it: he names James first, then Symeon, and then a rapid sequence of bishops down to the dispersion of the Jewish-Christian community (Eusebius, HE 4.5; trans. NPNF II/1). In every version of the list, James heads it. He is not merely a leader at Jerusalem but the one from whom the bishops of Jerusalem trace their descent — the prototypical first bishop whose name anchors the whole line.

The First Bishop and the Local Episcopate

In Orthodox ecclesiology the bishop is the head of the local church, the visible center of its unity, standing in the place of Christ amid his presbyters and people; the catholicity of the Church is realized in each local church gathered around its bishop in the Eucharist (see Ecclesiology). James is the great early instance of exactly this pattern. He is bishop of a church — Jerusalem — not a roving apostle of the nations, and his authority is the authority of a settled local episcopate exercised in one place. In him the office of bishop is seen at its origin, before the later development of metropolitan and patriarchal structures, simply as the headship of the mother church. It is for this reason that the church of Jerusalem could later ground its dignity among the ancient sees on its foundation by James: the patriarchate of Jerusalem traces its apostolic origin not to a missionary’s passage but to the Brother of the Lord himself, the first to sit upon its throne (see Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem; on the world of the pre-Constantinian sees, Pre-Schism Church). The “throne of James,” preserved and venerated, is thus more than a relic; it is the sign of a claim — that here, at Jerusalem, the episcopate of the Church began.

See Also

• James the Just — the identity and righteousness of the man who held the throne
• The Mother Church — the Jerusalem community over which James presided
• The Council of Jerusalem — James’s episcopal authority exercised in council
• Hegesippus and Josephus — the sources on James’s standing and death
• Ecclesiology — the Orthodox doctrine of the bishop and the local church
• St. Apostle Peter — the apostle who, with John, set James over Jerusalem

References

• Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History (HE). Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. New York, 1890. (2.1: James the Just receives the throne of Jerusalem, with the citation of Clement of Alexandria’s Hypotyposes that Peter, James, and John chose James the Just as bishop; 4.5: the succession-list of Jerusalem bishops beginning with James; 4.22: Symeon as the second bishop, implying James as first; 7.19: the throne of James preserved and venerated at Jerusalem in Eusebius’s day.)
• Clement of Alexandria. Hypotyposes, Book 6. (Lost; quoted in Eusebius, HE 2.1: Peter, James, and John “chose James the Just bishop of Jerusalem.”)
• Bauckham, Richard. Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990. (James’s leadership at Jerusalem and the kinsmen of the Lord in the succession.)
• Painter, John. Just James: The Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition. 2nd ed. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. (The episcopate of James and the evidence of Acts and Eusebius.)
• The Holy Bible, Authorized (King James) Version. (Acts 12:17; 15:13–21; 21:18.)