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 turns at once, with almost none of the doctrinal architecture found in Paul, to the conduct of a life already committed to faith. It does not argue toward belief; it assumes belief and asks what belief does. Its concern is what faith looks like once it is held — in speech, in money, in patience under trial, in the treatment of the poor who come into the assembly. The letter has no narrative, names no churches, settles no controversy of its own moment that can be securely dated. It reads, from the first verse, like the voice of a teacher addressing people who already know the doctrine and need to be told how to live inside it.

A letter shaped like wisdom

The genre is the first thing to grasp, because it governs everything else. James belongs less to the argumentative letter than to the older stream of moral instruction — the wisdom and exhortation tradition that runs through Proverbs, Ben Sira, and the sapiential writings of Hellenistic Judaism, and through the moral diatribe of the Greco-Roman moralists. Its method is the string of pithy admonitions, the proverb, the rhetorical question put to an imagined objector, the vivid figure drawn from ordinary sight: the wave of the sea driven by the wind, the withering grass, the bridle in the horse’s mouth, the spark that sets a forest alight, the farmer waiting for the early and late rains. The Greek is supple and deliberate, fuller of assonance and wordplay than its plainness first suggests, and it is among the better Greek in the canon. The thought moves the way wisdom literature moves — by association and reprise rather than by linear proof — so that the same themes return, circled rather than developed, until the whole reads as a sequence of linked counsels rather than a single thesis.

This places James close to two bodies of teaching and far from a third. It stands near the Jewish wisdom out of which it is built, and it stands strikingly near the sayings of Jesus preserved in the Gospels — sharing in substance, though never by direct quotation, the counsel against storing up wealth, the warning that the merciful obtain mercy, the prohibition of oaths, the blessing on the poor and the patient. What it does not resemble is the sustained doctrinal letter. There is no extended Christology, no account of the cross as an event interpreted, almost no liturgical or eschatological apparatus beyond the brief expectation of the Lord’s coming near the end. The name of Christ appears only twice. For a New Testament book this is a striking economy, and it is the source of nearly every later quarrel about the letter’s worth.

Faith without works is dead

The signature claim returns several times and is pressed hardest in the second chapter. Faith without works, the letter says, is dead — useless, a body without breath. A faith that wishes a hungry neighbor warm and fed and supplies neither profits nothing. Even the demons, James notes with a kind of grim wit, believe in one God, and shudder; bare assent is a thing the damned can manage. The argument is then driven home with two figures from Scripture. Abraham was “justified by works” when he offered Isaac upon the altar — faith, the letter says, working together with his deeds, and made complete by them — so that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only. Rahab the harlot is added as a second witness, justified by her works when she received the messengers and sent them out another way. The conclusion is stated flatly: as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.

The force of the passage lies in its definition of what faith is. James is not arguing that deeds purchase standing before God; he is arguing that a faith which produces nothing was never the living thing it claimed to be. Works are not the price of faith but its respiration — the sign that it is alive at all. The hearer is being asked not to add works to belief, but to recognize that a belief which adds nothing has already proved itself counterfeit. This is the letter’s whole moral engine, and it is consistent with the rest: the warnings against partiality to the rich man in fine clothing, against a tongue that blesses God and curses men, against a piety that is all hearing and no doing. The man who hears the word and does not do it, James says in the first chapter, is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and at once forgets what he looked like.

The fire of the tongue

The longest single development in the letter is its warning about speech, and it is among the most vivid passages in the New Testament. The tongue is a small member, James writes, and yet it boasts of great things. A small fire sets a great forest ablaze; the tongue is “a fire,” a world of iniquity among the members, kindled, in the letter’s startling phrase, from hell. It stains the whole body and sets the wheel of existence alight. Men have tamed every kind of beast and bird and reptile and sea-creature, but no one can tame the tongue — it is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it men bless the Lord and Father, and with the same tongue curse those made in God’s likeness; from one mouth come blessing and cursing, and this, the letter says, ought not to be so. A spring does not pour out fresh water and bitter from the same opening; a fig tree does not bear olives. The passage is not an aside but a test case for the whole argument: if faith is known by its works, the most constant and most revealing work is what a person says, and the discipline of the mouth becomes the measure of the rest.

The sick and the elders

Near the close, the letter gives the instruction that would acquire a sacramental afterlife it could hardly have anticipated. If anyone is sick, James says, let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up, and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. The instruction sits within a wider counsel on prayer — prayer in suffering, praise in gladness, confession of sins to one another, the example of Elijah who prayed and the heavens were shut and opened again.

In its own setting this is the practical wisdom of a community that prayed over its sick and anointed them with oil as both medicine and sign. In its later career it became the principal scriptural warrant for the rite of anointing the sick — the sacrament the medieval West came to call extreme unction, and which it numbered among the seven. Peter Lombard fixed it in that list in the twelfth century; the Council of Trent, in 1551, defined it as instituted by Christ and promulgated through this very passage of James, by which grace is conferred, sin remitted, and the sick comforted. The anointing of the sick thus rests, in Catholic teaching, on five verses of a letter whose own authority was for centuries in doubt — a passage of plain pastoral counsel raised, over a thousand years, into a defined mystery of the church.

Who wrote it

Authorship is contested, and the dispute is old. Tradition assigns the letter to James, called the brother of Jesus and the leading figure of the Jerusalem community in the decades after the crucifixion — the James whom Paul names among the pillars, and whom the historian Josephus reports was stoned to death in Jerusalem around the year 62, on the order of the high priest Ananus. The text itself, however, names only “James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,” with no claim to that office and no appeal to kinship with Jesus, and this reticence cuts both ways in the argument.

Much of modern scholarship judges the letter pseudonymous, or at least removed from the historical James. Three considerations carry the weight. The Greek is fluent and rhetorically trained — fuller of literary device than one would expect from a Galilean craftsman’s household, though the reach of Greek education in first-century Palestine is itself disputed. The attestation is late: no certain citation survives before the third century, when Origen quotes it and is the first to link it firmly to James the brother of the Lord. And its admission to the canon was slow and reluctant — Eusebius, writing his church history in the early fourth century, lists James among the disputed books, the antilegomena, noting that few of the ancients had quoted it; it is absent from the Muratorian list and from several early canon catalogs, and it entered the Syriac churches only later. Against this, scholars such as Richard Bauckham have defended an early date and a real connection to the Jerusalem James, reading the letter as the encyclical voice of a teacher addressing the dispersed people of God in the idiom of Jewish wisdom; Luke Timothy Johnson, in his major commentary, has argued that the genre and the moral world of the letter fit a first-generation Jewish-Christian setting better than a later forger’s workshop. The question of the author’s identity stays genuinely contested. What is not contested is that the letter circulated, that its acceptance into the canon came late and after debate, and that once accepted it was never afterward expelled.

Text and scholarship

The contours of the attestation question are set by the ancient sources themselves. The fullest early notice is Eusebius of Caesarea, whose church history both records the martyrdom of James in Jerusalem — drawing on Hegesippus and on Josephus — and registers the letter’s contested status, noting that it is counted the first of the catholic epistles yet is disputed because few of the older writers quoted it (Historia Ecclesiastica II.23, in the public-domain Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation, available through New Advent). The later reception — Origen’s third-century citations, the absence of James from the Muratorian list, the slow Syriac admission, and the use of James 5 as the scriptural warrant for anointing the sick defined at Trent — is gathered in the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia article on the Epistle. The modern critical conversation is anchored by two commentaries that read the evidence in opposite directions: Luke Timothy Johnson’s volume in the Anchor Yale Bible (1995), which locates the letter’s genre and moral world in first-generation Jewish-Christian wisdom, and Richard Bauckham’s study (1999), which presents James as a deliberate reworking of the teaching of Jesus the sage addressed to the dispersed people of God. The contested verdict of the Reformation belongs to the documentary record as well: Luther’s demotion of the letter survives in the 1522 Preface to the New Testament, whose later excision from his Bibles is itself part of the text’s history.

The letter and the apostle

The deepest of the letter’s controversies is not historical but theological, and it turns on a single word shared with Paul. James says that a man is justified by works, and not by faith only, and offers Abraham as proof. Paul, above all in the letter to the Romans and in Galatians, says that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law, and offers the same Abraham as proof — citing the same verse of Genesis, that Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. The two appear to read one patriarch toward opposite conclusions.

The standard resolution, worked out across centuries and broadly shared by Catholic and Protestant readers alike, is that the two are answering different questions with the same vocabulary. Paul writes against those who would make observance of the law the ground of acceptance before God, and means by “works” the works of the law — circumcision, the calendar, the dietary code — and by “faith” the trust that lays hold of grace. James writes against those who would let faith dwindle to bare assent, and means by “works” the active mercy and obedience of a living belief, and by “faith only” a profession that does nothing. Paul speaks of how a person comes to stand righteous before God; James of how a faith already professed shows itself to be real. Abraham can be justified by faith in the moment he believes the promise, and justified by works in the moment he carries Isaac up the mountain, without contradiction, because “justified” is doing different work in each clause. Paul gives the ground of justification; James gives the evidence of a faith genuinely held.

The Reformation quarrel

This irenic settlement was not always available, and the letter’s sharpest crisis came in the sixteenth century. The Reformation made justification by faith alone the load-bearing doctrine of its theology, and James, with its flat assertion that faith only does not justify, sat awkwardly across the new foundation. Martin Luther, in the preface to his 1522 German New Testament, ranked the epistle below the chief books and called it, in the phrase that has shadowed it ever since, a “right strawy epistle” — an epistle of straw — because, he wrote, it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it. He set it against Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, First Peter, and First John as the books that truly preach Christ, and moved James, with Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation, to the back of his New Testament without numbers in the table of contents.

The verdict was sharper in reputation than in fact. Luther never struck the letter from the canon, and in the same preface allowed that it contained many good sayings and that anyone who wished might extol it; the “epistle of straw” paragraph itself was quietly dropped from editions of his Bible after 1522. Later Lutheran and Reformed theology made its peace with the letter along the lines already drawn — Paul and James addressing distinct questions — and the Council of Trent, answering the Reformation, leaned on James precisely where the reformers were uneasy, citing it for both the necessity of works and the sacrament of anointing. The dispute, in the end, only sharpened the letter’s own demand. James does not ask its readers to choose between believing and doing; it tells them that the choice was never real, that a faith which warms no one and feeds no one and governs no tongue has already declared what it is. The man who hears the word and walks away unchanged is the figure the whole letter is written against — and by its own measure, the only faith worth the name is the one that has already started to move.

→ Related: Epistle To The Hebrews · First Epistle Of Peter · Second Epistle Of Peter · Canonization · Epistle Of Jude · Epistles Of John · Epistle To The Romans · Abraham · Isaac · Paul The Apostle · Martin Luther · Anointing Of The Sick