The Apostle St James the Great is believed to have been martyred in ca. AD 44 at the orders of King Herod Agrippa (Acts 12:1-2). The place of execution is not stated, although it is commonly believed to be Jerusalem. The first reference to his tomb appears in the late 6th c., when an anonymous Byzantine record known as the Apostolic Catalogues records that ‘James, son of Zebedee, preached in Hispania and at sites in the West and, slain by the sword under Herod, was buried in Achaia Marmarica’. Marmarica was in Roman times a province on the North African coast between Egypt and Cyrenaica, while Hispania was the Roman name for the Iberian peninsula. The passage also appears in the writings of the cleric and scholar Isidore of Seville (AD 560-636), with minor variations, suggesting that no tradition existed at that time in Isidore’s native Iberia that St James had been buried there.
The earliest known mention of any cult of St James the Great does not occur until around the late 8th c. at the earliest, when a hymn celebrating the apostle as a patron saint in the kingdom of the Asturias in northeast Spain. The first certain record of the presence of relics of St James the Great in Spain is a royal donation by King Alfonso II of Asturias to the new church of Santiago at Compostela in 829-834. This records their recent discovery (between 818 and 834) in this same location. The relics were found in a Roman-era stone tomb within a graveyard predominantly dating to the town’s Roman period (early 3rd c. A.D. to ca. 400).
Meanwhile, in Toulouse, a church was also dedicated to St James the Apostle in the 9th c. By the 15th c., a local tradition held that relics of St James were encased within a reliquary pillar inside this church, while relics of the saint had also identified in the medieval Basilica of St Sernin in the 14th c. Today, the Basilica holds all of Toulouse’s major relics of St James the Great. These are contained in a reliquary bust of the saint, and in a reliquary casket in the crypt beneath the Basilica. A few years ago, scholars from the University of Toulouse discovered that surviving sources may have made a mistake in recording the exact date in the 14th c. . when the relics were enshrined within their reliquaries. The Archdiocese of Toulouse thus decided to convene an ecclesiastical tribunal to investigate the exact nature of the relics within these two collections. I was invited to assist the tribunal from a scientific perspective. The findings were presented in a joint conferences at the University of Toulouse, attended by representatives of the Archdiocese and the City of Toulouse, and publication is in preparation!
