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.
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