James the son of Alphaeus is one of the most shadowy figures in the apostolic list. He is named in all four lists of the Twelve (Matthew 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13), always paired with Thaddeus / Judas of James, and never appears in any narrative episode in the four Gospels or in Acts. Beyond his presence in the lists, the New Testament tells us nothing direct about him.
The complication is that there are three figures named James in the early Christian sources, and they are sometimes confused: (1) James the Greater, son of Zebedee, brother of John, one of the inner three, martyred in 44 AD; (2) James the Less, son of Alphaeus, one of the Twelve, the subject of this entry; and (3) James the brother of the Lord, leader of the Jerusalem church after Pentecost, author of the canonical Epistle of James, martyred c. 62 AD (recorded by Josephus, Antiquities 20.197–203). The patristic tradition has sometimes treated James the Less and James the brother of the Lord as the same person — particularly in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions, which generally distinguish only two Jameses among the apostles. Other commentators, particularly in Protestant traditions, distinguish all three. The textual evidence does not definitively resolve the question.
If James the Less is the James referred to in Mark 15:40, then his mother was 'Mary the mother of James the Less and of Joses,' one of the women at the cross. This would make him a cousin of Jesus through his mother's relation to Mary the mother of Jesus, on certain reconstructions of the family tree. The Aramaic word for 'brother' (ach) is regularly used to mean 'cousin' or 'kinsman' in Semitic usage, and this is one of the standard moves in identifying the 'brothers of the Lord' as cousins.
The post-apostolic missionary tradition assigns him variously to Egypt, Persia, and southern Arabia. The mode of his death is unsettled — some traditions say he was sawn in two, others stoned, others martyred by being thrown from the pinnacle of the temple (this last is the death of James the brother of the Lord according to Hegesippus, preserved in Eusebius). The iconographic attribute of the fuller's club is borrowed from the Hegesippus account of James the brother of the Lord, where after he was thrown from the temple, a fuller (a cloth worker) finished him off with the club used in his trade. The confusion between the two figures is part of why this attribute attaches to James the Less in Western art.