In this “New Testament in a Nutshell” thread I come now to the intriguing book of James, long one of my favorites among the Catholic epistles.  At one point in my earlier existence, I liked the book so well that I memorized it.  Don’t ask me to recite it now; that was 50 years ago.

Even so, I still think it is a terrific book.  And now I realize it is intriguing for all sorts of reasons I never would have imagined back when I was able to recite it at a drop of the hat.

I start here with a one-sentence, fifty-word summary.

The Book of James consists of ethical instruction for followers of Jesus who are to live in ways pleasing to God as a way of demonstrating their faith, since anyone who thinks they can be saved only through what they believe does not understand that “faith without works is dead.”

For the rest of this post, I will summarize the major themes and emphases of this short, five-chapter book, which, hey, you too can memorize.

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James consists of a series of ethical admonitions to those “who believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ” (James 2:1). It is a letter in form, at least partially: it begins with a prescript that names the author and contains a greeting. There is no epistolary conclusion, however, and the “letter” gives no indication of a specific occasion. It is instead a collection of pieces of good advice to those who “believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ” (2:1).

There is some question concerning the identity of the book’s author. He gives his name as James, but then does not tell us which James he is.  In my next post I’ll be explaining why he almost certainly wants his readers to think he is James the brother of Jesus; and I’ll also be argueing that he almost certainly was someone else wanting his readres to think that he was that James.

Whoever the author actually was, he fills his book with ethical exhortations to his readers, many of which appear to  reflect (although they never quote) traditions of Jesus’ own teaching as found, for example, in the Gospel of Matthew.  Here too believers are urged not to swear oaths, but to let their “yes be yes” and their “no be no” (James 5:12; cf. Matt 5:33–37); we learn that loving one’s neighbor fulfills the Law (2:8; cf. Matt 22:39–40); and that those who are rich should fear the coming judgment (5:1–6; cf. Matt 19:23–24). One of the most striking features of the book, however, is that Jesus himself is scarcely ever mentioned.

Apart from 1:1, the epistolary opening, and 2:1, the verse quoted earlier, Jesus makes no appearance by name. What is even more intriguing is that, apart from these two verses, almost none of the ideas in the book are uniquely Christian. The various ethical injunctions have numerous parallels, for instance, in non-Christian Jewish writings; and all of the examples of ethical behavior are drawn from stories of the Hebrew Bible (Abraham 2:21; Rahab 2:25; Job 5:11; Elijah 5:17) rather than from the life of Jesus or the activities of his apostles. Even the communities of believers that are addressed appear in Jewish guise—they are described as “the twelve tribes in the Dispersion,” and their place of assembly is literally called a “synagogue” (2:2).

For these reasons, some scholars have argued that James is a kind of Jewish book of wisdom (somewhat like the book of Proverbs but without as many one-liners) with only a thin Christian veneer. According to this opinion, the author took over a piece of Jewish writing and “Christianized” it by adding a couple of references to Jesus.

Not everyone is persuaded by this point of view, however. Many scholars, for example, have observed that a large number of the admonitions in James have particularly close parallels with Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). In addition, portions of the book relate closely to other teachings of Jesus (compare, e.g., James 4:13–15 with Jesus’ parable of the rich fool in Luke 12:16–21).

How, then, does one account for the general nature of these admonitions—that is, the fact that most of them are not distinctively Christian—and for their close similarities to older traditions about Jesus? It may be that the author strung together a number of important ethical admonitions that could be found in a variety of settings, such as Jewish wisdom literature and traditions of Jesus’ own teaching, and has applied them to the Christian communities that he is addressing.

James particularly emphasizes that those who have faith need to manifest it in the way they live (1:22–27; 2:14–26). Other recurring themes include the importance of controlling one’s “tongue” (i.e., one’s speech; 1:26; 3:1–12), the danger of riches for believers (1:9–11; 4:13–17; 5:1–6), and the need to be patient in the midst of suffering (1:2–8, 12–16; 5:7–11). The author, however, is not concerned only with what we might call individual ethics. Near the end of the book, he turns to address communal activities within the church as well, giving his readers advice about saying prayers, singing psalms, anointing the sick with oil, confessing sins, and restoring those who have strayed from the faith (5:13–16).

In many ways, the book of James is best known for its insistence that it is not possible to have faith apart from doing “good works, and for the polemical tone of the book in some of its key passages.  It clearly is directed against notions advanced by other Christians this author considers aberrant.  In particular he appears to take digs either at Paul or his later followers over the idea that a person can be “justified” by faith alone without reflecting that faith in their life.  For this author true faith will always be manifest in one’s life, especially in the ways one treats the poor and the oppressed. To put it in his own words, “a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24) because “faith without works is dead” (2:26).

Was this author really James the brother of Jesus?  Was he writing in direct opposition to Paul and his theological views of salvation?  These are issues we will address in the following posts.