The appearance “to James” which is related by St Paul alone, is important, and calls for special notice. There are three persons called “James” in the sacred books, and there may be a question which of these it is of whom St Paul speaks. I am of opinion that it is James the brother of our Lord. The Corinthians, to whom St Paul is writing, would hardly know of any other; he was the head of the church at Jerusalem and when Paul speaks of “James” simply, as in Galatians ii. 9, 12, he means always the brother of the Lord. “James, the son of Zebedee,” Acts xii. 2, is designated “the brother of John” for distinction’s sake, and of James the son of Alphaeus we never hear. Every disciple however in the Church at Corinth had heard of James, the “pillar” of the Church at Jerusalem.(337) Nothing is heard of our Lord’s brethren during the week of the Passion; possibly, they were not in Jerusalem, but, from the Acts, as has been just said, we find that they were present there at the time of the Ascension. “These all with one accord continued steadfastly in prayer, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren.” Acts i. 14. This adhesion of the brethren falls in with the supposition that our Lord appeared to His brother James after the Resurrection in Galilee. It was natural that James and the younger brethren should have found difficulty in comprehending that their elder brother, who had played among them as a child was of a nature essentially different from their own; and that this exceptional hindrance to belief should be counterpoised by an exceptional, but not absolutely decisive, revelation is what we might expect. It is not inconsistent with our Lord’s treatment of doubt; for the difficulty arose out of circumstances and not from adverse will. Of James, our Lord may have felt sure; and Joses and Jude and Simon,(338) no one of whom could have been much over thirty years of age, while one or two of them must have been quite young men, may have been brought to full discipleship by what they heard from James. From what St Paul says, “Am I not an Apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?”(339) it seems likely that to have beheld the Risen Lord was held to be a condition of the status of an Apostle. St Paul must have meant “seen the _Risen_ Jesus,” for to have cast eyes on the bodily presence of Jesus, as He journeyed and taught, would have been a distinction shared with thousands. Without some recognition of James by our Lord, such as is related by St Paul, it is hard to account for his being placed at the head of the Church. We hear of no election or form of appointment, but we find him in this position about ten years after this time. It would have been at variance with our Lord’s repeated injunctions to the Apostles not to seek authority one over the other, if the primacy had been made a matter of contest.(340)