The Letter of James. Addison Hodges Hart
related—either directly or indirectly—to Paul’s well-known penchant for “speaking like a fool” (2 Cor 12:11) and lashing out in angry outbursts against his opponents (e.g., Gal 1:8–9 and 5:12). Christians over the centuries, rightly revering Paul for his greatness on many levels, have tended to explain away such intemperate rhetoric or justify it as “righteous zeal” for the sake of the gospel. We forget, however, that such behavior may not have been considered acceptable by someone as austere as James apparently was. After all, as we can note in his letter, his ethics is in the spirit we hear in the Sermon on the Mount, wherein all “judging” and “condemning” of others is rebuked out of hand.
There is at the very least in James’s epistle a direct confrontation with what appears to be a poorly digested Paulinism, one that has misinterpreted Paul’s teaching about faith and good works, thereby letting self-discipline slip, “faith” to be perverted into mere assent to doctrines, and inequality between rich and poor Christians to flourish (and one can see, from even a cursory reading of Paul’s letters, that he himself had to deal with such distortions of his gospel: “What shall we say then? Should we persist in sin so that grace might abound? Let it not be! We who have died to sin, how shall we still live in it?”; Rom 6:1–2).
Fifth, as we have already had occasion to note, James’s moral injunctions have numerous parallels with the teachings of Jesus as we find them in the Synoptic Gospels, and in Matthew in particular. At the same time, these are indeed parallels and not direct quotations—echoes, as it were, of a common body of teaching fully digested and integrated by James into the body of his letter. In other words, one has the impression that James is so close in time and spirit to his brother that he has no need to quote him word for word. What we find instead is a shared ethos, imbibed from the source and flowing through James, and practiced in every aspect of his daily existence. As such, he simply communicates it with an easy authority gathered from lived experience. He speaks in the same spirit as his risen brother, and one senses that that is all he believed was required.
Taken together, these reasons for my acceptance of the genuineness of James’s authorship may not be persuasive for some, but they are sufficient for me to come down on the side of its authenticity.
9. Hengel’s essay has influenced my own view of the Letter of James, although I would hesitate to follow him in every particular. He goes into some detail, explaining that the epistle, written by James himself, is a sustained anti-Pauline polemic following the arrest of Paul (i.e., sometime between 58 and 62), and (at least, primarily) addressed to the Gentile Christians of Paul’s mission. He highlights seven passages that—to his mind—are direct attacks by James on Paul’s character and theology. I believe Hengel is too extreme in his conclusions, and that not all the “evidence” he accrues is convincing. To his credit, he states that he is only engaging in “a ‘science of conjecture.’” Still, caveats aside, many of his conjectures ring true enough that, in muted form, some of them will reappear in my own commentary below. Martin Hengel’s 1987 essay, “The Letter of James as Anti-Pauline Polemic,” can be found, in a somewhat abridged form, in The Writings of St. Paul: A Norton Critical Edition (2nd ed.), edited by Wayne A. Meeks and John T. Fitzgerald (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 242–53.
V.
The Spirit of this Commentary
If there is a single passage in the Letter of James that can be said to illuminate the essence of the book’s overall message for me, it is this: “For the one who has gazed intently into the perfect law, which is one of freedom, and has stayed there next to it, becoming not a forgetful listener but instead a doer of work—this one will be blissful in what he does. If anyone fancies himself religious while not bridling his tongue, but instead deceiving his own heart, his religion is empty. Pure and undefiled religion before the God and Father is this: to watch over orphans and widows in their affliction, to keep oneself unstained by the cosmos.” (Jas 1:25–27)
James’s chief purpose in writing his epistle, then, is to remind his readers of the characteristics that constitute “pure and undefiled”—that is to say, true—“religion.” No term in recent decades has been so ill-defined and maligned at the same time as the word religion—both by those professing no faith and by those professing faith in Jesus Christ. It may be one thing for non-religionists (or anti-religionists) to get it wrong, either through ignorance or malice, but it is quite another for Christians to think that there is anything to be found in either the Old or New Testament that speaks against “religion” per se. Certainly they can find texts that castigate false religion or negligent and hypocritical religious leaders, but they will find absolutely none that denigrate religion itself.
The term, admittedly, is difficult to define, especially since the study of religions in recent centuries has come to use it as an umbrella word to cover a variety of beliefs—monotheistic, monist, henotheistic, polytheistic, pantheistic, atheistic, animist, and anything else that can fall under its capacious and amorphous shade. For our purposes, the meaning that the term held for James must suffice. The word that he used and is translated as “religion”—θρησκεία—originally meant “fear of the gods,” hence “worship” and “piety”, and was understood in its practical sense to mean service rendered to deities, a deity, or the Deity. For James, as for Jesus, “religion” meant specifically Jewish religion, and—as they both clearly taught—it is a religion not primarily about, or reducible to, externals. Before anything else, it must be a matter of the heart. It is about the transformation of the human soul and the human mind: “Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-souled men.” (Jas 4:8)
The teachings and ethics of Jesus were eminently pragmatic in nature, and James is likewise a pragmatist—for him, proof is in the pudding, faith without works is dead, “fruits not roots” are what matter, and doctrine is only valid when it is inspirited by practice. There is no orthodoxy without orthopraxy, and of the two the latter is what will count most in the “day of judgment.” That means that any service that is rendered to God must at the same time be a service that benefits human beings, who are made in the image of God, but not to the neglect of one’s own self (“keeping oneself unstained by the cosmos”). This theme positively dominates the letter, whatever particular matter James addresses. It is the epistle’s undercurrent even when it is not explicitly stated. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the great Indian statesman and philosopher, wrote about his own tradition in words that can be easily applied to the mind of James (and Jesus): “Our enjoyment of the world is in direct proportion to our poverty. A call to renunciation in the sense of killing out the sense of separateness and developing disinterested love is the essence of all true religion.”10
James, then, is tackling a grave misapprehension of what constitutes the nature of Christian religion. It is currently fashionable in some evangelical circles to contrast Jesus with “religion,” conveniently undefined and forgetful that Jesus attended synagogue and revered the Temple as his “Father’s house.” It has also become a cliché in formally non-religious contexts to speak of being “spiritual but not religious,” as if these two terms have clearly defined meanings and can be legitimately placed in opposition to one another. But neither of these constructed rivalries (Jesus vs. religion and spirituality vs. religion) would have made any sense to James or to Jesus, both of whom were observant Jews and both of whom taught that religion is primarily an interior (“spiritual”) reality.
James’s concern is certainly not whether or not one can rightly call Christ’s message “religious”—for him, that can never be in doubt—but, rather, whether or not the recipients of his letter can be said actually to be practicing the religion of Jesus or only paying lip service to it. When James reprimands them for a show of formalism masquerading as “faith,” for having unbridled tongues, for judging and condemning others, for sucking up to the rich and powerful and disdaining the poor (among whom he numbers himself and all followers of Jesus), and so on, he is in fact striking at a series of manifestations of a single recurrent blight on Christian life: false religion.