AUTHOR
AUTHOR
The letter claims to have been written by "James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ” (Jas. 1:1). The lack of elaboration points to a well-known James, and it is natural to think first of those men by this name who are mentioned in the New Testament. There are at least four: (1) James the son of Zebedee, brother of John, one of the Twelve (see, e.g., Mark 1:19; 5:37; 9:2; 10:35; 14:33); (2) James the son of Alphaeus, also one of the Twelve (see Mark 3:18; he may be the same as "James the younger” [Mark 15:40]); (3) James the father of Judas (Luke 6:16; Acts 1:13); 1(4) James, "the Lord’s brother” (Gal. 1:19), who plays a leading role in the early Jerusalem church (see Acts 12:17; 15:13; 21:18).
Of these four, the last is by far the most obvious candidate for the authorship of this letter. James the father of Judas is too obscure to be seriously considered; the same is true, to a lesser degree, of James the son of Alphaeus. James the son of Zebedee, on the other hand, is given a prominent role among the Twelve, but the date of his martyrdom—c. A.D. 44 (see Acts 12:2)—is probably too early to allow us to associate him with the letter. We are left, then, with James the brother of the Lord, who is certainly the most prominent James in the early church.
A circumstance that corroborates this decision is the striking similarities between the Greek of the epistle of James and that of the speech attributed to James in Acts 15:13
21. 2Also in keeping with this identification are the frequent allusions to the teaching of Jesus within the letter, the Jewish atmosphere of the book, and the authority assumed by the author in addressing "the twelves tribes in the dispersion.” Early Christian testimony is not unanimous on the point but tends to favor the same identification. Origen identifies "James the apostle” as the author, 3but only the sometimes unreliable Latin translation of Origen by Rufinius explicitly mentions the brother of the Lord. Eusebius claims that the letter was generally attributed to James the Lord’s brother but that there were some dissenters (H.E. 3.25.3; 2.23.25). 4
The case for identifying the letter with James the brother of the Lord is, then, quite strong. Despite this, alternative theories of authorship have been propounded, and these must now be considered.
1. A few scholars have attributed the letter to an unknown James. 5But while this is possible and would conflict with nothing in the letter itself, the simplicity of the author’s identification points to a well-known individual—and so well known a person is likely mentioned in the New Testament.
2. The most important alternative is that the letter is pseudonymous—that it was written by an unknown early Christian in the name of James. 6Advocates of this view agree that the "James” in the salutation points to James the brother of the Lord but are convinced that this James could not have written this letter. They base this conclusion on four main arguments:
It is thought to be inconceivable that a brother of the Lord would have written such a letter without alluding to his special relationship to Christ or to his confrontation with the resurrected Christ (cf. 1 Cor. 15:7). This objection presupposes, however, that blood relationship to Christ was highly valued in the early church. But this is doubtful, particularly in the case of James, who derived no spiritual benefit from his earthly relationship to Christ (see John 7:1-5). It is noteworthy in this respect that the author of Acts never calls James "the brother of the Lord.” In fact, the importance of physical ties to Christ emerged only later in the history of the church; the reticence of the letter in this respect favors an early date. 7
Another reason for denying the letter to James the brother of the Lord is the language and cultural background of the letter. It is written in fairly good Hellenistic Greek and evidences certain literary touches in its choice of vocabulary and style (e.g., the incomplete hexameter in Jas. 1:17). Moreover, the author alludes to concepts derived from Greek philosophy and religion (e.g., the phrase ό τροχός τής γενέσεως [ho trochos tes geneseos, "the whole course of his life”, from τροχός + γενέσεως, G5580 + G1161] in 3:6). Could a Galilean Jew with the reputation of being a conservative Jewish Christian and who, as far as we know, never left Palestine, write such Greek with such sophisticated allusions? Many answer no.
But this answer is not so obviously the right one, for three reasons. First, while the Greek of the letter is undoubtedly well polished, its quality should not be exaggerated. Ropes concludes that "there is nothing to suggest acquaintance with the higher styles of Greek literature.” James’s style is not that of a literary Atticist, but that found in other Hellenistic-Jewish works of his day, such as Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and Sirach. Second, we must not underestimate the extent to which Palestinian Jews in the first century were conversant with Greek. Recent discoveries suggest that Greek was a language widely used in Palestine and that someone like James would have had ample opportunity to become fluent in the language. 9Indeed, J. N. Sevenster uses James as a test case for his investigation into Greek influence in Palestine and concludes that the brother of the Lord could very well have written the letter. 10Third, the religious and philosophical concepts alluded to in James are of the sort that would have been fairly widespread among the general population. 11We conclude, then, that the language of the letter is no obstacle to identifying the brother of the Lord as its author.
A theological reason for thinking that James the brother of the Lord could not have written this epistle has to do with the way the Old Testament law and Judaism generally are treated. 12In both Galatians (Gal. 2:12) and Acts (Acts 21:17-25), it is argued, James appears to be a spokesman for a conservative Jewish-Christian position on these matters. Later legend magnifies this characteristic, where James is seen as zealous for the law and respected by most of his Jewish contemporaries. 13Yet the letter takes a somewhat liberal view of the law, ignoring its ritual demands and calling the law "the law of liberty” (James 1:25; 2:12).
A response to this argument would be to note that both sides of the polarity just sketched are exaggerated. On the one hand, the legends that picture James as a hidebound Jewish traditionalist are probably tendentious. 14Nor is the New Testament evidence about James’s theological position clear. Galatians 2:12 tells us only that the Judaizers in Antioch claimed to come from James, and Acts 21:17-25 betrays no extreme Jewish viewpoint. On the other hand, James’s rather liberal pronouncement on the question of the law and circumcision in Acts 15 paints a very different picture. Moreover, the letter of James, while not encouraging obedience to the ritual law, does
not prohibit it—and we can surmise that this may have been a nonissue for James and his readers. Nor does the view of the law in the letter conflict in any way with what we can assume to have been James’s position.
The final main reason for thinking that James must be pseudonymous turns on the relationship between Paul and the letter of James on the doctrine of justification. As is well known, the letter of James (Jas. 2:20-26) takes an approach to this issue that many find to be at variance with Paul’s view. Yet it is also generally thought that what James says fails to meet Paul’s position directly—that he is arguing with a garbled or misunderstood form of Paul’s teaching on this matter. These circumstances, it is argued, can be accounted for only by presuming that the letter of James was written considerably later than Paul. Kummel succinctly summarizes the point: "The debate in 2:14ff. with a misunderstood secondary stage of Pauline theology not only presupposes a considerable chronological distance from Paul—whereas James died in the year 62— but also betrays a complete ignorance of the polemical intent of Pauline theology, which lapse can scarcely be attributed to James, who as late as 55/56 met with Paul in Jerusalem (Acts 21:18ff.).” 15
The relationship between James 2:14-26 and Paul’s teaching is the most vexing theological issue in the letter, and we consider this later (see the section The Contribution of James). But assuming that the relationship between James 2 and Paul is as described above (that James 2 responds to a misunderstood form of Paul’s teaching), the point to be made here is that there is an alternative explanation for the situation. Could not the letter of James have been written at a time during which Paul’s teaching was beginning to have an impact on the church, yet before James and Paul had met? 16Such a circumstance would explain the fact that James seems to have Paul’s distinctive emphasis on justification by faith in mind, yet does not fairly grapple with Paul’s real point with the doctrine. In other words, James’s contact with Paul’s doctrine would be only indirect, coming from those who have misunderstood Paul’s teaching and taken the idea of justification by faith alone as an excuse for moral laxity. It is to this garbled form of Paul’s teaching that James responds because he is writing before he had the opportunity to learn from Paul himself just what Paul means by the doctrine. If this situation is possible (and it makes more sense of James 2 than to suppose that someone with Paul’s letters in hand would so seriously misunderstand him), then the teaching of James 2 offers no difficulty to thinking that the Lord’s brother could have written it.
3. A third general position on the authorship of James admits the force of both the evidence for identifying the writer of the letter with the brother of the Lord and of the objections brought against that identification. A mediating position is therefore adopted, according to which James’s teaching lies at the base of the letter but has undergone a later editing that has put it in the form we now have it. 17The main objection to this view is that it is unnecessary. We have seen that the arguments against the ascription of the letter to James the brother of the Lord do not hold water. It is far simpler, then, to view James as the author of the letter in the form that we now have it than to hypothesize levels of redaction for which there is no textual or solid historical evidence.
We conclude, then, that James the brother of the Lord is the author of the letter. This is the natural implication of the letter’s own claims, it is corroborated by New Testament and early Christian evidence, and it has no decisive argument against it.