Abstract
The Letter of James (New International Commentary on the New Testament)
Scot McKnight
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011. 532 pp. $55.00
Scot McKnight is the newly appointed Professor of New Testament at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary (IL). His contribution to the NICNT series replaces the 1976 commentary by James Adamson, whose reading of James is substantively thin by today’s standards, even though his sustained argument for the letter’s theological coherence challenged the critical consensus of his day. Adamson was a Presbyterian minister interested in producing a useful guide for clergy preaching their way through James. McKnight brings a different résumé with him to the text, one honed by conversations with scholars and classrooms of students and a body of published research that covers an impressive sweep of topics and audiences. Not surprisingly, McKnight’s bibliography of secondary sources is extensive, funding several hundred detailed footnotes that provide academic readers with a robust critical apparatus of James. Every reader will enjoy McKnight’s delightful writing style as well, crafted by blogs and public lectures as much as by his classrooms and scholarly roundtables.
McKnight introduces his commentary with the scholar’s exhortation to “read James in light of James” (1). Good advice, but which “James” is this? For McKnight, he is the historian’s James, the Lord’s brother and the Jerusalem church’s legendary leader, and his introduction provides readers with the details of modernity’s quest of the historical James (1–38); it is this “James” who must illumine today’s reading of James. But the historian’s quest is mostly a dead-end for lack of useful evidence—a realization that McKnight frequently admits. (Nowhere, however, does McKnight also consider the awkward silence of this letter until Origen in the third century, which seems odd—and important—given the hagiography that surrounds him into the third century, especially in the East.)
This historical indeterminacy forces McKnight to attach what he does dig up from antiquity to a profile of the James inferred from a close reading of the letter, from snapshots of the James of Acts and Paul’s references to the Jerusalem “pillar” in a couple letters, and from family “photos” of Jesus’ family found in the synoptic Gospels. These various textual bits when cobbled together fashion the rather conventional identity of McKnight’s James as the brother of Messiah Jesus, the Torah-observant leader of an impoverished “Jewish messianic community” living in the diaspora probably during the 50s.
The theological goods one might expect from such a James for such an audience is of a piece with biblical Israel’s story (especially its Wisdom iteration), plotted by its struggles “to live out the Mosaic Torah as God’s enduring will” (39–47). When applied to James, one finds a New Testament writing more interested in ethics than soteriology, more interested in covenant-keeping than covenant-initiating, more interested in following Jesus as a messianic exemplar of a loving God and neighbor rather than a cruciform savior from sin and death. McKnight contends that James and Paul were contemporaries, but not adversaries. The emphasis on ethics in James is not to counter the emphasis on soteriology in Paul; rather, each witness reflects the apostolic accommodations of two very different early Christianities.
McKnight consistently develops this sensibility in his verse-by-verse commentary on the text of James, which he approaches as a work of Hellenistic paraenesis fit into a letter genre (39–55, 59–61). Following a standard sender–recipient address (1:1), the letter’s main body is subdivided into six thematic units: (1) on the Christian and trials (1:2–18), (2) general exhortations (1:19–27), (3) on the Christian and partiality (2:1–13), (4) on the Christian and works (2:14–26), (5) general exhortations aimed at the community’s teachers (3:1–4:12), and (6) on the messianic community and wealthy antagonists (4:13–5:11). James concludes, as do most New Testament letters, in congregational exhortation (5:12–20).
McKnight provides us with a wonderfully written, critically current, theologically rich commentary on a first-century Christianity of a messianic Jewish community living somewhere (probably) in Roman Asia. His judgments about the text, if not also the world behind the text, are measured and insightful. I have no doubt that scholars and their advanced students will find it a helpful portal into academic study of the letter.
But will it preach? I’m not as certain. Whilst McKnight consistently makes winsome applications to the contemporary church, they always feel forced to me, mostly because of the distance he has created between the historian’s James and the embattled messianic Jewish community he addresses in the first century and today’s audiences addressed by this same letter. In my mind, James is better illumined for today’s readers by its postbiblical history and the role given it and a canonical James—both within the Catholic Epistles collection and also the entire New Testament canon—by the catholic community of the third century who first recognized this letter as Scripture. Whilst readers receive James with a social world, which social world we choose makes all the difference.