Boundaries,Intersections,and the Parting of Ways in the Letter of James

Introduction

In some ways the letter of James is a liminal or marginal text. Martin Luther’s description of it as “an epistle of straw” ¹ has in part led to the ongoing negative contrast in the Protestant tradition between James’s works-righteousness and Paul’s gospel of sola fides. ² Catholics, drawing upon exegetical arguments at least as old as Jerome’s letter against Helvidius (383 CE), have demoted the letter’s putative author from the Lord’s brother to his cousin. ³ On the other hand, the letter of James resonates with many Christian readers on account of its straightforward moral exhortations on care for the poor, the dangers of evil speech, and the importance of good works for the Christian life. The reception history of James by Dale C. Allison reveals the letter to have offered rich source material for sermons on a variety of topics across several denominations. ⁴ Indeed, in the Revised Common Lectionary, most of the letter is read sequentially on Sundays 22–26 after Pentecost in Year B, with the notable omission of 2:18–26, which most clearly seems to contradict the teaching of Paul in Romans and Galatians. ⁵ Broadly speaking, the theological issues surrounding the letter—the identity of its author, the role of works in salvation, the perpetual virginity of the mother of Jesus—while certainly not unimportant to Christians, have done little to lessen the text’s appeal to those who go to the Bible looking for relatively direct advice on how to live. Here too, then, one sees a divide between the academy and the church at work.

The letter of James exposes another, uglier, fault line in Christian biblical interpretation: the persistence of anti-Semitic ideology in both scholarship and preaching. Luther (once again) claimed on the basis of what the book didn’t say about Jesus or his death and resurrection, that James was written by “some Jew,” ⁶ an opinion that can be seen in the claims of some modern commentators that James is the least Christian book of the New Testament. A more egregious example is the language used by many influential commentators to describe the target of James’s condemnation of the rich in 2:6–7 and 5:1–7 as proof that the letter is addressed to Jews and not fellow Christians because—evidence from the Pauline corpus, Acts, and 1 Clement aside—there were no rich Christians for James to condemn, but certainly lots of rich people in Jewish communities. ⁷ This is not to say that James could not have been written by a Jewish author (on that see below). Rather, the way that some Christian readers respond to that possibility reveals the ongoing presence of anti-Semitism in biblical interpretation.

It merits mention here that, even when the rich in James are understood to be fellow Christians, the perennial struggle between the Bible’s preferential option for the poor and the allure of economic power for many elite Christians has led to preachers and commentators going to great lengths to make the text say less than what it does. As Alicia Batten notes:

James does not receive nearly as much attention as Pauline literature or the gospel material, but when it does, its attack upon wealth is often toned down or massaged, such that it can be accommodated to the social and economic structures which the interpretive community inhabits. ⁸

Although it is a small text, tucked into the back half of the New Testament, we should not be surprised to find that the letter of James—as all Scripture tends to do—both confronts readers with their own shortcomings and blind spots, and challenges those readers to embrace the risk of faith that involves transcending boundaries and centering the margins.

The authors of this essay come to it from partially overlapping social locations and identities. One of us is a female scholar of the New Testament with a Protestant seminary background. The other is a male Catholic scholar of the Hebrew Bible trained in Catholic institutions. Both of us are tenured faculty members at the same small, Catholic, liberal arts institution in the upper Midwest. We are both White and teach in predominantly White classrooms. Our socio-economic and cultural privilege as White, cisgender, heterosexual Christians surely influences our reading of James and what we can and cannot see in the text. For example, even though we write about anti-Jewish interpretations of James, it is undoubtably true that someone who has lived with anti-Semitism would understand these biases differently.

In this essay we highlight the position of James as a text at the boundaries of the dominant paradigm of Christian theology, as a marker in the so-called parting of the ways between ancient Judaism and Christianity, and as a site of intersection between traditions in the Jewish Scriptures.

Thinking about James as a Jewish Letter

The letter of James is a helpful source for information about ancient Judaism. Even though we often look to the New Testament for information about the early church, the collection of texts that we call the New Testament is likewise a rich trove of data for a study of ancient Judaism in all of its complexity. As is well known and frequently acknowledged, most of the figures in the New Testament were themselves Jewish: Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Peter, Paul, and, indeed, James. Even though scholars do not agree on whether the letter of James was written by James, the brother of the Lord (and we make no claims either way about that argument here), it is clear that the author of this letter, whoever s/he is, is strongly connected to the Jewish law and Jewish wisdom traditions. Reading James as a text that is key in the so-called “parting of the ways” is a way to acknowledge the complexity of ancient Judaism (including what we now think of as “Christianity,” an entity that did not exist in the first century).

Many studies of James try to locate it either within early Christianity or about ancient Judaism. Older conversations about the provenance of James relied on strong boundaries between Judaism and Christianity before a time when such boundaries existed and, indeed, before a time when the latter existed. ⁹ Some nineteenth-century scholars argued that James was a Jewish text later “baptized” by adding the two lone references to Jesus. ¹⁰ More recent scholarship is less drastic; for example, Matt Jackson-McCabe’s assessment is typical:

The Letter of James was produced in some circle of Christians for whom the Torah remained the central expression of love of God, and thus a critical criterion for inheriting the promised kingdom that would be given to the “twelve tribes” at the parousia of the messiah, Jesus…the Letter of James provides important, if all too rare evidence for a form of the Christian movement where soteriology centered not on rebirth through “the Gospel,” but on observance of the Torah. ¹¹

In light of more recent scholarship on the messy borders (or lack of borders!) between Judaism and Christianity in antiquity we could go further. Rather than seeing James as produced by Christians who value torah, we might rather see James produced by a group of Jews who observed torah and believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah of Israel. Thus, they are neither “Christian” nor “Jew” (by our modern definitions) but both or neither, “hybrids” in Daniel Boyarin’s estimation. ¹² We see James as a text that sits on the precarious and obscure border between the groups that eventually became Judaism and Christianity. Boyarin reminds us, in haunting prose, given our own contemporary conversations about borders and immigration in this 2020 election year: “Borders are also places where people are strip-searched, detained, imprisoned, and sometimes shot. Borders themselves are not given but constructed by power to mask hybridity, to occlude and disown it. The localization of hybridity in some others, called the hybrids or the heretics, serves that purpose.” ¹³ James and its original audience are situated near this precarious border.

Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity

The scholarship on when, how, and why Judaism and Christianity became separate religions is complex. For simplicity, we will briefly summarize the main developments in that scholarly conversation in order to show how James might be understood in that context. Like many areas of New Testament studies, the scholarship on the so-called “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity has been deeply influenced by the Holocaust. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ancient Judaism was often described as a dry, ossified, dying system of belief that demanded perfect adherence to the law of Moses. ¹⁴ In contrast, Jesus and/or Paul preached a gospel message of love that was antithetical to this dying Spätjudentum (“late Judaism,” the preferred German term for ancient Judaism; even the idea of calling it “late” implies that it was on its way out). In the wake of the Holocaust, many scholars acknowledged the anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic bias inherent in this way of describing the origins of Christianity. ¹⁵ They then attempted to account for the separation of Christianity from Judaism in ways that did not disparage Judaism. For the second half of the twentieth century, it became more common to speak of the different sects within ancient Judaism, of which emerging Christianity was one. The discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi codices, both in the 1940s, have further complicated this picture by giving evidence of the incredible diversity of ancient Judaism and Christianity. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, scholars became more interested in the ways in which we might describe ancient Judaism and early Christianity as closer and more intertwined than previously thought. ¹⁶ This includes an emphasis on placing any definitive “parting” much later than previously understood and generally emphasizing the messiness of that parting. Indeed, many scholars are invested in finding a different model for understanding these groups; rather than “parted ways,” how might we understand these various groups as diverse, overlapping, complicated, and entangled?

The Letter of James in its Ancient Context

Rather than seeing James as a Christian letter in a community that cannot figure out which side of the border it belongs on, we propose reading James as a Jewish letter in a community that sees Jesus as the Jewish messiah; that is, this letter exists before any border between Judaism and Christianity exists. Tobias Nicklas, naming some possibilities for future research on these ancient borders, writes, “The Epistle of James, in addition, seems to come from a milieu where the Torah, understood as the perfect law of freedom (1:25; 2:12) and the royal law (2:8), is observed and followers of Christ can be addressed as members of the ‘Twelve Tribes in Dispersion’ (1:1).” ¹⁷ There are many aspects of the text that lead to this interpretation: its emphasis on wisdom (see below), its cosmology, ¹⁸ its address to the “twelve tribes in the diaspora” (1:1), and more. Here, we will mention two examples: the discussion of law that pervades James and the brief reference to synagogue life in 2:2.

Throughout the letter, the author reminds the audience to value and keep the law (nomos). In fact, “law” is used ten times in James, in a variety of contexts. One of the longer discussions comes in 1:22–25, in which James famously admonishes the audience to:

be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, forget what they were like. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing” (emphasis added).

This is often read as a response to or argument with Paul’s letters, which assumes that Paul and James are opposed, that James knows Paul’s letters or at least his ideas, and that James writes to correct or oppose Paul’s teachings. If we do not assume that James and Paul are arguing here (that is, if we can decenter Paul), then it is perfectly natural to read James as a Jewish author who is reminding other Jews of the importance of being attentive to torah, the teachings that guide the community.

In chapter 2, James warns against favoritism: “My brothers, in partiality do you have the faith of our Lord, Jesus the messiah of glory?” (2:1, literal translation). ¹⁹ Some translations obscure the possibility that this verse reminds readers to imitate Jesus (the “faith of our Lord” which can refer to the faith that Jesus showed or the faith that believers put in him). Then, James goes on to offer an example: if a rich person and a poor person enter the synagogue and the rich person is honored while the poor one is ignored, “have you not made distinctions among yourself and become judges with evil thoughts?” (2:4). Here, James gives us information about the context for the community: they meet in a synagogue and/or feel comfortable calling their assembly a synagogue. The vast majority of translations have “assembly” or “meeting” for 2:2, though a few have “synagogue” (for example, ESV, ASV, Darby). This word is not used in any other New Testament letter, but occurs twice in Revelation, a handful of times in each Gospel, and nineteen times in Acts, usually to indicate a Jewish synagogue. This use of “synagogue” (synagōgē) as a straightforward designation for their community is but one example of the messy and, perhaps, non-existent border we are discussing.

James at Margins and Intersections

One of the supporting claims for the Jewish nature of James is the long-standing critique of the letter as a text that omits so-called essential elements of Christian Scripture (e.g., reference to the saving work of Jesus, or the importance of baptism). Here James intersects with the texts and scholarship on what is broadly called the wisdom tradition. As a category, however, this doesn’t help much, as scholars have argued for the influence in James of wisdom traditions from the Hebrew Bible, early Judaism, Greco-Roman moral philosophy, and early Christianity. ²⁰ Looking specifically at the category of wisdom literature in the Jewish Scriptures shows, as Will Kynes has recently argued, that this label isn’t an ancient genre designation but one developed by nineteenth-century biblical scholarship. ²¹ Moreover, in Hebrew Bible studies, this category in part has been used to cordon off biblical texts (i.e., Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes) which were judged to be missing the “essential” elements of biblical theology: covenant, God’s saving acts in history, and the like. In other words, the category of biblical wisdom literature is itself marginal, and for just the same reasons as the letter of James is considered Jewish (as opposed to Christian) by many New Testament scholars—absence of pre-determined essential elements found in other, more central, texts. What we want to argue in this section is that, while James certainly contains sapiential elements, the letter’s author has combined them with prophetic critique of the privileged which links the text to larger parts of the Hebrew Bible than simply the modern category of wisdom literature.

The question of determining literary dependence, intertextual relationship, or the presence of allusion is a thorny one, but we need not deal with it here. ²² In a detailed, book-length study of the intellectual, moral, and religious influences on the letter, James Riley Strange arrives at the conclusion that James is a text fully imbued with the significant cultural influences of its day, from both the Greco-Roman and early Jewish traditions, but that these influences are used to address a novel situation facing this nascent Christian community. ²³ But the wisdom elements in James are not only distinct because they are in a different context, they are also combined with prophetic traditions. Here our metaphor can move from images of the periphery to that of the crossroads or intersection, as James offers a meeting place of wisdom and prophetic elements from the early Jewish and biblical traditions. Specifically, James takes wisdom claims about universal human limitations and combines them with prophetic critiques of the wealthy.

James 4:13–14 gives us a directive that critiques the desires of those who plan to travel in order to “do business and make money.”

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.” Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.”

James bursts these bubbles by showing them for what they are. We cannot plan even for tomorrow because, quite simply, we have no guarantee that we will be here to see it. Humankind’s fundamental ignorance and impotence with regard to the future are also succinctly expressed in Proverbs: “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring (27:1).” ²⁴ In response to his rhetorical question, “What is your life?” James tells his audience that they themselves—not just their plans, nor their knowledge of the future, but their very existence—are nothing but mist and smoke (atmis gar este). This comparison of human existence with an ephemeral substance that disappears without warning or trace is perhaps the most significant theme of Ecclesiastes, which describes the sum total of existence with a term usually translated as “vanity,” but which can also denote either “mist” or “vapor” in Hebrew. ²⁵ James’s “you are mist,” then, is another iteration of the sentiment expressed in Qoheleth’s “All is vanity/vapor” (Eccl 1:2). But the line in James has a prophetic edge to it as well. In the LXX of Hosea 13, an oracle of doom addressed to Ephraim foretells that “they shall be like the morning mist, or like the dew that goes away early, like chaff that swirls from the threshing floor or like smoke (atmis) from a window” (Hos 13:3). ²⁶ This hint of prophetic condemnation in James 4:13–14 is made explicit by the overt use of the prophetic taunt in condemnation of the rich in James 5:1–6.

Another place in James where we see universal human transience qualified and targeted toward the wealthy is 1:10–11:

The rich will disappear like a flower in the field. For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the field; its flower falls, and its beauty perishes. It is the same way with the rich; in the midst of a busy life, they will wither away.

The Hebrew Bible contains a rich tradition of imagery that captures the ephemeral nature of humanity. One of these is the picture of vegetation ending its short lifespan under the burning sun. Psalm 90 (the only one in the Psalter attributed to Moses) provides a striking parallel with James:

You sweep them away; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning; in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers. For we are consumed by your anger; by your wrath we are overwhelmed. (Ps 90:5–7)

The burning wrath of God in Psalm 90 is directed to all those who are sinners. In James, this divine anger is limited to the wealthy. ²⁷

James 4:9 ²⁸ contains another interesting intersection with both Qoheleth and prophetic texts: “Lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection.” This counterintuitive claim is also the thematic link between the small collection of proverbs in Ecclesiastes 8, e.g., “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting … Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of countenance the heart is made glad” (Eccl 8:2–3). In the same way as the general statement of human transience in Jas 4:13–14 is qualified by a prophetic critique, so here too the audience for this advice of James are called sinners and “doubleminded,” and the command to trade laughter for sorrow echoes what we find in a text such as Isa 22:12–13 where God calls the people “to weeping and mourning … but instead there was joy and festivity.” As in the case of Jas 4:13–14, here too, we can see a prophetic edge in James because, unlike Qoheleth but very much like the prophets, the letter of James justifies this embrace of lament by grounding it in eschatological claims. ²⁹

Any discussion of wisdom and James must include the explicit mention of Job in James 5:11, where the biblical character is held up as a figure of endurance. Noteworthy is that James focuses on Job’s endurance while glossing over his fantastic wealth that is restored by God at the end of the book. This could in part be due to the emphasis on Job’s steadfast faith that comes to the fore in the LXX of Job and the Testament of Job, both of which go to great lengths to portray Job as more pious and faithful in his suffering than the Hebrew text of Job does. ³⁰ In this regard, however, it may also be noteworthy that Job is the second example named by James for “suffering and patience,” the first being “the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord” (5:10). While early Judaism had an expansive understanding of “prophet”—Josephus used the term to describe all the biblical authors (Ag. Ap. 1.37 ) ³¹ —given what we’ve seen about how James recontextualizes wisdom elements alongside prophetic motifs, the juxtaposition here of the prophets and Job is noteworthy.

How and Why this Matters for Us

Because James is in the New Testament canon, readers naturally read it for information about Christian theology and the early church. This is not wrong, but to do so misses an opportunity: to read for information about ancient Judaism and, in doing so, remind ourselves about the deep connections between Judaism and Christianity. In a moment of rising anti-Semitism in the United States and around the world, this reminder is more important than ever. ³² Biblical interpreters, whether those in ministerial or academic settings, hold a crucial role here: we can either give clear and accurate information about Judaism in antiquity, confront anti-Jewish tropes when we see them in readings of Scripture, and deliberately work to reduce anti-Semitism, or we can continue to contribute to a culture that maligns and scapegoats Jews, both ancient and modern. How might we respond to this important call when reading James?

First, we can remind Christians (especially people in the pews) that Jesus and his community were Jewish. This means giving regular reminders that Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Mary Magdalene, Peter, Paul, James, John the Baptist, and most of the rest of the characters in the New Testament were Jewish, and that “Christianity” as such does not exist in the pages of the New Testament. So, when talking about the letter of James, we can issue reminders that “James” (both the brother of the Lord and the author of this letter, whether or not we take that to be the same person) was Jewish and point to places where we see evidence of that, particularly his discussion of the law, his use of Hebrew Scriptures, and his case study involving synagogue life. We can also remind people who value Christian Scripture that the community to which James is writing is likewise Jewish.

Second, we can deliberately read James for information about ancient Jewish communities and beliefs, rather than retrojecting later Christian questions onto a Jewish book. This may seem to be a scholarly concern, rather than a pastoral one, but we argue that it can be both. It is a given that historical-critical scholars of the New Testament should strive to avoid anachronism and should value historical precision. Even pastoral and devotional readings of James might learn from this concern though: we might be moved to see how God spoke to a community in the midst of transition and rupture. We may learn from the ways that an ancient community strove to remain committed to tradition while also acknowledging the ways that tradition might evolve and open itself to the movements of God in our midst. And Christians benefit from being reminded of the beauty and goodness of God’s law, especially in traditions that have falsely emphasized the liberation of the gospel as something that denigrates the law.

Third, the presence of James in the canon reminds us that these borders are never closed off; these intersections are never empty. This text is always a potential site for meaningful dialogue between Judaism and Christianity, and a place of challenge for those of us with privilege who encounter the letter’s deft combinations of the wisdom tradition’s universal claims about humanity with prophets’ pointed critique of wealth.

Given the uncertain and rapidly changing times in which we are writing, these assurances might move us to trust. We are writing in the first few months of what will apparently be a long-standing coronavirus pandemic. Schools, religious communities, and non-essential stores are closed or have moved to virtual services. It is easy to feel like these are unprecedented times and, in certain ways, they are. But we read James as evidence of God’s presence with a community in the midst of transition and change, even as the community seeks wisdom in its traditions. The assurance that other communities have lived through such losses and that God was present with them is hopeful indeed.