Bones Venerated as St. James the Younger's Don't Belong to the Apostle [View all]

For more than 1,500 years, devout Christians have traveled to the Santi Apostoli church in Rome to view the relics of two of Jesus’s apostles: St. Philip and St. James the Younger (also known as St. James the Less, he may have been Jesus’s brother). Now, new research suggests that James’ purported bone fragments actually belong to an individual who lived centuries after the saint.

As Sebastian Kettley reports for Express, researchers from Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy and England used radiocarbon dating to pinpoint fragments of James’ supposed femur to between 214 and 340 A.D.—long after the saint’s death sometime in the first century A.D. (Little is known about James’ life beyond his status as an apostle and possible family members.) The team published its findings last month in the journal Heritage Science.

“Though the relic is not that of St. James, it casts a rare flicker of light on a very early and largely unaccounted for time in the history of early Christianity,” says lead author Kaare Lund Rasmussen, an archaeometry expert at the University of Southern Denmark, in a statement. Rasmussen tells Live Science’s Patrick Pester that radiocarbon dating of the collagen and amino acid yielded matching dates, showing that the femur’s owner was some 160 to 240 years younger than James.

“We consider it very likely that whoever moved this femur to the Santi Apostoli church believed it belonged to St. James,” says Rasmussen in the statement. “They must have taken it from a Christian grave, so it belonged to one of the early Christians, apostle or not.” Though the researchers managed to disprove the Santi Apostoli relics’ ties to James, they decided against conducting similar tests on the supposed remains of St. Philip.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/supposed-bones-st-james-younger-may-belong-someone-else-180977024/