By Chad Hershberger

This post is part of our Leadership of the Disciples series. 

During the height of pandemic, I really saw the value of having trusted friends and colleagues to turn to for advice, guidance, and help take a step back and process all that is going on in the world. If you are like me, you have a core of close friends and colleagues that you can call, text, or email to say, “Can I pick your brain about something.”

As I thought about some of Jesus’ disciples, I was reminded that he also had a core group he turned to and trusted in. The brothers, James and John, were in that core group.

James and John left a very good family business (fishing) to learn from Jesus. It was a “well to do” family with some substance. This family supported Jesus’ ministry when he and the disciples were in their community. James and John were cousins of Jesus.

James was one of the pillars of the Jerusalem church. Some claim he was first Bishop of Spain. James was the first of the disciples to suffer martyrdom. He was executed barely fifteen years after Jesus called him to discipleship. James became a political target of Herod Agrippa I. He killed James with a sword (beheaded in AD 44). James’s martyrdom is the only disciple’s death that is reliable as there is biblical record. The rest of the apostle’s deaths are remembered by tradition.

John, unlike his brother and the rest of the group, lived into old age. Like Peter and James, he too was in Jesus’ inner circle. He became known as the disciple Jesus loved. This is the only disciple that stuck with Jesus through the crucifixion. It was here that Jesus asked John to take care of his mother and John did so from that day forward. John was one of the pillars of the Jerusalem church. John faced martyrdom when he was to be boiled in a huge basin of boiling oil, but he was miraculously delivered from death and sentenced to work in the mines of Patmos. He was vengeful and fiery, judgmental, and selfish. He had a long life to reflect on the events of Jesus life, and his gospel reflects it. Also, he wrote three epistles and was privileged to be the final prophet of record in God’s word, Revelation. John died in Ephesus around AD100 as an old man, the only apostle to die peacefully.

Hopefully you have people like James and John to walk beside you.