in Nazareth as the village carpenter until the age of thirty is at least an indication that he was the eldest son and had to take upon himself the responsibility of the support of the family after the death of Joseph.
We believe that the brothers and sisters of Jesus really were his brothers and sisters. Any other theory ultimately springs from the glorification of self-denial and from a wish to regard Mary as forever a virgin. It is surely a far more lovely thing to believe in the sanctity of the home than to insist that celibacy is to be valued more than married love.
So, we believe that James, called the Lord’s brother, was in every sense the brother of Jesus.
James as the Author
Can we then say that this James was also the author of this letter? Let us collect the evidence in favour of that view.
(1) If James wrote a letter at all, it would most naturally be a general letter, as this is. James was not, like Paul, a traveller and a man of many congregations. He was the leader of the Jewish section of the Church, and the kind of letter we would expect him to write would be a general letter directed to all Jewish Christians.
(2) There is scarcely anything in the letter that a good Jew could not accept – so much so that there are those who think that it is actually a Jewish ethical tract which has found its way into the New Testament. The New Testament scholar A. H. McNeile has pointed out that in instance after instance there are phrases in James which can be read equally well in a Christian or a Jewish sense. The twelve tribes of the Dispersion (1:1) could be taken to refer either to the exiled Jews scattered all over the world or to the Christian Church, the new Israel of God. ‘The Lord’ can again and again in this letter be understood equally well of Jesus or of God (1:7; 4:10, 15; 5:7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 15). Our bringing forth by God by the word of his truth to be the first fruits of his creation (1:18) can equally well be understood of God’s first act of creation or of his re-creation of men and women in Jesus Christ. The perfect law and the royal law (1:25, 2:8) can equally well be understood of the ethical law of the Ten Commandments or of the new law of Christ. The elders of the church, the ekklēsia (5:14), can equally well be understood as meaning the elders of the Christian Church or the Jewish elders – for in the Septuagint, the Greek edition of the traditional Hebrew Scriptures that was most widely used in the synagogues in New Testament times, ekklēsia is the title of the chosen nation of God. In 2:2, ‘your assembly’ is spoken of. The word there used for assembly is sunagōgē, which can mean the synagogue even more readily than it can mean the Christian congregation. The habit of addressing its readers as brothers is thoroughly Christian, but it is equally thoroughly Jewish. The coming of the Lord and the picture of the Judge standing at the door (5:7, 5:9) are just as common in Jewish thought as in Christian thought. The accusation that they have murdered the righteous one (5:6) is a phrase which occurs again and again in the prophets; but a Christian could read it as a statement of the crucifixion of Christ. There is nothing in this letter which orthodox Jews could not heartily accept, if they read it in their own terms.
It could be argued that all this perfectly suits James. He was the leader of what might be called Jewish Christianity; he was the head of that part of the Church which remained centred in Jerusalem. There must have been a time when the Church was very close to Judaism and it was more a reformed Judaism than anything else. There was a kind of Christianity which did not have the width or the universality which the mind of Paul put into it. Paul himself said that the task of preaching to the Gentiles had been allocated to him and the task of taking the good news to the Jews was given to Peter, James and John (Galatians 2:9). The letter of James may well represent a kind of Christianity that had remained in its earliest form. This would explain two things.
First, it would explain the frequency with which James repeats the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount. We may, out of many instances, compare James 2:12–13 and Matthew 6:14–15; James 3:11–13 and Matthew 7:16–20; James 5:12 and Matthew 5:34–7. Any Jewish Christian would be supremely interested in the ethical teaching of the Christian faith.
Second, it would help to explain the relationship of this letter to the teaching of Paul. At a first reading, James 2:14–26 reads like a direct attack on Paulinism. ‘A person is justified by works and not by faith alone’ (James 2:24) seems a flat contradiction of the Pauline teaching of justification by faith. But what James is attacking is a so-called faith which has no ethical results, and one thing is quite clear – anyone who charges Paul with preaching such a faith cannot possibly have read his letters. They are full of ethical demands, as, for instance, a chapter like Romans 12 illustrates. Now James died in AD 62 and, therefore, could not have read Paul’s letters, which did not become the common property of the Church until at least AD 90. Therefore, what James is attacking is either a misunderstanding of what Paul said or a distortion of it, and nowhere was such a misunderstanding or distortion more likely to arise than in Jerusalem, where Paul’s stress on faith and grace and his attack on the law were likely to be regarded with more suspicion than anywhere else.
(3) It has been pointed out that James and the letter of the Council of Jerusalem to the Gentile churches have at least two rather curious similarities. Both begin with the word Greeting (James 1:1; Acts 15:23). The Greek is chairein. This was the normal Greek beginning to a letter, but nowhere else in all the New Testament is it found other than in the letter of Claudius Lysias, the military officer, to the governor of the province quoted in Acts 23:26–30. Second, Acts 15:17 has a phrase in the letter of the Council of Jerusalem in which, as the Revised Standard Version has it, it speaks of the Gentiles who are called by my name. This phrase occurs nowhere else in the New Testament other than in James 2:7, where it is translated as the name by which you are called. Although these translations differ slightly, the Greek is exactly the same. It is curious that the letter of the Council of Jerusalem presents us with two unusual phrases which recur only in James, when we remember that the letter of the Council of Jerusalem must have been drafted by James.
There is, then, evidence which supports the belief that the Letter of James was the work of James, the Lord’s brother and head of the Jerusalem church.
On the other hand, there are facts which make us a little doubtful whether he was, after all, the author.
(1) If the writer was the brother of our Lord, we would have expected him to make some reference to that fact. All he calls himself is ‘a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ’ (1:1). Such a reference would not have been in any sense for his own personal glory, but simply to lend authority to his letter. And such authority would have been especially useful outside Palestine, in countries where James could hardly have been known. If the author was indeed the Lord’s brother, it is surprising that he makes no reference, direct or indirect, to that fact.
(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
