The Expositor's Bible: The General Epistles of St. James and St. Jude. Alfred Plummer
clergy of Edessa are directed to read the Law and the Prophets, the Gospel, St. Paul's Epistles, and the Acts, no other canonical book being mentioned. In all Churches the number of Christian writings read publicly in the liturgy was at first small, and in no case were the Catholic Epistles the first to be used for this purpose.
The internal evidence, as we shall see when we come to examine it more closely, is even more strong than the external. The character of the letter exactly harmonizes with the character of James the first Bishop of Jerusalem, and with the known circumstances of those to whom the letter is addressed, and this in a way that no literary forger of that age could have reached. And there is no sufficient motive for a forgery, for the letter is singularly wanting in doctrinal statements. The supposed opposition to St. Paul will not hold; a writer who wished to oppose St. Paul would have made his opposition much more clear. And a forger who wished to get the authority of St. James wherewith to counteract St. Paul's teaching would have made us aware that it was either an Apostle, the son of Zebedee or the son of Alphæus, or else the brother of the Lord, who was addressing us, and would not have left it open for us to suppose that the Epistle was from the pen of some unknown James, who had no authority at all equal to that of St. Paul. And let any one compare this Epistle with those of Clement of Rome, and of Barnabas, and of Ignatius, and mark its enormous superiority. If it were the work of a forger, what a perplexing fact this superiority would be! If it be the work either of an Apostle or of one who had Apostolic rank, everything is explained.
Luther's famous criticism on the Epistle, that it is "a veritable Epistle of straw," is amazing, and is to be explained by the fact that it contradicts his caricature of St. Paul's doctrine of justification by faith. There is no opposition between St. James and St. Paul, and there is sometimes no real opposition between St. James and Luther (see p. 147). And when Luther gives as his opinion that our Epistle was "not the writing of any Apostle" we can agree with him, though not in the sense in which he means it; for he starts from the erroneous supposition that the letter bears the name of the son of Zebedee. We must also bear in mind his own explanation of what is Apostolic and what is not. It has a purely subjective meaning. It does not mean what was written or not written by an Apostle or the equal of an Apostle. "Apostolic" means that which, in Luther's opinion, an Apostle ought to teach, and all that fails to satisfy this condition is not Apostolic. "Therein all true holy books agree, that they preach and urge Christ. That too is the right touchstone whereby to test all books—whether they urge Christ or not; for all Scripture testifies of Christ (Rom. iii. 21). … That which does not teach Christ is still short of Apostolic, even if it were the teaching of St. Peter or St. Paul. Again, that which preaches Christ, that were Apostolic, even if Judas, Annas, Pilate, and Herod preached it." The Lutheran Church has not followed him in this principle, which places the authority of any book of Scripture at the mercy of the likes and dislikes of the individual reader; and it has restored the Epistles to the Hebrews and of James and Jude to their proper places in the New Testament, instead of leaving them in the kind of appendix to which Luther had banished them and the Revelation. Moreover, the passage containing the statement about the "veritable Epistle of straw"[16] is now omitted from the preface to his translation. And with regard to this very point, his former friend and later opponent Andrew Rudolph Bodenstein, of Karlstadt, pertinently asked, "If you allow the Jews to stamp books with authority by receiving them, why do you refuse to grant as much power to the Churches of Christ, since the Church is not less than the Synagogue?" We have at least as much reason to trust the Councils of Laodicea, Hippo, and Carthage, which formally defined the limits of the New Testament, as we have to trust the unknown Jewish influences which fixed those of the Old. And when we examine for ourselves the evidence which is still extant, and which has greatly diminished in the course of fifteen hundred years, we feel that both on external and internal grounds the decision of the fourth century respecting the genuineness of the Epistle of St. James, as a veritable product of the Apostolic age and as worthy of a place in the canon of the New Testament, is fully justified.
[8] The date so frequently given, A.D. 363, cannot be substantiated, and on the whole is not probable. See Hefele, History of the Church Councils, II. vi. 93.
[9] The Epistle to the Hebrews and the Apocalypse.
[10] γνωρίμων δ' οὖν ὅμως τοῖς πολλοῖς (H. E. III. xxv. 3), where γνώριμος, as usual, indicates familiar knowledge. Eusebius is a desultory writer, and one has to gather his views from statements scattered over chaps. iii., xxiv., and xxv., some of which are not very precise. The following table seems to represent his opinion:—
| Canonical Books (ἐνδιάθηκοι γραφαί) | Universally acknowledged (τὰ ὁμολογούμενα) | Four Gospels, Acts, fourteen Epistles of Paul (Hebrews ?), 1 John, 1 Peter, Apocalypse (?). |
| Disputed (τὰ ἀντιλεγόμενα) | As to authenticity—2 Peter. | |
| As to Apostolicity—James, Jude, 2 and 3 John. | ||
| Uncanonical | Orthodox, but of no authority, because defective | As to authenticity—Acts of Paul, Shepherd, Apocalypse of Peter. |
| As to Apostolicity—Epistle of Barnabas, Doctrines of the Apostles, Gospel according to Hebrews, Apocalypse (?). | ||
| Heretical | Gospels of Peter, Thomas, Matthias, Acts of Andrew, John, etc., etc. | |
[11] Epist. Fest. xxxix. The passage is given in full by Westcott On the Canon, Appendix D., xiv. The Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius cannot have been completed later than A.D. 325, but the earlier books were probably written about A.D. 313, soon after the Edict of Milan. See Bishop Lightfoot, Dict. of Chris. Biog., I., p. 322.
[12] Harnack, Das Neue Testament um das Jahr 200 (Freiburg I. B., 1889), p. 79.
| Compare Clement | with James. |
| x. 1 | ii. 23. |
| xi. 2 | i. 8; iv. 8. |
| xii. 1 | ii. 25. |
| xvii. 6 | iv. 14. |
| xxx. 2 | iv. 6. |
| xxxi. 2 | ii. 21. |
| xlvi. 5 | iv. 1. |
| xlix. 5 | x. 20. |