Bringing James Out of The Shadows by Ben Whiterington
Echoes of the Sermon on the Mount in the Book of James – The author cites a line from the Sermon, then cites the parallel in James.
Luke Timothy Johnson [an American Catholic New Testament scholar, a Benedictine monk and priest, and historian of early Christianity] is a proponent of an early dating for the Epistle of James, arguing: The Letter of James also, according to the majority of scholars who have carefully worked through its text in the past two centuries, is among the earliest of New Testament compositions. It contains no reference to the events in Jesus’ life, but it bears striking testimony to Jesus’ words. Jesus’ sayings are embedded in James’ exhortations in a form that is clearly not dependent on the written Gospels.[3]
Extract for Bart Ehrman’s Post here.
AT A GLANCE: James
- The book consists of a series of ethical admonitions to Christians to show them how they need to live as Christians – and in fact, how to live if they actually want to be. For this author, those who do not live out their faith in lives of love and giving cannot claim to be “justified” (right with God).
- The book seems to be a letter: it names the author and contains a greeting, as ancient letters do. But there is no epistolary conclusion (it just kinda ends) and does not seem to have any specific occasion. It is instead a collection of pieces of good advice to those who “believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ” (2:1).
- The author calls himself James, and almost certainly, he means his readers to think that he is that James, the brother of Jesus. There are very good reasons that it could not have been written by James of Nazareth though, who was almost certainly an Aramaic-speaking, uneducated day laborer, not a highly educated Greek author.
- The differences between this author’s view of “justification” and Paul’s have led many readers (for centuries) to think the books are completely at odds with one another (e.g., does faith alone save, or does one also have to do good works?). These differences, however, may be more superficial than real, since Paul too agreed that followers of Jesus would necessarily be highly ethical, and his concern is not whether one can “do good things” for salvation but whether one had to follow the requirements of the Jewish Torah (“the works of the Law”).
- And so the book of James may be taking issue with Christians who understood Paul’s doctrine of “justification by faith apart from works of the Law” to mean that it did not matter what you did as a Christian as long as you believed.
James D. Tabor
The Forgotten Brother of Jesus Part 1 and Part 2
Q: Could James be Jesus’ brother? – Tabor recommended here a paper by mathematician Andrew Sills here and in Sills’ folder in DropBox. Here we will consider a question of identity among certain persons in the New Testament that lends itself to a much more straightforward probabilistic analysis.
The ratio of these two probabilities 0.0000317 ÷ 0.000000469 is about 67.6, i.e. the scenario that Jesus’ brothers James, Simon, and Joses are among the Twelve Apostles is more than sixty-seven times as likely as the traditional scenario that the brothers are separate from the Apostles, based on name frequencies
The New Testament Code | Robert Eisenman | James the Brother of Jesus
Evidence for when James was written.
Extracts from Bart Ehrman’s post Does James (the Book) Have the Same Concerns as James (the Man)? Part 2, July 28, 2019.
For one thing, the debate over whether it was important for Christians to engage in “good works” is itself evidenced in the post-Pauline period. In Paul’s day, and James’s, the pressing issues had to do with the relationship of believers in Jesus to the “works of the Law.” Only later, as we will see more fully below, did that concern migrate into a conflict over the importance, or irrelevance, of doing good deeds for salvation.
Another indication of a late date is the concern over ostentatious wealth in the community. Wealthy people have come into the congregations and caused problems, both by their very presence (the problem of favoritism; 2:1-5) and by their actions (dragging the poor into court; 2:6). That rich members of the community formed a sizeable minority is evident from the charge of 5:1-6. And how early in the history of the Christian communities could this have been a problem? Surely not in the first decades. So too we learn that even though the “coming of the Lord is at hand” (5:8-9), people need to exercise the patience of Job in waiting for it. This seems to indicate that a good deal of time has passed in the expectation of the parousia, so much so that people have grown highly impatient and need proverbial patience in order to quell their anxieties. Consonant with these considerations is the fact that “elders” appear to be in charge of the community (5:14), a development that appears closer to what we find, say, in the Pastoral epistles than in the letters of Paul written during James’s lifetime.[2] These indications of late date (and the Hellenized language) not only show that the letter was not written by James, but also that it was not commissioned by him in his lifetime…
