James the son of Zebedee, brother of John the Evangelist, is one of the inner three of the apostolic company — present with Peter and John at the Transfiguration, at the raising of Jairus's daughter, and in the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus gave the brothers the nickname 'Boanerges' — 'sons of thunder' (Mark 3:17) — a name whose origin Mark does not explain but which suggests a temperament: they once asked the Lord whether they should call down fire on a Samaritan village (Luke 9:54).
Acts 12:1–2 records his death in a single, almost terse, sentence: 'About that time Herod the king laid violent hands on some who belonged to the church. He killed James the brother of John with the sword.' The matter-of-fact brevity is striking. There is no martyr's speech, no dramatic confrontation. The first apostle to die is dispatched in the same chapter that records Peter's miraculous escape from the same prison — a juxtaposition that has been theologically read for centuries: God's deliverance is unevenly distributed, and the same providence that frees one servant lets another go to the sword.
The Herod in question is Agrippa I, grandson of Herod the Great, ruler of Judea from 41 to 44 AD. James's execution was almost certainly political — Agrippa was courting Jewish establishment opinion, which had grown hostile to the Nazarene movement. James was the visible, prominent disciple whose death could be used to demonstrate the kingdom's stance.
Later tradition — especially the medieval Spanish Camino de Santiago — attributes a missionary journey to Iberia to James and locates his body's translation to Compostela. The earliest Christian sources do not support this; the consensus of modern critical scholarship is that the Compostelan tradition is a 9th-century development. But the early historical James — the apostle who was first to drink the cup he had asked the Lord to share (Mark 10:38–40) — needs no embellishment.