Red-Letter Day
Apostles
May 1
also known as Philip and James the Less, Sts. Philip and James
Two of the Twelve, kept together on one day since the sixth century. Philip, of Bethsaida in Galilee, is the apostle of the Fourth Gospel: called with two words, sent to fetch Nathanael, tested before the loaves, asked by Greek pilgrims for a sight of Jesus, and answered at the Last Supper with the plainest word in John on seeing the Father in the Son. James, son of Alphaeus, appears four times in Scripture and only ever in a list. The West joined them by a shared shrine at Rome; the East keeps them apart to this day.
Philip came from Bethsaida on the Sea of Galilee, the same town as Peter and Andrew, and the first thing he did after Jesus said "Follow me" was go and find somebody else. He found Nathanael and told him they had found the one Moses wrote about, Jesus of Nazareth. Nathanael sneered: could anything good come out of Nazareth? Philip did not argue with him. He said, "Come and see." That is the whole of his method, and it worked.
He was not a quick man. Once, with a hungry crowd of thousands in front of them, Jesus turned to Philip and asked where bread could be bought to feed them all. The evangelist tells us plainly that this was a test. Philip failed it by doing the sums: two hundred pennyworth of bread would not give each of them a mouthful. Andrew, standing by, found a boy with five barley loaves. Philip was the one who counted; he was also the one the Greek pilgrims came to, later, at the feast, when they said, "Sir, we would see Jesus," and he went and told Andrew, and the two of them brought the strangers to Christ.
And at the Last Supper, on the last night, Philip asked for the one thing he still wanted. "Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us." He had been with Jesus for years and had not yet understood what he was looking at. The answer he got is the sentence the whole Church has leaned on ever since: "he that hath seen me hath seen the Father." Philip's slowness bought that for everyone who came after him.
Of James, son of Alphaeus, Scripture says almost nothing. He is named four times, always in the list of the Twelve, always in the same place in it, and he never speaks and is never spoken to. The West came to hold that he is the same man as James the Just, called the Lord's brother, who led the church at Jerusalem, and if that is so then much more is remembered: a man who kept off wine and flesh and the razor, who prayed alone in the Temple so long and so often that his knees hardened like a camel's, whom the people called the Just and the bulwark; and who, set up on the Temple pinnacle at Passover and told to deny Christ before the crowd, confessed him instead, and was thrown down, and stoned, and finished by a fuller with the club he beat clothes with. The East holds that these are two different men, and gives this James a different road: preaching in Judea and Edessa and Gaza, travelling with Andrew, and crucified at last at Ostrakine in Egypt. Both traditions end the same way, which is to say they end in the killing of a man who would not stop saying what he had seen.
There is no story anywhere of Philip and James together. They are kept on one day because their bones were laid, or believed to be laid, under one Roman altar. That is a thin reason for a feast, and it is enough: the Church remembers what it has, and what it has of these two is a man who said "come and see" and a man who left no words at all, both of them kept.
You will not be remembered for what Philip said; he asked one good question and got it wrong twice before that. You will probably not be remembered at all in the way James son of Alphaeus is not remembered, four times named and never once quoted. And yet the Church has kept his day for fourteen centuries on the strength of nothing but a post held and not abandoned. Most of what you are asked to do is like that: unquoted, unrecorded, and known only to the one who assigned it. When Philip met a man's contempt he did not defend his case; he said, come and see, and let the meeting do the work. Where in your own life have you been arguing when you were meant simply to bring someone and stand aside?
Almost everything securely known about either apostle comes from one Gospel and four lists. Philip is a name in the Synoptic rolls of the Twelve and in Acts 1, and a character only in John, which gives him his call, the test before the feeding, the Greeks at the feast, and the question at the Supper. James son of Alphaeus is named at Matthew 10:3, Mark 3:18, Luke 6:15 and Acts 1:13, and nowhere else under that name; he never speaks and has no scene of his own. Mark 15:40 names "Mary the mother of James the less," and that verse, with its Greek ho mikros, is the sole origin of the epithet "the Less"; joining that James to the son of Alphaeus is traditional inference, not a statement of the text.
For Philip after the Ascension there is one early witness. About AD 189 to 198, during the Quartodeciman dispute, Polycrates of Ephesus wrote to Pope Victor I that Philip, one of the twelve apostles, sleeps at Hierapolis with two daughters who grew old as virgins, and a third who lived in the Holy Spirit and rests at Ephesus. Eusebius preserves the letter in the Church History, at Book III chapter 31. Eusebius also, in the same passage, sets beside it Proclus on four prophetesses at Hierapolis and Luke's account of the four daughters of Philip the Evangelist at Caesarea, so the ancient confusion between the apostle and the deacon of Acts 6 stands inside our earliest witness rather than being imposed on it from outside. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1911 says candidly that it is hard to decide which Philip Hierapolis buried, and that many modern historians favour the deacon. From the fourth to the sixth century a martyrium and church complex stood at Hierapolis, modern Pamukkale, and archaeologists reported from 2011 a first-century tomb beneath it, marble worn by pilgrim feet, Greek prayers to Philip cut into the walls, and a sixth-century bread stamp bearing his image. How Philip died is not attested by any early source. Crucifixion at Hierapolis comes from the Acts of Philip, a Greek apocryphon of about the fourth century.
For James the question is not what happened but who he was, and the traditions divide. Following Jerome in the fourth century, the West identifies James son of Alphaeus with James the Just, the Lord's brother and first bishop of Jerusalem, taking the "brethren" of Jesus as kin in the wider Semitic sense and Clopas and Alphaeus as two Greek spellings of one Aramaic name; the Catholic Encyclopedia calls the single-person view by far the most probable. Following Epiphanius, also fourth century, the East holds them three distinct men and keeps three feasts: James son of Zebedee on April 30, James son of Alphaeus on October 9, James the Brother of God on October 23. A modern critical line descending from Helvidius separates them again on other grounds, and John P. Meier is cited as finding the identification unlikely. Commontide runs as a separate entry, which is structurally the Eastern answer, and this page follows the corpus: the man kept on May 1 is the apostle of the lists, and the Jerusalem material is given here as what the West received rather than as his biography.
The joint feast is Western and late. Tradition holds that the relics of both apostles were carried to Rome and laid beneath the altar of the basilica of the Holy Apostles, founded under Pope Pelagius I and dedicated under his successor John III, and dates the feast from that dedication. It should be said plainly that this is the tradition's own explanation rather than an established one: the sources give three incompatible years, no Roman document has been produced to settle them, and the basilica's own architectural history attributes its founding to something else entirely, a votive monument for the liberation of Rome from the Goths after Narses's victory at Taginae in 552. No source anywhere gives a doctrinal or biographical reason for pairing these two apostles rather than any others, and there is no first- or second-century evidence that they were remembered together at all. What is certain is where our own date comes from: the Roman May 1 passed into the Sarum calendar and from Sarum into the English prayer books, where the 1549 kalendar prints "Phil.& Ja." at May 1 and the 1662 heads the day "Saint Philip and Saint James day," with the collect beginning "O Almighty God, whom truly to know is everlasting life," the Epistle from the opening of the Epistle of James, and the Gospel from John 14. Rome moved the pair to May 11 in its 1960 calendar, after Pius XII gave May 1 to St Joseph the Worker in 1955, and settled them at May 3 in 1969; May 1 is kept by Anglicans, Old Catholics, and the Lutheran churches. The East never joined them: Philip is honoured on November 14, the day the Nativity Fast opens, and James son of Alphaeus on October 9. In art Philip carries a cross, often a Tau cross, a basket of loaves from the feeding, and a dragon underfoot from the Acts of Philip; James carries the fuller's club. Filippino Lippi painted Philip before the temple of Mars in the Strozzi Chapel at Santa Maria Novella; Ribera's Martyrdom of Saint Philip hangs in the Prado, its subject misidentified as Bartholomew until Delphine Fitz Darby corrected it in 1953; El Greco's Saint James the Less is at Toledo. Melozzo da Forlì's Ascension in the apse at Santi Apostoli was destroyed in the basilica's 1711 remodelling and survives only in fragments.
Almighty God, you gave to your apostles Philip and James the grace and strength to bear witness to Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life: Grant that we, being mindful of their victory of faith, may glorify in life and death the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The Gospel quotations here follow the Authorized Version of 1611: Philip's call and "Come and see" at John 1:43-46; the test before the loaves at John 6:5-7; the Greeks at the feast, "Sir, we would see Jesus," at John 12:20-22; "Lord, shew us the Father" and its answer at John 14:8-9; the apostolic list naming James son of Alphaeus at Matthew 10:2-4; "James the less" at Mark 15:40; and the Prayer Book Epistle for the day at James 1:1-5. Polycrates of Ephesus on Philip at Hierapolis is quoted by Eusebius, Church History, Book III chapter 31, in Arthur Cushman McGiffert's translation for the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series. Hegesippus on James, including the abstinences at section 5, the camel's knees at section 6, "Let us stone James the Just" at section 16, and the fuller's club at section 18, together with Clement of Alexandria's divergent variant at section 3, is preserved in the same work at Book II chapter 23, McGiffert's translation. Josephus on the stoning under Ananus is at Antiquities of the Jews, Book XX, chapter 9, section 1, in William Whiston's translation of 1737. The apocryphal Acts of Philip is edited by François Bovon, Bertrand Bouvier and Frédéric Amsler as Acta Philippi, Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum 11-12 (Brepols, 1999), and translated by Bovon and Christopher Matthews as The Acts of Philip: A New Translation (Baylor University Press, 2012); the fuller Greek text came to light only in 1974, when Bovon and Bouvier identified a fourteenth-century copy at Xenophontos Monastery on Mount Athos. The Prayer Book texts are the 1549 kalendar and the 1662 collects, epistles and gospels. On the Catholic identification of the two Jameses see J. P. Kirsch on St Philip and A. Camerlynck on St James the Less in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910-1911). The 2021 radiocarbon study of the Roman relics, led by Kaare Rasmussen, is published open access in Heritage Science.
Philip is as much to say as the mouth of a lamp, or the mouth of hands. Or it is said of philos, that is as much to say as love, and of yper, that is to say sovereign, so Philip is as much to say as love of sovereign things. Then is it said, mouth of a lamp for his clear preaching, and mouth of the hands for his busy work, and love of things sovereign for his celestial love and contemplation.
Of the Life of S. Philip.
S. Philip, when he had preached in Scythia by the space of twenty years, he was taken of the paynims, which would constrain him to make sacrifice to an idol which was called Mars, their God, and anon under the idol issued out a right great dragon, which forthwith slew the bishop's son that appointed the fire for to make the sacrifice, and the two provosts also, whose servants heed S. Philip in iron bonds; and the dragon corrupted the people with his breath that they all were sick, and S. Philip said: Believe you me and break this idol and set in his place the cross of Jesu Christ and after, worship you it, and they that be here dead shall revive, and all the sick people shall be made whole. And they that were sick cried to S. Philip, and said: If you may do so much that we may be guerished and whole, we shall gladly do it. And anon S. Philip commanded the dragon that he should go in to desert without grieving or doing any harm to any person, and anon he departed without appearing after; and forthwith S. Philip healed all them that were sick, and raised the three that were dead, and were all baptized, and preached to them the space of a year the faith of Jesu Christ. And when he had ordained priests and deacons, after, he departed and came into the city of Hierapolin in Asia, where he destroyed the heresy of the Hebronites, which said and preached that Jesu Christ had not taken very flesh human, but only the semblance of the body human. In this city were his two daughters, by whom our Lord had converted much people to the christian faith.
S. Philip tofore his death made to come tofore him all the bishops, seven days tofore his death, and also all the priests, and said to them: These seven days has our Lord given to me respite for to warn you to do well. And he was of the age of eighty-seven years. And after this the paynims took and held him, and fastened him to the cross, like unto his master, and so he yielded up his soul and died. And his body was worshipfully buried there, and his two daughters died long after him and were also buried, that one on the right side, and that other on the left side of the body of their father.
Isidore writes in the book of the life and death of saints, and says that Philip preached to the Frenchmen, and to men that were in darkness, he enlightened them in the faith. After, he was taken in the city of Hierapolin of the paynims, and of them stoned and crucified, of whom the martyrology of holy church speaks not. But of another Philip, which was one of the seven deacons, S. Jerome says in the martyrology that he was buried in the city of Cæsarea, where God showed many fair miracles for him, beside whom three of his daughters be buried, and the fourth daughter lies at Ephesus. The first Philip differences from this Philip, for he was an apostle and this was a deacon. The apostle rests at Hierapolin, and the deacon at Cæsarea; he had two daughters, and this four. Though Historia Ecclesiastica says that Philip the apostle had four daughters prophetesses, but it is herein more to believe S. Jerome. Then let us pray to the holy Life of apostle S. Philip that he pray for us to our Lord S. James that we may come to his bliss. Amen.
That material is strong. Josephus, writing about AD 93 to 94, reports at Antiquities XX.9.1 that the high priest Ananus ben Ananus used the gap between the death of the procurator Porcius Festus and the arrival of Lucceius Albinus to convene the Sanhedrin, accuse "the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, whose name was James" and some others of breaking the law, and deliver them to be stoned; the more equitable citizens objected, and Agrippa II deposed Ananus after he had ruled but three months. Josephus gives no year; about 62 is inferred from Albinus's term. This is a non-Christian notice within a generation or two of the event and is the best-attested death in this dossier. Hegesippus, writing in the later second century and surviving only in Eusebius at Book II chapter 23, gives a much fuller and more shaped account: the abstinences, the camel's knees, the titles the Just and Oblias, the pinnacle, the fall, the stoning, the fuller's club. Clement of Alexandria, quoted in the same chapter, has the fall and the club with no stoning at all, so the two earliest Christian accounts already disagree on the mechanism. The Golden Legend transmits Hegesippus by way of Eusebius and is not a further witness. The Eastern synaxarion, treating this James as another man entirely, sends him to Judea, Edessa, Gaza and Eleutheropolis, has him travel and preach with Andrew the First-Called, and has him crucified at Ostrakine in Lower Egypt. Read with the identity question in view, Ostrakine and Jerusalem are not rival reports of one death; they are the deaths of what the East holds to be two men.
One claim that circulates should be named and dropped: that James was tried before the Emperor Claudius and stoned by imperial order. No source carries it, and it cannot be true. Claudius died in AD 54, and the killing Josephus describes falls under Nero and was ordered by a high priest.
Isaiah 30:18–21Psalm 119:33–402 Corinthians 4:1–7John 14:6–14