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I.

Preliminaries

Martin Luther’s assessment of the Letter of James as “an epistle of straw” is, of course, almost a cliché. But, having mentioned it here, it’s also right to note that he withdrew the remark later. By “straw” he meant that the letter was useful for very little, if anything really. It was of a weak quality and not fit for building anything of lasting worth. This harsh assessment appeared only once, in the original version of Luther’s Preface to the New Testament (1522), as part of a paragraph that also made judgments about other New Testament books. Thinking better of it later, Luther struck the comment, along with the entire paragraph in which it appeared, from the text in subsequent editions of his Bible.

The reformer’s chief difficulty with James, which (despite his editing out the remark) he never abandoned, was that James did not express what he considered to be the most essential message about Christ. For Luther what was lacking was the good news itself. He asserted, and he went on asserting throughout his lifetime, that the Letter of James and the letters of Paul could not be reconciled. He did concede (surely backhanded praise, given Luther’s views) that James was “a good book” because it set forth the law of God. By saying that it was an epistle of law, however, he was unmistakably implying that it was not a proclamation of the gospel—which, for Luther, was summed up in the phrase “justification by faith alone.” There was irony in this, for—as Luther could not help but be uncomfortably aware—the only instance in the entire New Testament where the phrase “justified . . . by faith alone” appears is, in fact, in the Letter of James: “You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone” (Jas 2:24, RSV; emphasis mine). And that was not what Luther wanted to hear, and hence his difficulty with “strawy” James.

But, even long before the age of Luther, the Epistle of James had been open to criticism for its supposed shortcomings. In the West, its authorship was held in some suspicion well into the fourth century; and, indeed, its genuineness was still in question as late as the sixteenth century, most notably by Luther’s scholarly contemporaries, Erasmus and Cardinal Cajetan. In the Eastern churches, on the other hand, James had been included among the canonical books from early on, although Eusebius, writing in the 320s, ranked it among the “disputed” books (along with Jude, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John; see his History of the Church, III, 25). “Admittedly its authenticity is doubted,” wrote Eusebius, “since few early writers refer to it” (HC, III, 26). Nevertheless, as Eusebius admitted, there had at least been a “few early writers” who referred to it. For example, The Shepherd of Hermas, a popular late first-century or early second-century Roman apocalyptic work, cited the Letter of James more often than it did any other epistle found in the New Testament canon. And indeed, by the end of the fourth century, James’s place within the canon of the universal church was effectively and finally settled, its authority was deemed apostolic, and its author was generally accepted as being none other than James “the Just,” the brother of the Lord, the first “bishop” of Jerusalem, one of the three whom Paul had referred to as the reputed pillars of the church (along with Peter and John; cf. Gal 1:9), and the adjudicator in the troublesome matter of how to accommodate uncircumcised gentile converts within the community of this new Jesus-centered variant of the Jewish religion (cf. Acts 15).

Although the question of its authenticity was one reason given for some to feel hesitant about it, there were possibly other concerns in the church about its validity. We have already noted its seemingly direct rebuttal of Paul’s message, a subject we will come back to at some length in this commentary. Conspicuously, there was a certain lack of content in the letter that could well have seemed disturbing to some in these early Christian centuries. For instance, the letter mentions the name of Jesus only twice (1:1; 2:1). Likewise, Jesus’ death and resurrection, so pivotal in other writings that were deemed canonical, are not a central theme in the book. Doctrinal orthodoxy, in fact, gives way to orthopraxy (right behavior and action) as the focus of James’s concerns. Hesitancy about the Letter of James may have stemmed from a notable absence in it of specific doctrinal expectations.

When the New Testament canon was still in its formation, during the third and fourth centuries, the determinative criteria for including a book or epistle was to be found in the church’s common regula fidei—the “rule of faith” or the creedal formula affirmed by the “orthodox” churches (one version of which is the Western church’s “Apostles’ Creed”). Right belief was the guiding feature in discerning which books should be received as inspired, apostolic, and universally authoritative. Such careful attentiveness to basic doctrine was directly in reaction to versions of the faith that had, over time, been deemed heterodox—and, in fact, some of the very communities that were seen to hold heterodox opinions also were known to revere the memory of the authority of James the Just. Worse, some of these communities explicitly, even bitterly, rejected the authority of the Apostle Paul, whose reputation in the “great church” had become unassailable. In other words, in those metropolitan churches (primarily Rome, but also Antioch and Alexandria), in which Paul, along with Peter, after their deaths, had come to occupy the central place as the revered apostles par excellence, it was supposed that what was professed should be absolutely true to the faith these two apostles (and their episcopal successors) were believed to have imparted. Thus, what was confessed about the Trinity and about the person and work of Christ had to be sound and untainted by heterodox notions. This conviction became even more pronounced when Christianity became at first a faith and eventually the faith of the Roman Empire, since it was the grand design of the emperors, beginning with Constantine, to have a united imperial church with a coherent and obligatory creed, under the supervision of orthodox bishops, planted firmly at the center of an orderly and pious realm. The Letter of James, lacking a clearly articulated orthodoxy, offered little of use for cementing such a strong confessional faith in the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church” of the Empire; and its implicit tension with the teaching of Paul, as found particularly in the latter’s Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians, certainly might have been provocative.

There had been, as well, a lessening of the importance of the role Jesus’ family had played in the early church, since the decades when its center was still in Jerusalem. They, and James in particular, had been acknowledged as the key figures in that first community of Jesus’ followers. However, following the fall of Jerusalem in 71 AD, their influence was largely eclipsed outside Jewish Christian circles. The inevitable “gravitational” shift of ecclesiastical authority and influence, after the loss of the “mother church,” to newer centers in Antioch, Alexandria, and ultimately Rome, meant that James and the family of Jesus in Jerusalem were no longer at the heart of Christian identity. Peter, Paul, and Rome became that new center. The Letter of James, seen from this perspective, might be a surviving relic of a time when James still occupied a place as “first among equals” (as he did for a time), and thus able to pen what looks very much to be an “encyclical” letter, one intended for all the scattered communities of Christians. As mentioned above, the uncomfortable fact is that by the fourth century the remnant of the old Jewish Christian church, which had revered James for centuries, was held in suspicion for entertaining ideas deemed heretical by the now dominant imperial Roman church.

All this is inference, of course, but the fact remains that James’s letter was a “disputed book”; and yet, regardless of that, it survived to make the canonical “final cut.” One plausible reason for its final acceptance, one which I certainly have no difficulty accepting and do accept in this commentary, may simply have been that there was no good excuse not to believe it truly had come from the hand of James—that it was, in all probability, an authentic work that came with credentials too credible to be rejected out of hand, whatever its perceived deficiencies.

One aspect of the letter that could not be disputed was that, whereas it said little about Jesus, it undoubtedly reflected a familiarity with the authentic teachings of Jesus. Such texts as James 1:6 and 2:8, for example, have direct and obvious parallels to Jesus’ own words (and, of course, we will deal with those texts in their proper places below). James’s epistle can at times seem to be a restatement of the Sermon on the Mount (for example, compare Matt 5:9 with Jas 2:5; Matt 5:7 and 6:14 with Jas 2:13; Matt 5:11–12 with Jas 5:10; Matt 5:19 with Jas 2:10; Matt 5:34–37 with Jas 5:12; Matt 6:19 with Jas 5:2; Matt 6:34 with Jas 4:13–14; and Matt 7:24 with Jas 1:22–25). What we find in the letter, then, is not so much a religion about the person of Christ as a reiteration of the religion of Christ himself—what Jesus himself believed and taught his disciples about living in communion with God.

James is thoroughly pragmatic in his outlook as well as thoroughly immersed in the teachings of Jesus, his “brother” (a term we will look at more closely below). His exhortations are about living and doing, and the letter regards conceptual, confessional belief as something essentially lifeless unless it is energized by the “breath” or “spirit” of a lived, practical discipleship (“For just as the body without spirit [or, breath] is dead, so also faith without works is dead”; Jas 2:26). Because of its intimate familiarity with the core of Jesus’ instruction to his followers, readers can feel themselves near to Jesus, particularly as he is presented in the Gospel of Matthew, when one reads James. James retains many of the same emphases and inhabits the same thought-world as his Lord and brother.

This is, I suggest, an implicit argument in favor of James of Jerusalem as author of the epistle, rather than it being the work of someone writing in his name. It may, in fact, be one of the earliest of the New Testament books. There is nothing within the book to assign it decisively to a first-century date later than the death of James in 62. Attempts to date it later and assign it to a pseudonymous author have never risen above the speculative. To be sure, no one can assert conclusively that the letter is by James, but, by the same token, no one can assert conclusively that it is not. In this commentary, then, I adopt the judgment that it is James’s own work.