(2) Failing a reference to his relationship to Jesus, we would have expected a reference to the fact that he was an apostle. It was Paul’s regular custom to begin his letters with a reference to his apostleship. Again, it is not a question of personal prestige but simply a guarantee of the authority by which he writes. If this James was indeed the Lord’s brother and the head of the Jerusalem church, we should have expected some reference at the beginning of the letter to his apostolic status.
(3) The most surprising fact of all is that which made Luther question the right of this letter to a place in the New Testament – the almost complete absence of any references to Jesus Christ. Only twice in the whole letter is his name mentioned, and these mentions are almost incidental (1:1, 2:1).
There is no reference at all to his resurrection. We know well that the early Church was built on faith in the risen Christ. If this letter is the work of James, it is contemporary with the events of Acts in which the resurrection is mentioned no fewer than twenty-five times. What makes it still more surprising is that James had a personal reason for writing about the appearance of Jesus which may well have been what changed the direction of his life. It is surprising that anyone writing at such a time in the Church’s history should write without reference to the resurrection of Jesus, and it is doubly surprising if the writer should be James, the brother of our Lord.
Further, there is no reference to Jesus as Messiah. If James, the leader of the Jewish church, was writing to Jewish Christians in these very early days, one would have thought his main aim would have been to present Jesus as Messiah, or that at least he would have made his belief in that fact plain; but the letter does not mention it.
(4) It is plain that the writer of this letter is steeped in the Old Testament. It is also plain that he is intimately acquainted with the Wisdom Literature; and that in James is only to be expected. There are in his letter twenty-three apparent quotations from the Sermon on the Mount; that too is easy to understand, because from the very beginning, long before the gospels were written, compendiums of Jesus’ teaching must have circulated. It is argued by some that he must have known Paul’s letters to the Romans and to the Galatians in order to write as he does about faith and works, and it is argued rightly that a Jew who had never been outside Palestine and who died in AD 62 could not have known these letters. As we have seen, this argument will not stand, because the criticism of Paul’s teaching in James is criticism which could have been offered only by someone who had not read the letters of Paul at first hand and who is dealing with a misunderstanding or a distortion of Pauline doctrine. But the phrase in 1:17, ‘Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift’, is a hexameter line (a line with six accented beats) and clearly a quotation from some Greek poet; and the phrase in 3:6: ‘the cycle of nature’, may be an Orphic phrase from the mystery religions. How could James of Palestine pick up quotations like these?
There are things which are difficult to account for on the assumption that James, the brother of our Lord, was the author of this letter.
The evidence for and against James’ authorship of this letter is extraordinarily evenly balanced. For the moment, we must leave the matter unresolved and turn to certain other questions.
The Date of the Letter
When we turn to the evidence for the date of the letter, we find this same even balance. It is possible to argue that it is very early, and equally possible to argue that it is rather late.
(1) When James was writing, it is clear that the hope of the second coming of Jesus Christ was still very real (5:7–9). Now the expectation of the second coming never left the Christian Church, but it did to some extent fade from the foreground of its thought as it was unexpectedly delayed for longer and longer. This would suggest an early date.
(2) In the early chapters of Acts and in the letters of Paul, there is a continuous background of Jewish controversy against acceptance of the Gentiles into the Church on the basis of faith alone. Wherever Paul went, the Judaizers followed him, and the acceptance of the Gentiles was not a battle which was easily won. In James, there is not even a hint of this Jewish–Gentile controversy, a fact which is doubly surprising when we remember that James, the Lord’s brother, took a leading part in settling the matter at the Council of Jerusalem. That being so, this letter could be either very early and written before that controversy emerged, or it could be late and written after the last echo of the controversy had died away. The fact that there is no mention of the Jewish-Gentile controversy can be used as an argument either way.
(3) The evidence from the church order reflected in the letter is equally conflicting. The meeting place of the Church is still called the sunagōgē (2:2). That points to an early date; later, an assembly of Christians would definitely be called the ekklēsia, for the Jewish term was soon dropped. The elders of the Church are mentioned (5:14), but there is no mention of either deacons or bishops. This again indicates an early date, and possibly a Jewish connection, for the eldership was a Jewish institution before it was a Christian one. James is worried about the existence of many teachers (3:1). This could well indicate a very early situation, before the Church had systematized its ministry and introduced some kind of order; or it could indicate a late date, when many false teachers had arisen to plague the Church.
There are two general facts which seem on the whole to indicate that James is late. First, as we have seen, there is hardly any mention of Jesus at all. The subject of the letter is, in fact, the inadequacies and the imperfections, the sins and the mistakes of the members of the church. This seems to point to a fairly late date. The early preaching was ablaze with the grace and the glory of the risen Christ; later preaching became, as it so often is today, a tirade against the imperfections of the members of the church. The second general fact is the condemnation of the rich (2:1–3, 5:I–6). The flattery of the rich and the arrogance of the rich seem to have been real problems when this letter was written. Now in the very early Church there were few, if any, rich people (1 Corinthians 1:26–7). James seems to indicate a later time when the once poor Church was being threatened with a spirit of worldliness in its members.
The Preachers of the Ancient World
It will help us to date this so-called letter of James, and may also help us to identify its author, if we place it in its context in the ancient world.
The sermon is identified with the Christian Church, but it was by no means its invention. It had roots in both the Hellenistic and the Jewish world, and when we set James beside the Hellenistic and the Jewish sermons we cannot fail to be struck by the resemblances.
1. Let us look first at the Greek preachers and their sermons. The wandering philosopher was a common figure in the ancient world. Sometimes he was a Stoic; far more often he was a Cynic. Wherever people were gathered together, you would find him there calling them to virtue. You would find him at the street corner and in the city squares; you would find him at the vast concourses which gathered for the games; you would even find him at the gladiatorial games, sometimes even directly addressing the emperor, rebuking him for luxury and tyranny, and calling him to virtue and justice. The ancient preacher, the philosopher-missionary, was a regular figure in the ancient world. There was a time when philosophy had been chiefly the concern of the schools; but now its voice and its ethical demands were to be heard daily in the public places.
These ancient sermons had certain characteristics. The method was always the same; and that method had deeply influenced Paul’s presentation of the gospel, and James followed the same tradition. We will list some of the tricks of the trade of these ancient preachers, noting how they occur in James and bearing in mind the way in which Paul writes to his churches. The main aim of these ancient preachers, it must be remembered, was not to investigate new truth; it was to awaken sinners to the error of their ways and compel them to look at truths, which they knew but were deliberately neglecting or had forgotten. Their aim was to confront people with the good life