Abstract
This volume is the revised and published version of a doctoral thesis written at the University of Birmingham under the supervision Dr David Allen. In this study the author analyzes the use of named exemplary figures in the letter of James such as Abraham, Rahab, Job, and Elijah, and the way appeals to these figures function in the overall structure and argument of the letter.
The first three chapters are largely an orientation to the letter of James, an overview of its themes, and an outline of some of the scholarly debates pertaining to the issues of genre, structure, date and authorship. The next four chapters form the body of the book, and focus on the figures of Abraham, Rahab, Job, and Elijah respectively. The structure of each of these four chapters is similar, mutatis mutandis, and describing the approach in the chapter of Abraham provides insight into the structure in the other three chapters. The discussion pertaining to Abraham is broken into seven subsections. The initial six subsections provide background information: Abraham in the Hebrew Bible, Deuterocanonical literature, the Book of Jubilees, at Qumran, in Philo and Josephus, and in other NT works. After assembling this mass of background data, Foster then turns to a detailed study of the figure of Abraham in the Letter of James (pp. 80–103). Foster concludes that unlike other NT authors, the author of James ‘draws heavily on Jewish tradition in his use of Abraham as an exemplar’ (p. 102). This is seen as supporting the suggestion that the audience ‘is essentially a Jewish one’ (p. 102). Thus the point of the appeal to Abraham is to challenge the audience to examine its practices, especially in relationship to showing partiality within the community.
In sum, Foster argues that the use of exemplars in James serves the author’s primary purpose of encouraging the community “to embrace fully the more stringent demands of the royal law based in the teaching of Jesus” (p. 204). This is a solid piece of scholarship that makes a helpful contribution to the study of the letter of James.