James An Introduction and Study Guide: Diaspora Rhetoric of a Friend of God 9781350008830, 9781350008861, 9781350008854

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T&T CLARK STUDY GUIDES TO THE NEW TESTAMENT

JAMES

Series Editor Tat-siong Benny Liew, College of the Holy Cross, USA

Other titles in the series include: 1&2 Thessalonians: An Introduction and Study Guide 1 Peter: An Introduction and Study Guide 2 Corinthians: An Introduction and Study Guide Colossians: An Introduction and Study Guide Ephesians: An Introduction and Study Guide Galatians: An Introduction and Study Guide James: An Introduction and Study Guide John: An Introduction and Study Guide Luke: An Introduction and Study Guide Mark: An Introduction and Study Guide Matthew: An Introduction and Study Guide Philemon: An Introduction and Study Guide Philippians: An Introduction and Study Guide Romans: An Introduction and Study Guide The Acts of the Apostles: An Introduction and Study Guide The Letters of Jude and Second Peter: An Introduction and Study Guide

T&T Clark Study Guides to the Old Testament: 1 & 2 Samuel: An Introduction and Study Guide 1 & 2 Kings: An Introduction and Study Guide Ecclesiastes: An Introduction and Study Guide Exodus: An Introduction and Study Guide Ezra-Nehemiah: An Introduction and Study Guide Hebrews: An Introduction and Study Guide Leviticus: An Introduction and Study Guide Jeremiah: An Introduction and Study Guide Job: An Introduction and Study Guide Joshua: An Introduction and Study Guide Psalms: An Introduction and Study Guide Song of Songs: An Introduction and Study Guide Numbers: An Introduction and Study Guide

JAMES

An Introduction and Study Guide Diaspora Rhetoric of a Friend of God

By Margaret Aymer

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as T&T Clark 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015. This edition published 2017 © Margaret Aymer, 2017 Margaret Aymer has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: PB: 978-1-3500-0883-0 ePDF: 978-1-3500-0885-4 ePub: 978-1-3500-0884-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: T&T Clark Study Guides to the New Testament, volume 17 Cover design: clareturner.co.uk Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

For Laurent, Gabriel, Krysta and Wes

Contents Abbreviations

ix

Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Questions of Identity

3

Chapter 2 Listening to James

19

Chapter 3 That True R eligion: Theology and Ethics of James

35

Chapter 4 James and Kyriarchy 50 Chapter 5 James as a Migrant Writing

66

Works Cited Index of References Index of Authors

84 87 90

Abbreviations 1 Cor. 1 Corinthians 1 Sam. 1 Samuel 1 Tim. 1 Timothy 2 Pet. 2 Peter 2 Thess. 2 Thessalonians AB Anchor Bible Acts Acts of the Apostles Dan. Daniel Deut. Deuteronomy Eph. Ephesians Gal. Galatians Jas James Jer. Jeremiah Jn John Josh. Joshua JSNTSup Journal for the Study of the New Testament, Supplement Series Leg. all. Legum allegoriae Lev. Leviticus Lk. Luke lxx Septuagint Mk Mark Mt. Matthew Neh. Nehemiah Prov. Proverbs Ps. Psalms Rev. Revelation to John SBLDS SBL Dissertation Series SBLSS SBL Semeia Studies

Introduction James is an enigma. It appears to be a letter, but does not follow standard epistolary form. It claims to be written by someone whom, for the sake of clarity, we will call James throughout this volume. However, the author’s identity is a point of debate. James, the document, claims certain truths about the life of faith that are deeply consonant with other parts of the New Testament, while claiming other truths that seem to stand in opposition to dearly held tenets. Its structure, or seeming lack of structure, has been a point of consternation since the earliest days of critical biblical interpretation. Even its presence in the ancient library called the Christian Bible has not always been welcome. Luther famously called James a ‘right strawy epistle’ and actually wished it could be banished from academic study (P. Smith 1911: 268-69). So what are we to make of this writing? This introductory volume suggests James is an ancient encyclical or homiletic letter, intended to be heard by diaspora communities—that is, migrant people. Of course, to make that proposal, many questions must first be answered. Among these are questions about authorship and dating and genre, themes and structures of the biblical writing called James. For those already steeped in the research surrounding James, the answers put forward here will not be new. However, for those seeking an introduction to James, Chapter 1 will paint in very broad strokes the changes in scholarly hypotheses about James the text and James the author from Martin Dibelius to the present. Chapter 2 will overview the content of James’s encyclical, following the rhetorical outline proposed by Ben Witherington (2007: 409). Chapter 3 will consider James’s theological and ethical stances. Here, the primary structure will be Vernon Robbins’ proposed ‘sacred texture’ (1996: 120-31) and his set of criteria through which the theoethical ‘textures’ of James can be examined. In Chapter 4, James’s response to the presence of the Roman Empire will be considered. Here, postcolonial and kyriarchal lenses will help the reader understand James’s interaction with the greater empire, and his counsel to his diasporic ‘synagogue’ worshipping ‘assemblies’ (Jas 2.1; 5.14). Here the work of Elsa Tamez (2002), Pedrito Maynard-Reid (2004) and Cain Hope Felder (1989) will be helpful, as well as the kinds of questions posited by Musa Dube (2000) and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (2009).

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The final chapter of this volume will take seriously the opening address of James: ‘to the twelve tribes in diaspora’ (Jas 1.1). In it, we will examine what can be learned if we think of James as a migrant writing—a letter intended to be read by migrants rather than by landed citizen readers. Taking seriously this context of diaspora will mean taking seriously broader questions surrounding migration and diaspora. Thus, using theoretical lenses from the psychology of migration, like the work of John Berry (2001), and the sociology of migration, like the theoretics of Avtar Brah (1996), the final chapter will outline the kind of diaspora communities that James envisions, as well as the kind of diaspora space being contested and redefined in this ancient text. As part of this final chapter, consideration will also be given to this question: ‘What happens when contemporary Christians, reading this ancient migrant writing, adopt this migrant stance as the lens through which they interpret their world?’ An understanding of that stance may enhance our understanding not only of the ancients but also potentially of ourselves.

1

Questions of Identity Who wrote this ancient writing and when? What kind of ancient writing is it, and what is its purpose? Those are some of the basic questions of identity that begin any critical study of a biblical text. However, when it comes to James, there is no settled scholarly consensus on these questions. This first chapter will summarize the scholarly debate surrounding authorship, dating and genre of the book, and will choose the scholarly hypothesis on these issues that seems most reasonable in light of current research. Readers should be careful to note that these are well-educated hypotheses rather than statements of certainty. As with any biblical book, we do not have the original copy of this ancient text, signed by the author and authenticated by trustworthy historians over time—what scholars call the ‘autograph’. What we have instead are copies of copies, clues within phrases and evidence from the history of the Roman-occupied Mediterranean world. These are the traces that we must follow if we are to sketch, even faintly, the ‘James’ who wrote this ancient text. Which ‘James’? ‘Jacobos, of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ a slave, to the twelve tribes in the diaspora, greetings’ (Jas 1.1; all translations are mine unless otherwise noted). So begins the biblical writing known as ‘James’ or ‘the epistle of James’. Jacobos, the name that English writers rendered as James, is the Greek transliteration of the very common Hebrew name Yachov or Jacob. The name is so common that there were no fewer than five men named James in the New Testament writings concerning the early Christian movement: James the brother of John and the son of Zebedee (Mt. 4.21); James ‘the Little’ (ho mikros), whose brother is Joses and whose mother is one of the Marys but not Jesus’ mother (Mk 15.40); James the son of Alphaeus, who is always listed as an apostle (Mt. 10.3, Mk 3.18; Lk. 6.16; Acts 1.13); James the father of an apostle named Judas (but not Iscariot) (Lk. 6.16; Acts 1.13); and James the ‘brother of the Lord’ (Gal. 1.19), who is also known as James the Just. Could one of these Jameses have been the Jacobos in Jas 1.1? And if not any of these, who is this Jacobos?

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James

The starting place for adjudicating these questions must be the book of James itself. It does not give many clues, but there are some things that may be asserted from its contents. The first clue rests with the simplicity of the address in Jas 1.1. The author of this letter feels no need to further identify himself than with the name James. Like famous persons of today (e.g. Madonna, Prince), he expects that through that one name, he will be known to his audience. As Ben Witherington puts it, James of this document ‘assumes an inherent authority and does not bother to argue for it, even as Paul does on occasion’ (2007: 397). Of the five men called James, we can only hypothesize that kind of prominence and authority for three of them: the two Jameses that are named apostles (i.e. James of Zebedee and James of Alphaeus) and the James who is ‘the brother of our Lord’. James the Little and James the father of Judas are thus eliminated from consideration. About the apostle James of Alphaeus we know very little. He is not mentioned in any of the ancient Christian documents to which we have access beyond the four texts we listed above, nor did his fame cause him to rise in importance later in the early Christian church writings. None of this, of course, absolutely removes him from consideration as the James of this text. However, it significantly lessens the likelihood. The almost complete silence about him, outside of the lists of apostles, suggests that he might not have had the prominence simply to address a letter as Jacobos and expect the audience to know who he was. This leaves us with two possible candidates for the authorship of this letter, if we posit that it was written by a person named in the New Testament: either it was written by James of Zebedee, who is mentioned repeatedly in the Gospels as part of the inner circle of Jesus’ disciples; or by James the brother of the Lord, called the Just, who rises to prominence as the head of the Jerusalem church and is recognized as such both by Paul (Gal. 1.19) and, it seems, by Peter (Acts 12.17). Scholarship leans decisively toward this James, the Just, as the author of our text. Typical of this scholarship is Richard Bauckham’s assertion: ‘only one James was so uniquely prominent in the early Christian movement that he could be identified purely by the phrase: “James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ…” This James was the eldest of the four brothers of Jesus (Mk 6.3)’ (1999: 16). However, notoriety alone is not enough upon which to base such an assertion. Other factors must also support this hypothesis for it to hold any sway. A second clue from the text of this ancient writing is the diatribe in James 2 that addresses faith (pistis) and works (erga). James 2 shows a remarkable similarity to the vocabulary and teaching of Paul of Tarsus. Indeed Luther’s deprecatory remarks against James derive from the perception that, in James 2, James proposes to reverse and change Pauline ‘faith alone’ soteriology, which is the basis for much of the theology of the Protestant Reformation. If, in fact, this author is addressing Paul’s teaching, either in



1.   Questions of Identity 5

oral or written form, or teachings inspired by Paul of Tarsus, then, as Peter Davids argues, the author must be writing after James of Zebedee is put to death in Jerusalem around 44 ce (1989: 3). This is so because, according to the Acts of the Apostles, the ministry of Paul of Tarsus only very briefly overlaps the life of James of Zebedee (cf. Acts 9; 12). Many scholars think a response to misrepresented Pauline theology is exactly what is intended in James 2. Douglas Moo posits that ‘James is reacting to a misunderstood Paulinism’ (2000: 19), that is, James was writing a response to things that had been reported to him either in writing or orally, but that James, when writing this response, had never actually spoken to Paul. Thus, James misunderstood Paul and became imprecatory. By contrast, Margaret M. Mitchell believes that James is a Paulinist text that draws heavily on 1 Corinthians and Galatians (2007). As we will see below, she uses this to argue against this Jacobos being James the Just. I mention it here to point out that she too thinks James 2 is referring directly to the writings or teachings of Paul of Tarsus. Todd Penner cautions, however, that we should not to put too heavy a weight on this piece of evidence alone: ‘While it is true that Paul had a distinctive contribution to make, we do not know for certain that he was the first to make such a contribution, whether his specific insights were shared by a majority of first-century Christ-followers, and/or whether we have not over-emphasized one particular reading of Paul which unduly sets him apart from other early Christian writers’ (1996: 61). Penner’s caution reminds us that early Christianity might have already been going in the direction of Paul long before Paul wrote the letters that we now have. Further, Robert Wall points out that ‘Paul could as easily have been responding to the kerygma of Jerusalem Christianity’ (1997: 9). In other words, presuming that Paul’s arguments were the earlier arguments, rather than a reaction to what was already being preached, may be presuming too much. The rhetoric of James 2 again tilts the likelihood of the author toward James the Just and away from James of Zebedee. It does not completely rule out the possibility that James of Zebedee himself might have been responding to a trend in Christianity on which Paul then elaborated further. Still, if this connection is a valid one, it must lean us very heavily toward James the Just, because Paul consulted with James the Just at least twice in his ministry (Gal. 1.19; 2.9; Acts 15). By contrast, if the accounts in Acts are reliable, Paul’s conversion only slightly overlapped with the ministry of James of Zebedee (Acts 9; 12.2), and never once are they said to meet. Thus, if Jacobos the slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ were intentionally responding to Paul of Tarsus, he would have to be James the Just—again, if he is a James named in the New Testament at all. A final piece of evidence in favor of James the Just and against James of Zebedee is that this document is a letter to gatherings of early

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James

‘Christ-followers’, a term I use to distinguish these beginning movements from contemporary Christianity. The genre of the text will be discussed more broadly below. However, as Bauckham notes, ‘James has the only formal feature of the ancient letter form which was essential: the letteropening’, that is, Jas 1.1 (1999: 12). Examinations of the oldest manuscripts of James that are available show that Jas 1.1 is original to this document as far back as scholarship can trace. Therefore, it appears that James of this text intended it to be sent as a letter, even if the rest of its structure bears another form. Probably a good name for such a letter would be an encyclical, or a general letter, as opposed to a personal letter. Acts 15 represents James the Just as having been involved in the writing of such a letter, an encyclical to the churches that Paul was serving. The author of Luke–Acts could, arguably, have invented this detail. Nevertheless, for some scholars this depiction adds weight to the argument that this letter is another such encyclical written by James the Just. James of Zebedee, by contrast, is never portrayed as a letter-writer in the New Testament. Further, as Robert Wall (1997: 7) demonstrates, the tenor of the letter mirrors the picture of James the Just we get in other parts of the New Testament: his concerns for purity (Acts 21), Torah (Galatians 2) and commitment to the poor (Gal. 2.10). Of course, we cannot say for certain that this picture of James the Just is historically accurate and not an ideological assertion of first-century Christ-followers seeking to legitimate the leadership in Jerusalem. Further, we have no evidence that James of Zebedee did not share these concerns. As it stands, the preponderance of evidence leads scholars to believe that the Jacobos of Jas 1.1 refers to James the Just, the leader of the early Christian church of Jerusalem, or at least to someone who functions in similar ways to the depiction of James the Just in the New Testament. Is ‘James’ a Pseudonym? To assert that the James referred to in Jas 1.1 is James the Just is just the beginning of unraveling the mystery of this ancient encyclical. There is always the possibility that the author was using the name James pseudonymously. There is evidence for pseudonymity in other books of the New Testament, especially the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) and, because there are no ancient autographs of any New Testament writings, pseudonymity must always be considered a possibility in any New Testament writing. Five reasons are typically given by scholars who argue that James was written pseudonymously: the quality of James’s Greek, the absence of the text from the earliest Christian canons, the silence of the text on major



1.   Questions of Identity

7

issues of Torah observance, the letter’s seeming dependence on the writings of Paul of Tarsus, and the author’s silence on his familial relationship with Jesus of Nazareth. The Language Question The first of these, the quality of James’s Greek, has been the most consistently raised reason to argue for James as a piece of pseudonymous writing. As Bauckham notes, ‘James is written in quite accomplished Greek with some Greek literary features’ (1999: 21). By ‘accomplished’, scholars don’t just mean that James has an unusual vocabulary, although he does. As Luke Timothy Johnson states, James’s language also ‘employs a variety of rhetorical tropes (alliteration, paranomasia) and at times achieves real elegance (see 1.17)’ (2004: 25). In addition to James’s artistry as a writer, he also seems to know some philosophy. ‘James is aware of Greco-Roman moral commonplaces, and uses them deftly’, Johnson continues (2004: 25). In fact, James’s writing is so good that it is often compared in quality to the most beautifully written of New Testament writings, Hebrews (Witherington 2007: 387). James’s quality of writing raises the important question on whether a Galilean peasant, a son of a carpenter, would be able to write in such educated Greek. For those scholars who answer this question negatively, James must therefore be pseudonymous, a later creation by someone of import using James’s name and stature to make an argument to churches that might or might not actually have been diasporic. Other scholars, tempering this perspective, suggest the presence of an anamneusis (i.e. a ‘secretary’) or, as Wall has hypothesized, the redaction of sermons and themes that were unique to James by a later writer. Wall is joined in this by Peter H. Davids, who proposes that ‘James the Just is probably the main source of the sayings and discourses, but he delivered his sermons in Aramaic or relatively Semitic Greek. Later, either because visitors of Jerusalem requested it, or because James’s martyrdom stimulated it, the sermons of James were collected, edited into a book around his favorite themes, and circulated as a general letter’ (1987: 7). Today, however, there are a growing number of scholars who believe it would have been quite possible for a Galilean to write Greek as well as James did. They base their assertion, first, on the scholarship of Martin Hengel’s seminal work Judaism and Hellenism (2012). One of Hengel’s most important findings is that the entire world of Roman Palestine would have been able, as a matter of course, to write and speak Greek for centuries. Indeed, many Palestinians, especially in Galilee and even from poor families, would have grown up with fluency in Greek (Moo 2000: 15). As Bauckham states, ‘Hengel showed that the extent to which Jewish Palestine had been Hellenized, in language and culture, in the period since Alexander

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made it quite inappropriate to call diaspora Judaism Hellenistic Judaism, as though Palestinian Judaism were not Hellenized’ (1999: 22). Because of Hengel’s argument, scholars can no longer assume that one who wrote good Greek could not have been writing from Jerusalem or born in Galilee. Therefore, the assumption that somone from Jerusalem would not be as fluent in Greek as someone like Paul of Tarsus, who lived and worked outside of Jerusalem, cannot be supported. Those who argue for James the Just as the author of this letter also point out that the Greek of James is ‘good Greek, even literary Greek; however, it is also simple Greek and does not rise to the heights of eloquence of various Greek masters…it is the kind of Greek that someone who has learned it well and is proficient, though not usually eloquent, would produce’ (Witherington 2007: 399-400). That is to say, James writes like a native speaker of Greek, but not like a Greek academic or scholar. James knows how to write the language well enough to be well spoken among common people, but nothing in the text of James suggests the presence of a highly educated author. This kind of Greek could be expected of a literate but not scholarly author from first-century Galilee and Judea. While scholars differ on the literary mastery of James, they do not differ on his mastery of Holy Scriptures. James’s language reflects that its author is steeped in the Greek translation of the Scriptures of Judaism from Hebrew and Aramaic known as the Septuagint. According to Witherington, although a number of James’s words are unusual for the Greek New Testament, ‘only thirteen words in James are not found in the Septuagint’ (2007: 388). This suggests two things. First, it suggests that James himself read and knew well the language of the Septuagint, that this Greek translation of the Scriptures informs the way that James thinks theologically and ethically even more than its Hebrew and Aramaic versions. (Today, one sees a similar phenomenon in the King James Version of the Bible. Four hundred years later, its language still profoundly impacts how people speak about matters theological.) Second, James’s use of Septuagint suggests that he expects his audience to know and understand these cadences. It is not only that James quotes the Scriptures that are now called the ‘Old Testament’ or the ‘Hebrew Bible’, but, in quoting the Greek translation and employing scriptural cadences and vocabulary, he shows his presupposition that his audience of diaspora Christ-followers would recognize and honor these as scriptural—that is, as writings sacred to them through which they have already come to understand the world (Witherington 2007: 388). By writing his Greek in the educated but familiar cadences of the Septuagint, the only translation of the Bible many first-century Jews and Christ-followers would have recognized, James creates a level of trustworthiness with his audience that allows them to hear his arguments.



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Of course, the author’s use of Septuagint Greek does not necessitate that James the Just is the author of this letter. Indeed, this fact might be used to argue either side of the case. However, that James’s Greek is based on the Septuagint removes as a premise the argument that this author was unusually educated for a Jew from Palestine. Clearly the author was educated. However, just as clearly, the basis of that author’s education was not the Hebrew and Aramaic Scriptures, which would have been the concern of the most educated persons in Jerusalem; nor was it the works of the Greek philosophers, as one might see in the writings of Philo of Alexandria. Instead, this author was an educated, pious Jew: one who knew the Scriptures in their most commonly accessible form and one whose language had been shaped by those Scriptures. While this does not necessitate that James the Just is the author, it allows for this as a possibility. The Acceptance Question The second argument that scholars raise to argue for a pseudonymous author of James is that this piece of writing was not accepted by the early church as Scripture. This argument comes from the relative absence of James from the earliest western Christian canons, or collections of Holy Writings, as well as from statements by early church fathers such as Eusebius of Caesarea. Scholars note, in the first instance, that James appears in neither the late second-century Muratorian canon nor the fourth-century Mommsen catalog, two important lists of the Scriptures of the early western church (Moo 2000: 4). In the second instance, scholars point out that Eusebius names James as one of the ‘antilegomena, that is, a letters of disputed origin and canonical authority’ (Witherington 2007: 385). Origen also calls James ‘the letter that bears the name James’, which seems to imply questions from the early church about James’s authorship (Witherington 2007: 386). These facts seem to suggest that James might have been written much later than the rest of the New Testament and that it might have been treated with suspicion and only brought into the New Testament canon after years of doubt about its origin and authorship. Luke Timothy Johnson’s extensive research on the use of James in the early, Greek-speaking church contradicts these assertions and underscores James’s importance in the eastern wing of the early Christian church. James seems to have been very popular in Egypt, especially among the teachers of Alexandria. Despite questions by scholars about James through Origen (as mentioned above), primary source research reveals that James is first explicitly quoted in the writings of the Egyptian church by Origen of Alexandria, and that Origen lists James among the Holy Christian Scriptures of his canon (Johnson 2004: 65, 69). After Origen, fragmentary evidence from Alexandria indicates that James was frequently used as Scripture. Cyril and Athanasius of Alexandria both quote him frequently (Johnson 2004: 69).

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The first extant commentary on James also comes from Egypt: it was the work of Didymus the Blind, an Alexandrian theologian of the fourth century (Johnson 2004: 69). Unsurprisingly, James was also a popular writing in Palestine, and particularly Jerusalem, the city from which the text was probably written (Johnson 2004: 70). In addition to Egyptian and Palestinian church leaders, James was a favorite book of the monks of the deserts of Egypt and of Palestine, as well as among the moralists of the city of Constantinople (Johnson 2004: 72). John Chrysostom, the great archbishop of Constantinople not only quoted James extensively but himself also wrote a commentary on James. According to Johnson, ‘monks appreciated James because, like him, they were concerned with the practical living out of Christian ideals. They found in him a clear and challenging support for flight from the world of sin, repentance, the giving of alms, and control of anger and of the tongue’ (2004: 72). Within these eastern writings, the author of James is called alternatively ‘the brother of the Lord’ (Origen), ‘disciple of Christ’ (Cyril of Alexandria) and ‘brother of God’ (John of Chrysostom); this last designation parallels the church calling Mary the ‘mother of God’ (Johnson 2004: 66). This suggests that the canonicity and authenticity of the letter was not disputed in every part of the Christian church. Despite James’s popularity in Alexandria and Palestine, James was not a favorite text of the eastern church in Cappodocia, the Antiochean portion of the eastern church. It appears that, in the fierce heresy struggles between Antioch and Alexandria, James was used by the Alexandrians and thus neglected or intentionally omitted by the Antiocheans (Johnson 2004: 71). John Chrysostom was the noted exception to this. Within the western church, the evidence for James was much more vague. It seems clear that 1 Clement, a late first-century text composed in Rome, quoted from James both in thought patterns and in particular borrowed words (Johnson 2004: 94; Witherington 2007: 398). So also, it seems, does The Shepherd of Hermas, an early second-century Christian text from Rome (Johnson 2004: 94). Some evidence indicates that James continues to be used in the Roman church well into the fourth century (Johnson 2004: 96). However, James’s popularity in the western part of the church depends on the intervention of three persons in Rome, all of whom studied Origen and held him in high esteem: Rufinus, Jerome and Augustine. Each of these, following the lead of the Egyptian church leader, included James as a crucial text in the canon of western Scripture (Johnson 2004: 96-98). Johnson’s reconstruction of the reception history of James provides a necessary response to the claim that James was not accepted by the early church, and therefore must be late and pseudonymous. As Johnson demonstrates, James was accepted both by the Roman church (1 Clement; The



1.   Questions of Identity 11

Shepherd of Hermas), and (more widely) by the Egyptian, as well as, ultimately, the eastern church through the influence of Origen of Alexandria. Thus, the absence of James from early canons like the Muratorian Canon does not in itself signal pseudonymity or that the writing was unknown by the entire Christian church. Questions about Torah and Sibling Relations Of the other arguments for pseudonymity, two can be quickly dismissed: the arguments about Torah observance and about James’s familial relationship with Jesus. In the former case, the argument made is that James does not deal with kosher laws, sacrifice or circumcision when there are major issues of Torah observance noted elsewhere in the New Testament. Thus, some consider the text’s approach to Torah too ‘liberal’ to belong to the James depicted in the Acts of the Apostles. However, as Douglas Moo notes, this is an ‘overinterpretation’ of who James was on the basis of extant fragments from the writings of the second-century historian Hegesippus (2000: 15). A close reading of James shows, rather, that the content of the text mirrors the New Testament depictions of James from Acts and Galatians. James’s concern over purity (Acts 21), Torah (Galatians 2) and commitment to the poor (Gal. 2.10) are clearly visible, if not focal or central. Even the language Luke uses to write James’s speech reveals ‘a remarkable similarity in both substance and vocabulary’ with James the writing (Wall 1997: 8). To expect the epistle of James to address the issues raised in Paul’s churches is to assume that these same issues were of concern for James’s ‘twelve tribes of the Dispersion’ (Jas 1.1). This is hardly a fair assumption at the outset. As to the argument about James’s familial relationship with Jesus, the argument is made that James’s silence about his familial relationship, about the resurrection or about personal conversations he had with Jesus of Nazareth points to the likelihood that he was not, in fact, Jesus’ brother and thus not James the Just. This argument assumes that James would need to include such details to establish his authority and authenticity with his firstcentury audience. This does not seem to be the concern of an author who felt confident enough to simply begin his letter with his name: James. Contemporary readers should keep in mind that there is no way to verify that this letter was the only text ever written by James. It is the only extant—that is, existing—text for us; however, James the Just might well have established jurisdiction over these early Christian churches in texts that had long since disappeared. Still, there are some clues to keep in mind. The author does not address Jesus with the rather exalted Christology of, say, the Philippian hymn (Philippians 2). Rather, James simply refers to Jesus as ‘Lord’ or ‘master’ and as ‘Christ’ or ‘the anointed’; these references suggest an earlier and lower Christology. Also, it seems clear that James knows the oral teaching of Jesus well. It is woven ‘into the very fabric of [his] instruction’

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(Moo 2000: 6), and includes ‘preliterary…allusions to the Sermon on the Mount’, allusions that suggest an oral familiarity with teachings that were not yet codified (Witherington 2007: 399). These suggest an early author: one whose writing predates the canonized Gospels, one who was deeply familiar with the oral teachings of Jesus and who had the authority to teach and write to churches ‘in the diaspora’. Furthermore, if one considers James’s references to (1) synagogue rather than church out Jas 2.2; (2) elders rather than bishops in 5.14; and (3) the early and late rains, a weather phenomenon peculiar to Palestine, in 5.7, one might see an author living in Roman Palestine during the early period of the formation of the church. James is unconcerned with demonstrating a close familial relationship with Jesus, but we cannot from this silence argue against the existence of such a relationship. There is simply not enough evidence upon which to make this argument and then an argument for pseudonymity. The Paul Question The final argument for pseudonymity touches upon the main objection to James that emerged in Protestant circles beginning with Martin Luther: its relationship to the writings of Paul of Tarsus. This argument centers around Jas 2.14-26, where James famously writes that faith without works is dead. Scholars who make this argument claim that James is responding to Paul and, at least in the case of one author, that he is also dependent on the writings of Paul for his own argument (Mitchell 2007). If this were to be accepted, then the author would be much less likely to be James the Just, for what historical writings we have suggest that James predeceased Paul. Any writing based on Paul’s later letters, then, must be pseudonymous. Other scholars raise counter arguments to the assertion that James relies on Paul. These include the possibility that James was written at a very early date (i.e. before the Jerusalem council), and so the author had no understanding of Paul’s teachings (Moo 2000: 20). As I have mentioned earlier, Todd C. Penner and Robert Wall also take a stand against reliance on Paul, respectively. For Penner, Paul and James might have been using a common tradition of moral teaching in the early church (1996: 60-61); for Wall, contemporary readers like us cannot easily surmise the order of events, since Paul himself could be responding to something rather than pioneering or innovating something to which others responded (2000: 9). The answer, then, to James’s reliance on Paul is that such reliance is ultimately not provable at the moment. As such, for many scholars, it cannot stand as a barrier to an early dating of James or its authorship by James the Just. Answering the questions raised by those who have hypothesized that James is pseudonymous does not, in itself, prove that James is an authentic writing of James the Just of Jerusalem. With regards to ancient writings,



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proof is often illusory and assertions of certainty, foolish. Indeed, it is entirely possible, although rarely considered, that the James in this letter is some other author named James known to the recipients of the letter but lost to us in history. Still, the weight of evidence suggests that, contrary to older scholarship, James was a known book of the first century, both in Rome and in the southeastern church, particularly the church in Egypt. It was written in a studied, Septuagint Greek, thus implying an author who was educated in the common Greek texts of Judaism, but perhaps not in the Hebrew or Aramaic texts. While James does not address some of the more heated arguments about Torah observation found in Paul (which might actually function as an argument for it preceding Paul), it does reflect the kind of concerns about piety and purity that James the Just of Jerusalem is said to have held in other parts of the New Testament. Further, without the presence of dated autographs, no definitive proof can be given that James relies on Pauline writing rather than on traditions commonly held by Paul and others. All of this suggests that, though James may yet be a pseudonymous writing, it may as easily be authentic and its authenticity may be the simplest answer to its reception and popularity within Palestine, Egypt and Rome. By When Was This Text Written? Establishing the possible date of an ancient text is often as hard as establishing its author. Further, the two are often intertwined: an earlier date or later date may be assigned based on a scholar’s hypothesis of the authenticity or pseudonymity of the text’s authorship. Although pinpointing exact dates of a text’s initial writing is impossible, certain criteria, like dependence and intra-textual clues, can help to establish parameters for a timeframe within which an ancient writing might have been written. Consider the criterion of dependence: determining lines of dependence means deciding whether or not an ancient text is quoted by another ancient text of whose date we are more certain. Unless there is clear evidence that both texts are sharing a common source, the quoted text is likely to be older than the text which quotes it. As for James, it is quoted in at least two ancient texts that we are fairly certain post-date it: 1 Clement and The Shepherd of Hermas. 1 Clement is a late first-century or early second-century encyclical from Clement the bishop of Rome to the church in Corinth. In it, Luke Timothy Johnson and other commentators have found clues of its possible dependence on James. These include (1) Clement’s concern for the care of orphans and widows; (2) his use of the unusual word ‘double-minded’; (3) the ongoing theme of ‘opposition between arrogance and humility’; (4) references to ‘wars and…battles among you’, which echo Jas 4.1; (5) a discussion of envy and call to conversion similar to that in James 4; and (6) a reference to Abraham as one who was considered righteous because of his

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deeds (Johnson 1995: 73-74). A particularly unusual sequence of 13 parallels with James within 1 Clement; these occur toward the end of 1 Clement in the section that begins with an ‘exhortation to approach God in holiness of soul and with pure hands’ (Johnson 1995: 74). As Johnson himself notes, this evidence is not conclusive; however, it is suggestive that James might have been a source for this late first-century document. This, in turn, would mean that James has to be dated earlier in the first-century. As for The Shepherd of Hermas, a late first-century or early secondcentury apocalypse, the parallels are even more striking. Hermas uses not only similar language to James (e.g. ‘double-minded’) but also, even more impressively, a similar understanding of the cosmos. In Hermas as in James, a spatial relationship between God and the devil (represented by ‘above’ and ‘this world’ or ‘the earth’) leads to advice to turn toward the ‘faith from above’ (Johnson 1995: 77). James’s concerns about wealth and poverty, the oppression of the poor, favoritism toward the rich and the self-assuredness of business people all find their expression in Hermas (Johnson 1995: 78). In addition, James’s concerns for wicked speech and his upholding of those who endure are also present in Hermas, as is his belief that ‘the implanted word’ (1.21) can save one’s soul (Johnson 1995: 78-79). Even James’s discussion of sins of omission (4.17) and his counsel to turn those who are wandering back toward the way (5.19-20) are found in Hermas. As Johnson puts it, ‘Hermas meets all the criteria for deciding in favor of literary dependence. Within a document of manifestly different literary character and purpose, there is an extended sharing in outlook, theme and language with James’s’ (Johnson 1995: 79). Taking Shepherd of Hermas and 1 Clement together, it seems fairly safe to assert that James must have been written in the middle of the first century. Much later that that hardly seems plausible, if the text had to travel from Jerusalem to its intended audience of readers and then on to Rome, and to gain enough prominence that it would influence other early Christian writings like the two we have discussed. Of course, its wide influence does not remove the possibility of pseudonymity. It lessens it to be sure but, given this evidence alone, one could still argue for a date of composition that postdates 62 ce, when most scholars date the death of James the Just. Textual dependence may narrow dates, but other clues must also be considered. For James, these clues are hidden in the text of the letter itself and in its silences. The first of these clues, which we have already noted above, is placing James’s provenance in Palestine and not Rome, from where 1 Clement and The Shepherd of Hermas are often viewed to originate. James notes weather patterns in 5.7—late as well as early rains—that are typical of Palestine, but not Rome. Thus, it is unlikely that James was composed in Rome. If James was written in Jerusalem, and even if one were to posit that it was written in Samaria or the Galilee, a Palestinian location for



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composition almost certainly moves James’s date back earlier than 70 ce, the time of the Roman siege of Jerusalem. Indeed, if James were written during that time of conflict, one would expect the letter to reflect that conflict in some way (e.g. see Mark 13). However, although James identifies Palestinian weather patterns, there is no mention in the text of this sort of violence or danger, as one might expect for a time around 70 ce. There are other clues also. Consider, for instance, James’s use of the word ‘synagogue’ in 2.2 to refer to the gatherings of the Christ-followers to whom he writes, when the more common word for such gatherings in the New Testament is ekklēsia. Paul’s gatherings of Christ-followers are always referred to as ekklēsiai, and Paul’s writings were quite early, ranging between 40 and 66 ce within Pauline scholarship. Yet, James chooses to use the word ‘synagogue’, the common word for the gathering of the faithful both in Second Temple Judaism and in very early Christianity, before the increasing tensions over the identity of and faith in Jesus caused separation not only of communities but also of vocabularies. Indeed, much of James’s discourse is reminiscent of Second Temple Judaism. James is notable within the New Testament for ‘the absence of any awareness of the conflict over Torah that emerged in the early church as a result of the Gentile mission’ (Moo 2000: 25-26). As noted briefly before, James’s writing includes echoes of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5–7. These are ‘preliterary allusions’ rather than quotations. They probably come from the oral traditions that, later, would be incorporated into the written Gospels; as such, they point to James being composed earlier rather than later than the canonical Gospels (Witherington 2007: 398). Even the sections of James that don’t allude to Jesus’ teachings point to an earlier rather than later date. Penner notes, for instance, the similarity between James and the Judaism of the Second Temple (1996: 27577). According to Pedrito Maynard-Reid, James ‘presupposes the social position of the primitive Palestinian community, particularly Jerusalem, prior to the Apostolic Council’ (1987: 8). In short, there is a significant amount of internal and external evidence to suggest that this ancient writing was written in the early part of the first century, in a context of Second Temple Judaism-inflected Christianity. It derives from the Palestinian mainland, as its weather description demonstrates. Its writing bears none of the later scars that would characterize the fierce infighting between Jews who came to believe the messianic claims about Jesus of Nazareth, and Jews who did not. As Andrew Chester puts it, ‘James is representative of a specific form of Jewish Christianity, and is addressed to a particular group or groups of Jewish-Christians outside Palestine’ (1994: 15). Given the evidence available, a reasonable hypothesis is that this text was written between 40 and 60 ce by James the Just during his leadership of the church in Jerusalem in a period that precedes

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the internecine fighting between church and synagogue or the terrors of the Roman siege. What Kind of Writing is This? Considerations of genre may seem separate from the questions surrounding authorship and dating of James. However, identifying a text’s genre can strengthen an hypothesis of who an author is or might be and establish what the author intends to accomplish by writing the text. In the case of James, considerations of genre have shifted as radically as have hypotheses about authorship: from the assertion that this text is a series of unconnected instructions and exhortations (paraenesis), some scholars have begun to argue that this text is an encyclical homily. For a long time, the accepted scholarly hypothesis about James’s genre relied on the work of Martin Dibelius, an early twentieth-century German scholar. According to Douglas Moo, Dibelius argues that James is best classified as paraenesis because (1) it is heavy on exhortation, (2) it is focused on a general situation and (3) it uses traditional material and is loosely organized (Moo 2000: 8). Dibelius presents James as ‘a jumble of teachings held together, at best, through catchwords’ (Batten 2007: 16), such as faith or envy. James is, in short, a disorganized mess in which ‘there is no continuity of thought’ (Witherington 2007: 390). According to Dibelius, ‘the author of James moves quickly from topic to topic, and the logical relationship of the topics is not at all clear’ (Moo 2000: 7). Dibelius can be forgiven for this perspective. Certainly to the contemporary reader of the English New Testament who is not steeped in ancient rhetorical or literary structures, James can read as a string of unrelated arguments that, despite some very forceful points, do not seem to hold together at all. However, more recent scholars have shown that James’s text is actually a piece of carefully crafted rhetoric that was intended to be read aloud in community by the few who were literate to the majority who were not. Ever since Dibelius’s argument, scholars have been re-examining James to see whether it is as disconnected as Dibelius has claimed. Upon closer examination, scholars first noticed evidence of small units of organized thought in James. They argued, for instance, that James 2 is a coherent argument about faith and works, and that James 3 is about teaching and governing one’s words. Others pointed to James’s use of alliteration and word play (Witherington 2007: 389), which one would not expect to find in jumbled ideas that are just gathered together. Eventually, scholars began to propose an entire structure for the epistle of James, based on the rules of ancient rhetoric. By the rules of ancient rhetoric, a speaker who is advocating for a change of behavior will start by warming up the audience and getting their trust;



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this part of the speech is called the exordium. Then the speaker may lay out the basic structure of an argument in a short statement called the propositio, from which we get our English word ‘proposition’. This will then be followed by the speaker’s elaboration on his or her arguments. Finally, the speaker will appeal to the emotion of the listener through an exhortation and emotional appeal called the peroratio. Witherington argues that such a structure is clearly visible in James: the exordium is found in Jas 1.2-18; the propositio in Jas 1.19-27; the arguments from Jas 2.1–5.6; the peroratio in Jas 5.7-20. Organized in this way, James transforms from being a collection of sayings into a clear appeal from a recognized leader to gatherings of Christfollowers ‘in the diaspora’ (Jas 1.1). It also points to someone with at least a good knowledge of Greek rhetoric, yet who knew the Septuagint and the oral traditions of the teachings of Jesus. The crafter of such a rhetorical argument must have been someone who was not only interested in gathering together important statements of faith and pithy proverbs, but someone who also wished to persuade the hearers of the argument toward particular actions and reactions, particular ways of living ‘in the diaspora’. There is, however, one verse that is not strictly a part of the rhetorical structure proposed by Witherington and others: Jas 1.1. In this first verse, James the author begins as though he were writing a letter: ‘James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes in the diaspora, greetings’. And yet, the rest of James is missing most of the customary structures of an ancient letter, like ‘greetings, references to fellow works and travel plans…references to specific people, places or situations’ (Moo 2007: 6). Still, to repeat Richard Bauckham’s argument: ‘James has the only formal feature of the ancient letter form which was essential: the letteropening’ (1999: 12). Thus, according to Bauckham and others, James must be a letter. This seeming conundrum between James as a homily and James as a letter is relatively easily resolved if one turns to the culture of Jerusalem around the time when James was writing: 40–60 ce. At that time, there was already a long tradition—going back over four centuries—of letters from Jerusalem to the diaspora. These included brief letters on matters of law, like those sent by Rabbi Gamaliel, as well as longer letters on life together like that sent by Jeremiah to the Babylonian exiles in Jeremiah 29 (Bauckham 1999: 19-20). According to Acts 15, James the Just sends at least one such letter to the Gentile churches with stipulations about ethical behavior for Christ-followers. All of this suggests, as Alicia Batten argues, that ‘James is a letter which deliberately seeks to convince its audience about what to think and what to do, and this persuasion clearly involves consideration of material concerns, as well as the relationship between ideas and practices’ (Batten 2007: 16).

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One might solve the conundrum, then, by calling James an encyclical letter, or perhaps better a homiletic letter or epistolary sermon. It is, in fact, both a letter and a sermon in one document. Structured as a speech, it follows precise rhetorical patterns that would have been familiar to its audience of hearers—so not individual readers as we tend to be today. However, this was a speech with legs. For a people without video conferencing and livestreaming, this text became James’s virtual presence within the diaspora communities. The speech was not, after all, for Jerusalem but for dispersed Christ-followers, and as such took the form of long-distance communication for the first century: a letter. To try to choose between these two genres for James would be like trying to decide whether a YouTube link sent via email of Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream Speech’ is first an email or a speech. It is in fact both of these. The email is the form of conduit and the reliability and verifiability of its sender affects the way in which the link is received (and whether or not it is viewed). Yet, what is received is, finally, not an email but a speech, a received missive from the sender to the viewer of someone not physically present but made present through their words (and in the case of a video, their words and deeds). So what is this ancient text and who wrote it? In truth, we can only hypothesize and, like Dibelius before us, our hypotheses may prove fallible in the next generation of scholarship. However, the best information we have today suggests that James is not a late, pseudonymous collection of wisdom sayings somewhat randomly assembled with catchphrases loosely binding it together. James is an ancient epistolary sermon or homiletic letter, an encyclical from James the Just, the head of the early Christian church in Jerusalem to communities that were, for the most part, Jews that had come to believe in the messianic claims of Jesus of Nazareth and part of the early Christian movement. These communities were actually, rather than metaphorically, in diaspora and worshiped in communities that they (still) called ‘synagogues’, not ekklēsiai like Paul’s assemblies of a later time. James assumed they knew who he was, and that, as a community or communities of Jewish Christ-followers (as opposed to Gentile Christ-followers), they would have been steeped in the language of the Septuagint as he was. Like his contemporaries of the Sanhedrin, James wrote to these sisters and brothers—as Jerusalem had always written to the Diaspora—to call them to a pattern of faith and life.

2

Listening to James If the genre, authorship, dating and structure of James have been considered enigmatic until recently, equally so has been James’s argument. Some of the responsibility for this enigma lies with the endurance of Martin Dibelius’s hypothesis regarding the nature of James. Dibelius calls James an unstructured ‘paraenesis’, a collection of wisdom sayings loosely-held together. Perhaps the primary reason that Dibelius’s hypothesis is so enduring is that, although James begins like any ancient letter, it does not follow the structure of a letter. If this is what we expect to find in James, it is no wonder that James appears unstructured and loosely tied together. James does have a structure—not the structure of a letter but the structure of an ancient speech. As scholarship has now come to argue, James structures his encyclical according to the rules of ancient rhetoric: exordium, propositio, probatio, peroratio. This ‘letter’ was meant to be heard; and we must, therefore, try to ‘listen’ to James and ‘hear’ the points that James makes in his speech as he tries to convince those he calls the ‘twelve tribes’ to live according to ‘the religion from above’ (1.1; 3.17). The Epistolary Introduction James begins his ‘speech’ in the form of a letter. This opening verse would seem to be an anomaly; as James was writing a speech, as noted above. However, the opening verse, sometimes called ‘the epistolary introduction’ occurs in all of the oldest manuscripts we have of James. Therefore, we have to assume, based on what we know, that it is an original part of the ancient text. In adding this prescript, James signals that he intends his speech for a wider audience: he expects it to be mobile. In the ancient world’s equivalent of YouTube, James is sending out a ‘virtual representation’ of himself and of his instruction to those women and men whom he calls ‘the twelve tribes in the diaspora’ (1.1). As noted in Chapter 1, James, whose Greek name is Jacobos or the Greek form of Jacob, offers very little explanation of who he is. He calls himself ‘a slave of God and the Lord Jesus Christ’. ‘Slave of God’ was a common moniker for those who were considered in a special relationship to

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God. Thus Moses and Daniel are called ‘slave of God’ to denote their particular relationship with the Holy One of Israel (Neh. 10.29; Dan. 6.20). Notably, James does not call himself ‘slave of God and brother of the Lord Jesus Christ’, which has led some commentators to suggest that he could not be James the Just of Jerusalem, Jesus’ brother. However, James’s choice to name himself not a brother of Jesus but his slave, ironically, would be an increase in status for him, for it would denote the same relationship between himself and his brother that Moses had with God—slave of the Holy One. And while slavery was and is an oppressive relationship, there was an uncritical use of slavery as a metaphor for the worship of or devotion to a holy being or deity in the ancient world that elevated the status of ‘slave of the Holy’ in paradoxical ways. Further, James’s naming of Jesus as Lord and Christ reflects what seems to have been a very early designation of Jesus in the early church. It stands to reason that James, as a leader of the early church, would use established language of the church in a letter to far-flung groups of believers. These groups of believers James calls ‘the twelve tribes in the diaspora’. Clearly, ‘twelve tribes’ is a reference to Israel, a reference that occurs frequently both in the New Testament and in the Hebrew Bible. This may well suggest that the community or communities to which James was writing should be predominantly Jewish (rather than Gentile) followers of Christ. It seems unlikely that, without theological explanation, James would have written such a greeting to those who did not understand themselves to be part of that narrative. There is no small irony that this missive ‘to the twelve tribes’ was being written by one named after Jacob, the father of the original twelve. Although the author could play off of this irony in his writing, he does not. Instead, he connects his audience to a different narrative by referring to them as ‘in the diaspora’. The original sense of ‘diaspora’ is the forced dispersion, or scattering, of Judah and Israel after being conquered by foreign nations. From this dispersion grew communities of Jews to the south and north of the Mediterranean Sea, around the Mesopotamian delta and east into modern-day Iran. James could certainly be writing to cells of Christfollowers among these groups of dispersed Jews. However, James could also be talking to members of the earliest church who fled Jerusalem after the first rejection of Christ-followers after the stoning of Stephen, to which Paul was a party (Acts 6–7). If James was writing after this violent incident and subsequent scattering, then James might well be writing to those who gave their allegiance to Christ in Jerusalem and fled the city after Stephen’s death. To be sure, James makes no note or mention of this incident; however, the beginning verses of James mention trials, which raises the possibility that James might not be speaking theoretically in his counsel to count trials as ‘joy’ (1.2).



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The Exordium—1.2-18 The actual speech James is making begins in Jas 1.2. As is typical of this style of speech—called deliberative rhetoric—James begins with an exordium, an element of rhetoric intended ‘to make the audience open and well-disposed to what follows’ (Witherington 2009: 16). By paying some attention to the way James presents the exordium, one can get a better sense of the kind of community that James is addressing. If one could hear the text of James read aloud in its original language, Greek, the first thing one might notice is that James is a wordsmith who loves to make linguistic connections between words and phrases. Thus 1.3-4 are joined by ‘endurance’, 1.5-6 by variations on the words ‘give’ and ‘ask’, 1.4-5 by ‘lack’ and so forth. James even takes the time to play with alliteration, the stylistic repetition of a particular sound at the beginning of many words in a row (e.g. ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers’). Consider 1.2. In one translation, this reads ‘whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy’ (nrsv). However, James’s alliteration sounds more like this: ‘consider it all joy when you trip into teeming tests’ or, even closer, ‘consider it all joy when you plummet into plenteous problems’. All of this wordplay suggests that James expects his audience to hear his text, not to read it silently. He is playing with words and making connections so that they will both enjoy his discourse and make appropriate mental connections as they listen. A well-written speech, which James’s language play portends, already disposes an audience to listen to the words of the speaker. However, an exordium does not only predispose an audience favorably through its style. Its subject must also draw an audience in. For his opening subjects, James has chosen two: the trials of the community and the limitless benevolence of God. James begins with trials perhaps because he has already identified his audience as those who are dispersed now. In their place of dispersion, James seems to say that they are facing numerous trials (1.2), although what these are is unclear. Certainly, a part of those trials must be an economic and social lowering, for James contrasts in a countercultural manner the exaltation of the lowly with the abasement of the rich (1.9-10). However, the bigger and more dangerous trial is that which comes out of one’s desire, a trial that ultimately leads to sin and death (1.14-15). Here, desire can be compared with another trial or threat that will show up later in James: envy, which could lead to ostracism, gossip, feuding, litigation and homicide (Malina 2001: 118-20; cf. Jas 4.1-2). James is identifying two characteristics of his community here. They face multiple tests and a sense of lack (1.3-4, 17-18); and they are in danger of succumbing to the kind of desirous envy that can lead even to murder (4.1-2). By naming these two things, James signals his understanding of

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their plight and also of the danger that they face as a community. But his rhetoric suggests that he is optimistic about their strength as a community. Thus he can counsel them to count trials as joy with an eye to endurance and becoming fully complete (1.2-4). Those who are complete and lack nothing would have no need to be envious of others. In the same way, James depicts the lowly person as more able to endure than the wealthy with fleeting riches (1.9-11), and honors the one who, like a gladiator, endures the fight and gains the crown (1.12). These are the kinds of persons who these dispersed tribes might become: enduring fighters who, though lowly, are complete, want nothing and will earn the crown. James also reminds the community of the presence of a benevolent God, unchanging in the midst of trials, steadfast and trustworthy in the midst of tests and temptations brought on by community desires, and limitless in giving in the event of any lack, a God who gave birth to this community of enduring fighters as ‘first fruits’—the portion of the harvest specifically dedicated to God (1.5-8, 13-18). In creating this tone in the exordium, James hopes that this combination of depicting the community as enduring gladiators and God as the limitless benefactor of these dispersed persons will open the hearts of his listeners to his teaching. The Propositio—1.19-27 The propositio of an ancient speech is its thesis statement. In it, a speaker lays out before the intended audience the main points of the speech ahead of them. James’s proposito, 1.19-27, functions in exactly this way. In it, James lays out for his audience the primary themes of the rest of his encyclical. He begins, in 1.19-20, with a description of how the endurance he spoke about in the exordium should look. That endurance should not be characterized by wrath or anger, one of the side effects of envy, or by idle speech—that is gossip. Gossip, in turn, is a side effect of envy. Envy in the ancient world was not simply desire for the things that others had. Envy was understood to be a destructive force that might lead to the death of another (Malina 2001: 108-83). These things, James reminds his audience, do not bring about God’s ‘justice’ (dikaiosynē), a more accurate translation than the more common ‘righteousness’ found in most modern translations. Justice is a remedy for the inequities of the ancient world that are hinted at in James’s exordium, inequities such as trials and poverty that his communities would be experiencing. These inequities would lead to a desire for justice and a temptation to envy as noted above. Although James does not mention envy by name in the propositio, in James’s references to wrath and gossip and in his reminder that what is needed is God’s justice (rather than vengeance), a first-century listener would immediately understand that the



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effect of envy on the communities in dispersion is one of James’s primary concerns. James’s second theme for his encyclical is the one for which he is most often maligned: the call to do rather than just to hear the word (1.21-25). In this section of the propositio, James highlights this theme with threefold repetitions of word (logos), hearer (akroatēs) and doer (poiētēs). James’s argument here gives the antithesis to envy-inspired wrath or anger: welcoming ‘the implanted word of the one who is able to save your souls’ or perhaps ‘your lives’ (1.25), since the Greek word psychē can mean either. The argument is plain. Salvation from the trials of this world can only come from ‘one who is able to save’. The nature of the ‘implanted word’ that the community is to receive (1.21) and do (1.22-24) remains undefined until 1.25. There, James identifies the word (logos) with Torah (nomos), which he calls ‘the perfect law of freedom’. This description of Torah as ‘perfect’ echoes what we find in Ps. 19.7 (Ps. 18.7 in lxx). James’s belief that obedience to Torah brings freedom was a common theme for writers in the Second Temple era such as Philo and the author of 4 Maccabees (Johnson 1995: 209). However, James’s identification of word (logos) with Torah (nomos) sets his writing apart from other New Testament writings, particularly those of Paul and of the writings of the school of John. For James, unlike Paul, Torah is perfect and the source of freedom; it is to be used as a mirror for ‘moral self-examination’ (Johnson 1995: 210), and to be acted out by the faithful (1.23-25). The encyclical will return to this theme particularly in James 2 and in the last argument that spans James 4 and 5. James’s final theme laid out in the propositio is a call to what the African American spiritual famously calls ‘true religion’. Indeed, James repeats ‘religion’ or ‘religious’ (thrēskos/thrēskeia) three times in 1.26-27. For James, true religion has three characteristics. First, it refrains from the gossip that envy can cause by ‘bridling’ the tongue (1.26), as James has already suggested in 1.19. Second, it does the requirements of the implanted word—that is, the Torah—by caring for orphans and widows (1.27), which is a constant refrain particularly in Deuteronomy. Third, it keeps itself pure from the ‘world’ (kosmos), which James always sees as a place in opposition to ‘our God and father’ (1.27). This final call to a religion unmarked by the kosmos, along with the charge against envy and the call to live out Torah, represent themes that James will reiterate throughout his encyclical. ‘The Faith of our Master Jesus’— Chapter 2 James launches into the argument section of his encyclical in James 2 with a two-part discourse on the practice of faith. However, he is making a very different argument from the Pauline assertion of ‘salvation by grace through

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faith’ (cf. Eph. 2.8). Instead, James is demonstrating for his audience what faith looks like when put into practice. In the first part of James’s discourse, he argues that ‘the faith of our master Jesus’ stands in direct opposition to favoritism or, literally, ‘taking face’ (prosōpolēmpsia/prosōpolēmpteō, 2.1, 9). He begins to build his argument by giving an egregious example of what this favoritism might look like: For if a gold-ringed man should enter your synagogue in bright clothing, and a destitute person should enter in filthy clothing, and if you should gaze on the one who is wearing the bright clothing and should say, ‘You, sit here in a good place’, and to the destitute person you should say, ‘You stand there’ or ‘Sit under my footstool’—have you not differentiated among yourselves and become judges with wicked reasoning? (2.2-4).

James’s example presents a stark contrast between two visitors to the worshiping community. The first, specifically called ‘a man’ (anēr), signals by the brightness of his clothing and the gold rings on his fingers that he is not a member of the working class or of the poor. The second visitor is not called a man, but simply ptōchos, a masculine word that refers to someone who is ‘dependent on others for support’ (Bauer et al. 2001: 6423). Within the honor-shame world of James’s day, the natural tendency would have been to give honor to the former and to shame the latter. Yet James highlights and criticizes ‘the typical honor-shame favoritism of ancient culture’ (Johnson 1995: 228). James proceeds to remind the community that those of the gold-ringed, bright-clothed class oppress them, drag them before tribunals and slander (blasphēmeō) the name invoked upon them (2.6-7). By contrast, the destitute poor are those who are affluent in faith and whose inheritance will be God’s empire or kingdom. The irony in James’s argument is pointed. If faith and inheritance of the kingdom are goals of the beloved community, then should they not be honoring those who abound in such things? Not only is this ‘taking face’ illogical, argues James, but it is also unlawful. Here James refers back to the ‘law’ (nomos)—that is, the Torah. To astute listeners, this would have been clear from the beginning of James’s argument, as it would have reminded them of Leviticus 19 in the Septuagint. (The Septuagint, or the Greek translation of the Scriptures of Judaism, would also have been the Bible of the early church.) In the Septuagint, Lev. 19.15 cautions you shall not ‘take face’ (ou lēmpsēi prosōpon); it is these last two words that James has combined into prosōpolēmpsia (Johnson 1995: 228). Further, the ‘royal Torah’ in Jas 2.8 is a quotation from Lev. 19.18. Thus James gives the community a choice. They can act as violators of Torah who ‘take face’, or as those who are to be judged by the Torah of freedom and thus obey the law and do not ‘take face’, even if it costs them the protection of patronage in their communities (Jas 2.9, 12). Those who would demonstrate the faith of Jesus must choose the latter for,



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as James warns, those who show no mercy will have no mercy shown to them (2.10). It should not be surprising that James calls the gathering place a ‘synagogue’ in 2.2, particularly if James is given an early date of composition. Rodney Stark has shown that earliest Christianity was an outgrowth not first of Gentile groupings but of Jews who came to believe in the messianic claims about Jesus (Stark 2011: 71-87). That in 5.14 James calls the same gathering an ‘assembly’ or ‘church’ (ekklēsia) suggests that the distinction between synagogue and church had not yet been hardened by schism. The second part of James’s discourse on faith (2.14-26) parallels the first (2.1-13) in at least five ways. It begins with a question for which James expects a negative answer. It focuses on actions that James considers incompatible with the claim that one has faith. It presents an extreme hypothetical example of the principle under discussion. It turns from examples in contemporary life to the teachings of the community’s Scriptures. Finally, it ends with a pithy, memorable statement summarizing James’s position. However, while James is focused on separating faith from favoritism in the first part of the discourse, he is focused on connecting faith with action in the second. The opening question to James’s second discourse on faith raises the challenge of whether the claim to have faith without accompanying actions (works) is able to save a sister or brother within the community (2.14). James expects a negative response, and this is underscored by the example James provides to make his point. If a brother or a sister is naked and is lacking daily sustenance, and if someone of you should say, ‘Go in peace, keep warm and be fed’ but you do not give to them the things that are necessary for the body, of what benefit is it? (2.15-16).

Note that once more, James has chosen to focus the community’s attention on the poor. In the first example, the poor person was dishonored. In this example, their needs are neglected. The problem of poverty, however, is secondary to James’s main point: the true nature of faith. For James, those who demonstrate ‘the faith of our master Jesus Christ of glory’ (2.1) would neither dishonor nor fail to act on behalf of the poor. James’s second discourse then turns toward the Scriptures of the community. Before he makes that transition, however, James posits a hypothetical interlocutor: someone who accuses James of having faith while the interlocutor has works (2.18; cf. Witherington 2007: 475). James’s retort is that he can demonstrate his faith by his works, and in so doing makes the distinction between faith and works seem senseless. James then turns to the Scriptures, pointing out that belief is not enough. First, James points out that belief in the oneness of God (see Deut. 6.4) is something shared by

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believers and demons; such a belief, by itself, is not sufficient (2.19). His counter-examples to this are Abraham and Rahab, both of whom act out their faith and are counted as just by God because of it (2.21-25). Note that James argues that Abraham is not only counted as just but is also called ‘friend of God’ (2.23). The question of friendship (philos/philia) will return later in Jas 4.1, except he will be excoriating friendship with the world there rather than praising friendship with God. James ends his discourse on the nature of faith with the maxim, ‘just as the body without breath is dead, so also faith without works is dead’ (2.26). This final assertion seems to contradict the assertions of Paul of Tarsus that salvation is by faith alone and not by works. The similarity in vocabulary could well be a coincidence. As Johnson points out, ‘both James and Paul were first generation members of a messianic movement that defined itself in terms of the “faith of Jesus”’ and ‘both instinctively turned to Torah for that explication and found…the figure Abraham as open to midrashic exploitation’ (Johnson 1995: 250). Alternatively, the similarity in vocabulary but dissimilarity in emphasis might point to the diversity of early Christian thought about what it means to be a person of the faith of Jesus Christ. Perhaps in response to that diversity, James argues that faith turns from favoritism but is demonstrated in good works. The Wise Ones— Chapter 3 Scholars are generally in agreement regarding the division of the arguments in James 2. However, for James 3, there are numerous proposals. Some, following Johnson, break the chapter into two separate arguments: 3.1-13 and 3.14–4.10 (Johnson 1995: 254-89). Others like Cargal posits an argument that runs from Jas 3.1–4.12 (1993: 137-68). Like Witherington, Wall and Davids, I think James 3 is a single argument. This disagreement underscores just how well constructed James’s encyclical is: every argument builds upon the last until it is sometimes difficult to tell where one ends and another begins. Whereas the subject of James’s first argument is faith, the subject of his second argument is wisdom—or, to be more precise, the nature of the wise ones of his community. The connection between faith and wisdom first appears in Jas 1.5-6. There, James counsels those who lack wisdom to ask for it in faith. In his first argument, James illustrates the nature of faith. Now, James turns to the kind of wisdom for which the one with faith should ask. As in the first argument, so also here James sets up foils for his argument: flawed human examples from which he will draw a lesson for the community. In James 3, his foils, among which James numbers himself, are teachers who stumble in speech (3.1-2). In James’s day, teachers would have been ‘textual performers’ and ‘text brokers’ (Snyder 2000: 190). They



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might have attained that status through ‘patrimony or proper connections’, but there is also the likelihood that, within the earliest communities of Christ-followers, the status of ‘teacher’ was ‘won through public demonstration and debate’ (Snyder 2000: 191). According to Snyder: To speak publicly was to perform, and technical aspects of speaking, including both voice and posture, were measures by which an audience might judge a speaker. Pronunciation, correct word formation, and tone of voice appropriate to the subject matter all were crucial to a speaker’s success… Comprehensive control of one’s subject matter was also of utmost importance (2000: 191).

When James speaks about teachers who stumble in their speech, it seems likely that he is invoking this kind of public performance and verbal command of the law, rather than our modern image of the bookish professor or schoolteacher. It is the public nature of a teacher’s performance that will cause the strict judgment of Jas 3.1: the judgment comes not only from God but also from the teacher’s audience. After all, one’s very honor as a teacher and sage is on the line every time one opens one’s mouth. The danger to teachers, the sages of James’s community, is the uncontrolled tongue. To James, the tongue is the member of the body that is most difficult to control; only the complete or mature teacher (teleios) is capable of controlling it (3.2). James values completion or maturity very highly, holding it up as a characteristic of God and of the Scriptures (1.17, 25). However, in the case of aspiring teachers, that completion is often thwarted by their only means of proving their wisdom: speech with the tongue. And, for James, the work of the uncontrolled tongue is the very antithesis of wisdom. For James, the tongue represents ‘the world of injustice [ho kosmos tēs adikias] within our members’ (3.6). Later, in James 4, the ‘world’ (kosmos) will be identified as the antithesis of God. James warns that those who befriend the world find themselves in the unenviable position of being God’s enemies (4.4). The tongue, this cosmic instrument of destruction, is able, like a ship’s rudder, to steer our bodies and, like a small flame, to set an entire forest ablaze (3.4-5). Indeed, by James’s account, the tongue has the power to set ablaze even the wheel of existence itself and derives its power from Gehenna—James’s euphemism for hell (3.6). Thus far, James is simply making an emotionally descriptive case about the power of the tongue and attributing this power to evil forces. However, in 3.7, he explains clearly his antipathy for the tongue and how it has the power to discredit wise, well-practiced orators like the teachers of James’s day. At stake, for James, is that the tongue of even the wisest person or the most gifted teacher is capable of cursing other human beings made in the divine image while at the same time blessing the one in whose image they are made (3.9-10). For James, this goes against the very laws of nature or

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wheel of existence (3.6), for all other natural objects act according to kind. As James puts it: Surely a spring out of the same opening does not pour forth sweet and bitter, does it? Surely a fig tree is not able, my sisters and brothers to bear olives or a grapevine, figs? Nor can salt water create sweet water (3.11-12).

And yet, the tongue functions contrary to nature: as a member of the body, it is able to bring forth blessing and cursing, sweet and bitter. It is unable to be controlled except by the most complete or mature teacher. Having established the fragile wisdom of would-be teachers who are unable to control the tongue, James then explores the nature of ‘wisdom from above’ (3.17). The wise ones, James argues, like the faithful ones in James 2, display their wisdom through what they do rather than through what they say (3.13). In contrast to them, James places those who, in their envy and strife ‘exult and lie against the truth’ (3.14). Here, then, is the way that the tongue’s power manifests itself among people. In speaking, it reveals that their hearts are envious and full of strife rather than full of wisdom’s gentleness (3.13, 15). James is pointing his community to the same kind of truth that is credited to Jesus in Mk 7.21-23: the kinds of evil thoughts and acts which might emerge from within a person render that person unclean— or. as James might say, ‘earthly, unspiritual’ and ‘demonic’ (3.15). James 3.17 is the climax of James’s second argument, as it lays out for the community just exactly how wise ones should act. Pulling on all of his poetic power, James creates a list that would be striking if read aloud. Nine of the words of the list start with either the Greek letter alpha or the Greek letter eta, two vowels that are fairly close in sound; some of these words also rhyme, three or more in a row—this is a rhetorical technique known as epiphora (Witherington 2007: 503). Of note are the characteristics that are highlighted in this list of virtues, another common trope of Hellenistic rhetoric. James highlights, as the first characteristic of wisdom, purity. The word for pure here, hagnos, signifies a ritual purity as well as a moral purity, which, in a way similar to what Mark’s Jesus taught (Mk 7.18-23), cannot be yours if envy and strife emit from your heart via your mouth—that is, your tongue. Next, James highlights the peaceableness of the wise ones; these are the ones who, by making peace, sow justice in their community. This will be less obvious to English readers, but there is then a word that does not begin with either alpha or eta; it is, in other words, among the very few words in this verse that do not fit into the Greek alliteration. The word is ‘full’ (mestē), the modifier of ‘mercies’. As this word breaks the practice of epiphora, it may be a signal that the mercies of the wise are able to crowd out the envy and strife of the unspiritual. The second word that breaks the epiphora is the word ‘fruits’ (karpōn), underscoring again James’s preference for those who demonstrate their wisdom



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through their actions rather than those who assert their wisdom through their speech. With his repetition of ‘fruit’ (which the nrsv renders ‘harvest’ in English) in 3.18, James strengthens the parallel arguments of James 2 and James 3. In each, the community is called to action rather than speech; action will make visible the community’s spirituality, whether understood as faith or as wisdom from above. Calls to Repentance—4.1–5.6 In James 4, the encyclical begins a fourfold call to the arrogant in the community—those whom God opposes—to repentance (4.6). The first of these is a refutation of hedonistic pleasures (hēdonē, 4.1) along with the arrogance (hyperēphania, 4.6) of envy that emerges when these pleasures are not forthcoming from God. In this first call to repentance (4.1-10), the longest of the four in the beginning of James 4, James takes on envious strife and hedonistic desire in the community. He has already shown this to be ‘earthly, unspiritual, demonic’ (3.15). However, instead of naming the source of the envy as the tongue—it is, after all, only the uncontrollable conduit—James now gets at the heart of the matter. Behind all of this envy and hedonistic desire, the very opposite of wisdom, is an attempt among members of a diaspora community to prove themselves as friends of the ‘world’ (kosmos, 4.4). In doing so, they are epitomizing not only the opposite of wisdom, but also the very opposite of what faith looks like. As demonstrated by Abraham, faith should be epitomized by friendship with God (2.23). James sees any such attempt to befriend the world as demonic: it takes the spirit God has implanted in the community and gives it away to the kosmos that opposes God. This giving away of that for which God is zealous, James describes as an act of adultery, branding all of those involved in such acts ‘adulterous women’ (moichalides, 4.4). The Scripture that James is quoting in 4.5 has been lost to history; however, the theme of a zealous God pursuing an adulterous people is a common trope within the prophetic tradition (e.g. Isaiah 1; Hosea 1; cf. Davids 1989: 100). James’s audience might have been moved, but they should not be shocked by his pointed language. As Johnson notes, ‘the harsh condemnation of the audience is not an uncommon feature of the diatribe’ (1995: 278). However, James does not stay with the language of diatribe. Instead he turns to the Proverbs (Jas 4.10; cf. Prov. 3.34) to propose a way back to the way of faith and wisdom. That way is ‘humility’ or ‘lowliness’ (tapeinos, 4.6), the same word that James uses to describe the one who should boast in being raised up (1.9). This now third connection to the opening exordium leads to James’s assertion that those who make themselves humble (tapeinos) will be raised up by God (4.10). Thus James’s call to repentance, to

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cleaning hands and purifying hearts (hagnizō, from the same root as the earlier hagnos in 3.17), is a call to the community to return to being those beloved of God that James addressed at the outset, those who seek wisdom with faith rather than the things of the world (1.5-9). James’s second call to repentance (4.11-12) turns toward the practice of slander. Slander (katalalia), like gossip, derives from envy which James has already denigrated in his encyclical, and comes into the community by means of the untamable tongue. James’s prohibition of slander is an echo particularly of condemnations found in the Psalms. Psalm 50.20, for instance, is a divine rebuke of slander; the same is found in Ps. 101.5. However, James does not name the Psalms to justify his prohibition; he names Torah. Do not slander one another, sisters and brothers. He who slanders a brother or who judges his brother slanders Torah and judges Torah. And if you judge Torah, you are not a doer of Torah but a judge. There is one Torahgiver and judge who is able to rescue and to destroy. But who are you, who judges the neighbor? (4.11-12).

James may here be making reference to Leviticus 19, the same chapter that he referred to in 2.8-12, for Leviticus 19 specifically prohibits slander (19.16). The version we now have of the Septuagint Greek does not contain katalalia or any of its cognates; however, this does not mean James is not referring his community back to Leviticus 19. Indeed, there are at least two very good reasons to suspect he is doing just that. First, James has already demonstrated the importance of Leviticus 19 to his argument about the nature of faith. In it, he has identified the ‘royal Torah’ (2.8), that portion of Torah that Jesus held as second only to the Shema in importance (‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself’; cf. Mk 12.31). Since James is one tightly constructed homily with themes that overlap, it would be surprising for Leviticus 19 not to make a reappearance after having played such an important role. Second, James’s argument against slander rests on Torah, of which Leviticus is a part, and not on Scriptures at large. Earlier, James has reminded his audience that they are to be judged by the Torah of freedom (2.12). Now James charges that some in the community have wanted the tables turned: in their arrogance, they want to be able to judge Torah, rather than to be judged by Torah. In so desiring, they betray that they want to be in the place of God. Since the thread of James’s argument rests on the assertion that Torah and the giver of Torah are the judges of the community, it seems reasonable to suppose that James may have had Lev. 19.16 in mind as the Scripture undergirding his condemnation. James’s third (4.13-17) and fourth (5.1-6) calls to repentance, tied together by the repetition of the words ‘come now’ (age nun) in 4.13 and 5.1, focus the audience’s attention toward the arrogance (hyperēphania) of



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the rich of the ‘world’ (kosmos), those whom the community is tempted to favor and envy (1.10; 2.2; 3.16; 4.1-4). Each of these calls seeks to make abhorrent to the community the idea or the lure of the ‘world’ (kosmos); it is presented as contrary to the royal Torah and thus unworthy of envy. The third call to repentance specifically targets the merchants of James’s communities. These are not small shopkeepers in diaspora towns. Rather, as Pedrito Maynard-Reid points out, James depicts the rich trader as is suggested by the word [poreusometha] (we will go)—a word that occurs only one other place in the New Testament where it means ‘to cheat or deceive’ (2 Peter 2.3)… The persons James refers to were the type of schemers who would do what they liked, go where they liked and remain as long as they liked (2004: 71).

These merchants are already suspect in their motives and methods; however, James underscores this by playing on the verb ‘to do’ (poieō), a verb closely linked with James’s call to do the works of faith and wisdom in James 2 and 3. James notes in 4.13 that the merchants have made plans to to ‘do’—that is, to work—but their works are ‘business’ and ‘making money’. Their plans presume a control over the future that they do not have, for they are only ‘vapor’ (4.14). Their ‘doing’, James argues, should not be subject to ‘business’ and ‘making money’, but to what ‘the Lord wills’ (4.15). It should, therefore, comprise in doing the ‘good’ (kalon, 4.17)—perhaps the works of faith and wisdom?—that they know they ought to be doing (Wall 1997: 218). As with earlier arguments about favoritism, earthly wisdom and slander, James’s focus here is on correcting the merchants’ perceptions of their own importance and, by extension, the community’s perception of their stature. Perhaps citing a variant manuscript tradition of Ecclesiastes (Wall 1997: 220), James reminds the merchants that they are ‘a vapor that, for a short time, appears and then also disappears’ (4.14). Similar warnings of the transience of the rich occur in the prophetic and Second Temple writings. In these writings, as in Jas 4.13-17, the underlying theme is one of impending judgment (Penner 1996: 174). James’s point is clear: such transience is the best that the ‘world’ (kosmos) has to offer, so the choice to befriend the ‘world’ rather than to do good is a choice for the impermanence of sin rather than for the power of faith or wisdom in the eternal God. The last of James’s calls to repentance (5.1-6) is a prophetic and apocalyptic dirge against ‘the rich’ (hoi plousioi) who first occur in 1.10-11 and continue as the primary examples of the influence of the ‘world’ (kosmos) on the community throughout James’s encyclical. These rich people (in this case, landowners), to whom the community has directed both their favor and their envy, are charged first with hoarding wealth. This hoarding stands in stark contrast to Jesus’ teachings that oppose storing up ‘treasures for yourself on

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earth’ and lament the eventual fate of the rich (hoi plousioi) in Mt. 6.19-20 and Lk. 6.24 (Davids 1989: 115). Jesus’ teachings themselves echo the prophetic and second Temple tradition (cf. 1 En. 98.9-10; Jer. 25.34) that foresees the destruction of the unjust rich and powerful by the justice of God and the coming of a new age (Hartin 1999: 118-19). Thus, James presents the vivid picture of moth-eaten and rusted wealth (5.2-3) as the standard divine judgment against those who hoard while others go hungry. Hoarding is not the greatest sin of the rich, however. To his earlier charges of oppression, litigiousness and slander, James adds a direct violation of Leviticus 19: the withholding of the wages of a laborer (5.4; cf. Lev. 19.13). Here once more, James charges those allied with the ‘world’ (kosmos) for being violators of Torah and thus enemies of God. Bringing his calls to repentance to a climax, James includes an eschatological warning in his charge. These violations of the law of God have occurred ‘in the last days’ (5.3), and have resulted in the murder of ‘the righteous one’ (5.6), who may represent Jesus (cf. Witherington 2007: 529-32) or the community of faith. Their divine judgment is certain. Thus James commands them to weep and wail. The intended audiences of James’s rhetoric about the rich is James’s diaspora community, members of which are being tempted by their desires (1.13-15) to envy the rich and to war amongst themselves (4.1-3). In the face of these temptations, as Batten notes, Jas 5.1-6…serves to unify the audience in opposition to the rich, for who would want to be associated with such greedy, monstrous people?… Who among James’[s] audience would venture to think that he or she had anything in common with the rich?… Based on what James says about the rich, no recipient in the letter would want to behave as they do (2007: 23).

In painting the rich landowners in such stark terms, James punctuates his final argument against friendship with the ‘world’ (kosmos). In James’s depiction, a friend of the ‘world’ becomes not only unlawful but also fundamentally dishonorable as well. Be Patient and Pray—5.7-20 In 5.7-20, James turns to the peroratio of his encyclical. In Hellenistic rhetoric, ‘the peroratio sums up or amplifies some major argument and/or makes a final appeal to the deeper emotions to make sure the argument persuaded’ (Witherington 2009: 16). James’s peroratio functions primarily as a summation, a reiteration of major themes with an eye to how these might be practically carried out by his listeners. Here, the actions of faith and carefully monitored speech are combined to portray a community not only of faith but also of endurance, cohesiveness and eschatological hope.



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James first returns to the theme of endurance with which he begins the encyclical (1.2-4). Endurance gives James’s audience an appropriate response to the power of the kosmos. In the diaspora, they are to be patient until the ‘coming’ (parousia) of the one who will judge and overthrow the rich oppressors. Meanwhile, they are to follow the lead of the small farmers who depend on God for rain and wait for it with faithful endurance. Endurance is also the means by which they should tame their tongues (James 3) from grumbling against each other, which is a relative of slander. As James notes in 4.11, slanderous grumbling is an act of judgment but judgment should be reserved for the soon-arriving judge (5.9). James concludes the call to endurance by referring the community to Job, not the Job of the Hebrew Bible but as attested in the Testament of Job, a Second Temple writing in Greek that focuses on Job’s endurance (Johnson 1995: 324; Wall 1997: 255). The urgency of this section is underscored by James’s threefold repetition of the command ‘Look’ (idou, 5.7, 9, 11) and of the address ‘sisters and brothers’ (adelphoi, 5.9, 10, 12, 19). Stand together, James seems to say, and watch for your deliverance. James 5.12 functions as a pivot point for the peroratio. Before this, James is focused on how the community should respond to the overweening power of the ‘world’ (kosmos). The verses that follow will focus on the way the community should respond to each other. James 5.12 addresses both external and internal relationships. In the face of a kosmos in which persons frequently swear by the deities or by the created order (which is where the English exclamation, ‘by Jove’, derives), James’s communities are to distinguish themselves by not taking any oaths, either in their dealings with outsiders or with each other. This injunction against oaths, of course, is one of Jesus’ teachings in Mt. 5.33-37. Refusing to take oaths performs two functions. It prevents James’s community from breaking the injunction against swearing falsely by God’s name in Lev. 19.12; if they do not swear at all, they cannot violate Torah. In addition, it reminds the community, again, of the importance of taming the tongue (James 3). James concludes his encyclical by giving examples of what appropriate speech should look like in the community. Appropriate speech, for James, includes prayer, confession and restoration. For James, prayer is appropriate speech both for those who are suffering and for those who are cheerful, because, in prayer, one depends on the deity rather than attributes any power, whether to heal or to cause joy, to the ‘world’ (kosmos). Nor is prayer simply about the speech of individuals. Prayer is to be the speech of the community, particularly if there is a member of the community who is unable to be present in the assembly or ‘church’ (ekklēsia). This is the only time in the encyclical that James names the community of faith ‘church’ (ekklēsia). It seems possible that for James ‘synagogue’ is the place of gathering (2.2) and ‘assembly’ or ‘church’ signifies the community

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of faith (5.14). When James speaks about the ‘synagogue’, he is speaking specifically about seating arrangements (2.2); when he speaks about the ‘assembly’ or ‘church,’ he is speaking about a group that is led by elders (presbyteroi, 5.14), people marked by their just lives who are able to anoint and pray for the sick. To the ekklēsia, James underscores the effectiveness of prayer by invoking a final character from the Scriptures: Elias or Elijah. In arguing that Elias was ‘a like natured person to us’, James asserts that a community member does not need to exhibit the unusual powers of Elijah in order to channel his speech into effective prayer. A single-souled person who prays rightly—that is, not out of envy and desire—might well pray a prayer that can effect significant healing and restoration within the community (1.6-7; 4.1-3). Confession, too, is considered wise speech by James, both by those within the community and those ‘who have wandered off’ because they have become enamored of the world and mimic it in their actions and words (5.19). James’s call for restoration is a note of consolation to end his homily. It affirms that James’s intention is not the dismissal of schismatists but rather the strengthening of a community against the powerful temptation of friendship with the kosmos in light of the immanent parousia of Christ. The joy of endurance (1.3) is not simply completion or maturity; it is being prepared as a community in diaspora for the promised upending of society into one governed by a merciful and just God.

3

That True Religion: Theology and Ethics of James ‘A right strawy epistle.’ This is how German Protestant theologian Martin Luther famously characterizes the epistle of James. According to Luther, the epistle of James ‘says nothing about Christ, or his death and resurrection, and contradicts Paul and the true gospel of justification by faith by preaching justification by works’ (cited in Chester 1994: 3). Luther complains because these central beliefs of the Protestant reformation, beliefs that still shape the practices of much of Christianity today, are absent from James’s argument. Although many of his adherents do not realize this, Luther did not completely shun the epistle of James, claiming that ‘there is many a good saying in it’ (cited in Tamez 2002: 4). Still he determines not to place it ‘in the number of the proper chief books’ within the Bible (cited Tamez 2002: 4). Accordingly, in his translation of the Bible into German, Luther places James with Hebrews, Jude and Revelation at the end of the Bible (Tamez 2002: 2). Still, the absences that Luther notes have led some to perceive the Christianity described in the epistle of James as inferior to the Christianity described in the soaring rhetoric of Paul (Tamez 2002: 2). Luther’s disdain for this epistle has been one cause for its neglect as a source of theology. But one must also ‘credit’ the highly influential German New Testament scholar of the first half of the twentieth century, Martin Dibelius, for the continued neglect of the theology in this epistle. Martin Luther had found little consonance between the theology of James and his movement toward ecclesiastical reformation. Still he accepted that the epistle had a theology, even if he deemed this theology inferior. As Andrew Chester notes, Martin Dibelius pronounces the epistle of James to be ‘general paraenesis (or exhortation), with isolated wisdom material connected only by catchwords and lacking any overall argument or coherence’ (Chester 1994: 4). Arguing that James was just a collection of wisdom sayings, Dibelius asserts that the epistle of James ‘has no theology at all’ (Chester 1994: 4). An only slightly more charitable reaction to James’s theology is that of J.T. Sanders; Sanders writes: ‘[T]he closest [James] comes to…a sustaining principle [or ethics] is a vague humanism’ (Johnson 1995: 159). Dibelius’s assertion that James has no theology is clearly an exaggeration. The epistle of James clearly has a theology. Luther’s dismissal of James’s

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theology as inferior and Sanders’s denigration of it as ‘a vague humanism’ are both unfair. Luther and Sanders are comparing James with other New Testament books like the Gospel of John or the letters of Paul that have, as a primary concern, the elaboration of theological tenets for communities that might need clear instruction in those tenets. James’s context appears to be different from this. His audience appears to be well grounded in a form of early Christian faith. James’s quarrel with them is not belief, but the living out of that belief in diaspora (Jas 1.2). James’s primary concern is not theological correctness but ethical praxis. Praxis, according to Brazilian theorist and educator Paolo Freire, requires ‘reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it’ (2006: 51). In this epistle, James exhorts his audience to move beyond reflection toward action, beyond a confession of a living faith to a demonstration of that faith (James 2). This marks James as an epistle that proposes an early Christian ethics, a praxis of Christian theology. To capture a true sense of James’s theology one must put aside the temptation to compare James to Paul, as if the latter were the norm by which all other ancient theologies and ethics were to be measured. James deserves to be treated on its own terms, as a theological writing that weaves together theology and the praxis of a community into a homiletic epistle that is not so much an explanation of Christianity for outsiders as it is a guide to Christian communal life for insiders. The Essence of God and the Praxis of Faith The God that James describes in his homiletic epistle would have been very familiar to his audience, a community that James describes as ‘the twelve tribes in diaspora’ (1.1). James’s descriptions of God reflect many commonly held beliefs of Hellenistic Christ-followers and Jews. These beliefs fall into two overarching categories: (1) the nature of God’s being or essence; and (2) the relationship between God and the community of faith. James, in describing God’s essence, focuses on God’s singularity and God’s immutability. God’s singularity is a fundamental tenet of Jewish and Christian theology: God is one (2.19). This is not a particularly controversial assertion, nor is it particularly Christian in its emphasis; perhaps that is why we have Dibelius’s claim that James has no theology at all. However, James does not intend, by this statement, to invent a new belief for the faith community. For James, belief in God’s singularity constitutes a necessary but not sufficient demonstration of faithfulness. After all, James chides, ‘even the demons believe’ in the singularity of God (2.19). For the community of faith, praxis must accompany this belief, or their assertion of God’s singularity only serves to mark a dead faith (2.18-20).



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This is the primary rationale between James’s much maligned argument that faith without works—that is, no praxis—is dead in itself. The singularity of God must, argues James, have some consequence on the living of the life of faith. Otherwise, it stands as a curious anomaly, strange but of no consequence to the believer or to the wider society with a polytheistic belief and worship. James takes a little more time defending God’s second essential characteristic: immutability. For James, God is the antithesis of all that is created, including even the awe of the heavens that darken and lighten with the movement of the planets. Why? Because even the stars and planets change; they wax and wane in their position in the heavens. God, by contrast, does not change characteristics like a moveable heavenly object (1.17). God is the unchanging constant from which all of the rest flows. God is the progenitor of all things, even light itself. Peter Davids describes James’s assertion this way: ‘the character of God is not subject to change… God…has no eclipse, no rising and setting, no phases, no obscurity due to clouds. His [sic] character is absolutely constant, trustworthy, and dependable’ (1989: 37-38). God’s immutability is no more of a controversial assertion than God’s singularity. Other prominent Jewish and Christian writers of James’s era also asserted the immutable nature of God (e.g. Philo, Leg. all. 2.89). Here again, James concerns himself not with inventing Christian theologies or with rehearsing communal creeds for their own sake, but rather with the praxis of faith that such a creedal statement implies. Facing the constant change and turmoil of diaspora, James’s community is called again to praxis, to putting its trust and reliance upon a God that it affirms to be immutable. This requires community members to trust in God wholeheartedly, not blaming God for tests and trials but relying on God in the midst of the ever-changing world (1.12-18; 4.1-5). Such reliance is not easy, particularly in the face of human desires. However, James sees all such desires as evidence of the impure hearts of the double-minded person, who split his or her allegiance between the immutable God and the changeable world (4.8). This utter reliance on God can only happen if one believes that God is utterly reliable—immutable! Such a faith cannot be demonstrated by words confessed; it must be demonstrated in one’s praxis of faith. The Community in Relationship to God While James does describe some abstract qualities of God, the majority of James’s descriptions of God focus on the relationship between God and the community of faith. To do so, James employs metaphors that derive from the family and the economic culture of the ancient Mediterranean basin, describing God as father, mother, husband, friend, patron, judge and

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defender. Once more, James is engaging not in the invention of some new theological understanding but in the rehearsal of accepted theologies for the purpose of encouraging the appropriate praxis of the Christ-following community. James’s use of familial metaphors suggest particular kind of praxis which his faith community would have understood. These relationships all rely on a social matrix of honor and shame that undergirded all of ancient life. How one acted toward one’s parent, friend or patron could impact one’s honor within one’s community. Loss of honor was as disastrous in the first century as loss of wealth is today (Malina 2001: 31). James’s relational metaphors for God would have carried for them a premise of praxis: one should live out one’s role in accordance with the expected norms of the social order so that one could maintain one’s honor and the honor of one’s community. God in Familial Metaphors James’s relational metaphors for God are often gendered and gendered in ways that reinscribe gender norms of the ancient world. God is father (1.17, 27; 3.9), birthmother (1.18) and husband (4.4) of the faith community. Here, we will focus on how these metaphors invoke relationships that, if negotiated correctly, may result in honor for the community and, when botched, would result in communal shame. The metaphor of God as ‘father’ carries with it cultural norms. The concept of fatherhood in the ancient world bears with it a prescription for the appropriate honorable role that children are to play. Children must act in obedience and deference to fathers in all things, and they must grant fathers’ public honor. This is why James can assume that a community of faith that calls God ‘father’ will ‘bless’ or speak well of God as ‘father’ (3.9). But James counsels them to go beyond speaking well; they need to conform their praxis, not just their speech, to ways that are pure and undefiled (1.27). They must bring honor to the father by being honorable in themselves. A similar understanding of relational deference and honor may be read into James’s use of the verb apokueō (‘I give birth’, 1.18), to describe God. This, unlike ‘father’, is an unusual metaphor for God, as it describes God as the birthmother of the community. The metaphor here is not purely feminine. James uses masculine participles to modify the verb. Nevertheless, the use of apokueō is unusual for a masculine being, occurring no place else in the Greek New Testament or Hebrew Bible with a masculine subject. One should not consider this a ‘softer’ understanding of God, however. In the ancient world, a mother commanded filial duty, and in Roman culture, mothers that showed vigilance and high standards in the raising of their children received great respect (Aymer 2010: 188-91). Thus, when James uses motherhood language, he is calling the community to the praxis of the filial duty: they need to live up to the vigilance and high standards of one’s ‘mother’—in this case, their God. As James puts it, the community exists



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as the ‘first fruits’ of creation, and thus should live that way (1.18-22). By living virtuously within the relationship of mother and child, the community’s praxis ascribes honor to God, the mother who gave them birth. This praxis leads to the acquisition of community honor. Curiously, James does not take the logical step to move from these metaphors of parenthood to the corollary metaphor that the community constitutes children of God. However, in keeping with the familial metaphors, James, like many Christian writers, opts for the language of adelphoi— translated either ‘brothers’ or ‘brothers and sisters’—as his predominant address for the community of faith (1.2, 9, 16, 19; 2.1, 5, 14-15; 3.1, 10, 12; 4.11; 5.7, 9, 10, 12, 19). As Darien Lockett notes, ‘the term adelphos [the singular of adelphoi] indicates a less hierarchical relationship between teachers and student… This group would…share the ties of loyalty, mutual commitment and support which bonded the members of a physical family’ (2008: 154). Practically, for James’s community, this translates to praxes of communal life that would facilitate good relations with one another, praxes such as guarding one’s tongue (3.1-18; 4.11-12), confession to one another and restoration of one another (5.16, 19-20). Maintaining these familial bonds and thus strengthening the community becomes critical when one remembers that this community lives within a diaspora context that includes trials and tests (1.1-3, 12-15). In addition to metaphors of parent/child and brother/sister, James also uses the metaphor of marriage to describe the faith community’s relationship with God. This sort of metaphor—a community of faith as the bride or wife of God—occurs frequently in the prophetic writings of the Hebrew Bible/Septuagint, as well as in the Revelation to or Apocalypse of John (cf. Isaiah 54; Ezekiel 16; Hosea 4; Revelation 21). James’s use of this metaphor most closely resembles those of Ezekiel and Hosea. As in these writings, members of the community of faith are enticed by the ‘world’ (kosmos) away from their true devotion to God, and James likens them to ‘adulterous women’ (4.4). Liaison with this ‘world’, this unsuitable lover, leads to unmet cravings and desires, causes actions that disrupt the community of faith. James, perhaps exaggeratedly, uses the very colorful language of the battlefield in 4.1 to refer to these disruptive actions as ‘wars’ (polemoi) and ‘physical fights’ (machai). Members of the community, here, are set up as foils for James’s ideal praxis. They demonstrate its antithesis through their lack of devotion. Their praxis of unfaithfulness dishonors the husband, God, and as a result brings dishonor and condemnation on the community, both from God and from James. James is so emphatic in this metaphor that he switches from calling the community of faith siblings (adelphoi) to calling them ‘adulterous women’ (moichalides). This is an insult regardless of whether or not his audience is all male or of mixed gender. The mark of their unfaithfulness is,

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as we will see below, friendship with the ‘world’ (kosmos). Such a friendship constitutes, in James’s mind, turning one’s back away from proper loyalty and deference to only God. To James, such actions merit shaming and shunning of the highest order to preserve the community of God’s family. God in Economic Metaphors James’s other relational metaphors for God derive from the business world of his day, although in James’s day there was not as hard a division between family and business as there often is today. These metaphors, God as friend, patron and judge, also require from the community of faith responses of praxis, praxes of loyalty to God and care for the community of faith. Praxes of loyalty take two main forms in James: acting as God’s friend and relying on God’s patronage. Abraham is James’s primary example of friendship with God. James 2.21-22 suggest that in offering Isaac on Moriah, Abraham is acting out his loyalty to God, even at the expense of his only son. This is the crux of James’s faith-versus-works argument: Abraham’s loyalty is demonstrated in the ways his actions reflect his beliefs— that is, his praxis. Abraham’s loyalty makes him a friend of God (2.23). By contrast, in 4.2, James upbraids members of the community for their divided loyalty. They claim a loyalty to God but they crave worldly pleasures so much that they are willing to go to war with one another and even— claims James (one hopes exaggeratedly)—to kill one another! To James, these actions demonstrate divided loyalties between two rival patrons: God and the ‘world’ (kosmos). An attempt to be a friend of both James considers impossible. To demonstrate its loyalty to God, the faith community must rely on God as its patron. God, for James, stands as the ultimate patron. God gives to the community all perfect gifts (1.17); and God gives to those who demonstrate single-hearted loyalty as much as they need (1.5-7). But this patron will not give to those who are ‘double-minded’ (1.6-7) or who divide their loyalty and hedge their bets with the world (4.1-4). And this patron has no interest in helping those who are proud (4.6). In describing God as patron, James presents his audience with a choice. They are to turn from the call of the world to choose a wealthy patron as the source of good gifts. Instead, they are to have one patron, the God who is the giver of all good gifts. As Darian Lockett puts it, Where patron-client relationships with the ‘rich’ are rejected, such benefaction from God is promoted… God’s giving is universal, abundant, without envy, and consistent. And it is the attitude of total trust and dependence upon God…to which James’s readers are called (2008: 177).

Once more, as in the metaphor of marriage, James calls the community of faith to loyalty. Community members demonstrate this loyalty to God, their



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friend and patron, by going to God with single-hearted trust as the source of the gifts and graces that they need, rather than competing for the favors of wealthy human patrons (James 2) or of the ‘world’ (kosmos) in general (4.1-4). Since patrons in the first century also functioned as judges for the disputes of their friends and clients, unsurprisingly James’s description of God as patron includes this description of God as judge. Community members would have recognized the metaphor ‘God is judge’ as easily as the metaphor ‘God is father’. As Peter Davids notes, ‘every Jew knew that God gave the law… God gave the law; God enforces the law. As the only sovereign, he [sic] has authority over life and death’ (1989: 105). James uses the metaphor of God as judge of all persons to underscore the importance of ethical praxis within the community of faith. The community is to act as those who are about to be judged (2.12; 5.9), and stop judging other members of the community, as well as putting an end to fighting and grumbling against one another (4.11-12; 5.9). To be sure, the lawgiver and judge will judge the community on the law of liberty, but poor treatment of one another does not demonstrate the praxis of those who claim God as their friend, patron and judge. God does not judge the community of faith alone. God is judge even of those who do not understand or acknowledge divine patronage, especially those who mistreat the poor. Accordingly, James consistently warns of God’s severe judgment of those who become wealthy on the backs of the marginalized. James depicts this impending judgment most colorfully in 5.4: ‘The wages of the workers who mowed your fields, those wages which have been witheld by you, they cry out, and the shouts of the harvesters have entered into the ears of the Lord of hosts.’ James’s warning reflects an ancient belief: God as judge of all hears the cry of those unjustly treated and comes to their aid. Without asserting the latter directly, James warns the community that the God they call patron and friend, father and birthmother, keeps an ear open for the cry of those who are mistreated. Most contemporary readers would consider the majority of James’s metaphors for God positive, even in light of questions of gender and class. However, James also uses a metaphor of slaveholder or slavemaster for God when James describes himself as a ‘slave of God’ (theou…doulos, 1.1). This metaphor of the religious person as God’s slave runs throughout the Bible. According to Luke Timothy Johnson the term ‘connotes the special relationship between God and humans defined in terms of possession (by God) and service (by humans)’ (1995: 167). Johnson and other commentators express no concern that the nature of this relationship is one of possession and bondage, even though Johnson himself remarks, ‘The term doulos denotes literal bondage to the authority of another’ (1995: 167). That James describes God as a slavemaster whom he serves in literal or even figurative bondage should make contemporary readers pause, lest we

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develop an insensitivity to injustice within the Bible itself. Contemporary readers must question whether God as slaveholder is essential and inseparable from the other familial and business-oriented ancient metaphors or just a deeply problematic hangover from first-century Mediterranean culture. No easy response exists, for many fathers and mothers, husbands and, especially patrons, were also slavemasters, controlling their human property as they saw fit. James complicates the readers’ decision by not attaching to the slavemaster metaphor any explicit praxis; ‘slave of God’ is just a title that he, like Paul, adopts without further comment. And what’s more, it is practically the only self-description of James in his entire homiletic epistle. James the writer, the teacher of teachers and the leader of the community of faith who counsels so much good praxis to his community, identifies himself only with the phrase ‘slave of God’. Jesus Christ and the Praxis of Faith In stark contrast to James’s many metaphors for God, the epistle is almost silent regarding Jesus Christ. The name Jesus occurs only twice in the epistle, once in the opening greeting (1.1) and once in James 2 (2.1). Far more frequent is the use of the word ‘Lord’. However, many of these references may not be specific references to Jesus, but rather general references to God (see especially 5.4). In fact, only two of these uses of ‘Lord’ are clearly referring to Jesus: 5.7-8 and 5.14-15. As with his references to God, James’s reference of Jesus Christ is not intended as an explanation or defense of the community’s beliefs. Rather, James references Jesus Christ to call the community to the action of ethical praxis. James’s first explicit reference to Jesus Christ is part of his problematic self-identification as a ‘slave’ of Christ, an uncritical use of chattel slavery as a metaphor for his relationship to Jesus. James is not only a slave of God but also of the master or Lord Jesus Christ. As noted above, there is no explicit ethical praxis connected with this metaphor of slavery. However, an implicit problematic ethos and praxis accompany this metaphor: one of the unswerving obedience and complete submission reserved for chattel. James’s second explicit reference to Jesus Christ begins his argument about faith and favoritism in James 2. For James, one cannot model the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, or faith in Jesus Christ, while showing favoritism in the community. As the argument progresses, James chastises his community for importing the class distinctions and patronage system of the ancient world into the nascent church. These distinctions, James argues, do not befit those who claim to have the faithfulness of Christ or even faith in Christ. James makes it clear to his community that Jesus Christ would stand against such distinctions within the worshiping community.



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In addition to James’s explicit references to Jesus, the end of James’s last chapter contains two other likely references, as mentioned earlier. The first of these, found in 5.14-15, refers to prayer ‘in the name of the Lord’. The practice of performing ritual acts in the name of Jesus is well attested throughout the New Testament. Further, someone who understood himself to be under the aegis of the Law, as James clearly does (2.8), would not call his God by name, ritually or otherwise. Therefore, James here may be implicitly referring to Jesus Christ. The ethical praxis connected to this reference is the prayer and anointing of the sick, which is more broadly connected to the proper use of the tongue for James’s community: members should use their tongues for song and prayer, rather than for fighting and quarreling. Finally, Jas 5.7-8 seems also to be a reference to Jesus Christ. Here, James turns to an eschatological hope for the return of ‘the Lord’. Although there are countless references to the coming of ‘the Day of the Lord’ in Hebrew Bible as an activity specifically linked to God, James’s use of the Greek word parousia signals a more specific Christian theological expectation of the return—or second coming—of Christ. Like prayer in the name of Jesus, many New Testament writings attest to the centrality and importance of this belief for the early church. Once again, however, James references this central belief to call the community to praxis: in this case, the praxis of patience even in the face of the trials the community is facing and the temptations of the world around the community (5.7-8; cf. 1.2-4). Although James rarely names or points to the person of Jesus, several scholars have pointed out that James extensively paraphrases the Sermon on the Mount as recorded in the Gospel according to Matthew (Witherington 2007: 394). This suggests that James was deeply familiar at least with the orally transmitted teachings of Jesus. However, James does not use these to instruct his community about what Jesus taught. James uses them to remind his community of the praxis that is expected of the community of Christ. Consider, for example, James’s reference to the teaching ‘do not store up for yourself treasures on earth’ that is also found in Mt. 6.19. James’s use of this teaching in 5.2-3 functions not as an introduction of the teaching of Jesus to novices, but as a condemnation of those who should already know the teaching but who do not follow it. Once more, James demonstrates a concern for the ethical praxis to those who are already followers of Christ rather than a desire to instruct new believers in the faith. James assumes that his community knows the teachings of Jesus; James wants them to practice what they know. The Praxis of Faith and Eschatological Expectation In contrast to James’s relative taciturnity about Jesus, the epistle lays a discernible if incomplete eschatological vision, a depiction of how things

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will turn out in the end. James projects an imminent eschatology, a near advent of ‘the Lord’. As noted above, James uses the word parousia here in its Christian theological sense. And this advent or return of the Christ is near (‘at the door’, 5.8). On this expectation of an imminent parousia, James bases both his warnings and visions of hope. Once more, James’s intent is not primarily to teach new theological tenets to his community, but to remind his community that their praxes should match their confessions of faith. Eschatological Warnings James’s eschatological warnings of impending divine judgment fall first upon those he describes as the rich (5.1-6). He targets these for criticism throughout the epistle, not solely for their wealth but, as we have noted above, also for their actions in light of their wealth. James hints at this eschatology early in the epistle, when he compares the passing away of the rich to the fading of grass (1.9-10). In the end, he suggests, persons who now exert a great deal of power because of their wealth will be as inconsequential as blades of grass withering in the sun. This might be read as the kind of wisdom reflected in Ecclesiastes; after all, all persons will eventually die and their significance will diminish. However, in the rest of the epistle, James makes clear that this withering is evidence not of the mortality of the rich but of God’s eschatological judgment. God’s judgment will fall on the rich because of their praxes of injustice, specifically their treatment of poor laborers (5.1-6). Similarly, James’s audience stand in danger of eschatological judgment for showing favoritism toward these rich people, who, James points out, consistently act coercively toward those in the community (2.1-12). These coercive actions underlie James’s warning that ‘judgment will be without mercy for those who show no mercy’ (1.13). This is a reminder to his audience that all who act without mercy, especially the rich favored by a segment of the community, will be subject to the judgment at the imminent coming of the Christ. In addition to the rich, James warns potential teachers that they too may be subject to condemnation in the inevitable day of judgment. Like the rich, James’s community gives significant respect to teachers. However, James warns anyone who might want to be a teacher that judgment not only follows this rank but is also stricter than that facing the rest of the community (3.1). Judgment will be visited upon teachers who cannot control their tongues, whose speech denigrates other community members and exhibits envy and selfish ambition. Teachers such as these will face a significant change of status in the day of judgment, a denigration in proportion to the ways their speech are false to the truth.



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Visions of Hope James’s warnings about eschatological judgment, although pointed, are accompanied by the opportunity for change, for repentance, forgiveness and restoration before the imminent advent of Jesus Christ (4.9-10; 5.16, 19-20). Praxis again takes center stage. James does not explain the theological merits of or rationale behind forgiveness and repentance. Nor does he expand upon the theology of these praxes, like the authors of Matthew and Luke do when they, quoting Jesus, pronounce the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit unforgivable (cf. Mt. 12.31; Lk. 6.37). Rather, James teaches about praxis to a community that seems to share a common theology regarding the praxes of repentance, forgiveness and restoration. James counsels the community to continue in these praxes, which will prepare them to face that inevitable, imminent advent with hope rather than terror. For many in James’s community, the imminent advent of the Christ portends a time of hope and justice. This includes promises like the crown of life (1.12), a promise that must have seemed marvelous in a community with a median life-expectancy of 45 years if they made it past the first five years of life, which half of all infants in that time and geographical region did not (Carter 2006: 494). This promise of life, long or even eternal, would become a standard Christian hope and theological claim. James uses this tenet of faith and eschatological promise to remind the community that endurance as a praxis yields as its reward this coveted crown. In addition to life, James reminds the community that God has promised the kingdom as an inheritance to the faithful poor. Does James counsel poverty as a praxis? Nothing in James’s letter suggests this. Indeed, Jas 2.5 notes that the kingdom is promised both to the poor and to those who love God. James does pointedly remind the community of the folly of mistreating the poor who are to inherit the kingdom. Later, James also challenges whether or not the professed love of those within the community is genuine by calling them ‘adulterous women’, as noted above. But the call is not to voluntary poverty. Rather, James calls his community to a praxis of genuine, unadulterated love of God and to praxes of honor and justice for all people, especially the poor. The Praxis of Faith and the Nature of Community James’s theologically grounded counsel regarding the praxis of faith is written to a specific community. Clues in James’s letter may reveal for us some characteristics of this specific historical community to which the letter was addressed. However, James’s letter reveals more than potential historical information. James’s letter also reveals his standards for an ideal community of Christ-followers, regardless of where it might be located. That is to

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say, James’s letter reveals something of his ecclesiology, his understanding of what it means to be ‘church’. Some specific historical information of James’s community may be gleaned from the letter. First, James names this community ‘the twelve tribes in diaspora’ (1.2). As noted in Chapter 2, these ‘twelve tribes’ could refer to the more widely scattered Jewish community or communities that had been living outside of Jerusalem for generations, or to those Christfollowers who fled Judea after the initial persecution of the church, or to a combination of both. It could also be a rhetorical device used to designate the status of James’s community as culturally set apart. Whether this diaspora is real or rhetorical, the designation ‘twelve tribes in diaspora’ evokes a community of mainly Jewish Christ-followers who had maintained a culture and heritage at least partially influenced by Jerusalem, even if interpreted through cultural lenses shaped in diaspora (see Chapter 2). The community of faith self-identifies with Jewish history in general and the Jewish history of exile in particular. James notes that the community of faith gathers in synagogues for its rituals (2.14). Notably, James never uses the word ‘Gentiles’; this is in stark contrast to the Gospels and all of the letters of the greater Pauline tradition (except 2 Thessalonians). This does not mean that James’s community had no Gentiles. It does, however, suggest a community that was marked by a commonality of agreed upon cultural norms and self-identifications that stemmed from a form of first-century Judaism. Beyond the historical traces, readers can discern in James’s letter a pattern for a faith community that lives out the theology he espouses in their praxis of faith. According to James, Torah and the wider Scriptures of Judaism should underlie the theology and praxis of a faithful community (1.25; 2.8, 10-12). James’s ethical admonitions are grounded in the Scriptures, including Leviticus 19 (which includes the familiar call to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’), the Psalms and the prophetic traditions, among others. James clearly considers these writings authoritative for appropriate behaviors, and expects the community of faith to do the same. In addition, as noted above, James upholds the teachings of Jesus, particularly those from the Sermon on the Mount, which James combines with Torah and the rest of the Scriptures as critical guidelines for the praxis of faith (Witherington 2007: 394). James’s position on Torah differs considerably from the majority position in the New Testament writings represented by Paul. In his letter to the Galatians, for example, Paul asserts that the Law served as a childcare provider until the community reached mature faith (Gal. 3.24-25). However, for James—who does not appear to be tackling the critical issues of circumcision and kashrut laws that bedeviled Paul’s communities—one’s faith is not divorced from one’s praxis, and one’s praxis, in turn, is governed by at least some of the provisions of Torah. These teachings form the



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common ground upon which a community of faith may stand, even in the midst of diaspora. The word diaspora, here, does not only signal a possible historical reality for this community. It also signals a marked difference between the community of faith and the world in which it is located. James counsels that a community of faith must maintain that difference, keeping itself ‘unstained from the world’ (1.27). Tellingly, in counseling the community to stand apart from the cultural norms in the place of its exile, James describes not only the bounds of the community but also what he understands to be an essential praxis of ‘true religion’ (1.27). For this reason, James’s rhetoric explodes in condemnation of those who seem to be co-opted by the wider society’s ideals by seeking to be friends with the ‘world’ (kosmos); James calls these people ‘adulterous women’ (4.1-5). Similarly, James’s scorn for those who make plans about their future stems from the way in which their planning mirrors the ideals for commercial enterprise of the wider world without taking seriously their dependence on the God of their own Scriptures (4.13-16). For James, the community of faith must be different from the world into which it is dispersed, different not only in name but also in its praxis of an ethical faith. Anything else is unacceptable. Unlike the many liturgical and communal roles discernible within the communities of the Pauline traditions (cf. 1 Corinthians 12), James’s letter is notable for its relative lack of differentiation and hierarchy. The community members bear none of the names that would become common in the churches of the Pauline tradition: bishop, deacon, apostle, elder and ‘widow’ (which is likely an office that goes beyond a woman’s marital status). Instead, as discussed before, all community members are addressed as brothers or sisters (e.g. 1.2; 2.15). A diaspora community of brothers and sisters needs to maintain the harmony of an ideal family—whose head is God—if it is to survive in a world of difference and possible hostility. Thus, James counsels against the kind of actions that can lead to dissension between family members: anger (1.19), partiality (2.1-9), careless speech (3.1-18), gossip and slander (4.11-12) and grumbling (5.9). Instead, he calls the community to praxes of taciturnity (1.19), gentleness and peacefulness (3.17-18), repentance (4.7-10), confession (5.16), and restoration (5.1920)—that is, praxes that would hold a community of faith together. With such a vision of life together in peace, yet set aside from the world, it is no wonder that James became a favorite Scripture for monastic communities. To be clear, James’s ideal community is not leaderless. However, its leaders are not bishops, deacons or apostles. They are teachers. To these leaders, James devotes nearly one-fifth of his letter (3.1-18). James’s concern is that these community leaders focus on the hard work of controlling their speech, not only in terms of its scriptural content but also in terms of its emotional and communal impact. Aware of the potential for harm caused

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by careless or hurtful speech, and especially when that speech comes from a community leader, James makes particular effort to caution the community’s teachers that they will face stricter judgment for their praxis of speech than all of the rest of the community (3.1-2). He then moves to a dire depiction of the impact of the tongue in community, as this member of the body is able to bless God an curse brothers and sisters made in God’s image (3.910). This community-destroying speech emerges from selfish ambition and envy (3.14). By contrast, James counsels the community teachers and all who would be considered wise to live gently within the community, sowing a harvest of justice in peace by carrying out a praxis of peacemaking (3.13, 16-18). Notably, James’s description for teachers in the community does not contain specific personal criteria for leadership beyond the praxis of gentle speech and peacemaking. Unlike the later writings of the Pauline tradition (e.g. 1 Timothy), there are no marital, familial or other requirements of comportment. Neither is gender specified for the role of teacher, although certainly most teachers would have been male. Still, James’s taciturnity on other criteria for leadership does not mean there were no such criteria. Rather, James, in lifting up particular criteria rather than others signals his sense of their singular importance for leaders of this community in diaspora that must remain separate from the world. Two hallmarks mark the distinctiveness of James’s ideal community of faith. First, a praxis of justice—in particular, care for and honor of the destitute—distinguishes the faithful community. This theme permeates every chapter of James’s epistle. The community must not only maintain their distinctiveness from the world; in order to practice ‘true religion’, they must also tend to the most vulnerable among them: widows and orphans (1.27). Favoritism of the rich over the poor receives condemnation, both because the poor receive honor in the imminent kingdom of God and because of the unjust actions of the rich toward the community (2.5-7). Those who engage in unjust speech (3.1-18) or covetousness that leads to injustice between community members (4.1-3) receive chastisement. Those who withhold the wages of the poor and who cause the innocent to be sentenced to death face imminent eschatological catastrophe (5.1-6). James envisions a community in which faithfulness is demonstrated through just relations. Nothing less is acceptable. Second, the faithful community is known by its endurance in the face of trial (1.2-7; 5.7-11). This theme begins and ends James’s remarks, but he does little to elaborate upon it directly. However, traces of possible trials can be discerned in James’s epistle. Some of these trials appear to be internal; for example, the trial of temptation and desire (1.14-15). This trial may also be linked to a wider desire to be a part of the ‘world’ (kosmos) rather than be separate from it (cf. James 4). Other trials seem to emerge from the



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rich who interact with the community. These include maligning ‘the name that was invoked’ over the community, garnishing or withholding wages, lawsuits, imprisonment and even death (2.6-7; 5.4, 6). By contrast, at least some community members appear be in danger of destitution (2.15-17). For whatever other trials the community might be facing, James gives no hints, but he expects the response to trials to be prayer and endurance, using Job as the example of the latter. The community’s endurance allows it to maintain its diaspora character, separate from and unstained by the world, regardless of what it costs them in business dealings and in social capital. Their endurance demonstrates their character as a community of faithfulness, regardless of the cost. Luther’s epithet and Dibelius’s dismissal have cast a long shadow on the epistle of James, leaving its ethical riches on the praxis of faith community largely untapped in many branches of Christianity, particularly those of the Protestant and Anabaptist traditions. For this reason, Elsa Tamez famously calls James an ‘intercepted letter’ (Tamez 2002: 1). Luther’s and Dibelius’s influence notwithstanding, James presents an epistle that could still be helpful today, not so much in the theological definition of the contours of Christian faith but, certainly as important, in the ethical living out of that faith in the face of contemporary challenges. James’s most pointed and controversial charge still haunts the church today. Perhaps, today, he might have worded it this way. Systematic theologies matter little if one doesn’t act on them. Theology, even faithful theology, without praxis is dead.

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James and Kyriarchy The epistle of James is filled with examples of ethics for first-century Christ-followers, calling the community of faith to a particular praxis of religion. Yet, the epistle of James also emerges out of a society with a set of cultural norms, all of which may not be considered ethical today. We have already caught glimpses of those norms as we considered James’s use of the word ‘slave’ to describe himself. Slavery, culturally accepted in the ancient world, found its way into the biblical texts largely uncriticized, and in many places and times even upheld as the normal state of being. That a book of the Bible should contain these cultural norms is not surprising. Whether or not one accepts the theological assertion that these books were divinely inspired, they were nevertheless written by human beings in particular times and places, speaking from within particular cultures. Within the first century ce, the biblical world under Roman occupation was a world of kyriarchy. ‘Kyriarchy’, a neologism coined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, describes ‘the rule of the emperor, lord, slave master, husband, or the elite freeborn, propertied, educated gentleman to whom disenfranchised men and all wo/men were subordinated’ (Schüssler Fiorenza 2009: 9). The entire social structure presumed levels of power and status, from the beggar and the slave to the emperor and the gods. Within each category, women were to be subservient to men and children to adults. However, the wife of the master would have more power than the most important adult male slave or beggar. So what is the relationship between the epistle of James and kyriarchy? The answer: ‘It’s complicated.’ After all, in the end all acts of power and domination in the ancient world fell under the larger category of kyriarchy. Against some of these acts of power, like acts of power against the poor, James’s epistle is highly critical. However, in the face of gender and particularly the role of women, the epistle unquestioningly follows the norms of its day. At the same time, in the face of the politically oppressive status of exile—James is written to ‘the twelve tribes in Diaspora’—James proposes an alternative to the unnamed but ever present Roman Empire. Yet, that alternative directly mimics the imperial kyriarchal structure to which it is supposed to be an alternative.



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This chapter deals with these varying degrees of interaction with kyriarchy found in James. Its intention is first illustrative. James is a document of its time, not only because of its language and culture but also because of the social structures it presupposes. However, this chapter is also an invitation to a different kind of engagement of this text. Without considering the ways in which James’s vision of the world reinscribes kyriarchy, those who hold this ancient text to be sacred could uncritically follow James and use this text to reinscribe the oppression of some forms of kyriarchy. By understanding James’s critique of the injustice found within the contemporary kyriarchy of his day, readers too will be able to raise their voices against parallel kyriarchal injustices of their own day. James and Class: Critiquing Kyriarchy Our first exploration of kyriarchy in James concerns the matter of class and economics. We have already begun this discussion in Chapter 3, as we considered the problematic use of slavery as a metaphor for the relationship between God and humanity in James. However, the question of economics in James is much bigger than slavery, and James’s instruction to the community about economics represents a sharp critique of a society in which the vast majority of persons lived at or below basic subsistence. In Chapter 3, we explored the question of wealth and poverty in terms of community ethical praxis. However, to really understand James’s critique, it will be necessary to take a step back and examine the structure of ancient society. Only then will we be able to understand how James’s counsel about wealth, business practices and the treatment of the poor serve as a critique of the economic kyriarchy of his day. According to the United States census bureau, 15% of the population of the United States lived in poverty in 2012 (United States Census). Many in the United States and in the global north generally find these numbers unacceptably high. Thus, few of us can comprehend the level of poverty with which James and his audience would have been familiar in the first century ce around the Mediterranean basin. Warren Carter (2006) helps to put James’s discussions about economics in context by laying out some statistics about poverty in the ancient Mediterranean around the time of Jesus, Paul and James. According to Carter, the ruling elite of Rome was comprised of 2% of the total population (2006: 492). These persons, provincial elites and Roman rulers, controlled all of the substance of the empire: its goods, its money and its power. This meant widespread poverty was the norm rather than the exception. Carter estimates that 34% of the population were marginal economically, cycling above and below subsistence-level poverty; 20% were ‘in permanent crisis’; and 4% to 8% were beggars (2006: 492). In other

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words, James’s society would have had a poverty rate of between 44% and 62% at any given time. Or, to put it another way, on average, five of every ten persons in James’s communities were poor. It is no wonder that the Lord’s Prayer in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke includes a prayer for ‘daily bread’. For about half of the population at any given time, daily bread was not assured. For the poor, survival might entail securing for oneself a patron from among the elites of society. Such a person could be solicited for favors that might include money, food, protection or legal help, for example. In exchange, the poor person would show gratitude through public praise, loyalty (read: faith), and doing whatever the elite person required of them (deSilva 2000: 115-18). Alicia Batten notes that this ‘patron-client model formed the backdrop for most exchanges of goods and services between people of unequal social status, with the stronger party generally controlling the nature of the exchange. This exchange could, and in many cases did, become overtly exploitative’ (Batten 2007: 11). The poor would be continuously beholden to their patrons, willing to do any small act to demonstrate their gratitude for the grace bestowed on them, while the rich felt it within their rights to exploit the poor who owed them everything. Poverty was made even worse by regressive forms of taxation. The poor found themselves taxed by regional elites, religious centers and Rome, a triple-taxation burden that increasingly meant the loss of family lands and inheritance. K.C. Hanson and Douglas Oakman assert that ‘taxation in Roman Palestine was extractive, that is, designed to assert elite control over agrarian production… [Its] major impact was to remove most goods from the control and enjoyment of most people…the benefits in ancient economy flowed “upward” to the advantage of the elites’ (1996: 116). The poorest of the poor, already struggling to survive, were taxed more deeply into debt. Those who went into debt could find themselves in court sued for their last remaining possession: their clothes (cf. Mt. 5.40). Some of the poor fell so far into debt that they sold themselves, or were sold by those to whom they owed money, into slavery, a brutal institution even in the first century ce (cf. Lk. 12.47). Many more of the poor worked as day laborers, making just enough money to survive for short periods of time. As found in the Gospels of the New Testament, Jesus tells parables of these persons. One of the best known is of the workers in the vineyard who agree to the standard day’s wage: a denarius (Mt. 20.1-8). Elsa Tamez notes that day laborers of the first century were some of the most vulnerable of society: In many cases slaves had more protection than the laborers, because the slaves could at least depend on food and shelter from their owners. The laborers, on the other hand, depended completely on their salaries. In the times of Jesus…there were more day laborers than slaves. Day laborers



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earned on the average a denarius, that is to say, the minimum needed for one day’s survival, including their meal (2002: 15).

A day laborer without work for a few days, or one who developed an inability to work because of a physical disability, quickly transitioned to the status of a beggar. James 2 and 4.1–5.6 should be read with this economic context in mind, for this context supported the kyriarchy in which members of James’s diaspora community found themselves. The ‘man with gold rings and in fine clothes’ (2.2) would certainly have represented the rare exception among those entering the worship gatherings of James’s audience. More commonly found within the community, simply because of the nature of the society, would have been the ‘poor person in dirty clothes’ (2.2). It would have been standard cultural practice among James’s audience to show favoritism to the wealthy man; such favoritism would have been seen as an appropriate response to the grace of his presence. Such ‘appropriate’ treatment could have resulted in patronage in the form of protection, financial or medical help, or any other kind of help. Of course, there would be ‘strings attached’ to this help, but such was the economy of the patronage system. As Johnson puts it, ‘the community as a whole has suffered from those “acts of favoritism” by which the wheels of the world are greased: they have suffered at the hands of “judges with evil designs” [Jas 2.4] instigated by the powerful machinations of the rich’ (Johnson 1995: 229). James stands firmly against his audience’s co-optation into the economic structural kyriarchy of his day. He rails against favoritism toward persons of wealth as a violation of the ‘royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”’ (2.8). He exposes the exploitative practices of the richest of the rich, those who take his community members to court, and who insult ‘the excellent name that was invoked over you’ (2.7). Later in 4.13-16, James takes up the theme again, mocking the merchant class for their boasting about how they will make money, as if they were in charge of their own fate. Then James takes on those who exploit the day laborers and announces, ‘Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you have kept back by fraud, cry out and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts’ (5.4). This is a prophetic warning, a call to repent because, as James reminds the community, the Lord who hears the cry of the poor is very near (5.7-8). But James goes beyond issuing a critique of the kyriarchy of his day. He calls his audience to live ‘unstained by the world’ (1.27). The favoritism in James 2 demonstrates that some members of the community, having been victimized by the wealthy elites, might ‘have adopted the attitudes of the oppressors against their own member’ (Johnson 1995: 229). The hubris of the merchants in James 4 shows that the attitudes of the world have begun to infect the merchant class and the rich of his community, leading them to arrogance and oppressive actions against the poorest of the poor. In the face

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of these near and very real temptations, James cautions the community not to capitulate. Alicia Batten is correct in stating that James is not calling for a revolution here. ‘James does not want his audience to go out and change the world,’ she writes, ‘but to remain unblemished by it’ (Batten 2007: 25). Still, even such a stance would have been a significant shift from the standard practices of James’s day. At the same time, James takes on community prejudices surrounding poverty. He not only challenges the economic kyriarchy but also the cultural values of honor and shame attached to wealth and poverty, respectively. To understand James’s reversal, we must first understand that wealth was often considered to be the tangible evidence of God’s blessings of God’s people, and impoverishment was considered a sign of God’s displeasure. Thus, the most valuable of limited commodities, honor, would have been ascribed to the rich just on the basis of their wealth. When James rails against giving a rich man in fine clothes with gold rings a place of honor in the assembled Christian community, he does not need to be speaking about a specific incident or a specific person. This would have been a common cultural practice. Instead, James is speaking against a kyriarchal structure in which the rich, by virtue of their wealth, are ascribed more honor and thus treated with more honor than the poor. Alicia Batten reminds us that James’s reversal may not have been meant literally. The language of the epistle shows that James, the preacher, clearly knows his prophets and the prophetic tradition of stereotyping all rich persons as evil or unjust. Batten notes that rich people, in James, ‘could simply function as an example of what James’s listeners are not or should not be’ (2007: 19). By contrast, other commentators agree with Elsa Tamez that James is being quite literal and, given the ancient structures of James’s day, it is possible that she is correct. Literal or not, James’s language would not only have been shocking in its condemnation of the rich, it would also have been equally shocking in its celebration of the poor. As mentioned above, if the rich were seen as examples of divine favor, the poor, by contrast, would have exemplified divine displeasure. Persons from such a culture would have been taken aback by James’s charge that they were in error for dishonoring the poor (2.6a). James does not use the Greek word for the working poor: penēs. Instead, James calls his community to honor the ptōchoi—that is, the destitute. As Tamez notes, this Greek term designates the poorest of the poor within the ancient world, ‘those who totally lacked the means of subsistence and lived from alms; they were the beggars’ (2002: 19). James goes beyond naming these poorest of the poor ‘honorable’, he argues that God has chosen these destitute women and men to be models of the kind of faithfulness that clients typically show their patrons. These poorest of the poor are, according to James, heirs of God’s own kingdom (2.5).



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James’s condemnation of the community’s treatment of the poor is the second part of his response to the threat of economic co-optation by ‘the world’ (kosmos), the culture in which these diaspora persons live (1.27). While the community has likely suffered the oppression of the rich—or James’s examples would have been meaningless—members of this community mimic the actions of the rich who oppress them. Not only do they favor the wealthy who might enter their gatherings, but they also mistreat and dishonor the poor ones who come among them, placing them even below their feet (2.3). This practice is antithetical to what James calls pure and undefiled religion for it is stained by the class discrimination of the kyriarchal world (1.27). Pure and undefiled religion, by contrast, requires first that the community shift its concern to the poor, the destitute. This is not only praxis that derives from faith in God, although certainly it is that. It is also a praxis that responds tangibly to the oppression perpetuated by the kyriarchy of the community’s place of exile. This response is limited, understandably so if the community was predominantly made up of the working poor. James does not call for protest movements in the streets, or an uprising of the lower classes. In the first-century Mediterranean, such actions would only end in crucifixions and that would have meant the end of James’s community. However, James does not advocate inaction either. Instead, James turns the community’s focus to those even further down the kyriarchal hierarchy than they are: widows and orphans. As Tamez notes, ‘They are poor and oppressed because they have no one to defend them, nor can they defend themselves. They are truly helpless. Everyone takes advantage of them, especially those in power, such as the judges, the political leaders, and the priests’ (2002: 17). James calls the community to attend to and tend towards these persons. This caregiving is a mark of the community’s true religion. Importantly, James does not call explicitly for treating these in need of care as community equals in this homiletic letter. Nor does he call for the community to question the societal reasons that have caused so many of the poor to be widows and orphans. If this conversation was ongoing in the first century, it is lost to us. Nevertheless, James does call the community to respond to kyriarchy, even if that response does nothing to alter that kyriarchal structure. Further, James calls his community to live in active critique of the kyriarchy of the day. This he does by holding up the destitute as the model of Christian faith and the heirs of God’s kingdom (2.5). James is not calling the community to destitution. Rather, just as they currently model themselves after the rich, even oppressing those beneath them in the economic structure, so now James calls them to model themselves after the poorest of the poor. To model themselves in this way will require an attitudinal shift, a willingness to put God before the economic concerns and practices of the culture into which they are dispersed. It will mean to mourn if they

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find themselves on the top of the economic ladder oppressing others, and to rejoice with the humbled and the destitute at being raised by God and found to be faithful. James here is quite intentionally upending the honor/shame paradigm that would have been in place in his day. It seems not enough for him to critique its practice within the community of worship. He goes further. James takes honor, that limited good, and gives it to the poor over and against the rich, and he calls his community to live this code of honor out as part of its praxis. A community of the working poor that lived this way might quickly find itself without patrons, for only those patrons who agreed to this upending of honor would continue to support poor persons who did not return to them the gratitude and honor which would ordinarily have been ascribed to them. And yet, says James, this is what it means to live out pure and undefiled religion while in the diaspora awaiting the very near return of one’s own patron and Lord. Gender and Sex in James: Mirroring Kyriarchy Kyriarchal hierarchy does not only impact economic structures within a society. Gender and sex are also implicated. Here, a word of definition will be helpful. By ‘sex’, I mean the biological bodies into which persons are born. By ‘gender’, I mean the roles in the society that persons born into particular bodies are supposed to perform. For instance, a person born biologically female (sex) is expected in twenty-first North American societies to buy into ‘princess’ culture and to love the color pink, or so those who market products for little girls would have parents and their daughter believe. Gender is different from sex in that gender is culturally determined. However, both of these, gender and sex, are structured and ranked within kyriarchal hierarchies. The body into which one is born is expected to affect one’s status in society and one’s actions in community. While James calls his community to critique and respond to the economic hierarchy of his day, he appears to accept the kyriarchal structure of gender at face value and reifies it in his homiletic epistle. ‘Consider, for example, James’s use of words for ‘man’ and ‘humanity’. Anthrÿpos is used in James, as usual in Greek, to denote humanity or human beings. James 1.7 uses anthrōpos to refer to the person who doubts, the one who will not receive anything from the Lord. In 1.19, when James counsels that every person must be ‘quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger’, anthrōpos is used, as it seems to refer to every member of the community. In 2.20, 2.24, 3.8, and 3.9, the word is used to refer to human beings in general: human beings, not men in particular, are justified by works, are unable to tame the tongue, are made in God’s image, and can be senseless. In 5.17, anthrōpos is used to remind the community not of Elijah’s masculinity but his humanity: ‘Elijah was a human being just like us’.



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By contrast, whenever James is using anēr, he seems to be following his society’s kyriarchal gender expectations for biological males. Gendered norms for biological males include a stable and unwavering character, not easily destabilized by excessive emotion. Thus, in 1.8, 12, 20 and 23, when James speaks about stability and instability of character, he uses anēr. James’s use of anēr in 1.12, in particular, seems to have overtones of a fighter in the arena who stands his ground in the face of trials. This is one worthy of honor (makarios) and emulation by the community. This same assumption that men are stable underlines James’s use of anēr in 3.2: ‘if someone does not stumble in what he says, he is a complete (or perfect) man’. Of particular note is how James describes the rich and destitute visitors to the community’s place of worship. The wealthy person is described as ‘a man [anēr], gold-ringed, in bright clothing’ (2.2). The other visitor is simply described as a ‘destitute person in filthy clothes’ or, perhaps even better, ‘a beggar in filthy clothes’ (2.2). James does not even give this second person the designation anthrōpos; the person is described solely by economic status (ptōchos). It is more difficult to make this argument from James’s constant use of adelphoi, for this can correctly be translated ‘brothers and sisters’ and, as we will see below, James does recognize the presence of women in the community of faith. James does, however, use the singular for brother, adelphos, twice: once when speaking about the pride of the humbled brother (1.9) and once when counseling the community not to judge one other (4.11). One cannot, by examination of these verses, make any assumption about the sex of the majority of James’s intended audience. There is simply not enough evidence by which to make a definitive judgment. However, the evidence that we do have causes James’s pejorative in 4.4, ‘adulteresses’ or ‘adulterous women’ to pop into sharp relief. Certainly Johnson is correct when he reminds us that ‘by calling these double-minded people “adulteresses” (4.4) James has used the language of the prophets, who imagined the people’s relationship with Yhwh in terms of marriage, and therefore, considered apostasy from covenant as adultery’ (1995: 289). Nevertheless, to a first-century male audience, this would be a great insult indeed. Not only is he calling his audience unfaithful, he is calling his audience, to whom he has commended as exemplifying the perfect, stalwart man, a bunch of adulterous women. James does not stay with the feminine imagery for long. Even this passage (4.1-4) is a discourse on masculinity. If the masculine gender is to be unmoved and unflappable, James’s interlocutors at the beginning of James 4 are acting in very unmanly ways. They chase after ‘the world’, an unsuitable lover who encourages in them cravings and desires that not only go unmet but also lead to actions that disrupt the community of faith. James uses the language of the battlefield to refer to these disruptive actions as

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‘wars’ and ‘physical fights’ (polemoi and machai, 4.1). It is only in this context of men fighting between themselves—that is, they have abandoned the masculine Stoic ideal of staying unmoved—that James resorts to calling these people ‘women’. They are not ‘acting like men’. They are not adhering to the kyriarchal gender roles that James unquestioningly upholds. As for women, they are almost invisible in James. Women in James, outside of the adulteress metaphor, serve one purpose: they are examples of the poor. We see women as widows (and possibly also as orphans) in 1.27. The community is charged to care for these persons, but, as noted above, James gives the community no charge to treat these widows as equal, full members of the community. Another woman occurs in James, this time in 2.15. Here again, however, she has no voice and she is known only for her poverty. She is barely even visible. Her primary characteristic is that of need: she, like the brother with whom she is paired, is poorly clothed and lacks daily bread. For James’s community, faithfulness means tending to her daily needs. It does not mean including her in the decision-making and leadership of the community, a least not in this letter. Thus for James, women, and children also, function solely as a trope, a metaphor for those who are the poorest of the poor, those for whom the community is to be responsible. These people are not completely insignificant to James, but their significance rests on how their presence moves the community of faith to action. The purity of the community’s religion is measured by their treatment of these persons. Women are not subjects with the power of self-determination in James’s homiletic epistle; unlike the poor persons worthy of honor and emulation who are always masculine gendered in James (1.9; 2.5), biological women are made to play the very culturally gendered role of the weak and dependent—they who must be cared for. As part of James’s maintenance of the kyriarchal gender roles of the firstcentury, sexuality is twice used as a metaphor for the community’s interaction with the ‘world’ and/or with its desires. The ‘adulteresses’ pejorative is the first of these, an insult which is clearly both gendered and sexualized (4.4). Here the charge is that the unfaithful are more than ‘friends’ with the ‘world’ (kosmos); they are in bed with the ‘world’, committing adultery against their proper lover. It should probably be noted that, if the ‘world’ is the lover with whom those in 4.1-4 are committing adultery, the relationship is homoerotic since kosmos is masculine. A similar use of sexuality occurs in 1.14. Here, the contrast is between the stalwart man in the arena who endures every test and the one who is tempted. The latter ‘takes the bait’ (deleazō), being seduced by desire (1.14). The sexualized intercourse is never made explicit, but desire must have been impregnated by the one enticed, for she gives birth to a daughter named ‘Sin’, who bears the impregnator a grandson named ‘death’ (1.15). James, here, is taking advantage of the gendered nature of Greek to



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sexualize his discourse. ‘Desire’ and ‘sin’ are both of the feminine gender in Greek and thus are often personified as women. James has no discourse about actual human sexual relations in the homiletic epistle. Marriage is absent from his discourse; the only women named are widows and the only children named are orphans. Absent, too, is any discussion of celibacy, prostitution, or any of the other matters that take up significant portions of the letters of the Pauline school. Whether intentional or not, this means that James’s only sexual discourse is as evidence of male community members’ failure to live up to the masculine norm of self-control. As already noted in Chapter Three, James’s metaphors for God are also gendered: birthmother, ‘father’, and husband. These metaphors also generally conform to ancient kyriarchal gender norms. The slight exception to this is God as birthmother in 1.18, and only in the use of the verb ‘I give birth’ (apokueō); all of the participles and adjectives connected to this verb are masculine. In this sole transgendering move, James depicts a masculine deity performing a feminine role as a positive action. However, the moment is fleeting; it is, after all, only one verse. The sex-specific function of giving birth is never mentioned again within the homiletic letter; nor is God ever again depicted outside of the traditional masculine gendered role. Indeed, the unusual gendering of God in 1.18 becomes the exception that proves the rule. For James, the rule is that God’s characteristics mirror the masculinity expected and upheld by the kyriarchal practices of his day, practices and structures that he accepts and reinforces as normative. James gives us a God who is a father, a masculine role with ascribed honor that requires obedience and deference in all things. In his call to the community of faith to ‘bless’ or speak well of God as ‘father’ (3.9), James reifies the masculine norms surrounding fatherhood within kyriarchy. Similarly, James describes a God who is the husband of the community of faith. Their unfaithfulness, then, can be paralleled with the unfaithfulness described by the ancient prophets (e.g. Isaiah 54; Ezekiel 16; Hosea 4; Revelation 21): they are not acting as obedient, faithful and deferential wives are expected to act within the kyriarchal structure. Compared to the critique that James levels against the economic structures of the kyriarchy, James’s treatment of gender directly mirrors the treatment of gender in the culture of his community’s dispersion. He makes no grand pronouncements about the equality of all believers regardless of gender that is similar to the baptismal formula in Gal. 3.28. He has no female protagonists like Luke’s Elizabeth and Mary (Luke 1–2). He also has no female villains like the so-called Jezebel of Revelation 2. In James, sex is a metaphor, even when it is occasionally homoerotic; however, even that is questionable, since the sexual partners of the masculine ‘world’ (ho kosmos) are called, in James’s gender-bending language, ‘adulterous

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women’. Other than this instance, women, when they are specifically mentioned, function as helpless victims in need of care through which the community demonstrates the purity of its religion. These are not subjects but objects of pity and recipients of religious care. For James, men, real men, are Stoics. They are unmoved in the face of trial and temptation, victors in the arena, unstained by the world. James’s treatment of gender exemplifies why James’s interaction with the kyriarchy is so complicated. When it comes to economics, James raises a strong critique of the status quo; when it comes to gender and sex, James largely perpetuates it. James and Empire: Mimicking Kyriarchy James’s interaction with empire in his homiletic epistle complicates James’s relationship with ancient kyriarchy even further, because this interaction can be seen as a combination of critique and conformity. On the one hand, James critiques the culture into which his community is dispersed, the culture he names ‘the world’ (ho kosmos). On the other hand, James constructs a vision of an-other world that is unmistakably a copy of the world that he abhors, with the exception that this very same structure has a different Lord (kyrios) in charge. And that, for James at least, makes all the difference. Imperial Subjects James begins his homiletic epistle by naming a painful and violent reality of life in empire, the reality of dispersion and exile. He names his addressees ‘the twelve tribes in diaspora’ (1.1). Diaspora is a description of divine judgment through most of the Septuagint writings: God acting to disperse the people throughout the nations as a punishment for unfaithfulness (cf. Deut. 28.25; Jer. 15.7; 41.17; Dan. 12.2). By the time of the writing of John’s Gospel, those living outside of Jerusalem are called ‘the diaspora’, perhaps with less of a sense of shame than of location (Jn 7.35). In either case, being in diaspora means not being ‘at home’. The word connotes that wherever these communities are living is not their proper home and that, by extension, the powers in charge of these places of dispersion are not legitimate ruling powers over the dispersed people. Diaspora also reminds the community that they are ‘other’, that they are ‘not from there’ and should maintain that ‘native’ identity. Throughout this homiletic epistle, James consistently charges his brothers and sisters in diaspora not to make themselves ‘at home’ in the ‘world’ but rather to remember that they are exiled subjects of another kingdom. To describe the subjects of this kingdom, James relies on metaphors of kinship. This would not have been unusual in the ancient world. Caesar was, after all, the father of Rome. In the same way, James traces the lineage of the community, those common ancestors that mark them as a people distinct



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from those among whom they live. Some of his descriptions are implicit. When he names the community ‘the twelve tribes’ (1.1), he is harking back to their eponymous ancestor, Jacob the usurper, whose twelve sons by two slaves and two free women became known as the leaders of the ‘twelve tribes’ of Israel (Genesis 49). Similarly, in his discussion of the faithfulness of Abraham (2.21-23), James reminds his audience that Abraham is ‘our father’, a reference not only to genealogy but also to a divine covenant of which they are also heirs, even in diaspora. With human ancestral markers such as Jacob and Abraham, James marks the denizens of his kingdom in dispersion as part of a particular people and nation. These markers are explicitly tribal, tracing the community of faith genealogically. If James means to extend this community identification with Abraham to include non-biological heirs of the covenant, as Paul of Tarsus often does (cf. Galatians 3), James does not say. That he does not suggests one of two things: either his argument predates the controversy of Gentile inclusion in these particular communities, or he understands that question to be settled in some way. James does not address this question, so it must remain unanswered in this context. The subjects of this alternative kingdom are not only described as children of Abraham and Jacob, since James also describes them as birth children of the God who is both their mother (1.18) and their father (1.17, 27). For James, these women and men in exile are daughters and sons of God. Within James’s context, this certainly would have been heard as only a partially veiled challenge of the Roman empire. By the early first century, Caesars were calling themselves ‘son of God’ (divi filii). Indeed, this Latin self-designation was stamped into coins that also carried Caesar’s image and likeness. James never uses the provocative Greek phrase ‘son of God’ (huios tou theou), but if God is the birther of the denizens of this kingdom in diaspora, the unstated implication is nevertheless present. This diaspora kingdom is made entirely of persons who are at least equal to Caesar in rank in the eyes of God. For all of them are birthchildren of God (1.17). James’s challenge to the economic kyriarchy above further upends what this kingdom in diaspora looks like. He asserts that the most destitute among the community are ‘inheritors’ of the kingdom (2.5). This makes the poorest of the poor equal to the most important families of Rome in this diaspora kingdom. They, like the children of the Caesars, will inherit the kingdom prepared for them by their ‘father’ who has named them as heirs. With these descriptions, James redefines the position of his audience from povertystricken exiles in diaspora: instead of being punished by God and exiled among the nations, they are, instead, subjects of a kingdom, a new, even more powerful empire about to break into the world. James, here, patterns the new inbreaking of God after the Roman empire. Just like Rome, God has an empire, with sons and daughters who have been named heirs. God’s

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empire is definitively not Rome, but James’s imagination of this inbreaking kingdom, or empire, mimics very directly the Roman empire it critiques. Imperial Leadership Rome, of course, is ruled by a Caesar. The leadership of James’s empire, as he describes it, is a bit more ambiguous. The problem rests in the word ‘Lord’ (kyrios). James uses this term interchangeably for Christ (1.1; 2.1) and for God (3.9; 5.4). While some uses are clear, in other places it is not sure which ‘Lord’ James has in mind or whether he equates Christ with God. Some things, however, are clear. First, the leadership of this empire comes not from this world, but ‘from above’ (1.17), and can be described as ‘the Father of Lights’ (1.17) as well as ‘our glorious Lord Jesus’ (2.1). Second, the leadership of this empire is quite aware of what is going on, even in the physical absence of its emperor (5.4), who will shortly return to set things right (5.7–8). James also chooses the unusual descriptor ‘Lord of hosts’ (kyrios Sabaōth) to describe the imperial leader (5.4). The word Sabaōth functions here in two different ways. It points to the unspoken, holy name of God, sometimes called the Tetragrammaton because it contains four consonants. The phrase kyrios Sabaōth is used repeatedly in the Septuagint to mark the presence of the Tetragrammaton (cf. Josh. 6.17; 1 Sam. 1.3). Here, then, James may be coming as close as he dares to calling the imperial leader by name. Furthermore, the word Sabaōth is best translated ‘armies’; with kyrios, the phrase can be rendered in English as ‘the Lord of armies’. Thus, when James names the leadership of this alternative empire, ‘the Lord of armies’, James is making a clear assertion of the imperial leadership’s power. Imperial Characteristics The primary characteristic of James’s alternative empire is its ‘royal law’ (2.8). This too parallels directly the Roman empire whose legal code is still studied today. However, James’s royal law, or law of the empire, is not Rome’s extensive legal codes but rather most probably Torah. This law, James argues, brings freedom (1.25; 2.12); the intimation is that Rome’s law does not. This intimation is made even more strongly when James illustrates the oppressiveness of Rome’s legal code, a code that allows the rich to drag members of the community into court and to ‘blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked’ over members of the community (2.7). Such actions James depicts as unjust and counter to the law of freedom, the law of the alternative empire. However, the community members are not to place themselves in the position of legal experts and judge one another. This minor departure from the structure of the Roman empire saves the community from fully importing the hierarchical structure of Rome and thus causing community



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dissatisfaction and division. James cautions his audience to remember that there is only one ‘lawgiver and judge’ (4.12). Subjects of this empire are not to be judges penalizing suspected lawbreakers (4.11-12; 5.9). They are to be doers of the law (4.11). In the same vein, community members are to avoid anger. Anger is also contrary to law, and does not bring about the justice of God (1.20). Rather, James counsels that those who plant peace will reap justice (3.18). Ultimately, God’s justice, and thus God’s justification, are God’s alone to hand out based on the actions of the imperial subjects. This belief that, ultimately, God will judge according to the actions of God’s imperial subjects is the basis for James’s discussion of Abraham in 2.21-24. In James’s alternative empire, God declares Abraham justified because of what he does, not merely because of what he says he believes (cf. 2.18-19). A secondary characteristic of this empire is that those within it may find salvation. This also directly parallels the Roman empire. Caesar was the savior of the world, according to Rome, the birth of Augustus was even being hailed as the birth of a savior. Thus, James is creating an intentionally similar alternative to the Roman empire. In this alternative world, the savior is again unclear; it may refer to God, to Jesus or to some combination of the two. Salvation, for James, is rescue of the psychē from death (5.20) and destruction (4.12). Whether James recognizes the ‘soul’ as separate from one’s life is not clear; the word psychē might mean either or both of these things. If James really understands the parousia of the imperial ruler (5.7-8) to be extremely imminent, then psychē probably means ‘life’. At the same time, for a community at risk of being dragged before courts, denied wages and generally oppressed, there may have been comfort in knowing that, as subjects of this alternative empire, not even death would be able to destroy one’s ‘soul’. Understanding James’s imperial imagery sheds new light on James’s description of God and/or Jesus Christ as the patron(s) of the community that we considered in Chapter 3. As David deSilva notes: Relief from oppression, whether from an extortionate local official, from pirates on the sea or from a hostile force from outside would be a benefaction especially well-suited for an emperor to give. Pardon for crimes committed was reserved for kings and emperors to grant, who were also credited with doing the broad public a great service if peace and stability characterized their rule (2000: 101).

When read through this lens, it becomes clear that James is depicting God/Jesus as the ultimate emperor, bestowing benefactions to those who are faithful subjects, those who are loyal friends. Facing trials tests the loyalty of the imperial subjects (1.2); if they face a test and stay loyal to their emperor, they are truly friends of God and they become complete in everything (1.4). Similarly, subjects of this emperor are to ask for favors without any wavering of their loyalty and allegiance (1.6). After all, what emperor

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will give benefactions to those who prove themselves to be disloyal? But the petitions of those who are truly loyal to the imperial power will be enough to save even the sick (5.15). James notes that the destitute of the community are particularly loyal to God, perhaps because they have nowhere else to turn (2.5). However, for most of the imperial subjects, their loyalty is determined by what they do, by how they live out their obedience to the law (2.14-26). This is why judging is problematic. It is an act of disloyalty, of placing oneself above the law in a position of power reserved for the emperor (2.1; 4.12). Rather, James counsels his audience to demonstrate their loyalty to the divine emperor by becoming friends of God, like Abraham was, and not friends of the world (2.21; 4.4). James and its Readers James’s language about empire shows again how complicated James’s relationship is with kyriarchy. The same author who calls for communal actions in critique of economic kyriarchy keeps the very gender and sex norms that kyriarchy demands. This same author also calls his community away from loyalty to the Roman empire, only to require of them loyalty to an alternative empire with its own law, custom and imperial leadership. Just as with gender and sex norms, James does not question empire or imperial structure. He assumes it. James’s critique is not of empire per se but of the current reigning empire of the world, which he sees as being in direct enmity with God. As a result, James exhorts his audience that they are subjects of an alternative empire, an empire that is not Rome, and they must not act like the denizens of Rome. For contemporary readers, James can feel at once preternaturally contemporary and hopelessly antiquated. Certainly some of James’s critiques of the economic injustices of his day feel as those they could have been written during the heyday of the Occupy Wall Street movement. At the same time, James’s views on gender, few though they are, seem hopelessly stuck in the first century. James’s view of the kingdom of God can be a source of tension. Contemporary readers must realize that neither James nor any of the other New Testament writers describe a democratic community in which each person may have her or his say and whose leadership is chosen by the people. Instead, James’s ‘kingdom of God’ describes a hierarchical empire in which silence is valued, leaders are rare, and all actions are taken ‘if the Lord wills it’ (3.1-18; 4.15). All of this can be masked by a familiar theological language, such as ‘faith’ and ‘Lord’. However, placed within its cultural context, James’s language reveals not so much anti-imperial critique as the creation of an alternative imperial structure, complete with an emperor, to which the members of his audience are, or should be, subject.



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Understanding this should raise questions for the contemporary reader of James. What does it mean to speak of oneself as the subject of an empire, particularly if one is from the global north and global west that so prize democracy and the voices of the people? What are the implications of the language of ‘kingdom’, ‘faith’ and ‘friendship’ for those who consider James Scripture and yet prize representative government? How does James’s language about kinship as a marker of imperial subjects intersect with cultures that prize international diversity and multiculturalism? How, if at all, might the praxis of James be implemented without recreating the imperialism on which that praxis is built? There are no easy solutions to these questions.

5

James as a Migrant Writing ‘James, of God and the Lord Jesus Christ a slave, to the twelve tribes in the Diaspora, greetings’ (1.1; my translation). So begins the epistle to James. So far, I have made suggestions about what this ancient text might have been and who might have written it. James is likely a homiletic epistle, a sermon in letter form, written by James the brother of Jesus in Jerusalem. However, there still remains the question of the ‘diaspora’. This final chapter will suggest that, in addition to its theology and its role in kyriarchy, we should consider James as a piece of migrant writing: it proposes to a community a particular migrant strategy for dealing with a host community. Further, this chapter will consider how the epistle of James functions as a kind of diaspora space, where cultures collide and commingle and where tradition is invented. Finally, this chapter will consider James’s contemporary role as a religious Scripture, because, ultimately, James is of particular interest to those for whom it is Scripture. This final excursus will consider what happens when a migrant writing and a diaspora space become Scripture. The New Testament as Migrant Writings What is a migrant writing? For the purpose of this chapter, a migrant writing is a text that purports to be written to, for, or by migrants; it gives some counsel regarding how those migrants might interact with their home and host cultures. James is not the only migrant writing in the New Testament. In fact, I have argued that at least the majority—if not the totality—of New Testament writings are migrant writings (Aymer 2014). First, consider Paul of Tarsus. Biblical scholars generally agree that Paul was a traveling preacher. There is no extant copy of a letter by Paul either written to or from his natal city of Tarsus. Paul was a migrant, a voluntary migrant to be sure, but nevertheless a migrant. Paul’s audience consists primarily of those whom the Gentiles mistakenly called Ioudaioi, or Judeans, but who were more broadly worshipers of the God of Israel dispersed—in diaspora—around the northern Mediterranean. Today, for shorthand, we call them Jews, but this does not get at the diversity of early Judaisms around the Mediterranean basin. Deeply Hellenized but still holding on to cultural



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practices that stemmed from their original places of migration in Galilee, Samaria, Judea, Perea and the areas surrounding these regions, Paul’s assemblies would have been gatherings of persons sharing not just similar religious convictions but also similar political, social and cultural values. After all, religion and politics were not separate in the ancient world. In addition, the cities to which Paul writes would have been, at least in part, comprised of migrants. Corinth was a city settled entirely by migrants to the region; Rome had destroyed the old Greek city and built a Roman one in its place, settling it with retired Roman soldiers. Philippi had met a similar fate. Thessalonike and the region of Galatia were also favorite places for Roman soldiers to be placed after retirement; they were cities full of migrants. Rome, of course, was full of all kinds of migrants. When one considers the Gentiles of Paul’s audience, the presence of a variety of migrants within those audiences is fairly certain. Given this historical reconstruction, which would cause little real controversy among biblical scholars, calling Paul’s seven undisputed letters ‘migrant writings’ is simply rehearsing the facts as we can know them. As for the Gospels, scholarly consensus still dates the very earliest of them—Mark—either during or immediately after the Roman siege of Jerusalem. Although it contains narratives about persons in Tyre and southern Syria, the Decapolis, Perea, Galilee, Samaria and Judea, many scholars insist that the Gospel of Mark was composed and disseminated outside of Galilee, possibly in Rome or some other large imperial city. Clearly the stories themselves have migrated, no doubt through the mouths of migrant storytellers and preachers; and the final composition, written for a tenuous and frequently expelled community of Ioudaioi and their Gentile allies in Rome or another large city within the Roman empire, must be understood as a migrant writing. Matthew and Luke, most scholars contend, use Mark and some other source(s) to compose their writings. Scholars usually place Matthew’s composition, some 15 to 20 years after Mark, in the Syrian city of Antioch, the city from which Roman armies would march on Jerusalem and destroy the Temple. If Matthew does in fact use Mark, and it seems fairly certain that he did, as 90% of Mark occurs in Matthew’s Gospel, then the Gospel narrative as a written document must have migrated from somewhere within the Roman empire back to Syria. That already would qualify Matthew and also Luke as migrant writings. Matthew’s community likely includes migrants from the Judean wars and certainly includes Ioudaioi in diaspora. All of Matthew’s audience were living away from Judea and thinking through the Christian gospel in light of the political, social and cultural values of the recently conquered lands to their south. Luke–Acts is usually dated at a time close to or later than Matthew, and its place of composition is an open and unsettled question. However,

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scholarship has not argued for a Galilean, Judean, Samarian or other Palestinian location of composition for Luke. So Luke–Acts, like Matthew and Mark, likely reflects a story written outside of its place of origin. Luke’s dependence on Matthew and Mark further reflects the migration of the writings and the migrants who composed the initial Gospel. With regard to the Gospel of John, similar arguments apply. Quite clearly, John’s narrative focuses on events and persons in Judea, Galilee, Samaria and the regions surrounding them. Without dispute, scholars place the authorship of John outside of Roman Palestine, possibly in Ephesus. That it would have been written outside of this region suggests, again, a migrant author, first or second generation, rehearsing the traditions of his or her home culture in this narrative for a community that most certainly includes at least Ioudaioi in diaspora. The possibility of Ephesus as the place in which the Gospel was written suggests the certain presence of those voluntary migrants who had flocked to one of the largest cities of the Roman empire. Many of the rest of the writings may be considered second-generation migrant writings—possibly produced by residents but tied to the traditions of their migrant forebears. Among these, one might include (1) the deuteroPauline and pastoral epistles, commonly considered to be part of a ‘school tradition’ surrounding Paul; and (2) the Johannine epistles, considered part of a ‘school tradition’ surrounding the Gospel of John. Hebrews, Jude and 2 Peter are more difficult. Both Jude and 2 Peter are generally considered later documents written after theological lines were beginning to be drawn in the early assemblies; so they too are kinds of migrant writings, drawing on a migrant tradition, whether or not they are written by residents. Hebrews is a puzzle, for it gives us no clear historical data on which to draw. However, again, its theology of Christian supersessionism of the Temple cult favors diaspora communities of Ioudaioi who might have had need to reinterpret faithfulness in light of distance from or destruction of the Temple. Of the New Testament, perhaps the texts that are most explicit regarding their status as migrant writing would be 1 Peter, the Apocalypse of John and the epistle of James. First Peter addresses itself ‘to the exiles in the diaspora’ (1.1). The Apocalypse of John was written when the seer John ‘was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus’ (Rev. 1.9), which most scholars read as being in exile. And, as noted above, James is addressed ‘to the twelve tribes in the Dispersion’ (1.1). In short, it is possible that most, if not all, of the writings of the New Testament were written, to, for, or by migrants. That the writings of the New Testament might be overwhelmingly related to migrants is, by itself, simply an interesting historical fact. Of significantly greater interest is the way in which migration, real and/or rhetorical,



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infuses these writings. Encoded in the theology, kyriarchy, and rhetoric of these writings are migrant strategies for communal survival, strategies that seek to help migrant communities negotiate at least two cultures: their home culture and their host culture (cf. Jas 1.1-2). By ‘home culture’, I mean the culture out of which these migrants, real or fictive, largely emerge, the cultural or geographic space from which they come and which sets them aside as ‘other’ and from ‘an-other’ place. By ‘host culture’, I mean the culture in which these migrants, real or fictive, find themselves: their place of migration. The migrant rhetoric in these writings serves as advice for survival— advice given to groups of voluntary or involuntary migrants, real or fictive, who have gathered illicitly in the name of an unknown crucified Palestinian Jew. They also serve to denote what sociologist Avtar Brah (1996) calls a ‘diaspora space’: a space of creative tension, recreation, and negotiation at the intersection of cultures. The rest of this chapter will turn to the question of migrant rhetoric and diaspora space, specifically as it affects the epistle of James. Let us turn first to explore what kind of rhetorical migrant strategy may be outlined in James. Migrant Strategies and James In his 2001 article, ‘A Psychology of Migration’, John Berry, professor emeritus of Queens University in Canada and a pioneer in the psychology of migration and acculturation, proposes four stances that migrants take as they negotiate their home culture (or their roots) and their host culture (or their place of migration): marginalization, separation, assimilation and integration. As explained by Sunil Bhatia and Anjali Ram, in Berry’s understanding of marginalization, migrants ‘lose cultural and psychological contact with both their traditional culture and the larger society’ (Bhatia and Ram 2001: 4). In other words, marginalized migrants, perhaps better named liminal migrants, are migrants who are disassociated both from their home culture and their host culture. Their mirror opposites choose the strategy of integration, or, as Margaret Gibson calls it, ‘accommodation’ (Gibson 2001: 20-21). If the liminal migrants are no longer ‘home’ but disassociate themselves from host culture, the accommodating migrants negotiate ways to stay in both home and host cultures, even when this causes tension; accommodating migrants sometimes choosing one culture over another culture but they try to keep both options open. That is, accommodating migrants practice ‘the deliberate preservation of the homeland culture…in an adapted form more suitable to life in the host country’ (Gibson 2001: 20-21). Migrants who choose the strategy of assimilation, Berry’s third migrant stance, ‘do not wish to maintain their cultural heritage’ (Berry 2001: 619). They pattern themselves entirely after their host culture, ridding

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themselves of all traces of their home culture if and when necessary. Their mirror opposites choose the strategy of separation, the last of Berry’s four possible stances. They ‘place a value on holding on to their original culture and at the same time wish to avoid interaction with others’ (Berry 2001: 619). Berry intends these descriptions for use in clinical psychological work with contemporary migrants. However, these descriptions can also be useful as descriptors of strategies for engaging the word (ho kosmos). These strategies—migrant strategies—may be found throughout the rhetorical fabric of the New Testament. In this way, New Testament writings function as a kind of migration rhetoric that encodes migrant strategies, regardless of whether a New Testament author’s and/or audience’s experience of migration was physical. To identify the strategy encoded in James requires an investigation of how James treats his host culture and his home culture. This will require following the clues found in James about his audience, its location, and the strategy he proposes for it. As noted above, James addresses his letter to ‘the twelve tribes in the diaspora’ (1.1). However, James is not explicit about where ‘the diaspora’ might be. Unlike the letter of Paul addressed to specific groups in specific cities—Corinth, Thessalonica, Rome—James’s missive does not name exactly where in the diaspora it is headed. Nevertheless, there are clear indications of the kind of migrant strategy James requires of his dispersed audience. The most explicit of these indications comes from James’s use of the term ‘world’ (kosmos). This takes place four times and at no time is it positive. In one case, ‘a world of evil’ is used to describe the tongue (3.6). From this alone, one cannot state James’s counsel about the host culture, as nothing necessitates that ‘world of evil’ to mean the host culture. However, 1.27 and 4.4 both make James’s position clear. Members of his community are to remain ‘unstained by the world’ (1.27). They dare not risk friendship with the ‘world’, lest they be seen as unfaithful adulteresses and enemies of God (4.4). Even the most neutral of these usages points to a negative view of the ‘world’. In 2.5, James speaks of ‘the poor of the world’. These, he says, will be rich in the things of God and inheritors of God’s kingdom. This, too, is oppositional. Those whom the ‘world’ does not value, God will value. Those impoverished in the ‘world’ will be enriched in the divine kingdom. In addition to explicit statements such as these, James contains a host of cultural critiques. James raises a critique of the patronage system in which the rich patrons are given preferential treatment while the poor are dishonored. This includes the assertion that such actions are direct violations of the ‘royal law’, on which basis community members are to be judged (2.813). The ‘royal law’ here might easily be contrasted with ‘the customs of the world’, or even ‘the laws of the world’. In addition to the use of kosmos



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as a description of how bad the tongue is, James names envy, selfish ambition, boastfulness and self-deception as ‘earthly’ (epigeios) wisdom (3.15). These contrast with the heavenly wisdom that is ‘first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy’ (3.17). Later, the polemic against the adulterous friends of the ‘world’ (4.4) is followed by a harsh critique of the equally worldly practice of boasting in one’s ability to make money without so much as an ‘if the Lord wills’ (4.15). Towards the end of the letter, James rails against the cultural practice of defrauding day laborers as an act that will reap divine judgment (5.1-5), and warns against the cultural practice of swearing by someone or something (5.12). These less explicit statements could be understood simply as cultural critique by a community that has chosen an accommodationist migrant strategy. However, they differ from an accommodationist tack given the basis of their moral opprobrium. In an accommodationist argument, the strategy would be to act in particular ways so as to not appear impious or unjust to those in the host culture. Consider, for instance, the argument against incest in 1 Cor. 5.1. Not only, argues Paul, is such an act forbidden by the Torah, but even the ‘pagans’ would condemn such an act. Or consider the argument in 1 Timothy regarding why slaves should obey their masters: ‘Let all who are under the yoke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all honor, so that the name of God and the teaching may not be blasphemed’ (1 Tim. 6.1, nrsv; emphasis added). At issue in both of these statements from Paul and his ‘school’ is the community’s relationship with its host culture. By contrast, each of the polemics in James has as its rationale the community’s relationship with Torah and with the one whom James calls the ‘lawgiver’ (4.12). So far, the evidence in James points to a community that holds its host culture in very low esteem. It does not alter its behavior to accommodate the ‘world’, and it considers friendship with the ‘world’ to be antithetical to its relationship with God (4.4). According to Berry’s categories, James’s community can neither be assimilationist nor accommodationist, for both of these require significant positive consideration of and interaction with the host culture. We are, then, left with the migrant strategies of liminality or separation. The determining factor here will be the role of the home culture in the identity and life of the community. To determine the nature of the home culture, one must return, once more, to the opening address of James: ‘to the twelve tribes in the diaspora’ (1.1). This opening uses two identifiable cultural markers to describe the intended audience of James’s encyclical. The ‘twelve tribes’ refer to the descendants born to Jacob/Israel by two slave women (Zilpah and Bilhah) and two free women (Leah and Rachel) in Genesis 29–30. More than this, ‘twelve tribes’ is a term denoting the ancestral line of the men born to these women, an

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ancestral line through which all Ioudaioi (‘Jews’ or ‘Judeans’) who were not proselytes traced their heritage. In James’s day, Judaism was a system of beliefs directly tied to a people—a specific biological and geographicallybounded people—with particular (and in the ‘pagan’ imagination, peculiar) practices and beliefs. This particularity and peculiarity was alternatively tolerated and persecuted by the Roman empire, sometimes resulting in defense and sometimes in expulsion, as well as other police actions (Rutgers 1998: 115). Despite the possibility that there might have been Gentile believers in James’s community, James chooses a primary identifier for the community that would mark them as a particular and peculiar people. They are not just any group of God-fearers; they are descendants of ‘the twelve tribes’, descendants of the original Jacobos. In addition, James names his community as a community in diaspora. As noted in earlier chapters, dispersion was often considered a mark of divine displeasure (Deut. 28.25; Jer. 15.7). However, a significant theme within the Scriptures of Judaism is the promise that God will eventually gather together those who have been dispersed among the nations (Deut. 30.4; Neh. 1.9). Within the context of the New Testament, the word ‘diaspora’ occurs twice more besides Jas 1.1. In each case, the word denotes worshipers of the God of Israel being scattered among non-Jews, but it carries with it no insinuation of condemnation. In John’s Gospel, the diaspora is where ‘the Greeks’ are (Jn 7.35). In 1 Peter, the specific diaspora churches being addressed are those in Asia Minor (1.1). James’s address is probably intended to be more like that of the New Testament than the usage of the word found in the Hebrew Bible: it functions as a marker of the community’s physical location rather than of God’s divine displeasure. Also, in naming the community’s location as diaspora, James highlights the minority status of the community among a world not mainly populated by descendants of ‘the twelve tribes’. The community is not ‘at home’. It exists as a minority group among a majority culture that shares neither their lineage nor their beliefs. Already, the reader can sense James’s valuation of the community’s home culture, even if they were physically dispersed or displaced. He has chosen to address them with a language that is particular to that culture, a language to remind them of their ethnic and cultural identity as well as their displacement outside of their natural home. Further reading in James underscores James’s embrace of his home culture, an embrace he expects his audience to share no matter where they are. Perhaps the most noted of these is James’s treatment of ‘the law’ or Torah throughout his missive. As one might expect from a devout Jew, James holds these first five books of his Scriptures in the highest esteem, and uses them as the arbiter of moral behavior within his community. James names Torah ‘the perfect law, the law of liberty’ (1.25), and he begins by charging those who practice prosōlēmpsia, translated as



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‘showing prejudice’ (2.1; cf. 2.9), for being faithless (2.14-26). He does not spell out why that might be, but as noted above, the word would remind readers of the command not to show partiality (ou lēmpsēi prosōpon) in Lev. 19.15. Later in that chapter, James calls ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself’ (Lev. 19.18b) the ‘royal law’, and he warns his community that those who ‘show partiality…commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors’ (2.9). We see James once again referencing the law in James 3. This time the reference is to Genesis; when James charges that with the tongue ‘we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God’ (3.9), it is an allusion to Gen. 1.26. James goes on and warns his community not to speak evil or judge each other because whoever does so ‘speaks evil against the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge’ (4.11) Since ‘there is one lawgiver and judge’ (4.12), anyone who stands up as a judge stands in the place of God. While the law is not specifically named in James 5, the allusion to workers being denied their wages (5.4) hearkens back to Leviticus 19. This time the verse in question is 19.13a. In other words, the source for James continues to be Torah, the central text that marks the identity of James’s community. Clearly, then, for James, Torah, the central moral marker of Judaism, is critical to the identity and ethics of his community. James references other Scriptures also. As noted previously, he alludes to Ecclesiastes when speaking of the withering of the rich (1.9-10). Abraham (2.21; cf. Genesis 22) and Rahab (2.25; cf. Joshua 2) both make appearances in James 2 as faithful actors. (Abraham, for James, is not merely an exemplary figure; he is also a father figure [patēr] to the community [2.21]). James’s polemic against the faithless adulteresses of James 4 echoes similar charges against Israel by the prophets, and James’s invocation of the Lord of Sabaōth or ‘Lord of hosts’ (5.4) is found throughout the historical writings and especially in the Psalms. Finally, James holds up as models of patient endurance for his community the prophets of Israel and the life of Job (5.11). In short, James’s moral compass for his community is, as has been noted in early chapters, grounded in the traditions and Scriptures of ‘the twelve tribes’—the traditions and Scriptures of his home culture, heritage and religion. James’s deep grounding in his home religion, and his call to his audience to return to such ‘home training’ clearly eliminates liminality as his migrant strategy. While the liminal Gospel of John might describe a community of ‘sons of God’—a community made of those who receive the incarnate word that was rejected both by the world and by his people, and hence a third-way community that lives in liminal space between the world and ‘the Jews’ reimagining what it means to be faithful—James’s counsel is clearly the establishment and maintenance of a separatist organization, a group ‘unstained

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by the world’ (1.27) while living in diaspora. James encourages a community of migrants who have not abandoned the old ways and who do not, and do not wish to, resemble their hosts. James’s migrant strategy is separation. James as Diaspora Space Following Berry’s framework, James’s migrant strategy becomes clear. However, Berry’s framework serves only as a helpful preliminary model. As any framework is wont to do, it can too neatly summarize positions as though these were static and absolute. As a psychologist for the current era, Berry also has clear preferences for the kind of accommodationist strategy (he calls it ‘integration’) that some migrants choose over the separation strategy that is James’s choice. For this reason, sociologist Avtar Brah of London provides a helpful complication in considering the implications of thinking of James as a migrant writing. In her book Cartographies of Diaspora, Brah describes the place of cultural formation and reformation that migrants inhabit as ‘diaspora space’. Diaspora space, for her, is that place where multiple subject positions are juxtaposed, contested, proclaimed or disavowed; where the permitted and the prohibited perpetually interrogate; and where the accepted and the transgressive imperceptibly mingle even while these syncretic forms may be disclaimed in the name of purity and tradition. Here, tradition is itself continually invented even as it may be hailed as originating from the mists of time (Brah 1996: 208; emphasis added).

This thick description reflects the struggle and promise of diaspora spaces, those spaces where migrants and host communities enter into the neverending dance of self-definition. But what does it have to do with the New Testament? Simply this. If the letter of James is indeed a migrant writing, James’s audience must also be expected to be in a diaspora space; if so, the kind of struggle and promise that Brah discusses should also be evident in James’s encyclical. Brah’s thick description raises for our consideration, first of all, the matter of subject positionality: the juxtaposition, contestation, proclamation and/ or disavowal of multiple subject positions (Brah 1996: 208). In the letter of James, the clear and consistent juxtaposition is that of ‘friend of the world’ versus ‘friend of God’. As noted above, James pits these two positions as stark contrasts with no hope of reconciliation. Either one is with the ‘world’ or one is unstained by it. Either one follows the law or one transgresses it by becoming its judge. Either one honors the poor and eschews honoring the rich, or one violates the command not to show partiality. Either one hedges all plans with a ‘Lord willing’ (4.15) or one is being hubristic. Either one is a friend of God and acts on it like Abraham, or one is an adulterous woman and a friend of the ‘world’. For James, there is no nuance and no place of



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compromise between these two positions. His migrant writing serves as a proclamation of one and a disavowal of the other. And yet, James writes in Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic. Indeed, this letter is beautifully composed and employs plenty of alliterative Greek. As noted in Chapter 1, this is one of the reasons that some scholars think the brother of Jesus could not be the author of this text. Further, James’s quotes from Scriptures, even his biblical wordplay like prosōlēmpsia, rely on his knowledge and use of the Greek translation of his Scriptures. The irony is immediately evident. This missive against being stained by the ‘world’ is written in the language of the empire. The ‘royal law’ has been colonized by hellenization. For all of his juxtaposition and contestation, James’s subject position is that of a partially Hellenized Jewish believer in the Christ. He is perhaps more culturally ‘pure’ than those he charges in his missive. However, not even James is ‘unstained by the world’ (1.27). This phenomenon is evident in the second part of Brah’s description: diaspora space is marked by the ongoing interrogation of the permitted and the prohibited, the mingling of what is accepted and what is transgressive and, ultimately, the creation of syncretic forms. James tries to set up clear categories regarding what is permitted and what is prohibited, categories based heavily on his reading of his community’s Scriptures. Some of these are straightforward. His migrant community members should honor the poor and refuse to be obsequious to the rich who drag them into court and blaspheme the name invoked upon them. They need to pay the workers, guard their tongues, take care of widows and orphans. They should not curse those made in God’s image, they should not swear by any power or location, and they should not seek to befriend the ‘world’. However, as noted above, these were still Hellenistic people, hearing this epistolary sermon in the Greek language—and Greek rhetorical style—in which it was composed, and referencing their Scriptures in the Greek translation. How many among them could have been expected to read, much less to read Hebrew? There are other forms of co-mingling also in James, most notably his willingness to accept and even to perpetuate the kyriarchy of the imperial structure in which his community lives. As noted in Chapter 4, James, for all of his critique of the economic kyriarchy of his day, uses slavery as a metaphor rather than addressing the horror that was ancient chattel slavery. Without comment, James calcifies the way in which gender would be understood by his community, relegating women to the ranks of the poor and helpless without either subjectivity or voice. Further, James’s inbreaking ‘kingdom of God’ can be read as a mimicry of the empire in which he already lives. As with the Roman Empire, the rule of the kingdom of God has no limits, extending to ‘every generous act of giving with every perfect gift’ (1.17); its rule governs one’s speech, one’s business practices and one’s treatment of others. As with the Roman Empire, James’s vision of the kingdom of God

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represents the telos of history with its promise of the coming parousia, at which time all will be judged. In addition, as with the Roman Empire, even one’s psychology is subject to this empire: one’s anxieties, one’s desires, one’s jealousies, one’s response to persecution and one’s plans for the future. Finally, denizens of this ‘kingdom’ are called to make peace. Could this be an echo of the Pax romana, the Roman peace that terrorized its colonies into submission? The degree of similarity between this kingdom and the summary description of empire given by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their massive study (2000: xv) is a bit too close for comfort. The point, here, is not that James’s ‘kingdom of God’ is an inherently sinister project. Rather, as a product of diaspora space, it is a thoroughly syncretic project. For all of James’s polemic against ‘adulterous women’ and befriending the ‘world’ (4.4), James’s own vision of religious community is as much a reflection of the host cultures of his diaspora community and of the political realities of his day as it is a call for separation. In other words, even with a migrant strategy of separation, for James and his community, there is not—and has never truly been—any absolute separation between these ‘twelve tribes’ and their host communities. Ultimately, these ancient migrant writings called the New Testament represent, as Brah posits, an invention of tradition, a tradition we have come to call Christianity. However, each writing’s invention differs on the basis of audience, situation, migrant strategy and the theology of the writer. James’s invention is a Christian practice of separatist and somewhat egalitarian— among men—community. If James is indeed writing from Jerusalem, he notably does not create for his diaspora community a structure of governance akin to what might be found in Jerusalem. This might indicate that he intends Jerusalem to continue to be the governing center of the nascent movement of Christ-followers. Alternatively, it may suggest that James truly envisions the Christ-following tradition he is inventing as having a relatively flat hierarchy: a group of sisters and brothers who make every effort to keep peace with each other and governed by rabbis, or teachers, who rely on the teachings of Torah. In James’s migrant writing, in his diaspora space, the Christ-following tradition is finally marked by a salvific faith that, in turn, is known only if demonstrated through action. Migrant Writings, Diaspora Spaces and Scripture: James as Scripture The first portion of this chapter has argued that the epistle of James constitutes a migrant writing and a diaspora space. Its intended migrant audience—the twelve tribes in diaspora—is encouraged to adopt a separationist stance toward the host culture. Why does this matter? Simply put, James’s stance toward the ‘world’, and indeed the contents and argument of



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this ancient document, matter because, for Christians regardless of tradition (even Lutherans), the epistle of James is Scripture. To understand what happens when faithful people name a text or a collection of texts ‘Scriptures’, the work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith is invaluable. Smith’s seminal monograph, What is Scripture? A Comparative Analysis, traces the human activities of making Scriptures and using Scriptures across a variety of religious communities and traditions. According to Smith: [S]cripture is a human activity…the quality of being scripture is not an attribute of texts. It is a characteristic of the attitude of persons—groups of persons—to what outsiders perceive as texts. It denotes a relation between a people and a text. Yet that too is finally inadequate…at issue is the relation between a people and the universe, in the light of their perception of a given text (Smith 1993: 18; emphasis added).

Cantwell Smith’s definition makes explicit what Christians are doing when they confess that the epistle of James, or any of the writings in our Holy Book, is ‘Scripture’. As a people of faith, they are confessing a particular relationship that they will have and will maintain with these ancient texts. They are pledging to have a different attitude to these texts than to the writings of Marcus Aurelius (which are as ancient as our own), the writings of Plato (which are equally informed by the Hebrew Bible) or the writings found in Nag Hammadi (several of which also reference Jesus Christ). Some Christians may explain this relationship in deeply theological language— for example, that these texts are uniquely inspired by the Holy Spirit, or that these texts are ‘inerrant’. However, this does not take away from the fact that by naming, confessing and treating James and the other New Testament writings as Scriptures, Christians choose to stand in a particular relationship to them that is significantly different than their relationship to other nonscriptural texts, no matter how beloved. More importantly, Cantwell Smith underscores that the scriptural relationship involves more than just a people and their Scriptures. The relationship stretches ‘between a people and the universe, in light of their perception of a given text’ (Smith 1993: 18). In this description, Cantwell Smith points to a critical definition of the function of any Scripture for any people of faith. For people of faith, texts considered to be Scriptures function as lenses through which they perceive all things: their understanding of God, themselves and their neighbors, the whole universe. As a lens, Scriptures help people of faith to clarify their proper relationship to their understanding of God or the gods, to themselves, and to their world. Cantwell Smith describes, therefore, a symbiotic relationship wherein people of faith shape and are shaped by those texts that they claim and use as Scripture. To say, then, that ‘James is a Scripture of Christianity’ is to say that—at least for some Christians—this ancient homiletic epistle is treated as a lens

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through which they perceive themselves, their neighbors, their world and their God. In other words, for those people of faith who treat the epistle of James as a Scripture, James’s ancient arguments are not examples of ancient rhetorical style or historical evidence for first-century Christianity. These are concerns of historians and rhetoricians. Rather, for Christians who enter into a scriptural relationship with James, this epistle affects their identity, their understanding of the nature of God and their relationship to God, as well as how they ought to live. To see, concretely, what this might mean, consider James’s teachings on class and economics. For Christians in the global north, James’s status as Scripture calls into question their way of life. Cain Hope Felder says as much in his reading of James. Speaking from his particular social location as a member of the Black Church, Felder notes: In modern times, the Black Church has often imitated the behavior of those whom James passionately seeks to correct. Having in recent centuries held second-class membership in churches of the dominant culture, some Black Church traditions have fallen prey to social stratification of the worst sort… One can only be troubled today when comparing [James’s] vision and social ideal with the socioeconomic realities that make such a New Testament vision and social ideal still so elusive (1989: 133-34).

Elsa Tamez concurs. Toward the end of The Scandalous Message of James, she warns: [A] militant reading of James will cause a crisis for many Christians today. If we cast a self-critical look at our communities we will see that we are far from the ideal community proposed by James… And if we look at the social class of our members we find that there are more from the upper middle class than there are poor (Tamez 2002: 64).

Tamez goes on to name this crisis a ‘crisis of Christian identity’ (2002: 65). This makes sense. If the nature of the relationship that creates Scripture includes the Scripture’s role in affecting the identity of those who name it Scripture, then for people of faith who genuinely claim a text as Scripture, the realization that the text fundamentally challenges their way of life would constitute a crisis of identity. Of course, not every scriptural use of James causes a crisis of identity. Some uses strengthen identity. Take, for instance, the use of James by monks of the eastern and southern borders of the Mediterranean in the centuries after James’s publication. Luke Timothy Johnson argues that James was a particularly popular book among monks. He notes: Monks—who are always moralists…loved the letter of James, whether they lived in the desert of Egypt, the countryside of Palestine or the capital city of Constantinople… Monks appreciated James because, like him, they were concerned with the practical living out of Christian ideals. They



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found in him a clear and challenging support for flight from the world of sin, repentance, the giving of alms, and control of anger and of the tongue (2004: 72).

Here, James serves not to condemn the practices of the ‘scripturalizing’ community. Rather, James serves to validate the practices of the faithful monastics. James has given their monasticism legitimacy. One could imagine uses of James as Scripture that could come across as oppressive. This might be the case for those against whom James’s polemic might be directed. James, for instance, could be employed as a scriptural basis for the tamping down of protest, whether inside a community of faith or between a community of faith and the wider world. After all, it is James that counsels removal from the ‘world’ and the taming of the tongue. In addition, those who use James as Scripture could interpret personal calamities of particular community members as evidence of a lack of faithfulness, or of incorrect, pleasure-seeking prayer (Jas 4.2). Those with chronic illnesses, or the leaders of communities suffering from chronic illness could also find themselves charged with faithlessness by those who treat James as Scripture (5.14-15). These examples show that using a text as Scripture may look very different depending on who is doing it. Once a text has been made Scripture by a community, it is the community—not the text itself—that will determine how the text affects that community’s relationships with itself, its God and its world. However, as will be seen below, those who enter into relationship with Scriptures very often sacralize more than just the words of a text. James, Migrant-Writing and Diaspora Space as Scripture James, as noted above, is a diaspora space. It proposes to its audience a subject positionality of withdrawal from the ‘world’. It melds tradition and host culture in a kind of syncretism, and then claims that its particular blend of culture marks it as ‘unstained by the world’ (1.27). Moreover, it invents tradition, a kind of diaspora Christianity modeled heavily after the diaspora synagogue in its adherence to Torah. It seems unperturbed (yet?) by the great Gentile invasion of Christianity that will be led by a Pharisee named Saul/Paul. Further, James’s diaspora space is marked by a migrant strategy of separation from the dominant culture. When such a document becomes Scripture, it is not only its words that become Scripture; communities of faith make the world orientation communicated through that document Scripture as well. Whatever migrant strategy is proposed and whatever form diaspora space takes, these also become ‘sacred’ to a community of faith. In other words, communities of faith do not only make texts Scriptures. They also make migrant strategies and diaspora spaces Scriptures as well. So it is with the epistolary homily of James. Beyond what James specifically

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states regarding community ethics and norms, James is also used as Scripture when faithful Christians mimic its world orientation. One way to speak about James’s world-orientation is to suggest that James is ‘reading darkness’. This phrase was coined by Vincent Wimbush in his introductory essay to African Americans and the Bible. Wimbush notes: Anyone can read darkness. Darkness is here to be equated neither with a simple negative nor with any one people or class. It is a particular orientation, a sensibility, a way of being in and seeing the world. It is viewing and experiencing the world in emergency mode, as through the individual and collective experience of trauma (2000: 21).

James is ‘reading darkness’ inasmuch as he has identified the ‘collective experience of trauma’ that defines his community—migration or, more specifically, the community’s identity as ‘the twelve tribes in Diaspora’ (1.1). Of course, not every migrant reads this trauma in the same way, and not every migrant chooses the same strategy with which to address the trauma. Diaspora causes James to choose, for his community, a particular orientation: separation and the creation of a colony of the home country among the host culture. Readers of James have indeed turned James’s world-orientation into a scriptural lens, a wedge by which they too might crack open the veneer of the ‘outsider’ culture—however they define ‘outsider’—and create in its midst a colony of ‘true religion’. In different ways, both Felder and Tamez above hint at this when they excoriate the Black Church, and the church overall, for not retaining its status as an ‘outside’ colony but rather mirroring the social classism of the current era. Another such reader, about whom I have written about elsewhere, was the abolitionist speaker Frederick Douglass (Aymer 2007). A runaway slave whose freedom was eventually bought by British allies while he was on a speaking tour of the United States, Douglass regularly turned to James to outline the nature of an alternative society marked by the ‘religion from above’ (cf. Jas 3.17). One example from perhaps his most famous speech, ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’, will suffice. These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing… It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers and thugs. It is not that ‘pure and undefiled religion’ which is from above, and which is ‘first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy’. But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation—a



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religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might well be addressed, ‘Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea! When ye make prayers, I will not hear. YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow’ (Douglass 1852: 378; emphasis original).

Notice, here, that Douglass, like James, is not proposing a liminal stance toward the world. Instead, Douglass is doing precisely what James does: returning to the Scriptures of the people to charge that they have abandoned these lenses in favor of ‘a cold and flinty-hearted thing’. However, Douglass is not so much pointing to specific actions from within the epistle of James that the ‘world’ does or fails to do. Rather, Douglass is focused on James as a diaspora space with a particular subject orientation over against the world, a syncretic culture that skews toward the old Scriptures, and a tradition that upholds peacefulness, gentleness and self-control as marks of divine religion. Douglass is focused on James as a migrant strategy of separation, as he, in another speech, calls the Scottish Free Church to separate from ‘the slave-holding, the woman-whipping, the mind-darkening, the soul-destroying religion that exists in the southern states of America’ (Douglass 1846: 282). In short, [I]n James, and in other biblical writings, Douglass found, and ‘scripturalized’ a world-orientation that questioned the status quo, problematizing it as ‘darkness…’ Biblical texts used as ‘scriptures’—including, but importantly not exclusive to James—became a lens through which Douglass ‘read’ ‘darkness’ (Aymer 2007: 90).

To put it another way, Frederick Douglass, born on the soil of the United States—but certainly not recognized as a citizen of the land of his birth— used James (and other migrant writings) to speak through a rhetoric of migration about the trauma of his own dispersion, and to call those who claimed to be part of his community to (re)turn to that migrant strategy, diaspora space and world-orientation that had formed them all. Migrant Strategies and Diaspora Spaces for Landed Peoples This last chapter on James as a migrant writing serves to push this conversation beyond the historical questions of how these texts functioned in the ancient world to how these texts continue to function today. Moreover, it serves to turn the spotlight away from texts to contemporary communities

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of readers, communities that form themselves, even today, based on ancient migrant strategies and ancient diaspora spaces. For most of the global north, these are also landed communities: communities made not so much of migrants as of residents and citizens, those who ‘belong’ in the ‘world’ in which they live. Yet, it is some of these same persons who forcefully assert their identity as ‘biblical’. To complicate matters, James is, as noted above, not the only migrant writing in the New Testament. It is not even unique in its strategy of separation. In this, James is joined by the Revelation to John and arguably the Gospel according to Matthew. Matthew may seem specious with its famous call to ‘make disciples of all nations’ (28.19), but note that this is a call to bring people into the community rather than to enter into an accommodationist stance. By contrast, Paul and his followers are the quintessential accommodationist, and with Paul the author of Luke–Acts. Even liminality makes its appearance in the New Testament; it is sacralized in the Gospels of Mark and John and in the Johannine writings. Each of these, and many if not most of the rest of the New Testament canon, encodes in its text a migrant strategy. Each functions as a diaspora space. Each is ‘scripturalized’ by communities and people of faith, turned into interpretative lenses for life, not only in each one’s message but, just like James, in each one’s migrant strategy and world orientation. This begs a number of initial questions. What happens when landed people, people who are primarily residents and citizens with legal status and investment in ‘the world’, turn migrant strategies and diaspora spaces into world-orienting, world-interpreting lenses? What happens when a seventh-generation landed person imagines herself to be in diaspora, and seeks to separate from the community that is her birthright? What happens when a fourth-generation member of the dominant community sings with the American folk singers, ‘This World is Not My Home’? Moreover, what happens when this migrant sensibility, when this diaspora space, becomes the interpretative lens not only of individual persons but also of a community or a political party? Might there not be a temptation to disavow ‘this world’ as evil, even as persons deeply involved and invested in ‘this world’? Might there not be a disinterest in caring for anyone except ‘one of us’, and a disinclination to care for the problems of the current era out of nostalgia for the past and hope for the inbreaking of a utopian future? A second set of questions attends. The migrant strategies encoded in the New Testament come to different conclusions about what appropriate interface with the ‘world’ should be. How then are these migrant strategies to be negotiated? How might people of faith employing one strategy interface with those employing another? Might not ‘James’s people’, the separationists, see ‘Paul’s people’, the accommodationists, as ‘adulterous women’? Might not ‘John’s people’ of liminality see both of these groups as needing



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to be born anōthen, that wonderful pun in John 3 which means both ‘again’ and ‘from above’? How do these manifest themselves in the world in which all of these groups exist, regardless of their interpretative lenses? Surely, the conflict between Douglass and the slave-owners of the United States gives testimony to this. The latter, accommodationist Paulinists to be sure, who enjoin slaves to obey their masters would have found themselves confronted by James’s separatist stance not only through Douglass but also through all the abolitionists, a stance that called the church away from the world’s addiction to chattel slavery. How might this conflict manifest today? Perhaps the hardest set of these questions stems from the demographic changes that seem to be imminent, at least in the United States, demographic changes that will mean the browning of the nation and a significant increase in its migrant population. As this nation wrestles with these and other contemporary matters regarding immigration, how will those who hold these texts as Scriptures interface with contemporary migrants in contemporary diaspora spaces in which we, and they, are changed? How will those, whose Scriptures contain not one but three migrant strategies, help ecclesial and civic bodies value the gifts, and the dangers, of each of these migrant strategies? And, for those who claim writings like James as Scriptures—that is, writings that have no migrant strategy of assimilation—what should their response be to societal demands that contemporary migrants assimilate to this world? James offers no easy answers to these questions, and neither do the rest of the migrant writings of the New Testament. However, one thing is certain. James would expect those who hold his homiletic epistle to be authoritative to take action. Even within separatist migrant communities creating separatist diaspora space like James’s twelve tribes in diaspora, faith without works is dead.

Works Cited Aymer, Margaret P. 2007 First Pure, Then Peaceable: Frederick Douglass Reads James (Library of New Testament Studies, 379; London: T. & T. Clark). 2010 ‘“Mother Knows Best”: The Story of Mother Paul Revisted’, in Mother Goose, Mother Jones, Mommie Dearest: Biblical Mothers and their Children (ed. Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan and Tina Pippin; SBLSS, 61; Atlanta: Society for Biblical Literature): 187-200. 2014 ‘Rootlessness and Community in Contexts of Diaspora’, in The Fortress Commentary on the New Testament (ed. Margaret P. Aymer, Cynthia A. Kittredge and David A. Sanchez; Minneapolis: Fortress Press): 47-61. Batten, Alicia 2007 ‘Ideological Strategies in the Letter of James’, in Webb and Kloppenborg 2007: 6-26. Bauckham, Richard 1999 James (New Testament Readings; New York: Routledge). Bauer, Walter, William F. Arndt, F. Wilbur Gingrich and Frederick W. Danker 2001 A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3rd edn). Berry, John W. 2001 ‘A Psychology of Immigration’, Journal of Social Issues 57: 615-31. Bhatia, Sunil, and Anjali Ram 2001 ‘Rethinking “Acculturation” in Relation to Diasporic Cultures and Postcolonial Identities’, Human Development 44: 1-18. Brah, Avtar 1996 Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London and New York: Routledge). Cargal, Timothy B. 1993 Restoring the Diaspora: Discursive Structure and Purpose in the Epistle of James (SBLDS, 144; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature). Carter, Warren 2006 The Roman Empire and the New Testament: An Essential Guide (Nashville: Abingdon Press). Chester, Andrew 1994 ‘The Theology of James’, in The Theology of the Letters of James, Peter and Jude (ed. Andrew Chester and Ralph P. Martin; New York: Cambridge University Press): 1-62. Davids, Peter H. 1989 James. (New International Biblical Commentary, 15; Peabody, MA: Henderson).



Works Cited

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deSilva, David 2000 Honor, Patronage, Kinship and Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press). Douglass, Frederick 1846 ‘American Slavery, American Religion, and the Free Church of Scotland’, in The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews (5 vols.; ed. J.W. Blassingame; New Haven: Yale University Press): I, 269-99. 1852 ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?: Oration Delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, July 5th, 1852’, in The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews (5 vols.; ed. J.W. Blassingame; New Haven: Yale University Press): II, 359-88. Dube, Musa W. 2000 Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (St Louis: Chalice). Felder, Cain Hope 1989 Troubling Biblical Waters: Race, Class, and Family (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books). Freire, Paolo 2006 Pedagogy of the Oppressed (trans. Myra Bergman Ramos; New York: Continuum; 30th anniversary edn). Gibson, Margaret A. 2001 ‘Immigrant Adaption and Patterns of Acculturation’, Human Development 44: 19-23. Hanson, K.C., and Douglas E. Oakman 1996 Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflicts (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri 2000 Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Hartin, Patrick J. 1999 A Spirituality of Perfection: Faith in Action in the Letter of James (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press). Hengel, Martin 2012 Judaism and Hellenism (London: SCM Press; new edn). Johnson, Luke Timothy 1995 The Letter of James (AB, 37A; New Haven: Yale University Press). 2004 Brother of Jesus, Friend of God: Studies in the Letter of James (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). Lockett, Darian 2008 Purity and Worldview in the Epistle of James (Library of New Testament Studies, 336; London: T. & T. Clark). Malina, Bruce J. 2001 The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press). Maynard-Reid, Pedrito U. 2004 Poverty and Wealth in James (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock). Mitchell, Margaret M. 2007 ‘The Letter of James as a Document of Paulinism?’, in Webb and Kloppenborg 2007: 75-98.

86

James

Moo, Douglas J. 2000 The Letter of James (Pillar New Testament Commentary; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). Penner, Todd C. 1996 The Epistle of James and Eschatology: Re-reading an Ancient Christian Letter (JSNTSup, 121; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). Robbins, Vernon 1996 Exploring the Texture of Texts: A Guide to Socio-Rhetorical Interpretation (Bloomsbury: T. & T. Clark). Rutgers, Leonard Victor 1998 ‘Roman Policy toward the Jews: Expulsions from the City of Rome during the First Century ce’, in Judaism and Christianity in First-Century Rome (ed. Karl P. Donfried and Peter Richardson; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans): 93-116. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth 2009 ‘Introduction: Exploring the Intersections of Race, Gender, Status and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies’, in Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies (ed. Laura Nasrallah and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza; Minneapolis: Fortress Press): 1-23. Smith, Preserved 1911 The Life and Letters of Martin Luther (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin). Smith, Wilfred Cantwell 1993 What is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). Snyder, H. Greg 2000 Teachers and Texts in the Ancient World: Philosophers, Jews and Christians (Religion in the First Christian Centuries; London: Routledge). Stark, Rodney 2011 The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion (New York: HarperCollins). Tamez, Elsa 2002 The Scandalous Message of James (New York: Crossroad, rev. edn). United States Census 2013 ‘Poverty: Highlights’, http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/over​ view/ (accessed 4 November 2013). Wall, Robert W. 1997 Community of the Wise: The Letter of James (The New Testament in Context; Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International). Webb, Robert L., and John S. Kloppenborg (eds.) 2007 Reading James with New Eyes: Methodological Reassessments of the Letter of James (Library of New Testament Studies, 342; London: T. & T. Clark). Wimbush, Vincent L. 2000 ‘Introduction: Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures’, in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures (ed. Vincent L. Wimbush; New York: Continuum): 1-43. Witherington, Ben, III. 2007 Letters and Homilies for Jewish Christians: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on Hebrews, James and Jude (Downers Grove: IVP Academic). 2009 New Testament Rhetoric: An Introductory Guide to the Art of Persuasion in and out of the New Testament (Eugene: Cascade).

Indexes Index of Biblical References Old Testament Genesis 1.26 22 29–30 49 Leviticus 19 19.12 19.13 19.13a 19.15 19.16 19.18 19.18b

73 73 71 61

24, 30, 32, 46, 73 33 32 73 24, 73 30 24 73

Deuteronomy 6.4 25 60, 72 28.25

Isaiah 1 54

29 39, 59

Jeremiah 15.7 25.34 29 41.17

60, 72 32 17 60

72 20

Ezekiel 16

39, 59

Psalms 19.7 (18.7 lxx) 23 30 50.20 101.5 30

Daniel 6.20 12.2

20 60

Hosea 1 4

29 39, 59

John 3 7.35

83 60, 72

30.4

72

Joshua 2 6.17

73 62

1 Samuel 1.3

62

Nehemiah 1.9 10.29

Proverbs 3.34

29

New Testament Matthew 4.21 3 5–7 15 5.33-37 33 5.40 52 6.19 43 6.19-20 32 10.3 3 12.31 45 20.1-8 52 28.19 82 Mark 3.18

3

6.3 7.18-23 7.21-23 12.31 13 15.40

4 28 28 30 15 3

Luke 1–2 6.16 6.24 6.37 12.47

59 3 32 45 52

Acts 1.13 3 20 6–7 9 5 12 5 12.2 5 4 12.17 15 5-6, 17 21 6, 11

James

88 1 Corinthians 71 5.1 12 47 Galatians 1.19 2 2.9 2.10 3 3.24-25 3.28

3-5 6, 11 5 6, 11 61 46 59

Ephesians 2.8

24

Philippians 2 11 1 Timothy 6.1

71

James 2-4, 6, 11, 17, 19, 36, 4142, 60-62, 66, 68, 7072, 80 1.1-2 69 1.1-3 39 20-21, 36, 1.2 39, 46-7, 64 1.2-4 22, 33, 43 1.2-7 48 1.2-18 17, 21-22 1.3 34 1.3-4 21 1.4 64 21 1.4-5 1.5-6 21, 26 1.5-7 40 1.5-8 22 1.5-9 30 1.6 64 1.6-7 34, 40 1.7 7, 56 1.8 57 1.9 29, 39, 5758 1.9-10 21, 44, 73

1.9-11 1.10 1.10-11 1.12 1.12-15 1.12-18 1.13 1.13-14 1.13-18 1.14 1.14-15 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.17-18 1.18 1.18-22 1.19 1.19-27 1.19-20 1.20 1.21 1.21-25 1.22-24 1.23 1.23-25 1.25 1.26 1.26-27 1.27

2

2.1 2.1-9 2.1-12 2.1-13 2.1–5.6 2.2

22 31 31 22, 45, 57 39 37 44 32 22 58-59 21, 48 59 39 27, 38, 40, 61-62, 75 21 38, 59, 61 39 23, 39, 47, 56 17, 22-23 22 57, 63 14, 23 23 23 57 23 23, 27, 46, 62, 72 23 23 23, 38, 4748, 53, 55, 58, 61, 70, 75, 79 4, 16, 2326, 29, 31, 36, 41-42, 53, 73-74 1, 24-25, 39, 42, 62, 64, 73 47 44 25 17 12, 15, 25, 31, 33-34, 53, 57

2.2-4 2.3 2.4 2.5

24 55 53 39, 45, 5455, 58, 61, 64, 70 2.5-7 48 2.6a 54 2.6-7 24, 49 2.7 53, 62 24, 30, 43, 2.8 46, 53, 62 2.8-12 30 2.8-13 70 2.9 24, 73 2.10 25 2.10-12 46 2.12 24, 30, 41, 62 25, 46 2.14 39 2.14-15 2.14-26 12, 25, 64, 73 47, 58 2.15 2.15-16 25 2.15-17 49 2.18 25 2.18-19 63 36 2.18-20 2.19 26, 36 56 2.20 2.21 73 2.21-22 40 2.21-23 61 2.21-24 63 26 2.21-25 2.23 26, 29, 40 56 2.24 2.25 73 2.26 26 3 16, 26-29, 31, 33, 73 3.1 27, 39, 44 3.1-2 26, 48 3.1-13 26 3.1-18 39, 47-48, 64 3.1–4.12 26 3.2 27, 57 3.4-5 27

Index of Biblical References

3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.9-10 3.10 3.11-12 3.12 3.13 3.14 3.14–4.10 3.15 3.16 3.16-18 3.17 3.17-18 3.18 4

4.1 4.1-2 4.1-3 4.1-4 4.1-5 4.1-10 4.1–5.6 4.2 4.4

4.5

27-28, 70 27 56 38, 56, 59, 62, 73 27, 48 39 28 39 28, 48 28, 48 26 28-29, 71 31 48 19, 28, 30, 71 47 29, 63 13, 23, 27, 29, 48, 53, 58, 73 13, 26, 39, 58 21 32, 34, 48 31, 40-41, 57-58 37, 47 29 29-32, 53 40, 79 27, 29, 3839, 57-58, 70-71, 76 29

4.6 4.7-10 4.8 4.9-10 4.10 4.11 4.11-12 4.12 4.13 4.13-16 4.13-17 4.14 4.15 4.17 5 5.1 5.1-5 5.1-6 5.2-3 5.3 5.4

5.6 5.7 5.7-8 5.7-11 5.7-20 5.8

29, 40 47 37 45 29 33, 39, 57, 63, 73 30, 39, 41, 47, 63 63-64, 71, 73 30-31 47, 53 30-31 31 31, 64, 71, 74 14, 31 23, 73 30 71 30-32, 44, 48 32, 43 32 32, 41-42, 49, 53, 62, 73 32, 49 12, 14, 33, 39 42-43, 53, 62-63 48 17, 32-34 44

89

5.20

33, 39, 41, 47, 63 33, 39 33, 73 33, 39, 71 1, 12, 25, 34 42-43, 79 64 39, 45, 47 57 33-34, 39 14, 39, 45, 47 63

1 Peter 1.1

68, 72

2 Peter 2.3

31

5.9 5.10 5.11 5.12 5.14 5.14-15 5.15 5.16 5.17 5.19 5.19-20

Revelation to John 1.9 68 60 2 21 39, 59 Other Ancient Writings Pseudepigrapha 1 Enoch 98.9-10 32 Philo Legum allegoriae 2.89 37

Index of Authors Aymer, M.  38, 66, 80-81 Batten, A.  16-17, 32, 52, 54 Bauckham, R.  4, 6-8, 17 Bauer, W.  24 Berry, J.  2, 69-71, 74 Bhatia, S.  69 Brah, A.  2, 69, 74-75 Cargal, T.  26 Carter, W.  45, 51 Chester, A.  15, 34 Davids, P.  5, 7, 26, 29, 32, 37, 41 de Silva, D.  52, 63 Dibelius, M.  1, 16, 18-19, 35-36, 49 Douglass, F.  80-81 Dube, M.  1 Felder, C.H.  1, 78, 80 Freire, P.  36 Gibson, M.  69 Hanson, K.C.  52 Hardt, M.  76 Hartin, P.  32 Hengel, M.  7-8 Johnson, L.T.  7, 9-10, 13-14, 23-24, 26, 29, 33, 35, 41, 53, 57, 78-79

Lockett, D.  39-40 Luther, M.  4, 35-36, 49 Malina, B.  21-22, 38 Maynard-Reid, P.  1, 15, 31 Mitchell, M.M.  5, 12 Moo, D.  5, 7, 9, 11-12, 15-17 Negri, A.  76 Oakman, D.  52 Penner, T.  5, 12, 15, 31 Ram, A.  69 Robbins, V.  1 Rutgers, L.V.  72 Sanders, J.T.  35-36 Schüssler Fiorenza, E.  1, 50 Smith, P.  1 Smith, W.C.  77 Snyder, H.G.  26-27 Stark, R.  25 Tamez, E.  1, 35, 49, 52-55, 78, 80 United States Census  51 Wall, R.  5-7, 11-12, 26, 31, 33 Wimbush, V.L.  80 Witherington, B.  1, 4, 7-10, 12, 15-17, 21, 25, 28, 32, 43, 46