The Legends of Saint James

Saint James the Greater.
This image hangs over the Marion and Terry entrance of the
Cathedral.
It dates from 1950.
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Pious historians have struggled for
centuries to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of Saint James’ life.
Some of these stories have become so overlaid with fantasy that they
strike the modern reader as too silly to be believed. The only
certainty is that a tremendous devotion to Saint James the Apostle grew
up around a certain tomb in Compostela in Spain (as late as 1884, these
relics were approved by Pope Leo XIII). The mystery is, how the apostle
James came to be buried there. According to legend, he had traveled to
Spain in the early years of his brief ministry, and met with little
success, winning over only a handful of disciples. Legend also tells us
that two of these (Theodore and Athanasius, by name) accompanied him
back to Jerusalem, where he was martyred at the hands of Herod. It was
these same disciples who stole away his body, and with it climbed into a
rudderless boat. They begged God to be their pilot; the boat drifted to
Galicia, Spain, and there the apostle was buried; in due time, his
faithful friends were buried beside him.
For centuries the tomb was forgotten.
It was rediscovered in the ninth century. Two quite distinct legends
have come down to us detailing how this miracle came about. One tells
us that “shepherds abiding in the field” witnessed mysterious starry
signs in the sky. The Bishop of Iria Flavia, Teodomiro, following the
lead pointed out by the stars, discovered the tomb of the apostle.
(Incidentally, until recent years Bishop Teodomiro was considered as
much a piece of fiction as the legend in which he figures, but modern
excavations beneath the Cathedral of Santiago discovered that he was
quite real, buried in the ninth century near the tomb of the saint he so
loved.)
A second legend which overlaps in some
details with the first is related in the Song of Roland. In this
famous narrative of the crusades against the Moors, there is a scene in
which the emperor Charlemagne, in a dream, is blessed with a visit from
Saint James the Greater. The apostle promises that Charlemagne will
conquer the Moors throughout all of Spain; he then shows him a vision of
a starry road in the sky, telling him to follow this path to the saint’s
tomb.

Saint James "the Moorslayer."
This little image, which was a gift to Father Ryan,
inspired the great puppet which makes an
appearance every year on the Feast of St. James.
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In fact, modern scholars consider both
legends as deriving from a simple misreading of the name of the village
where the tomb was located, Compostela. Medieval linguists preferred to
understand “Compostela” as campus stellae, or “field of stars.”
In fact, the name is a corrupted form of compositum, past
participle of the Latin verb componere, “to bury.” The recent
excavations of the area under the nave of the Cathedral have revealed
that the tomb of the Apostle was in fact part of a very ancient
necropolis, in use from the first century B.C. until the end of the
sixth century A.D. This discover has led many archeologists to believe
that the attribution of these relics to the Apostle James is not as
far-fetched as has been supposed. In this case there may well be “a
grain of truth in the wildest fable.”
And, true or not, the great battle in
which Saint James had purportedly achieved victory of Charlemagne made
both the emperor and the saint international celebrities. The apostle’s
fame as a miracle worker spread far and wide, and year after year, more
and more pilgrims began to make the journey west to visit his tomb and
beg for his intercession. These pilgrims had to be accommodated: in
the 830s, with a simple chapel built over the saints’ tomb; then, in 899
with a grander basilica, later destroyed by the Moors. In 1075 work was
begun on the present-day Cathedral of Santiago, which was at last
consecrated on April 3, 1211.
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