Christ is Lord

James worshipped Jesus. Historically, the evidence strongly points to the conclusion that James the Just was put to death because of his high Christological claims and devotion to Jesus, which the Jerusalem authorities construed as blasphemy or leading the people into apostasy. According to the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, the High Priest Ananus II convened the Sanhedrin during an interregnum of Roman governors, accused James and certain others of having "transgressed the law," and delivered them up to be executed by stoning. While Josephus does not specify the exact nature of the legal transgression, the prescribed penalty of stoning provides a crucial historical clue regarding the charge. Under Jewish law during the late Second Temple period, stoning was the specific penalty reserved for the most serious crimes, notably blasphemy (Leviticus 24:16) and enticing others to apostasy or the worship of false gods (Deuteronomy 13). Scholars conclude that James was condemned under one or both of these charges due to his public veneration of Jesus. First, James made claims about Jesus that the Sanhedrin considered blasphemous. According to the early Christian historian Hegesippus, James publicly testified before the religious leaders that Jesus is the Son of Man who is "sitting in heaven on the right hand of the great power". To the Sadducean high priestly establishment, claiming that a human being shares in God's unique cosmic sovereignty by sitting on the divine throne was viewed as an extreme blasphemy. Second, James likely faced the charge of being a maddiah, a person who leads a whole town or people astray into apostasy. Hegesippus's account of the martyrdom repeatedly uses the verb "to go astray" (*planao*), noting that the scribes and Pharisees accused James of causing the people to stray after Jesus. James's preaching included interpreting Old Testament texts about YHWH as directly referring to Jesus; for example, he interpreted "the gate of YHWH" in Psalm 118:20 as "the gate of Jesus". By associating Jesus so closely with the one God of Israel, James's teachings were interpreted by the high priest's council as leading the people into idolatry. In their work "James the Just and Christian Origins", Bruce D. Chilton and Craig A. Evans points out this data: "[...] account has been obscured in Hegesippus' version is the question put to James: "Who is the gate of Jesus?'. As we have seen this is probably part of the earliest core of this tradition about the death of James, since it uses an aspect of the Temple building, taken from Psalm 118, metaphorically rather than with reference to the existing Temple building. It refers to Ps 118:20: "This is the gate of YHWH; the righteous shall enter through it." The exegesis ascribed to James must have understood YHWH in the text to be Jesus, as is not infrequently the case in early Christian exegesis of the Hebrew Bible. The gate of YHWH/Jesus is Jesus himself as the gate of the eschatological Temple, the one through whom the righteous (with James the Righteous at their head) enter the presence of God in the midst of his people, the messianically renewed Israel. Some such exegesis of Ps 118:20, expounded in James' preaching, could well have been understood to associate Jesus so closely with YHWH as to be evidence that James was leading the people into apostasy. [...]" James the Just and Christian Origins, Bruce D. Chilton and Craig A. Evans, p. 232 The execution of James by stoning demonstrates that the earliest Jewish believers in Jerusalem were making divine claims about Jesus and offering him a level of devotion that non-Christian Jewish leaders viewed as a blasphemous infringement upon the uniqueness of God. Therefore, James's martyrdom was a direct, judicial result of his uncompromising worship and divine proclamation of his brother, Jesus.

ALERTE : Scènes de chaos ! Des manifestants s'en prennent aux portes d'un édifice 😱🔥🛑

It is a shame that none of their canonical qiraat come through the very man Muhammad himself named as best, when he said if you want to learn the Quran, learn it from Ibn Masud and three other Companions.