Читать книгу The Letter of James - Addison Hodges Hart - Страница 10

IV.

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

In this commentary I will assume that James was, in fact, the letter’s author. Some scholars argue that it is a late writing, written under the name of James by some unknown author of a later generation. One can meet with this view in numerous commentaries and study Bibles, too many to list. But, since the arguments for that opinion are well represented elsewhere and can readily be found, I will not repeat them here, but only briefly present my reasons for accepting James as the genuine author.

First, despite tolerable arguments to the contrary, there is no compelling evidence, either internal or external, that the letter must be regarded as a late writing (i.e., between 70 and 100 AD). It can, without any serious difficulty, be dated to the 50s or early 60s.

Second, because the Greek of the Letter of James is quite good by New Testament standards, it has been doubted by some scholars that a “rustic” Galilean, whose first language was Aramaic, could have composed it. But, in actual fact, we do not know at all just how “rustic” James might have been during his adult life, or, for that matter, just how polished or poor (or entirely lacking) his Greek may have been. His hometown of Nazareth, after all, was less than four miles from the cosmopolitan Greco-Roman city of Sepphoris—in other words, within easy walking distance. It is conceivable that James could have acquired a working knowledge of Greek there at some point during his life. If he had shared the trade of Joseph, his father, he may even have been personally involved in the building project that was taking place there while he was a young man. In later life, of course, he lived in Jerusalem, and among those who were members of the church in that city were Hellenistic Jews, whose first language was Greek. If he hadn’t already learned it elsewhere, he could have learned Greek through them. Alternatively, if he, in fact, really didn’t know a lick of Greek (which seems doubtful), he might have employed a bilingual amanuensis and translator to help him compose his letter. In short, the argument that his Greek is overly polished fails to convince.

Third, the Letter of James appears to be an encyclical epistle—that is to say, it is a letter addressed to all Christians, who are designated in it as “the twelve tribes in the Diaspora [i.e., Dispersion],” in other words, the “true Israel” scattered among the gentiles (compare the words of James, as recorded in Acts 15:15–21). Given what we have already cursorily seen as regards James’s influential position among the churches and how he was not hesitant to exercise that influence, it seems wholly in keeping that he could have issued such a general letter. As Martin Hengel noted in an incisive essay on James, “It is the first, indeed, the only early Christian letter that opens with the outrageous claim that it is intended to be heard by all.”9 In other words, it is the sort of communication one would expect from a recognized authority of James’s stature.

Of course, a suspicious reader (or scholar) might, in turn, suggest that that is exactly what a pseudonymous author would have wished us to believe. That is possible, certainly (in the sense that many other hypothetical notions might be possible); but is it necessary to harbor an attitude of suspicion when there really is no warrant for it? In short, there is no firm evidence to lend substance to such doubt. We know that James could have written an encyclical letter, and we have supporting evidence in Acts 15 to suggest that he was influential enough to have pronouncements circulated to the churches he regarded as under the oversight of the mother church in Jerusalem. The Letter of James fits into that early model of ecclesiastical oversight quite naturally.

Fourth, as we will see in our exploration of the text itself, the epistle appears to engage in a polemic, if not against Paul himself, then almost certainly against a misunderstood or corrupted version of Paul’s message. This is nowhere more evident than in the second chapter (the one that so provoked Martin Luther), in which James states flatly that one is not justified “by faith alone,” and that Abraham was “made righteous [i.e., justified] by works” (Jas 2:21, 24; compare Rom 5:1 and Gal 2:16). As Hengel proposed, other passages likewise could indicate a sustained polemic that may characterize the whole epistle.

To give but one example, it is conceivable that the passage about sins of the tongue in chapter three might be related—either directly or indirectly—to Paul’s well-known penchant for “speaking like a fool” (2 Cor 12:11) and lashing out in angry outbursts against his opponents (e.g., Gal 1:8–9 and 5:12). Christians over the centuries, rightly revering Paul for his greatness on many levels, have tended to explain away such intemperate rhetoric or justify it as “righteous zeal” for the sake of the gospel. We forget, however, that such behavior may not have been considered acceptable by someone as austere as James apparently was. After all, as we can note in his letter, his ethics is in the spirit we hear in the Sermon on the Mount, wherein all “judging” and “condemning” of others is rebuked out of hand.

There is at the very least in James’s epistle a direct confrontation with what appears to be a poorly digested Paulinism, one that has misinterpreted Paul’s teaching about faith and good works, thereby letting self-discipline slip, “faith” to be perverted into mere assent to doctrines, and inequality between rich and poor Christians to flourish (and one can see, from even a cursory reading of Paul’s letters, that he himself had to deal with such distortions of his gospel: “What shall we say then? Should we persist in sin so that grace might abound? Let it not be! We who have died to sin, how shall we still live in it?”; Rom 6:1–2).

Fifth, as we have already had occasion to note, James’s moral injunctions have numerous parallels with the teachings of Jesus as we find them in the Synoptic Gospels, and in Matthew in particular. At the same time, these are indeed parallels and not direct quotations—echoes, as it were, of a common body of teaching fully digested and integrated by James into the body of his letter. In other words, one has the impression that James is so close in time and spirit to his brother that he has no need to quote him word for word. What we find instead is a shared ethos, imbibed from the source and flowing through James, and practiced in every aspect of his daily existence. As such, he simply communicates it with an easy authority gathered from lived experience. He speaks in the same spirit as his risen brother, and one senses that that is all he believed was required.

Taken together, these reasons for my acceptance of the genuineness of James’s authorship may not be persuasive for some, but they are sufficient for me to come down on the side of its authenticity.

9. Hengel’s essay has influenced my own view of the Letter of James, although I would hesitate to follow him in every particular. He goes into some detail, explaining that the epistle, written by James himself, is a sustained anti-Pauline polemic following the arrest of Paul (i.e., sometime between 58 and 62), and (at least, primarily) addressed to the Gentile Christians of Paul’s mission. He highlights seven passages that—to his mind—are direct attacks by James on Paul’s character and theology. I believe Hengel is too extreme in his conclusions, and that not all the “evidence” he accrues is convincing. To his credit, he states that he is only engaging in “a ‘science of conjecture.’” Still, caveats aside, many of his conjectures ring true enough that, in muted form, some of them will reappear in my own commentary below. Martin Hengel’s 1987 essay, “The Letter of James as Anti-Pauline Polemic,” can be found, in a somewhat abridged form, in The Writings of St. Paul: A Norton Critical Edition (2nd ed.), edited by Wayne A. Meeks and John T. Fitzgerald (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 242–53.