Saint James the Less, Santiago el Justo or Santiago Apóstol. Any of the three names are compatible with one of the most outstanding evangelists of Jesus Christ. Santiago was the force, the impulse and the overflow of passion. Unique in the lineage of Jacobo and always willing to wield the sword to leave his skin for his own. All these characteristics are described by the writer and journalist Jesus Quite Liébana (Madrid, 1976) in his new book dedicated to one of the twelve apostles, to Christianity and to the path that guided so many pilgrims.
«To women, historically mistreated, by and from the Church. Whores and witches, obedient and submissive virgins, eternally shored up in the name of God. This novel, consciously, does not remedy this evil. This is how Jesus begins his book. Openly and enthusiastically, as he has been doing for years with digital religionReligious Information in ABC Y Public. But on this occasion it is different, because it is the first time that the life of the man whose tomb, in Compostela, has configured the greatest pilgrimage in the history of humanity has been fictionalized.
Santiago at the end of the worldedited by the sphere of books, recreates the life of the apostle and also that of those who guide them: witches, magicians, mercenaries, assassins… including the Virgin Mary. “The best Santiago is the invented Santiago,” he says, and in this way he justifies the fiction that he has wrapped in 402 pages of his book with an enormous resolution to all the doubts about the apostle and his path.
Likewise, Quite reveals to us the number of false stories that exist about the life of Santiago, whom he defines as “the character-fake most profitable of christian timess and on whose bones- fake The most brazen financial emporium has been built thanks to a loyal clientele. While it is true that Santiago’s presence is barely documented, there is little doubt about his existence. “The same as on the very existence of Christ.” The gospels speak on many occasions of Santiago as one of the three favorite disciples of Jesus, along with his brother Juan and Simón Pedro. However, the great question remained unanswered: did Santiago ever travel to Hispania? Nobody knows.
But did Santiago come to Spain? Are his remains the ones that rest in the Cathedral of Compostela? “I’m afraid we’ll never know for sure,” Quite replies to himself in his book.
The first references to its possible presence in our country appear in the treaty On the Trinity of Didymus the Blind, in the fourth century, which alludes to the fact that one of the twelve apostles preached the Gospel in Spain. His disciple Saint Jerome also speaks of it in his Commentary on Isaiah. Later, the most absolute silence, until well into the sixth century, with the publication of the Breviarum Apostolorum and the book From Ortu et Obitu Patrum.
«Beyond the dogma, Santiago exists on the Camino (and its paths), and in the millions of steps that have traveled it over the centuries, following in the footsteps of his faith, generating a new spirituality, a culture without the that Europe would not exist as we know it.
Santiago Apóstol, “the most profitable ‘fake’ character of Christian times”