Where Was James Buried?

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Controversy over the burial of James, the brother of Jesus, is nothing new. As early as the fourth century A.D., the location of James’s tomb was disputed. In the words of the church father Jerome, writing in 392 A.D.: “Some monks think James was buried on the Mount of Olives, but their opinion is false.” Jerome continues, “He is buried near the Temple from which he was thrown down. The grave-marker was well known up to the siege of Titus [ending the First Jewish Revolt against Rome in 70 A.D.] and even that of Hadrian 035[ending the Second Jewish Revolt in 135 A.D.].”¹ The question for Jerome, then, was whether James was buried on the western or eastern slope of Jerusalem’s Kidron Valley, which separates the Temple Mount and the City of David on the west from the Mount of Olives on the east (see map, below). Jerome was confident James’s tomb was on the west side of the valley, just outside the southeastern corner of the Temple Mount.

Born in northern Italy and educated in Rome, Jerome had settled in Bethlehem by 386 A.D., where he devoted himself to his studies. He was certainly familiar with the account of James’s murder written by the first-century A.D. Jewish historian Josephus. According to Josephus, a hot-headed high priest named Ananus accused “James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ, and certain others” of having broken the law and then “delivered them up to be stoned.”²

Jerome also would have known the more detailed report by Hegesippus, an early-second-century A.D. Jewish Christian who was probably a native of Palestine. Hegesippus’s original account is lost, but several quotations are preserved in Eusebius of Caesarea’s History of the Church (316 A.D.). According to Hegesippus, James was first thrown from the “pinnacle of the Temple.” When that did not kill him, he was stoned. When that did not kill him, his head was stove in by a fuller’s club. “And thus he suffered martyrdom. And they buried him on the spot, by the Temple, and his grave-marker is still there by the Temple.”³

This is the grave-marker Jerome describes as having remained in place at least until the Roman general Titus ended the First Jewish Revolt against Rome in 70 A.D. and perhaps as late as 135 A.D., when the emperor Hadrian suppressed the Second Jewish Revolt. That Jerome does not mention seeing the marker himself suggests it was buried by the debris that cascaded down the slope when Hadrian razed Jerusalem.

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The “pinnacle of the Temple” that Hegesippus mentions is traditionally identified with the southeastern corner of the Temple Mount, the platform that supported the Temple. Two first-century A.D. sources confirm there were tombs here. The first is the Copper Scroll from Qumran—a unique Dead Sea Scroll that was made out of pure copper sheet and listed hiding places for a treasure hoard. The scroll reads: “Underneath the South corner of the Portico, in Zadok’s tomb, underneath the column of the exedra, tithe-vessels of pine (?) resin and of the tithe of cassia (?) resin.”⁴ The portico (also called the “stoa”) ran along the southern wall of Herod’s Temple Mount. The Hebrew term zadok means “righteous” or “just”; since “Zadok” is not qualified in any way here, scroll editor Jozef Milik suggests that the allusion is not to the tomb of a specific individual, but to the place where (high) priests were buried.⁵

The presence of tombs in this area is also suggested by the first-century A.D. Lives of the Prophets, a collection of two dozen brief biographies believed to have been written by a Jew with firsthand knowledge of Jerusalem and its monuments.⁶ Of Isaiah, we are told: “His tomb is near the tomb of the kings, behind the tomb of the priests on the side towards the south. Solomon constructed the tombs, which had been designed by David, on the east of Zion.”⁷ In the Iron Age, the name Zion applied to Jerusalem’s eastern ridge, today called the City of David, where the earliest city stood and where, according to the Old Testament, Solomon, David and other kings were buried (1 Kings 2:10, 11:43, 14:31, 15:8, 15:24, etc.). Today, however, Jerusalem’s western ridge is known as Mt. Zion. Thus, the Lives of the Prophets is referring to tombs on the west side of the Kidron Valley, just south of the Temple Mount. That people other than priests could be buried here is confirmed not only by the presence of Isaiah’s tomb, but also by the minor prophet Haggai’s, of whom it is said: “He was buried near the tomb of the priests, honored as though one of their number.”⁸

The existence of tombs in the area where James is said to have been buried does not, of course, prove that he was buried there. In fact, it could be an argument against the case. Would someone like James, executed as a criminal, have been interred so close to royal and (high) priestly tombs? We must keep in mind, however, that, according to Hegesippus, James was known as “the righteous” because of his strict adherence to Jewish Law. Further, Josephus explicitly says that when Ananus executed James for failing to uphold the Law, 037he had no popular support. Indeed, “those of the inhabitants of the city who were considered the most fair-minded and who were strict in observance of the Law were offended at this.”⁹ Complaints were made to King Agrippa and the Roman procurator, and Ananus lost his office. Thus, it is entirely possible that James, an innocent victim and honored member of the community, was granted a grave close to those of the kings and priests as a form of compensation.

By the second century, however, the tomb was apparently inaccessible, buried under rubble, and memory of its location began to fade. James, however, was too important a figure to be permitted to languish in obscurity. He was, after all, the founder of the Jerusalem church. There had to be some kind of monument in his name. And what could be better than a tomb—not on the highly unstable west side of the Kidron Valley but on the gentler eastern slope? And what better way to “move” the tomb from one side of the valley to the other than a miracle?

By the fourth century A.D. (Jerome knew about it), a legend had arisen about a miraculous appearance of James. According to this account (translated into English for the first time in the sidebar to this article), James appeared to a hermit named Epiphanius, who lived in one of the burial caves on the east slope of the Kidron. James asks Epiphanius to persuade the bishop of Jerusalem to excavate within the cave, where he said they would find the skeletons of James, the brother of the Lord, the priest Simeon and Zechariah. Epiphanius approaches Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem (315–386 A.D., bishop from 349 A.D.), who refuses to take Epiphanius seriously and sends him away.

James again appears to Epiphanius in a vision, this time sending him to a wealthy citizen of Eleutheropolis named Paul. Having himself had a vision of James, Paul welcomes the hermit and offers to pay for the 038excavation. A team of workers is hired, and they uncover the skeletons of James, Zechariah and Simeon.

At this point, the bishop takes charge. He comes to the cave and, on December 1, 351 A.D., takes up the bodies. He places them “in a chest” and temporarily transfers them to Mt. Zion (the western hill of Jerusalem) while a chapel is built on the findspot through the generosity of Paul. When the chapel is completed, the relics are transferred back, on May 25, 352 A.D. Thereafter, other sources tell us, the site attracted great numbers of pilgrims.¹⁰

The legend exists only in a tenth-century A.D. Latin manuscript, but it is manifestly a translation of a Greek document¹¹ that dates as early as the fourth century A.D.

It is a cleverly crafted document designed to calm doubts about James’s burial place.¹² The chief actor is a hermit, so unworldly that he could not be suspected of unworthy or selfish motives. The objection that James’s tomb is on the west side of the valley is refuted by miracle. That the hermit and the bishop have initial doubts indicates this is a normal reaction—but one that will be overcome by a superior power.

There is no reason to doubt various aspects of the legend, such as the discovery of bones on the eastern slope of the Kidron, an area riddled with ancient tombs. That the legend mentions three skeletons—belonging to James, Simeon and Zechariah—is further evidence that bones actually were found. Were the story a complete invention there would be only one skeleton: James’s. The other two are an embarrassment that only diminish James’s role in the story. No one would have made them up.

Further, there is no reason to doubt that Cyril of Jerusalem moved the bones to Mt. Zion (probably to the principal church there, the Upper Church of the Apostles) and that the otherwise unknown Paul of Eleutheropolis paid for a chapel at the site.

But what about the identification of the bones? The legend credits a miraculous vision. Might there have been more concrete evidence that these were indeed the bones of men named James, Zechariah and Simeon?

A number of scenarios can be sketched. The first, and most obvious, is that the bones were actually found in inscribed ossuaries.

The use of ossuaries to hold bones was common among Jews of Jerusalem in the first century A.D. 039According to this burial practice, called ossilegium, a corpse was laid out in a niche carved into the wall of a burial cave; about a year later, when the body had decomposed, the bones were gathered together in a small box, called an ossuary, typically made of limestone and measuring about 20 inches long (just long enough to hold the longest bone in the body). The ossuary was then left in the burial cave. This practice created space for additional primary burials inside the burial cave. Ossuaries were sometimes inscribed, most often with the names of the deceased and his father. (The recently surfaced ossuary of James is unusual in that it includes the name of the brother, Jesus.)

Might the hermit’s cave have contained an ossuary bearing the inscription “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus”? That this seems too good to be true cannot exclude it as a possibility. Or might the cave have contained three ossuaries, bearing the names of James, Zechariah and Simeon?¹³ All three are common Jewish names of the period, and might well have been found together in one family tomb. If a Byzantine Christian found them and wanted to identify them with New Testament figures, he wouldn’t have to look far. The father of John the Baptist is called Zechariah (Luke 1:5), and a Simeon prophetized about Jesus in the Temple (Luke 2:22–35).¹⁴ To any Byzantine desperate to rehabilitate James the brother of Jesus, who was widely recognized as the first leader of the church, such coincidences would make the identification of the remaining ossuary certain.

Against both of these hypotheses is the fact that the text clearly implies the discovery of whole skeletons, and not the disarticulated bones that would be found in ossuaries. Thus named ossuaries are out.

This leaves us with the third scenario, namely, that there were no ossuaries and the names were simply conferred on the skeletons. One can understand why the Byzantines would want one to be James, but what determined the selection of the other two names? Perhaps there was a vague memory of tombs in the Kidron Valley associated with the murdered priest Zechariah (2 Chronicles 24:21; Matthew 23:35; Luke 11:51) and the celebrated high priest Simon (Sirach 50:1–21).¹⁵

Be that as it may, the three names were closely linked by the Byzantine period. The pilgrim Theodosius (c. 518 A.D.) wrote, “Saint James, Saint Zechariah, and Saint Simeon are buried in a single tomb, which Saint James himself constructed. He reburied in it the bodies of the other two, and gave instructions that he himself should be buried there with them.”¹⁶ Clearly Theodosius assumed that as bishop of Jerusalem James did honor to two illustrious members of his community by reinterring their bones where he himself would be buried.

Later sources, however, ignore Simeon and Zechariah and mention only James. A tenth-century guidebook to Jerusalem is typical, and also the most precise as regards the location of the tomb and church of James: “On this side is the Mount of Olive on which one climbs. At the beginning of the ascent is the Hand [Monument] of Absalom, a circular edifice with a slender top very like a domestic kettle with its cover. Thus it is called by the Arabs Qamqam [the Kettle]. On the road to the tombs is the tomb of Ornan [Araunah] the Jebusite. It is a single stone, and the walls around it are 20 cubits high and 12 cubits thick, and the roof is a single stone. Communicating with it is the tomb alongside, which is a single stone, its ceiling, its floor, 040its walls, and its pillars, everything one stone. Linked to it is a church […] named the church of James the brother of the Messiah Jesus.”¹⁷

The guidebook is describing well-known Jerusalem landmarks (see photo at the beginning of this article), still visible in the Kidron Valley just across from the southeastern corner of the Temple Mount. The Monument of Absalom, with its unusual bottle-shaped top, still goes by this name (it is also called Pharaoh’s Bonnet); although tradition associates it with David’s son, it is believed to be a first-century B.C. funerary monument. What the guidebook describes as a tomb, carved from a single stone and decorated with pillars, can only be the enclosed funerary monument (nephesh) with engaged columns about 50 yards to the south of Absalom’s monument. A passageway connects this nephesh to a burial complex with a distyle in antis entrance (that is, an open entrance with a portico supported by two freestanding columns; see photo in the sidebar to this article). This is the structure that even today some mistakenly identify as James’s tomb, but an inscription above the entrance identifies the tomb as belonging to the priestly family of the Bene Hezir (1 Chronicles 24:15). The guidebook also states that the nephesh is connected to James’s church, perhaps referring to the tomb or to a separate structure altogether.

In the Crusader period, several western pilgrims mention the beautiful chapel in the Kidron Valley where James was buried. More recent archaeological work has confirmed the existence of a church in the very spot mentioned by the guidebook.

In 1959, when he published his commentary on the Copper Scroll, Josef Milik identified one of the places in which treasure had been buried as the tomb of the Bene Hezir family.¹⁸ This led John Allegro, another one of the original Dead Sea Scroll editors, to initiate an excavation there from 1959 to 1960. No treasure was found, but a small number of architectural elements, including column drums and a base, came to light.¹⁹

They didn’t find much, however, since looters had 041already ravaged the site. Reporting on the dig, Howard Stutchbury, a member of Allegro’s team, quoted a 19th-century description of the site: “Very recent [1851] diggings … brought to light … the remains of a religious building … probably a church constructed by order of the Empress Helena or of Constantine. Fragments of cornices, capitals and shafts … are carried down with much labour from the spot where they have been dug up towards the bottom of the Vale of Jehoshaphat 042(i.e. Kidron Valley), where they are sold to the Jews, to be cut up and carved into funeral-stones, to be added to the innumerable quantity of the same kind, strewed over the side of the valley from the tomb of Absalom to the village of Siloam.”²⁰

Allegro had found the last remnants of the chapel erected by Paul of Eleutheropolis in honor of James the brother of the Lord, first bishop of Jerusalem.

Today, the church is gone. The adjacent “tomb of James” —the Bene Hezir burial cave—is not the tomb of James at all, despite what the miracle story says. Credible ancient reports tell us the grave was located instead on the spot where James was martyred. Might James’s bones have been laid to rest in an ossuary buried near the grave-marker at the southeastern corner of the Temple Mount? Perhaps. The evidence certainly does not preclude the possibility.²¹

Controversy over the burial of James, the brother of Jesus, is nothing new. As early as the fourth century A.D., the location of James’s tomb was disputed. In the words of the church father Jerome, writing in 392 A.D.: “Some monks think James was buried on the Mount of Olives, but their opinion is false.” Jerome continues, “He is buried near the Temple from which he was thrown down. The grave-marker was well known up to the siege of Titus [ending the First Jewish Revolt against Rome in 70 A.D.] and even that of Hadrian 035[ending the Second Jewish […]