I have been having a conversation with a Christian named DJ on my thread about contradictions in the Bible. As the conversation has outgrown the comments box, I propose to give full answer to his objections here. I have previously provided him with a short list of things you will NOT find in the Epistle of James. Here I will elaborate and apologies for once again including that list:

The Epistle of James

We can look to the Epistle of James for clues as to what the original Christians believed beyond the importance of Works over Faith. We can do this with some degree of confidence, despite its inclusion in the New Testament, for it seems to be not a product of “orthodoxy” or of Gentile Christianity at all but of Judaism. Samuel Sandmel points out that “specifically Christian touches number only two, the first verses of the first and of the second chapter,” and his judgment is that “it is quite likely that we have here a ‘Jewish’ book adapted for Christian use.”[1] Matt Jackson-McCabe points to its uniquely features:

The Letter of James evidences a variant early Christian myth that while different from the death-and-resurrection one that is reflected in much of the extant Christian literature, is consistent in significant respects with other Jewish messianic thinking in the early Roman period. The central metaphor that informs James’s interest in the figure of Jesus Christ is not, as in the Johannine or Pauline literature new creation or rebirth, but national restoration: the reestablishment of a twelve-tribe kingdom by the hand of an avenger messiah.[2]

In fact, by way of an examination of the so-called Epistle of James, which Julie Galambush calls “one of the New Testament’s best glimpses into the beliefs of a fully Jewish sect of Jesus-followers”[3] we find confirmation of our findings noted above. We can infer a few things from James both by what is and what is not spoken of. That there are differences is readily apparent when compared with Paul’s rhetoric. We find in James:

* No reference to Paul’s view of Jesus as the Divine Son of God.
* James’ assertion that “God is one” (2.19) leaves little room for Jesus as the Divine Son of God.
* No mention of the Holy Spirit.
* No mention of Jesus’ atoning death (compare 2 Cor. 5.5.14-15, 18-21)
* No mention of Jesus’ resurrection.
* No condemnation of the Law. Law and works are as important as Grace or Faith.
* That ethical discussions draw on the Old Testament, not on examples from Jesus.

It is a simple matter to test these assertions. Open your New Testament and contrast this with what you find in Paul’s Epistles. His letters are fairly loaded with comments regarding the four points above. Indeed, as we will see, the most important things to Paul were Jesus’ death and resurrection. For Paul, Jesus is God and he says this often, just as he often condemns the Law and belittles those who follow it in favor of Faith in Jesus’ atoning death and resurrection. If the author of James felt that these things were important, it is passing strange that he mentions them not at all.

The letter of James can be seen then to attach no importance at all to the things Paul held to be of utmost importance, and it contrasts even more strongly with the advanced theology of John’s Gospel. In essence, the letter of James has a far more Jewish tone than Christian, though Vermes remarks on the absence of “some allusion to the compulsory observance of the Mosaic Law by Jewish Christians in the letter.”[4] The authorship of James continues to be debated in scholarly circles, but if James did not write the Epistle in his name (and most scholars accept that he did not) it still seems to have been written with a refutation of Paul’s theology in mind[5] though Sandmel argues that “James is not contending against Paul” but “a perverter of Paul’s message.”[6] Whatever the target of the message, the “epistle” stands out as a starkly Jewish document in an otherwise Gentile New Testament. In Julie Galambush’s words, the letter of James is no longer seen as “’Judaizing,’ but as simply Jewish.”[7] It is easy to see, As Geza Vermes remarks, why this letter “has given many a headache to Christian interpreters from the time of the Reformation to the present day.”[8]

In his epistles Paul has quite a bit to say about people he calls “Judaizers” – obviously agents of the Jerusalem leadership who are busily introducing Paul’s Gentile converts to the importance of adherence to the strictures of the Law. These complaints of Paul’s offer us an opportunity to learn something about the theology of the Jerusalem Community. Geza Vermes points out certain facts about the James’ Epistle that further demonstrate the differences between Paul and those he calls “Judaizers”:

It should be underlined that James’s message is entirely God-centered. Jesus stands very much in the background. The prayers are directed to God the Father; it is he who is blessed, and to whom the believer submits himself. The God of James bears the “honorable name” of the God of Judaism (Jas. 2:7; cf. IQS 6:27); he is the God of Judaism. His pure and undefiled worship is defined throughout the letter in ethical terms: visiting orphans and widows in their affliction, and living a good life in the meekness of wisdom (Jas. 1:27; 3:13). All this is performed in the framework of ‘the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory’ and intensified by the lively prospect of his impending return (5:7-9).[9]

Robert Eisenman says of the Epistle of James,

Despite its relatively polished Greek style, the antiquity of its materials can also now be confirmed by reference to its many parallels to doctrines in the Dead Sea Scrolls, not available previously…Given its manifest parallels with the documents from Qumran, with which it makes an almost perfect fit, and doctrines attributable to the person of James from other sources it has to be considered a fairly good reflection at least of the ‘Jamesian’ point of view…it is one of the most homogeneous, authentic, and possibly even earliest pieces in the New Testament corpus.”[10]

Except for the brief references to Jesus as Christ, there is nothing in James that is not Jewish, whereas Paul’s epistles offer very little that is Jewish. Christians will contort themselves in an effort to jump through the requisite hoops in hopes of reconciling James with Paul, but it cannot be done. They are not the product of the same religion. And they cannot be, for James, like his brother was a Jew, and remained a Jew, while Paul was an apostate from his ancestral faith, preaching a Gentile creed to a Gentile audience. Just as Jesus’ mode of death (i.e. crucifixion) is evidence of who killed him and why (the Romans, for sedition) so is Paul’s arrest in Acts 21 provide proof of the proof of who stood against Paul (the Jerusalem Community) and why (apostasy). As Gerd Ludemann asserts, “The charges here invoked against Paul are undoubtedly historical, since they accurately reflect the objections of the Jerusalem Christians to his teaching and practice.”[11] It was likely too well known to be denied. Those charges being that “you teach all the Jews among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, and that you tell them not to circumcise their children or observe the customs” (Acts 21.21) we can safely conclude that James and his community held both these things in high regard, making them not Christians, but Jews.

Notes:

[1] Samuel Sandmel, A Jewish Understanding of the New Testament, 219. Sandmel typically is hesitant to issue firm judgment for he adds the proviso that nothing precludes it having been written “about the year 100 by a Gentile Christian.”

[2] Matt Jackson-McCabe, “The Messiah Jesus in the Mythic World of James,” JBL 122 (2003), 730.

[3] Julie Galambush, The Reluctant Parting, 233.

[4] Geza Vermes, Who’s Who in the Age of Jesus (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 129. Vermes notes that the overall tone of the work is more “theocentric” than “christocentric” and that”while James is unlikely to be responsible for the Greek style of the letter, the ideas contained in it may at least in part have come from him.”

[5] James 2.14-22 clearly suggests that the epistle was written after Paul’s activities and in response to his teachings. N.T. Wright (The Resurrection of the Son of God, 561) argues that James did write the epistle and asserts that it “is now much more widely recognized as a distinct possibility.” It is difficult to see how this could be so, given that the letter is written in Greek, a language James likely did not speak. Jerome, himself writing in the fourth century, believed that authorship belonged to another James, the son of Alphaeus, who was one of Jesus’ Twelve (Mk 3.16-19; Matt. 10.2-4; Lk 6.14-16; Acts 1.12-14), a attribution that makes no more sense than assigning it to James.

[6] Samuel Sandmel, A Jewish Understanding of the New Testament, 220. He finds evidence of this same reaction in Matthew 5.37 (cf. James 5.12).

[7] Galambush, The Reluctant Parting, 234.

[8] Geza Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus, 122, S.G.F. Brandon (Jesus and the Zealots, 125, n. 1) observes that “Although the so-called Epistle of James is not, by the general consensus of expert opinion, to be regarded as written by James, the brother of Jesus, it is significant that a document showing such social consciousness should be ascribed to him.” Though it is now seen by many scholars to be something called a “wisdom writing,” rather than a letter, it has been suggested by Martin Dibelius that James as we have it derives from a sayings collection which was later put in the form of an epistle, since it lacks certain features characteristic of letters. According to this theory, a prescript was added to give it the appearance of a letter. See Martin Dibelius, James: A Commentary on the Epistle of James (11th ed., rev. Heinrich Greeven; trans. Michael A. Williams; (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), 1-10. See also S.R. Llwelyn, “The Prescript of James,” Novum Testamentum 39 (1997), 385-393. Note that this solution would account for mentions of Jesus as “the Christ” – a view not likely held by the Jerusalem Community.

[9] Geza Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus, 123. Vermes calls the letter “a bridge linking the Johannine-Pauline religion devised for Gentile believers to the Judaeo-Christianity of Acts and the Synoptic Gospels.”

[10] Robert Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus, 10-11. Eisenman rates the Letter of Jude “probably on the same order of authenticity and its tone echoes the letter of James. Geza Vermes dates the letters of James and Jude both to the end of the first century/beginning of the second. See The Changes Faces of Jesus, 290.

[11] Gerd Ludemann, The Acts of the Apostles, 282-283.