Part II, Week 9 - Chapter 21 - The Epistle of James -

The Epistle of James states that the sender was “Iacobos” (translated as James). Both de Silva and the NIV Study Bible note that there is a good possibility that the author was James, the brother of Jesus, who was a leader, a “pillar” of the Jerusalem church, until his martyrdom in about 62 A.D. De Silva comments that James the brother of Jesus would have had the stature and the longevity to produce the letter. Regarding the dating of the letter, the NIV Study Bible indicates that although some date it to about 60 A.D., because of its strongly Jewish character and the lack of any reference to the rancorous dispute over circumcision, it may have been written before 50 A.D. In that case, it may be the earliest surviving writing – whether Gospel or Letter - in the NT, except for perhaps Galatians.

De Silva first notes, rather unpromisingly, that Martin Luther considered it the least of the books of the New Testament, an “epistle of straw.” Then he notes that there doesn’t appear to be an overarching theme to the letter. Rather, he writes that it “comes across as a disjointed collection of good advice.” (pg. 819) The letter is not directed to a particular group facing a particular challenge, and hence the letter lacks those references to particular individuals, companions and adversaries that help to give Paul’s letters such human interest.

However, de Silva recognizes that the letter has an organizational structure that does give it coherence. Funnily enough, both de Silva and the NIV Study Bible laud the author’s command of Greek (which is one of the reasons which “Jamesian” authorship is often contested); I detected some similarities to Mark’s Gospel, with his use of “inclusios” and thematic repetition for the purposes of driving home his points. Perhaps it is just because the letter is so “bare bones” that the organizational structure seems fairly obvious.

The Epistle of James has an epistolary greeting but no other evidence of having been actually dispatched as a letter. As in the case of Hebrews, that suggested to me the possibility that the epistolary portion may have been a later scribal addition – perhaps intended, in this case, to provide the desirable evidence of authorship and readership which might have been handed down by tradition in the communities in which it was preserved.

De Silva acknowledges that the greeting causes it to be classed as a letter, but adds that it most resembles collections of wisdom sayings, which were common in the Intertestamental Period in both Greco-Roman and Judaic cultures. He says it most resembles a “paraenetic letter,” a collection of “ethical advice that is generally assumed to be true and irrefutable, holding up core values of the culture in which it is written.” (pg. 821) He also notes a similarity to exhortations of the Greco-Roman philosophers who used the “diatribe,” like Epictetus, or the advice collections of Pseudo-Isocrates. The difference in this case is that the letter has a strongly Jewish character emphasizing morality rather than household codes and such that were common in the pagan wisdom tradition. De Silva suggests that the sayings may have been collated and given order by a later editor. Or they may have been organized by James himself. Either way, he notes that they bear a close resemblance – and share some of the sayings – which appear in Jewish wisdom literature of the Inter-testamental Period, including many of the sayings of Jesus which were preserved and which appear in the NT Gospels. In fact, de Silva suggests that James can be reasonably viewed as an example of the development of Jewish wisdom tradition in the setting of early Christianity.

The message of James is fairly straightforward. The Law for James is a living force (similar to what we read in the Gospel of Matthew) and not something that has been superseded by the New Covenant. De Silva notes that James emphasizes the importance of doing right and not just paying lip service to one’s faith. And he also notes that James’s focus is the trials that are within us, rather than persecution and ill-treatment from without. We are tested in these trials to give up something that we earnestly desire, “to give up something of himself or herself and to endure some kind of loss. . . . each situation becomes an opportunity for moving closer to wholeness, to that integrity that James so greatly yearns for Christians to possess, and to that transformation of life that leads to a positive verdict when we come to be judged by the “law of freedom” (Jas 2:12). (pg. 826)

De Silva feels that the usual presupposition is that Paul and James were bitter enemies, but that when the respective positions are examined, they are actually in agreement. He argues that the historic James would never have misunderstood Paul’s ideas as drastically as has been proposed, and therefore that would be an argument for late authorship and pseudonymity of the letter. (pg. 826) I think there is another possibility. I think that initially Paul was struck by the force of his revelatory vision – in effect overturning his previous mindset of Pharisaic zealousness for the Law. He felt guilty, I think, for having unjustly persecuted Jesus’s followers. He didn’t feel worthy of having been blessed with the revelation of God and Christ. He felt, naturally enough, that he had been blessed by God’s grace, in spite of his own efforts in support of the Law, rather than because of them. Consequently his message preached the idea of grace and justification by faith rather than works of the law. I don’t think Paul opposed good works as such; but his core message was that one was not saved by good works but by faith and grace. De Silva cites Galatians 2:15-16 (the classic Pauline doctrine of justification by faith) and James 2:14-26 (which begins in v. 14 with the declamation, “What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him?”) in support of his argument that the two are actually in agreement. But if one reads those verses, taking them at face value they seem to be in direct contradiction with one another. I would suggest that such a view as James expresses, which in effect propounds both faith and works, would be a message that an early follower of Jesus in the Jewish tradition might well espouse. I would also suggest that Paul’s views may have evolved to incorporate moral codes and good works – becoming more conventional, in a sense, as we see in the later Pauline writings - as problems arose with some of his congregations with sexual license and so on, as we saw in the Corinthian letters.

I appreciated the message of James. Since the perhaps-oversimplified Pauline doctrine of faith versus works has been so influential in the Protestantism of my lifetime, it is cool to read a counter-argument which was contemporaneous with Paul and which has been historically so submerged.