The Letter of James - Addison Hodges Hart

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a consideration had not been an issue for the writers of the New Testament is evident by their off-handed references to Jesus’ brothers and sisters, without once qualifying those terms. For the first generation of Jewish Christians, virginal chastity and celibacy were not regarded as signs of purity so much as signs of calling and consecration, often related to prophetic zeal (as, for example, in the case of John the Baptist).8 For the New Testament writers, then, whether or not Mary had conceived children other than Jesus was not of great concern. Subsequent generations of Christians, however, influenced by Greco-Roman views of matter and spirit, with the former being regarded as lower than the latter in value, were not so indifferent to the issue of Mary’s virginal status. It became increasingly important to see her as the type of the church’s perpetual virginal motherhood. The doctrine of her perfect physical inviolability was understood as complementing her inner spiritual purity.

      Not every thoughtful believer in the early centuries accepted the idea, however. One Christian writer by the name of Helvidius, writing towards the end of the fourth century, produced a treatise maintaining that the most obvious (and, it seemed to him, most ancient) way to understand the terms “brothers and sisters” in the Gospels was to take them literally. These were simply the biological children of Joseph and Mary born subsequent to Jesus’ birth (and therefore, in Helvidius’s view, James would have been the oldest of Jesus’ younger siblings). The ever-combative Jerome didn’t take what he saw as Helvidius’s attack on Mary’s perfect chastity lying down. He took up his pen and wrote against the latter, suggesting that Jesus’ “brothers and sisters” were in reality Jesus’ cousins and therefore not biological children of Mary. Jerome’s dubious “cousin hypothesis” has continued as an accepted view to this day in the Roman Catholic tradition. There is, however, very little evidence to suppose that the words “brother” and “sister” were used in Jesus’ time to mean “cousin.”

      Another, more plausible view is the one found in the otherwise fantastical second-century apocryphal book, the Protevangelion of James, in which the siblings of Jesus are said to have been Joseph’s children from a previous marriage. Mary is, in this account, the widower Joseph’s young second wife, and Jesus, born of her virginally, is her only child (and so James was, according to this narrative, the oldest of Jesus’ older half-brothers). This is the view that was supported by such church fathers as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Ambrose of Milan, Hilary of Poitiers, and others, and it remains the accepted view of the Eastern churches. It is also the reason why, in Christian art both of the East and the West, Joseph has often been depicted as an elderly gray-haired man. The brown-haired, brown-bearded Joseph of popular Roman Catholic art is a later representation.

      Thus we have three early views, all of them claiming antiquity and authenticity, regarding the siblings of Jesus—those of Helvidius, Jerome, and the Eastern fathers. Of these, the first and the last possess more credibility than Jerome’s. It is certainly not impossible that the brothers and sisters of Jesus were the children of a previous marriage of Joseph’s. On the other hand, long-standing pious tradition aside (a tradition which has, in all honesty, tended to regard even marital sexual relations with suspicion and—in its most extreme form—with hostility), the idea that they were also children of Mary, and thus Jesus’ younger siblings, is a thoroughly reasonable one.

      In this commentary, I will let the matter remain moot and take no definite position on it. But I will, following the usage in the New Testament, continue simply to refer to James as Jesus’ brother without qualification.

      IV.

      Was the Letter of James written by James or by someone else?

      In this commentary I will assume that James was, in fact, the letter’s author. Some scholars argue that it is a late writing, written under the name of James by some unknown author of a later generation. One can meet with this view in numerous commentaries and study Bibles, too many to list. But, since the arguments for that opinion are well represented elsewhere and can readily be found, I will not repeat them here, but only briefly present my reasons for accepting James as the genuine author.

      First, despite tolerable arguments to the contrary, there is no compelling evidence, either internal or external, that the letter must be regarded as a late writing (i.e., between 70 and 100 AD). It can, without any serious difficulty, be dated to the 50s or early 60s.

      Second, because the Greek of the Letter of James is quite good by New Testament standards, it has been doubted by some scholars that a “rustic” Galilean, whose first language was Aramaic, could have composed it. But, in actual fact, we do not know at all just how “rustic” James might have been during his adult life, or, for that matter, just how polished or poor (or entirely lacking) his Greek may have been. His hometown of Nazareth, after all, was less than four miles from the cosmopolitan Greco-Roman city of Sepphoris—in other words, within easy walking distance. It is conceivable that James could have acquired a working knowledge of Greek there at some point during his life. If he had shared the trade of Joseph, his father, he may even have been personally involved in the building project that was taking place there while he was a young man. In later life, of course, he lived in Jerusalem, and among those who were members of the church in that city were Hellenistic Jews, whose first language was Greek. If he hadn’t already learned it elsewhere, he could have learned Greek through them. Alternatively, if he, in fact, really didn’t know a lick of Greek (which seems doubtful), he might have employed a bilingual amanuensis and translator to help him compose his letter. In short, the argument that his Greek is overly polished fails to convince.

      Of course, a suspicious reader (or scholar) might, in turn, suggest that that is exactly what a pseudonymous author would have wished us to believe. That is possible, certainly (in the sense that many other hypothetical notions might be possible); but is it necessary to harbor an attitude of suspicion when there really is no warrant for it? In short, there is no firm evidence to lend substance to such doubt. We know that James could have written an encyclical letter, and we have supporting evidence in Acts 15 to suggest that he was influential enough to have pronouncements circulated to the churches he regarded as under the oversight of the mother church in Jerusalem. The Letter of James fits into that early model of ecclesiastical oversight quite naturally.

      Fourth, as we will see in our exploration of the text itself, the epistle appears to engage in a polemic, if not against Paul himself, then almost certainly against a misunderstood or corrupted version of Paul’s message. This is nowhere more evident than in the second chapter (the one that so provoked Martin Luther), in which James states flatly that one is not justified “by faith alone,” and that Abraham was “made righteous [i.e., justified] by works” (Jas 2:21, 24; compare Rom 5:1 and Gal 2:16). As Hengel proposed, other passages likewise could indicate a sustained polemic

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