James (New Testament Guides)

John S. Kloppenborg

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780567703965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Biography

James offers a concise and accessible introduction to a New Testament text, in this case aimed specifically at undergraduate-level students. John S. Kloppenborg introduces the reader to a series of critical issues bearing on the reading of James and provides a balanced presentation and assessment of the range of scholarly views, with guidance for further reading and research.

1

Approaching James

When one interprets any piece of early Christian literature, context matters. It matters in what company a text is placed, for that company will affect how the text is read. Does one read the canonical gospels only in relation to each other? Or only alongside other Christian texts? Or in the context of the biographies produced by Greek and Latin writers? Or in the context supplied by accounts of Hebrew prophets? Or in the context of the canon of the Christian Bible? It’s not that there is only one appropriate context. But some are more helpful than others, and as we will see, some contexts work to narrow or perhaps even distort interpretive possibilities. James, a relatively short letter of 108 verses (1749 words), has been read in a variety of contexts, and some of those contexts work to disguise James’s contributions to the history and thought of the early Christ movement and to narrow its interpretation significantly.

Modern editions of the New Testament place James at the head of the ‘Catholic’ or ‘General Epistles’—James, 1–2 Peter, 1–2–3 John, and Jude—that is, letters purported to come from Jesus’s closest associates. I say ‘purported’, because modern analysis has made it clear that the two Petrine letters were not written by Jesus’s disciple Peter. The two letters were not even written by the same author. It is impossible to connect 1–2–3 John with John the son of Zebedee. The authorship of the letter of Jude is also very much in question; what is clearer is that 2 Peter, which belongs to the second century CE, made use of the letter of Jude.

The Catholic letters are now found sandwiched between Paul’s genuine letters, the Pastorals (1–2 Timothy, Titus) and Hebrews on one side, and the Apocalypse of John on the other. Because at 37,400 words, the Pauline corpus and Hebrews are almost five times as long as the Catholic letters (7583 words), the current arrangement of NT books gives extraordinary weight to Paul and much less prominence to the Catholic letters. It is hardly surprising that the volume of commentary on the Pauline letters outweighs that on the Catholic letters and James by several magnitudes.

The arrangement of books in the modern NT canon is not, however, the arrangement found in most Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, which regularly placed Acts and the Catholic letters together. Both Codex Vaticanus in the fourth century and Codex Alexandrinus in the fifth, along with almost all later Greek manuscripts, place the Acts and the Catholic letters before Paul’s letters. The same arrangement is found in the lists of canonical texts in such Greek writers as Athanasius and Cyril of Jerusalem. Codex Sinaiticus in the fourth century differs in this regard, by placing Acts and the Catholic letters together, but immediately after Paul’s letters and Hebrews and before the Apocalypse, the letter of Barnabas, and the Shepherd of Hermas. In both of these sequences, Acts and the Catholic letters are treated as a single unit, which creates another interpretive context. The association of the Catholic letters with Acts has the effect of underwriting the authority of the Catholic letters by featuring letters from four disciples who appear prominently in the first fifteen chapters of Acts. Some have even suggested that placing the Catholic letters before Paul’s letters was to protect against extreme interpretations of Paulinism.

The canonical location of James provides one context for thinking about James. But of course, this has to do with decisions made by fourth- and fifth-century writers and copyists and how they conceived of the structure of the New Testament as a whole. Those choices, however interesting and telling they might be, do not tell us much about how James was read on its own terms, before its incorporation into the group of Catholic letters and before their incorporation to the NT canon.

For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, interpreters of James typically read the letter in another context, not in conjunction with Acts, but as a counterpoint to the letters of Paul. Until recently, the majority of monographs and articles on James focused on a single section, Jas 2:14–26 and its supposed confrontation with Pauline theology in Galatians and Romans. This fixation on Paul also led scholars to focus on James’s ‘theology’, as if James were self-evidently a theological tractate comparable to, and in conversation with, Galatians and Romans. Yet as Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr rightly observes, the structure of James’s letter hardly suggests that his primary concern was either theology or the relation of faith to deeds. Instead, it is a work about ethics, even if one can deduce some of the theological views that inform James’s ethical stances (Niebuhr 2009).

The opening section of James offers a partial table of contents. The list of topics mooted in chapter 1 includes the search of wisdom and how properly to approach God; the pointlessness of pursuing wealth and the dangers of pleasure and desire; and the importance of self-control and the willingness to hear and to perform the ‘perfect law of freedom’. True piety, says James, is ‘to watch over orphans and widows in their distress, and to guard oneself uncontaminated from the world’ (Jas 1:27).

In the light of the introduction James provided for his letter, it is mistaken to focus only on Jas 2:14–26, as though this were the core of his message. On the contrary, the common focus for the letter might be better conceived as what James calls ‘piety’ (thrēskeia, 1:26–27, often mistranslated as ‘religion’). Piety begins from a conception of God as the source of all that is good and as a generous benefactor. It also involves psychagogy, that is, the cultivation of the soul. It involves adopting the proper attitudes for approaching God, and awareness of the several impediments that cloud and obscure the perception of the Good, especially desire, pleasure, anger, and arrogance. When the appropriate conceptions of the self and God are in place, pious acts and a pious way of life follow: care for the poor; the rejection of favouritism; control of the tongue; suppression of envy; the rejection of injustice and arrogance, and the adoption of behaviour that nurtures the community.

Psychagogy thus entails both mental attitudes and moral actions. James is concerned with care of the poor and offers many critical comments on wealth and the wealthy (1:9–11). He objects to the sycophantic attitudes toward the rich and the actions that follow from such attitudes (2:1–13) and he decries the predatory practices of landlords toward their workers (5:1–6). James is not simply a list of do’s and don’ts. On the contrary, he is worried about the way that the pursuit of luxury and good living infects and perverts the soul. These topics resonate with other early Christian texts, in particular Luke’s gospel and especially the Shepherd of Hermas, both from the latter part of the first century CE or early second century.

The author of course has a paragraph on the relation of faith to deeds and declares that the faith that lacks the performance of corresponding deeds is unfruitful and indeed dead (2:20, 26). This is consistent with what is argued throughout the second chapter of James, that genuine faith issues in acts that are consistent with the Law, since piety for James entails both right beliefs and right actions. But James is also deeply concerned with speech ethics (3:1–12), the destructive nature and the causes of envy (3:13–4:10), and the arrogant and wilful behaviour of the wealthy (4:11–5:6). The letter ends with exhortations to patience (5:7–11), and a cluster of topics pertaining to conduct within the assembly (5:12–20).

Part of the reasons for the general neglect that James has suffered and for the narrowing of focus to Jas 2:14–26 alone can be traced to the sixteenth century. From almost the beginning, there had been persistent suspicions that James was a pseudepigraphon. It was in the sixteenth century, however, that these suspicions came to a head. Erasmus argued on stylistic grounds that the letter could not have been penned by the brother of Jesus, thought to be the first bishop of Jerusalem. Luther’s Catholic opponent Cajetan concluded that the letter was not by an apostle. It was, however, Martin Luther who cast the gravest doubts on the worth of James, famously declaring it to be a ‘letter of straw’ (‘Preface to the New Testament [1522]’, LW 35:362). (Interestingly, Luther omitted this comment from the editions of his New Testament published after 1522). His deepest problem with James was theological: it lacked any mention of what Luther considered to be the heart of the gospel—reference to the death and resurrection of Jesus and mention of the spirit of Christ. James seemed to disagree with Paul and it hardly mentioned Jesus at all (only in 1:1 and 2:1). He even opined at one point that James might have been forged a letter in order to oppose Christians (LW 54:424). His most immoderate statement came in 1546 when he mused about throwing ‘Jimmy’ into the oven (LW 34:317).

Luther’s comments on James had a lasting impact. For much of the twentieth century, James was either ignored, perhaps owing to Luther’s verdict that it was an inferior product and maybe not even Christian, or it was deemed worthy of discussion only insofar as it seemed to disagree with Paul on the topic of faith and deeds. Or perhaps Jas 2:14–26 could be reconciled with Paul. It was not until 1998 that Theologische Rundschau featured a review article on James. This journal typically carries lengthy bibliographical articles on biblical books. It had featured extensive surveys of scholarship on Paul beginning in 1929, on John from 1955, and Acts from 1960. Only in 1998 did it finally published a review article on James (Hahn and Müller 1998).

Beginning in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the focus on James widened beyond Jas 2:14–16. Scholars began to pay addition to James as a whole. Important publications in the 1970s began to examine a variety of topics other than his views of faith and deeds: the social context presupposed by the letter; its theological background; the overall structure and rhetorical species of the letter; James’s discourse on rich and poor; James as a document of second Temple Jewish wisdom; James as an example of epistolary paraenesis; James and the Jesus tradition, speech-ethics in James; James’s critical view of the Roman institution of personal patronage; and James’s urban perspective. Thus in 2004 Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr could finally describe a ‘New Perspective on James’ (Niebuhr 2004):

If one does not read the letter from a Pauline perspective, one would scarcely come to the conclusion that the argument about faith and works in 2:14–26 is its theological core and that it belongs to the context of early Christian debate about justification. Instead, the reader would seek the starting point for understanding the text at its beginning, the opening in which the author represents himself to his addressees as ‘Jacob, slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ’, and greets his addressees as ‘the twelve tribes of the diaspora’, and with an address comprised of admonitions addresses those who should persevere throughout their troubles.

(Niebuhr 2004, 1040)

Ironically, Luther’s criticisms of James have turned out to be almost a blueprint for the modern study of James: its authorship, its literary genre, the resources upon which it calls, and its addressees and function. It was Luther who mounted the most pungent attack on Jacobean authorship in the modern period. He was not the first to question the authenticity of James—Luther knew that there had been persistent doubts about the authenticity of James in antiquity. But he was the first to assemble a substantial set of objections to James. Many of those arguments would now be judged to be irrelevant or at least not probative. It will, however, be necessary to examine his, and other arguments against authenticity as well as defences of Jacobean authorship. This will be the task of Chapter 2.

Another second criticism of James by Luther had to do with its organization:

He throws things together so chaotically that it seems to me that he must have been some good, pious man who took a few sayings from the disciples of the apostles and thus tossed them off on paper.

(LW 35:397)

And again

Besides, there’s no order or method to the epistle. Now he discusses clothing and then he writes about wrath and is constantly shifting from one to the other.

(LW 54:425)

As Chapter 3 will explain, Luther was measuring James against the theological tractates of Paul. He both exaggerated the coherence of Paul’s letters and significantly underestimated the organization of James. What is more important, Luther entirely misjudged the genre of James; it is not a letter comparable to Paul’s letters; instead, it is an example of epistolary paraenesis. Paraenetic literature often lacks an overarching structure, and sometimes does not even display organization of smaller clusters of sayings. When James is placed in the literary context to which it belongs, it becomes clear that it is in fact one of the better organized examples of epistolary paraenesis. James is very far from being ‘chaotic’.

Luther’s chief reasons for rejecting James were that it contradicted Paul on the issue of faith and works, that it failed to mention the death and resurrection of Jesus or the spirit of Christ, which Luther took to be the sine qua non of any writing that qualified as apostolic, and that it barely mentioned Christ.

We should throw the Epistle of James out of this school, for it doesn’t amount to much. It contains not a syllable about Christ. Not once does it mention Christ, except at the beginning.

(LW 54:424)

The lack of mention of distinctively Christian beliefs and practices will occupy us in the final chapter. Luther’s complaint that James ‘contains not a syllable about Christ’, however, needs reconsideration. As we will see in Chapter 4, James very clearly knows the Jewish Bible, although he quotes it verbatim only at 2:8, 11, 23 and 4:6. Elsewhere his use of the Bible is paraphrastic. This is in fact what one should expect of a work of Hellenistic Judaism, where authors preferred paraphrasis to verbatim quotation. As most commentators have noted, James is also far from ignorant of the Jesus tradition; his prose is suffused with allusions—always paraphrased—to the sayings of Jesus, and as has been recognized recently, mostly from the Q source. Thus, while James may say little about Christ, the Jesus tradition is present throughout James.

For the most part Luther seems to have grudgingly accepted James even though he judged it not to be the work of an apostle. But in Table Talk he even proposed a non-Christian origin of the book:

I maintain that some Jew wrote it who probably heard about Christian people but never encountered any. Since he heard that Christians place great weight on faith in Christ, he thought, ‘Wait a minute. I’ll oppose them and urge works alone.’ This he did. He wrote not a word about the suffering and resurrection of Christ, although this is what all the apostles preached about.

(LW 54:424)

As Luther’s comment shows, he placed great weight on Jas 2:14–26 and Paul’s view of faith and deeds as theologically normative. And as we have seen, he was also struck by how little of explicit Christian teachings appeared. This continues to be an issue for interpreters. Is James, as some have suggested, a document originally penned by a Jewish writer and superficially Christianized? Was Luther right? The letter is addressed to the ‘Twelve Tribes’ in the diaspora. Is this a code word for Jewish Christians? Or all Christians? But if so, why is there no mention of characteristically Christian beliefs (about Jesus, for example), and practices, such as baptism and Eucharist? I will suggest in Chapter 5 another alternative: that the author, although he does not disguise his affiliation with the Jesus movemen...