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An Introduction to the New Testament

By Adolf Jülicher

PART ONE - Book I

Chapter 3 - Section 16

§ 16. The Epistle of James

[Cf. H. A. W. Meyer, vol. xv., by W. Beyschlag 1898 (ed. 6); Hand-Commentar iii. 2: Hebrews, 1. and 2. Peter, James and Jude by H. von Soden, 1899 (ed. 5); F. Spitta: ʽDer Brief des Jacobus,ʼ in ʽZur Gesch. u. Litt. d. Urchristentums,ʼ ii. 1-239, 1896; Massebieau: ʽLʼépitre de Jacques est-elle lʼœuvre dʼun Chrétien?ʼ 1896 (35 pp.); Ad. Harnack: ʽDie Chronologie d. altchristl. Litt.ʼ i. 485-491 (1897).]

1. There is no definite connection of thought in the Epistle of James: it consists of separate chapters merely strung together, and treating of certain questions of Christian life and feeling. The address is as short as possible, and final greetings, etc. are absent. Vv. i. 2-18 deal with temptations, which are declared to be salutary if they drive the Christian to prayer and strengthen his humility and his trust in God. Here are described the different relations towards temptation of God and of manʼs sinful lusts—from God we can receive nothing but good. The next passage¹ warns us to be doers of the word of God after hearing it diligently: this chiefly by curbing anger, bridling the tongue and practising mercy.² Next we are told that this mercy, the omission of which was counted a transgression of the Law before God as much as adultery or murder, was denied by the frequent disregard of the poor and the servile preference shown to the rich. No one, under any circumstances, was freed from the duty of loving his neighbour as himself. Yes a man must have works: faith alone was of no use. Faith without works was deadʼ in itself, as the stories of Abraham and Rahab proved.³ Vv. iii. 1-12 are an attack upon the sins of the tongue, while the next passage⁴ rebukes the love of quarrelling, the worldliness and the tendency to fault-finding nourished by the pride of wisdom. In iv. 18-17 we are called upon never to speak of our plans for future events without a pious ʽIf the Lord will,ʼ and in the next passage⁵ we have a comparison between the rich man going towards a terrible judgment and the poor man encouraged to wait in patience by the consoling thought of the approaching Parusia. Verse v. 12 commands us to refrain from swearing, and the Epistle ends with various directions concerning prayer, the confession of sins and the treatment of the sick and of those who had erred from the truth.

2. In so far as there is any connection to be found between these separate sections, it is furnished by accidental associations of ideas. The mention in i. 18, for instance, of the ʽword of truthʼ forms the connection to vv. 19 and 28, where the hearing and then the performance of this word are insisted on. In like manner the charge to visit ʽthe fatherless and widowsʼ calls forth the first apostrophe against the rich,⁶ which is continued in a yet sterner tone and after many digressions in v. 1—again by mere accident. And how easily the author allows himself to be led away from his subject by a subordinate idea may be seen even within the sections, e.g. in i. 5-11, where he completely loses sight of the theme of temptation and speaks of lack of wisdom, of the doubt which paralyses the force of prayer, and of the glory of the brother of low degree as opposed to that of the rich man. As in the Old Testament ʽBooks of Proverbsʼ and the Greek gnomic literature, the sentences are strung together like beads; the scarcity of connecting particles in the Epistle⁷ is not a sign of awkwardness of style on the part of the author, but is on the contrary quite in keeping with the character of the Epistle. We might point to the ʽdiscoursesʼ of Jesus arranged by Matthew⁸ as a parallel case, for there too we are frequently met by these unexpected transitions of thought, and accordingly there are many who would represent this Epistle as a similar collection of sayings for the most part already in existence. This supposition acquires much weight from such considerations as are suggested, for instance, by vv. i. 2-18, where ʽtemptationʼ evidently means something quite different at the beginning of the passage from what it does at the end; for we cannot seriously suppose that what we are told to ʽcount pure joyʼ in verse 2⁹ is the same thing as what in verse 14 is declared to represent the enticement and seduction of our own evil lusts. Sentences like ʽEvery good gift and every perfect boon is from above,ʼ and many others,¹⁰ have the ring of well-worn phrases, and the curious ʽbutʼ which connects the second part of verse 19¹¹ with the first¹² is best explained by supposing that the former was taken over without reflection from some written source where it had stood in a different context.

But still the Epistle of James is certainly not a mere compilation, in which the authorʼs only task would have been one of selection. Vv. ii. 14-26 were surely not copied from any other source, any more than i. 1-7 or iv. 13-16. But the rest of the Epistle fits in completely both in tone and phraseology with these passages; the author writes tolerable Greek throughout; he is master of the language, and can form word-plays like διεκρίθητε . . . κριταί,¹³ or φαινομένη . . . ἀφανιζομένη¹⁴ (that of iii. 9 is the most skilful, and betrays an acquaintance with-Greek literature), while he even ventures on a sort of oxymoron in the sentence ʽlet the rich man glory in that he is made low.ʼ¹⁵ His fondness for expressing himself in vivid figures,¹⁶ his employment, for didactic purposes, of similes from nature and from daily life,¹⁷ and of historical examples,¹⁸ all form part of his own individuality. In this so-called Epistle we are shown, not only the stability of an unerring taste in the collection of extraneous material, but the consistency of a literary personality; and the countless reminiscences of other literatures on which we stumble must be explained by the assumption that in its composition the author allowed himself to be greatly influenced by the rich stores of wisdom treasured in his memory: actually, no doubt, he offers old and new together, but the form in which it stands is all his own mental property. In this respect he stands no lower than Paul or the author of Hebrews, but the space which these would give to Old Testament quotations is filled by him with maxims and concise formulations of his own religious and moral experience.

In a composition of this kind there can obviously be no question of a consistent thesis. To impress upon his readers & quantity of sound precepts for a truly Christian life is the object for which the Epistle was written. That the author makes use of 54 imperatives in 108 verses is a sufficient sign of his intention: he delivers a kind of sermon of repentance. He does not wish to impart new wisdom, or to refute heretical doctrines, but simply to unmask the secularisation which had already met him in so many different forms, to hold a mirror¹⁹ to his brethren, that they might see their sorry figures and be lastingly ashamed. Even the passage concerning faith and works²⁰ is no exception to this rule—much less does it form the kernel of the Epistle—for it is merely intended to stir up those lax and indolent members of the community who glossed over their disinclination to active works of love by pointing to their faultless faith. The writer represents things as he unfortunately saw them everywhere, and measures them against his own ideal of piety without completeness either in blame or exhortation, but still in the hope of being able to rouse menʼs consciences with regard to some particularly important points, which he believed were somewhat overlooked in the ordinary preaching to the churches.

3. According to the opening verse, James was written for the ʽtwelve tribes which are of the dispersion,ʼ and the most obvious interpretation of the words would point to the Jewish Christians of countries outside Palestine, for the author certainly wrote to fellow-Christians: nothing in the Epistle reads like an appeal of James to unbelieving countrymen to submit to the word of truth. But the readers are thought of as living in organised communities²¹; and where and till when did any purely Jewish Christian communities exist in the Dispersion? Not a single word in the Epistle indicates readers of Jewish origin, for it would be preposterous to see in the ʽrichʼ of chaps. ii. and v. a portrait of the fat, usurious, arrogant Jews, while the word ʽSynagogue²² as applied to the general assembly of the addressees, does not imply a Jewish origin any more than does the ἐπισυναγωγή of Hebrews x. 25: it was the most appropriate Greek term for describing the religious assemblies even of Gentiles, and of Gentile Christians down to a much later time. No-. where is any national prejudice alluded to, and thus it seems best to interpret the address in the same way as that of 1. Peter; the twelve tribes are Godʼs people,²³ and Godʼs people, ever since the saving work of Christ, consisted of all believers who, though verily ʽof the dispersion,ʼ were to be found on earth.

The Epistle, then, fixes its horizon at the farthest possible point: it is an appeal to the whole of Christendom. And indeed we should have taken it for a truly Catholic Epistle even if it had had no address at all. It was given to the world as a literary work, not sent round by messengers to a definite circle of readers. The numerous appeals which it contains to ʽbrethren,ʼ ʽmy brethren,ʼ ʽmy beloved brethren "are just as rhetorical as the words of ii. 20,ʽO vain man.ʼ There is never any reference to the special circumstances of an individual community, nor does any personal intercourse take place between writer and readers; of the epistolary form, in fact, only a faint shadow is preserved.

4. According to the superscription, the author is ʽJames, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.ʼ²⁴ The mere fact that the title of Apostle is wanting forbids us to think of James the son of Zebedee or James the son of Alpheus, but the former was executed at an early date,²⁵ and the latter disappears from the scene after the Ascension.²⁶ All the greater however, was the part played in Jerusalem by James the brother of the Lord,²⁷ whom Paul mentions in Galatians²⁸ as one of the ʽpillars,ʼ naming him actually before Cephas and John. Even Josephus took an interest in him, and in about the year 180 Hegesippus²⁹ drew up a minute account of his personality. It may safely be assumed that he fell a victim to Jewish hatred before the outbreak of the Jewish war. And it is to him that, as far as they express an opinion on the subject, the Greek Fathers unanimously ascribed our Epistle. His right to address the whole of Christendom could not be disputed: he was the James κατ̓ ἐξοχήν, who did not need to present himself under any title, while the fact that he did not make a special boast of his relationship to Jesus in the opening verse aroused no wonder, but rather passed for tactfulness.

At first sight there seems to be a good deal of evidence in favour of the view that this ʽFirst Bishop of Jerusalemʼ was really the author of our Epistle. A thoroughly practical, conservative disposition, as we find it displayed in the Epistle, must surely have been his characteristic; he was a foe to many words, and easily inclined to treat poverty as a virtue without more ado. The tone of the Epistle bears a certain resemblance to that of the discourses of Jesus in Matthew, and points of contact with the Gospels are more numerous here than in any other Epistle of the New Testament. We might also attribute the use of the Wisdom of Jesus the son of Sirach and of the Wisdom of Solomon to a Palestinian Christian of that period, if we could believe that those books were still or already in circulation in the Palestinian tongue. Nevertheless, the arguments against authenticity are far too powerful and numerous to leave room for the slightest doubt on the subject. First, how could the son of a Nazarene carpenter have attained such fluency in the Greek tongue as is here displayed ʼ—a fluency which, as in the case of Hebrews, absolutely excludes the hypothesis that what we possess is a translation from an Aramaic original? The explanation that he did not acquire his fluency in the use of Greek in the school of a rhetorician but in his daily life is more than naive, in view of the rhetorical character of the Epistle of James; but he who considers it natural that James should have followed the Septuagint when he wrote in Greek, may certainly, if he likes, define his relation to the Greek tongue as ʽnot particularly awkward.³⁰ As to his use of the Septuagint, how could one who had grown up to manhood with his Hebrew Bible by any possibility use the former, especially to the extent here noticeable? For readers in a position to judge, the fact is established that Greek was the writerʼs native tongue, or one of them at least.

Secondly, how could that strict upholder of the Law, before whom Peter did not dare to defend the practice of sitting down to meat with Gentile Christians,³¹ have composed an epistle in which the necessity of observing the Ceremonial Law no longer comes under discussion, in which religion is said to consist in morality of conduct,³² which speaks with enthusiasm of the ʽperfect law, the law of liberty,ʼ³³ culminating in the royal command to love oneʼs neighbour³⁴—and the author of which must therefore have regarded the old Law as imperfect and as a law of bondage? Harnack makes the very apposite remark that the acceptance of such a theory would force us to believe that history had repeated itself in the strangest manner, for in this case a ʽChristianityʼ such as that of Hermas, Clement and Justin must already have flourished between the years 31 and 50; and Paulʼs appearance would then have been a sort of superfluous intervention—only not calculated this time to make sin greater, but to leave the good in a more precarious condition.

And, thirdly, the passage in chap. ii. vv. 14-26, is wholly inconceivable as coming from the mouth of James in the last years of his life. The writer here disputes the doctrine that man can be justified by faith alone without works (note that he says justified, not, according to the Gospel, saved): such a lifeless faith, he urges, could be of no use, and even devils possessed it. Now, Paul had taught justification by faith alone, and James ii. 24 is simply the contradiction of Paulʼs words in Romans iii. 28; as James ii. 28 is an attempt to wrest from Paul his chief authority, Gen. xv. 6, as to the faith of Abraham. That the one passage should be independent of the other is out of the question, still more so that James should have opened the dispute and that Paul should only have set up his theses out of opposition to him.³⁵ No, the Epistle is directed against a formula which had long been used to gloss over moral unfruitiulness, and to detach this from its connection with Paul is to represent things as they are not. The hypothesis which seeks to regard James as the oldest New Testament Epistle, dating back from the thirties or forties or the beginning of 51, is almost more grotesque than the assignment of 1. Peter to a date previous to the chief Pauline Epistles, for a declaration concerning faith and works as conditions of salvation could not possibly have been made before the historic and far-reaching activity of Paul; and, moreover, this assignment was evidently prompted merely by the wish not to be obliged to admit an antagonism between Paul and James.

Now, it is certainly possible that in the last years of his life James had heard with sorrow of the suspicious teachings of the Apostle of the Gentiles; it is conceivable—although certainly not very likely—that copies of those very Pauline Epistles had reached him from which the formule of James ii. 20 etc. are taken; but could he in such a life-anddeath struggle have contented himself with a few superficial objections, while he suffered the really important point—that of the observance of the Ceremonial Law—to pass by him in silence? In the Apostolic Age, or at least in Jerusalem among the leading spirits, so foolish a misunderstanding of the Pauline thesis is inconceivable. For ʽfaithʼ in James il. 14 etc. is a belief in fact, which even the devils could attain to; whereas with Paul it means a grateful submission to the saving will of God, as revealed in the crucified and risen Christ, and an inner union with Christ—a thing which naturally was only accessible to believers. And so, too, the ʽworksʼ which Paul rejects are the works of the Law, which Christ had abrogated; those which James demands, on the other hand, are the fruits of faith such as even under Paulʼs system would not and could not ʽhave been omitted— the ʽreasonable service,ʼ in fact, of Romans xii. 1. As far as the practical consequences are concerned, the author of James ii. stands on an equal footing with Paul; he will not allow faith to count as a comfortable excuse for moral indifference, but demands some proof of faith. This is precisely the case with Paul, except that he does not recognise as faith what remains without fruit. Now, this misunderstanding of Pauline expressions would be quite intelligible at some later time, when nothing was known of the rule of the Jewish Law, and the ʽworks of the Lawʼ were looked upon merely as moral actions: a man of such a time might have written James ii. 14-26 not as a disguised attempt to brand Paul as a heretic, but rather as a correct interpretation of his words.³⁶ In his eyes the Apostle could not have meant to encourage this easy-going younger generation, which imagined itself certain of heaven for its mere orthodoxy, and therefore he seeks to point out, with as close a connection as possible with Paulʼs words, how both faith and works could best be accorded their due. The ʽvain manʼ whom he indignantly apostrophises in ii. 20 is _not Paul, but someone who interprets Paul in this false and dangerous way. If, on the other hand, James the Just had written this passage about the year 60 or 61, the enemy against whom he contended could not have been a misrepresenter of Paulʼs teaching, but simply Paul himself, and the arguments employed against him, which could not then be palliated on the saving ground of incomplete knowledge, would in their conscious distortion of the case be as contemptible and cowardly as they were futile. Lastly, we may now add to these arguments against the authorship of James the positive tokens of a later time.

5. If the Epistle of James had come down to us unnamed, its assignment to the second century—say, to the period between 125 and 150—would commend itself on the most diverse grounds. It has a considerable literature behind it— not only Old Testament Apocrypha, but Christian writings also: Paul, Hebrews, 1. Peter³⁷ and the Gospels. The points of resemblance, too, between it and the first Epistle of Clement are so many and so striking that it is impossible to explain them satisfactorily except by supposing our author to have been acquainted with that Epistle. James shares its fundamental ideas with those of the Shepherd of Hermas, and even in expression it often approaches the latter remarkably closely—though what is there expressed in broad and commonplace form here becomes more refined. Unfortunately, however, the data are not forthcoming by which to prove the employment of the one by the other, and when we have no actual quotations to deal with, mere arguments about literary obligations are unsupported and futile. The determined opponent turns them round: according to Zahn, it was the study of James ii. 14 fol. which moved Paul in the Epistle to the Romans³⁸ to make an exposition of the subject, founded on Genesis xv. 6, incomparably more thoroughgoing than his former utterances in Galatians³⁹; and in writing the Epistle Paul did well, he adds, to take Jamesʼs methods of instruction into consideration, since the Christians of Rome were already accustomed to them! Still less telling is the reference to the much-oppressed condition of the Christians, as described in chaps. i. and v.; surely verse ii. 7 (ʽDo not they blaspheme the honourable name by the which ye are called?ʼ), coming after verse 6, points to a time in which the Christians were persecuted for their Christianityʼs sake⁴⁰; when even fellow-believers appear not seldom to have denounced one another.

Further, the state of the communities both as to morals and religion seems to have degenerated more considerably than we should have thought it possible before the time of Hermas. Universal indifference had established itself in the Church, and men sought shamelessly to excuse their vices and their laxity on the pretext that the temptations to which they were subjected came from God,⁴¹ or that since they possessed faith, that was enough for salvation.⁴² A long time must have passed before Paulʼs doctrine of ʽfaith aloneʼ could have been so boldly misapplied, and in a Church the majority of whose members set themselves so low a standard a reaction like that of Montanism (which began about 155 A.D.) could not have been far off. But the main point is that the writerʼs whole attitude, his theological position, take us, when compared with the interests and ideas of the Apostolic age, into a totally different world. Christ is scarcely mentioned at all, and when he is, it is only as the longed-for Judge; the Messianic idea has entirely disappeared, and faith now consists half in knowing,⁴³ and half in remaining steadfast.⁴⁴ The Epistle speaks of the Law entirely in the manner of the second century, with its enthusiasm for the ʽnova lex.ʼ Religion has lost the sharp, decisive features of the early times; practically nothing is left of it now but generalities— on the one hand a firm trust in Godʼs goodness, expressed in prayer and never losing hope, and on the other a zealous fulfilment of Godʼs commands, an exercise of pure piety as defined in verse i. 27. The author does not fight for Christ, for faith, for hope, but for conduct, for uprightness, for self-discipline; it is not his part to found and increase a Church in defiance of the world, but to drive the world out of the Church. On the face of it the Epistle of James declares itself, in spite of its earnestly religious character, to be perhaps the least Christian book of the New Testament—hence its want of attraction for Luther—and can it be that such a document belongs to the earliest Christian times?

With this assignment of the Epistle to so late a date, we may perhaps feel the absence of some reference to heretical troubles. Verse i. 17 can scarcely have been spoken with an anti-Gnostic purpose, but vv. iii. 1 fol. ʽbe not many teachersʼ (the very opposite of Hebrews v.12) and iii. 13; fol. show that there was no lack of vexatious tendencies of the kind at the time of our Epistle. Its author, however, did not look upon such wranglings as the main evil, or rather he did not expect much success from controversy with these fluent disputants. To conclude from his silence as to Gnostic seducers that he knew of none, would be just as wise as to conclude that because he gives no warning against sins of impurity there were no harlots and adulterers among his readers, and therefore that he could not be addressing Gentile Christian communities! He wished neither to draw up a complete list of requirements, nor a manual for inexperienced ʽteachers,ʼ but to offer ʽsome spiritual giftʼ for the edification of the Church; but all his observations led him to the conclusion that the Church of that time was lacking in moral energy, and he thought that if this lack were supplied the other evils would vanish of themselves. A blameless life he regarded as the test of the possession of truth and purity of faith. Perhaps, too, the split between the Church and the heretics had become wider by his time, so that as he had nothing to do with those outside, he was obliged to content himself with holding up a mirror to his own party, with its conceited orthodoxy, in order to draw its attention to the many blots with which it was still disfigured. Nor had Gnosticism appeared everywhere in equal strength, and where our Epistle was written we do not know. Many opinions favour Rome, but connections with Rome can be discovered in every document of uncertain origin of about this date, and Rome was certainly not the sole producer—scarcely even the most distinguished —of this form of literature.

But we have no grounds at all for fixing upon Palestinian soil and Jewish-Christian surroundings as the source of the Epistle of James. There is even less of distinctively Jewish character to be observed about the author than of distinctively Christian; his morality is rather Hellenistic than Palestinian, and the resemblances to Old Testament phraseology and thought in his Epistle are the fruit of many yearsʼ study of Church literature, in which, of course, the Old Testament ranked very high. His practical wisdom is of mixed Jewish, Christian and Pagan origin; he was probably a man of education, but sprung from a family that had long been Christian, and he wrote under the name of James, not because he wished to mark the antagonism between Paul and the Jewish Christians, but probably because he honoured in the person of James the first representative of the Lord upon earth, and did not venture to imitate Peter or Paul, whose Epistles were already in circulation. The exceedingly late appearance of James in the literature of the Church⁴⁵ is also a strong support to this view.

6. Some have recently attempted to throw a fresh light on the origin of James by assuming the existence of interpolations. In an investigation useful in many ways for the special exegesis of this Epistle, Spitta puts forward the ingenious hypothesis that James is a Jewish—possibly pre-Christian—document, for which a Christian admirer wished to find a place in the New Testament, and therefore inserted the name of Christ in the address and in verse ii. 1. And independently of Spitta, Massebieau has arrived at a similar result. There is much in i. 1 to make that view attractive; the rest of the address in i. 1, however, would sound exceedingly strange as a superscription to an epistle of a Jew to his fellow-believers. But what is urged against the pre-Pauline origin of vv. ii. 14-26 has just as much weight when directed against the supposition that the author was a Jew; I cannot believe that a Jew would write such sentences as i. 18, ii. 5, 7 and iv. 4, any more than that he would take pride in the ʽlaw of freedom,ʼ as in vv. i. 25 and ii. 12,⁴⁶ or that he would be yearning for the Parusia of the Lord.⁴⁷

There is nothing in the Epistle which could only have been said by a Jew, and even such thoroughly Christian writings as 1. Peter contain large sections which might as well have been written by a Jew as by anyone else.⁴⁸ If we can believe that the Epistle of James, although of Jewish origin, gave such extraordinary pleasure to a Christian of about the year 150 that he could not help changing it into a New Testament Scripture by the addition of a dozen words, we could as easily believe that a Christian of that time might have produced the whole document himself, seeing that no previous mention of it exists. The one theory is not in the least more difficult to accept than the other.

Harnack sets the Christian editor another task. He suggests that a collection of maxims and fragments of discourses which had been in circulation, say, since 180, and had originated with a post-Apostolic Teacher, was, about the year 200, remodelled by an unknown hand into a letter, for which it had never been intended, by the prefixing of verse i. 1, while at the same time it was provided with a great name, which soon won it the respect due to a Canonical work. But Harnackʼs reasons are not convincing. To say that no one would write a letter like this document is an exaggeration, where it is a case, as here, of a more or less skilful adaptation of a literary form unsuited to the object which the author had in view; I could rather believe that the Epistle was an excerpt from an originally much longer letter than a compilation from the discourses of the aforesaid Teacher. That the address appeals, in a somewhat artificial manner, to the whole of Christendom, while parts at least of the document are directed to a perfectly definite and limited circle, is a reproach which would apply to every Catholic Epistle, apart from any ʽartificiality.ʼ Finally, he contends that the forger nowhere indicates that he wishes to be considered as James, and, therefore that the so-called Epistle cannot originally have been a forgery. Now, I should have thought that the author made a claim throughout on the obedience of his readers, and wrote with the conviction that he had the right of administering sharp reproof to them⁴⁹; but if we go in search of indications that he is posing as James we mistake his object entirely. Clearly the forger neither prefixed the name of James to his Epistle nor wrote the Epistle itself, merely because he was determined to play the part of James, but because he wished to secure a universal hearing for his words. This he secured by the superscription; further efforts to appear as James would imply a consciousness of the danger and untruthfulness of such literary fictions, and a fear of the critical mistrust of his readers, both of them feelings as foreign to the writers of that day as they would be unavoidable to those of ours.