The Letter of James

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Addison Hodges Hart. The Letter of James

The Letter of James

Table of Contents

Introduction

Preliminaries

Who was James “the Just” of Jerusalem?

James: The “Brother” of Jesus?

Was the Letter of James written by James or by someone else?

The Spirit of this Commentary

Outline of the Letter of James

A Note About the Translation Used in this Book

Concluding Comments

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a pastoral commentary

Addison Hodges Hart

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We may well believe that James, called “the Just” or “the Righteous (One),” was a man of continual prayer, concerned for his people, abstemious, and possibly “priestly” in his demeanor and even attire. That these were aspects of the serious and devout character of the historical person seems likely, even if Hegesippus can be accused of embroidering some of the facts.

As the gulf between the imperial church and the later Jewish Christian “sects” widened, the memory of the authority of James became an anchor for the latter. No such high estimation of him seems to have lingered among the former. The third- or fourth-century Jewish-Christian Homilies of Clement contain two spurious letters addressed to James, one purporting to be from Peter and the other from Clement, bishop of Rome. In them we can see how exalted a figure he had become for the non- (anti-)Pauline churches of Jewish lineage. Respectively, they address James as “the lord and bishop of the holy Church, under the Father of all, through Jesus Christ,” and “the lord, and the bishop of bishops, who rules Jerusalem, the holy church of the Hebrews, and the churches everywhere . . .”5 James has assumed in the imagination of the writer of this pseudepigraphical work, in other words, the position of a “pope,” a final authority and governor of all churches.

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