James, Surnamed the Wise

James, surnamed the Wise, was bishop of Nisibis, the famous city of the Persians, and one of the confessors under Maximinus the persecutor. He was also one of those at the Council of Nicaea who, by their opposition, overthrew the Arian perversity with the word “of one substance.” The blessed Jerome mentions this man in his Chronicle as a man of great virtues, and yet he does not place him in his catalog of writers. This is easily explained if we note that, of the three or four Syrians he does mention, he says that he read them translated into Greek. From this it is clear that at that time he did not know the Syriac language or its literature, and so he did not know a writer who had not yet been translated into another language. [a]

All his writings are contained in twenty-six books, namely: On Faith; Against All Heresies; On Love toward All; On Fasting; On Prayer; On Particular Affection toward Our Neighbor; On the Resurrection; On the Life after Death; On Humility; On Penitence; On Satisfaction; On Virginity; On the Worth of the Soul; On Circumcision; On the Blessed Grapes; On the saying in Isaiah, “The grape cluster shall not be destroyed”; That Christ Is the Son of God and of One Substance with the Father; On Chastity; Against the Nations; On the Construction of the Tabernacle; On the Way of Life of the Nations; On the Persian Kingdom; On the Persecution of the Christians. He also composed a Chronicle, of little interest indeed to the Greeks, but very reliable, since it is built only on the authority of the Divine Scriptures. It shuts the mouths of those who, on some daring guess, idly speculate about the coming of the Antichrist or of our Lord.

This man died in the time of Constantius, and at the direction of Constantius’s father Constantine he was buried within the walls of Nisibis, evidently for the protection of the city; and it turned out as Constantine had expected. For many years later, Julian entered Nisibis, and, grudging either the glory of the man buried there or the faith of Constantine, whose family he persecuted out of this envy, he ordered the remains of the saint to be carried out of the city. A few months later, as a matter of public policy, the emperor Jovian, who succeeded Julian, handed the city over to the barbarians, and with the land around it, it is subject to Persian rule to this day.