The Epistle of James

The Epistle of James is a short catholic epistle of practical Christian wisdom, opening “James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad” (James 1:1). The Orthodox Church receives it as fully canonical, one of the seven catholic epistles, and finds in it the scriptural ground of the sacrament of Holy Unction (James 5:14–15); yet its road into the canon was slow, it stands among the disputed books in Eusebius, and at the Reformation Luther called it “a right strawy epistle.” This file sets out the book’s character and reception, including the contested question of its authorship.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Character of the Epistle

The epistle opens without elaborate greeting: “James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad, greeting” (James 1:1). What follows is not a doctrinal treatise on the Pauline model but a string of moral exhortations, terse and aphoristic, closer in form to the wisdom literature of the Old Testament — Proverbs, Sirach, the sayings of the sages — than to a letter of argument. It reads as catechesis for ordinary Christian life, and the Orthodox tradition has valued it precisely as such. Its texture is, above all, evangelical: the epistle echoes the teaching of Jesus, and especially the Sermon on the Mount, more closely than any other New Testament writing outside the Gospels — the blessing on those who endure trial (James 1:12; cf. Matthew 5:11–12), the prohibition of oaths in almost the Lord’s own words (“swear not… but let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay,” James 5:12; cf. Matthew 5:34–37), and the demand for mercy in judgment (James 2:13; cf. Matthew 7:1) all show a writer steeped in the dominical tradition (Bauckham 1999).

Care for the Poor, the Tongue, and Patience

Three running concerns mark the epistle indelibly. The first is its care for the poor and its rebuke of partiality: James forbids the church to honor the rich man in fine clothing above the poor man in vile raiment (James 2:4), for “hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith?” (James 2:5), while the rich are those “that oppress you, and draw you before the judgment seats” (James 2:6; cf. 2:1–7; 5:1–6). The second is the tongue, to which the whole third chapter is given: “a little member” that “boasteth great things” (James 3:5), “an unruly evil, full of deadly poison” (James 3:8), with which “bless we God… and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God” (James 3:9). The third is patience, makrothumia, under suffering: “Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord” (James 5:7), with “the prophets… for an example of suffering affliction, and of patience” — and Job, of whose endurance “ye have heard” (James 5:10–11; cf. 5:7–11).

The Anointing of the Sick

One passage has weighed heavily in Orthodox sacramental theology. James directs: “Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders [presbyterous] of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: and the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him” (James 5:14–15). The Orthodox Church reads this as the New Testament ground of the mystery of Holy Unction (the Euchelaion): the prayer of the presbyters, the anointing with blessed oil, the joining of bodily healing with the forgiveness of sins (cf. Soteriology; on the patristic reception, The Church Fathers). The text supplies the constitutive elements of the sacrament — minister, matter, and dual effect — and it is from James that the Eastern rite of Unction takes its scriptural charter.

The Slow Reception into the Canon

For all this, the epistle entered the canon slowly, and an honest account must say so (METHODOLOGY §4). It is absent from the Muratorian Fragment, the late-second-century Roman canon list, which knows the epistles of John and Jude but not James (Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament, 1987). And Eusebius of Caesarea, surveying the books in the early fourth century, places James among the antilegomena, the “disputed” books read in many churches but not yet universally received. Recounting the tradition of James the Lord’s brother, Eusebius writes that his is “said to be the first of the epistles called catholic,” but adds the caution: “It is to be observed that its authenticity is denied, since few of the ancients quote it” (Eusebius, HE 2.23; trans. McGiffert, NPNF II/1). In his formal classification of the canon he lists James again among the disputed writings, “yet recognized by many” (Eusebius, HE 3.25; NPNF II/1).

The reception was not uniform. Origen in the East cited James as Scripture and as the work of the Lord’s brother, and was among the first to give it clear standing (cf. Eusebius, HE 6.25). The Syriac church received it as one of the three catholic epistles included in the Peshitta. And by the latter fourth century its place was secure — it appears in the festal letter of Athanasius (367) — so that the Orthodox Church has ever after numbered it among the seven catholic epistles without question. But the memory of its disputed beginning is part of the record, not a thing to be hidden.

Luther’s “Epistle of Straw”

The book’s most famous detractor came at the Reformation. In his 1522 Preface to the New Testament, Martin Luther ranked the New Testament writings by how clearly they “show thee Christ,” exalting the Gospel of John, the Pauline epistles — especially Romans — and 1 Peter as “the true kernel and marrow of all the books.” Against that measure he judged James to fall short, and wrote the line for which the judgment is remembered: compared with these, “the epistle of James is a right strawy epistle [eine recht stroherne Epistel], for it has no gospel character to it” (Luther, Preface to the New Testament, 1522; Luther’s Works 35:362). In his separate Preface to the Epistles of James and Jude he set out his reasons: he thought James “flatly against St. Paul… in ascribing justification to works” (James 2:24), and that it “does not once mention the Passion, the resurrection, or the Spirit of Christ” (Luther, Preface to the Epistles of James and Jude, 1522; Luther’s Works 35:396–397). On these grounds Luther doubted the epistle’s apostolic authorship and relegated it, printing James, Jude, Hebrews, and Revelation after the others, without numbers in his table of contents.

It is fair to Luther to note that he did not strike James from the Bible: he printed and preached from it, and granted that it “sets up no doctrines of men” and “drives hard to God’s law.” His quarrel was governed by his doctrine of justification, the very point taken up in the companion file (see Faith and Works). The Orthodox Church never shared his hesitation: it receives James as fully canonical, the testimony of an apostle, and reads its teaching on faith and works not as a contradiction of Paul but as his complement.

The Question of Authorship

[Disputed: the authorship of the epistle is contested. The traditional ascription — held by Origen, presupposed in the tradition Eusebius reports, and carried by the title itself — is to James the brother of the Lord, first bishop of Jerusalem (see James the Just); on this reading the letter’s Jewish-Christian idiom, its address to “the twelve tribes,” and its closeness to the Jesus tradition fit the Jerusalem leader, and Richard Bauckham argues that the polished Greek is no obstacle, since a Galilean leader of a Greek-speaking diaspora mission could command or commission such prose (Bauckham, James, 1999). Against this, much modern critical scholarship judges the epistle pseudonymous or late: Martin Dibelius, in the standard form-critical commentary, held that the cultivated Koine Greek, the late and disputed attestation, and the generalized “paraenetic” character point away from the historical James to a later author writing in his name (Dibelius, James [Hermeneia], 1976). The matter is not resolved by the evidence available; this collection follows the Church’s traditional ascription while recording the critical case.]

References

The Holy Bible. The Epistle of James (cited throughout: 1:1; 1:2–8, 12, 22–26; 2:1–7, 13; 3:1–9; 5:1–15); Matthew 5–7. (Quotations follow the Authorized Version; Greek consulted for presbyteroi and makrothumia.)
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History (HE) 2.23; 3.25; 6.25. Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. 1890. (James “said to be the first of the epistles called catholic”; “its authenticity is denied, since few of the ancients quote it”; James among the antilegomena; Origen’s use.)
Luther, Martin. Preface to the New Testament and Preface to the Epistles of James and Jude (1522). In Luther’s Works, Vol. 35: Word and Sacrament I, ed. E. Theodore Bachmann. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg/Fortress, 1960, pp. 357–362, 395–397. (“A right strawy epistle”; the charge of conflict with Paul on justification.)
Metzger, Bruce M. The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. (James absent from the Muratorian Fragment; its disputed reception; inclusion in the Peshitta; Athanasius’s festal letter of 367.)
Bauckham, Richard. James: Wisdom of James, Disciple of Jesus the Sage. New Testament Readings. London: Routledge, 1999. (The epistle as wisdom literature and its closeness to the Jesus tradition; the case for authenticity.)
Dibelius, Martin. James: A Commentary on the Epistle of James. Rev. Heinrich Greeven, trans. Michael A. Williams. Hermeneia. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976. (The paraenetic genre; the case for a later, pseudonymous author.)