Today we are celebrating the feast of St James the Great, one of the 12 apostles. He was the first disciple to join Jesus (along with his brother John, and Peter), the second to die (after Judas Iscariot), and the first to be martyred.

James, together with his brother John and St Peter, were the only apostles present at 3 key events of Jesus’ ministry - the raising of Jairus' daughter, the transfiguration of Jesus and the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane – suggesting they were part of an inner group among the 12. But James and John also pushed their luck with Jesus, asking if they could sit on his right and left sides in heaven. Jesus was annoyed and asked if they were ready to drink from the cup he was going to drink from, in other words to suffer the same painful death. And at another time, they wanted to call down fire on a Samaritan town, but were again severely reprimanded by Jesus. The two brothers were known as the Sons of Thunder, perhaps because of James's fiery temper.

Saint James is the patron saint of Spain and, according to tradition, his remains are held in Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, the name Santiago being a local evolution of the Latin genitive Sancti Iacobi, "(church or sanctuary) of Saint James". The traditional pilgrimage to the grave of the saint, known as the "Way of St James", has been the most popular pilgrimage for Western European Catholics from the Early Middle Ages onwards and is currently experiencing something of a revival.

It is believed that St James preached the gospel in Spain in the late AD30s and that on 2 January AD40, the Virgin Mary appeared to him on the bank of the Ebro River near Zaragoza. She apparently appeared standing on a pillar, which is now conserved and venerated within the present Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar, in Zaragoza - and is the reason why some Spanish girls take the name Maria del Pilar, or simply Pilar.

St James died in the Holy Land by beheading in AD44, at the hands of Herod Agrippa. His followers then carried his body by sea back to Spain, where they landed at Padrón on the coast of Galicia, and then buried it at Santiago de Compostela. His remains were then, apparently, forgotten, before being discovered by Pelayo the Hermit in the Libredón forest in AD813. Further tradition says that James miraculously appeared to fight for the Christian army during the legendary battle of Clavijo, which began the reconquest of Spain from the Moors in AD844.

The picture above shows the great cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, by Jrjunior223, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons