In this short and accessible book, Margaret Aymer first engages a range of traditional issues regarding James and subsequently introduces a novel way of reading the letter. For the former, she relies considerably upon the commentaries of Luke Timothy Johnson (1995) and Ben Witherington III (2007). Although she is not adamant, she thinks it a ‘reasonable hypothesis’ (p. 15) that the letter was written sometime between 40-60 ce by James the Just while he was a leader in the Jerusalem church. James was an encyclical sent to mostly Jewish Christians living in diaspora communities worshipping in synagogues. Aymer attends somewhat to the rhetoric and structure of the letter in chapter two while in chapter three she defends James as a deeply theological text. In chapter four, entitled ‘James and Kyriarchy,’ Aymer argues that while the letter challenges dimensions of social and economic life, it conforms to gender and sexual norms. Whenever the letter uses the word, anēr, for example, it follows the culture’s characterization of an ideal biological male. Women are barely present in James, but when they do appear, they are depicted as dependent and powerless. In the final chapter, ‘James as a Migrant Writing,’ Aymer presents a new method of interpreting the letter; that is, through the lens of literature written for migrant communities. This type of literature provides strategies for communities to navigate between their home and host cultures. James’ strategy is that of separation in that the audience is exhorted to remain unstained by the world (1:27) and to uphold their traditions and practices as articulated by Torah. However, in some ways the letter mimics ‘the world’ insofar as the ‘Kingdom of God’ imitates the empire in which these people lived. In addition, James employs slave imagery metaphorically; a practice which Aymer calls ‘co-mingling’ or a readiness to accept some aspects of the kyriarchy of the time period (p. 75). At the end of the chapter, Aymer offers some reflection about how James, read in such a manner, might be useful today. The last two chapters of the book offer some new ideas about James that will be interest to a broad audience.
Alicia J. BattenConrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo
