Epistle of James

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The Epistle of James is one of the shorter letters of the New Testament, a compact work of practical exhortation that opens by addressing “the twelve tribes in the Dispersion” and proceeds, with little of the doctrinal argument found in Paul, to the conduct of a life already committed to faith. Its concern is what belief looks like once it is held — in speech, in wealth, in patience, in the treatment of the poor.

The text says that faith without works is dead, returning to the claim several times and pressing it with the example of Abraham, who was “justified by works” when he offered Isaac. It warns at length about the tongue, calling it a small member that boasts of great things, “a fire,” a thing no one can fully tame. It tells the rich to weep for the miseries coming upon them, and it instructs the sick to call for the elders of the church, who are to pray over them and anoint them with oil — a passage that grounded the later Christian rite of anointing the sick. The letter is closer in feel to Jewish wisdom literature, and to the sayings of Jesus preserved in the Gospels, than to the letters of Paul.

Authorship is contested. Tradition assigns the letter to James, called the brother of Jesus and a leader of the Jerusalem community, martyred around 62 CE. The text itself names only “James, a servant of God,” and many scholars judge it pseudonymous — written in polished Greek, attested late, and admitted to the canon only after extended doubt in the early church. Others defend an early date and a connection to the historical James; the question remains open. What is not in dispute is that the letter circulated widely and that its acceptance was slow.

Its sharpest afterlife came in the Reformation. The apparent tension between James’s “faith without works is dead” and Paul’s teaching that a person is justified by faith apart from works led Luther to rank the epistle below the others and to call it, in a much-quoted phrase, “an epistle of straw.” Later readers, Protestant and Catholic alike, have generally treated the two as addressing different questions rather than contradicting one another — Paul the ground of justification, James the evidence of a faith genuinely held. The letter stayed in the canon, and the dispute it provoked outlived the doubt about who wrote it.

→ Related: Epistle To The Hebrews · First Epistle Of Peter · Second Epistle Of Peter · Canonization