Article

Interpretation: A Journal of

Boundaries, Intersections, and

Bible and Theology
2020, Vol. 74(4) 335­–343
© The Author(s) 2020
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Letter of James DOI: 10.1177/0020964320936401

https://doi.org/

journals.sagepub.com/home/int

Kathleen Gallagher Elkins and Thomas M. Bolin

St. Norbert College, De Pere, Wisconsin, USA

Abstract
The letter of James reveals long embedded anti-Semitic elements at work in the articulation of the distinction
between Judaism and Christianity. However, careful examination of the text and the history of the early
synagogue and church challenges us to rethink how (and whether) Judaism and Christianity have parted
ways. James’s use of biblical traditions is not simply an embrace of torah piety or “works righteousness,” but
rather a careful juxtaposition of wisdom and prophetic traditions aimed to call the letter’s first readers, and
us, to move toward the margins of our ecclesial, academic, and wider communities.

Keywords
Letter of James, Wisdom literature, Parting of the ways, Jewish Law, Prophetic critique

Introduction
In some ways the letter of James is a liminal or marginal text. Martin Luther’s description of it as
“an epistle of straw”1 has in part led to the ongoing negative contrast in the Protestant tradition
between James’s works-righteousness and Paul’s gospel of sola fides.2 Catholics, drawing upon
exegetical arguments at least as old as Jerome’s letter against Helvidius (383 CE), have demoted
the letter’s putative author from the Lord’s brother to his cousin.3 On the other hand, the letter of

1 Martin Luther, “Prefaces to the New Testament,” Luther’s Works, Vol 35: Word and Sacrament 1, ed. J.J.
Pelikan, H.C. Oswald, and H.T. Lehmann; trans. Charles M. Jacobs (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1960), 33.
2 Luther’s criticisms of James (preserved in the prefaces he wrote to his translation of the Bible) are more
subtle and varied than most of us remember. He was aware of early church debate on the book’s canon-
icity, he questioned its authorship by James, and he placed it in a secondary position (along with other
biblical books) because it did not mention the saving work of Jesus: “Therefore, I cannot put him among
the chief books, though I would not thereby prevent anyone from putting him where he pleases and esti-
mating him as he pleases; for there are many good sayings in him.” See Stephen L. Chester, “Salvation,
the Church, and Social Teaching: The Epistle of James in Exegesis of the Reformation Era,” Reading the
Epistle of James: A Resource for Students, ed. Eric F. Mason and Darian R. Lockett (Atlanta: SBL, 2019),
273–89 (273–78).
3 Jerome’s argument is that the Mary wife of Clopas in John 19:25 is both the sister of Mary, the mother
of Jesus, as well as the mother of James “the Less” (Mark 15:40, distinguished from James the brother of
John and son of Zebedee). This makes James the Less the cousin of Jesus (his mother’s sister’s son), for
which the New Testament uses the term, “brother.”

Corresponding authors:
Kathleen Gallagher Elkins, St. Norbert College, 100 Grant St., De Pere, WI 54115, USA.
Email: kathleen.gallagherelkins@snc.edu

Thomas Bolin, St. Norbert College, 100 Grant St., De Pere, WI 54115, USA.
Email: thomas.bolin@snc.edu
336 Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 74(4)

James resonates with many Christian readers on account of its straightforward moral exhortations
on care for the poor, the dangers of evil speech, and the importance of good works for the Christian
life. The reception history of James by Dale C. Allison reveals the letter to have offered rich source
material for sermons on a variety of topics across several denominations.4 Indeed, in the Revised
Common Lectionary, most of the letter is read sequentially on Sundays 22–26 after Pentecost in
Year B, with the notable omission of 2:18–26, which most clearly seems to contradict the teaching
of Paul in Romans and Galatians.5 Broadly speaking, the theological issues surrounding the let-
ter—the identity of its author, the role of works in salvation, the perpetual virginity of the mother
of Jesus—while certainly not unimportant to Christians, have done little to lessen the text’s appeal
to those who go to the Bible looking for relatively direct advice on how to live. Here too, then, one
sees a divide between the academy and the church at work.

The letter of James exposes another, uglier, fault line in Christian biblical interpretation: the per-
sistence of anti-Semitic ideology in both scholarship and preaching. Luther (once again) claimed
on the basis of what the book didn’t say about Jesus or his death and resurrection, that James was
written by “some Jew,”6 an opinion that can be seen in the claims of some modern commentators
that James is the least Christian book of the New Testament. A more egregious example is the
language used by many influential commentators to describe the target of James’s condemna-
tion of the rich in 2:6–7 and 5:1–7 as proof that the letter is addressed to Jews and not fellow
Christians because—evidence from the Pauline corpus, Acts, and 1 Clement aside—there were
no rich Christians for James to condemn, but certainly lots of rich people in Jewish communities.7
This is not to say that James could not have been written by a Jewish author (on that see below).
Rather, the way that some Christian readers respond to that possibility reveals the ongoing presence
of anti-Semitism in biblical interpretation.

It merits mention here that, even when the rich in James are understood to be fellow Christians,
the perennial struggle between the Bible’s preferential option for the poor and the allure of eco-
nomic power for many elite Christians has led to preachers and commentators going to great
lengths to make the text say less than what it does. As Alicia Batten notes:

James does not receive nearly as much attention as Pauline literature or the gospel material, but when it
does, its attack upon wealth is often toned down or massaged, such that it can be accommodated to the
social and economic structures which the interpretive community inhabits.8

Although it is a small text, tucked into the back half of the New Testament, we should not be sur-
prised to find that the letter of James—as all Scripture tends to do—both confronts readers with

4 Dale C. Allison, “James Through the Centuries,” American Theological Inquiry 7 (2014): 11–23. “James
has, more than anything else, been a source for Christian exhortation” (18).
5 Information from https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/citationindex.php.
6 Luther’s statement is in the Table Talk (Luther’s Works 54 [ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, Philadelphia: Fortress,
1967], 424). The accuracy of the Table Talk has long been an open question. For example of a famous
misquotation of Luther’s being taken up in scholarship, see Thomas M. Bolin, Ecclesiastes and the
Riddle of Authorship (London: Routledge, 2017), 40–41. The remarks of later commentators are in Dale
C. Allison, “The Jewish Setting of the Epistle of James,” Tydskrif van die Gereformeerde Teologiese
Vereniging 49 (2015): 154–62 (155).
7 For example, see the quotation of James H. Moulton in Allison, “The Jewish Setting of the Epistle of
James,” 158.
8 Alicia Batten, “Ideological Strategies in the Letter of James,” Reading James with New Eyes:
Methodological Reassessments the Letter of James, ed. Robert L. Webb and John Kloppenborg (London:
T & T Clark, 2007), 6–26 (6).
Elkins and Bolin 337

their own shortcomings and blind spots, and challenges those readers to embrace the risk of faith
that involves transcending boundaries and centering the margins.

The authors of this essay come to it from partially overlapping social locations and identities. One
of us is a female scholar of the New Testament with a Protestant seminary background. The other is a
male Catholic scholar of the Hebrew Bible trained in Catholic institutions. Both of us are tenured faculty
members at the same small, Catholic, liberal arts institution in the upper Midwest. We are both White
and teach in predominantly White classrooms. Our socio-economic and cultural privilege as White, cis-
gender, heterosexual Christians surely influences our reading of James and what we can and cannot see
in the text. For example, even though we write about anti-Jewish interpretations of James, it is undoubt-
ably true that someone who has lived with anti-Semitism would understand these biases differently.

In this essay we highlight the position of James as a text at the boundaries of the dominant
paradigm of Christian theology, as a marker in the so-called parting of the ways between ancient
Judaism and Christianity, and as a site of intersection between traditions in the Jewish Scriptures.

Thinking about James as a Jewish Letter

The letter of James is a helpful source for information about ancient Judaism. Even though we often
look to the New Testament for information about the early church, the collection of texts that we call
the New Testament is likewise a rich trove of data for a study of ancient Judaism in all of its complexity.
As is well known and frequently acknowledged, most of the figures in the New Testament were them-
selves Jewish: Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Peter, Paul, and, indeed, James. Even though scholars do
not agree on whether the letter of James was written by James, the brother of the Lord (and we make
no claims either way about that argument here), it is clear that the author of this letter, whoever s/he is,
is strongly connected to the Jewish law and Jewish wisdom traditions. Reading James as a text that is
key in the so-called “parting of the ways” is a way to acknowledge the complexity of ancient Judaism
(including what we now think of as “Christianity,” an entity that did not exist in the first century).
Many studies of James try to locate it either within early Christianity or about ancient Judaism.
Older conversations about the provenance of James relied on strong boundaries between Judaism
and Christianity before a time when such boundaries existed and, indeed, before a time when the
latter existed.9 Some nineteenth-century scholars argued that James was a Jewish text later “bap-
tized” by adding the two lone references to Jesus.10 More recent scholarship is less drastic; for
example, Matt Jackson-McCabe’s assessment is typical:

The Letter of James was produced in some circle of Christians for whom the Torah remained the central
expression of love of God, and thus a critical criterion for inheriting the promised kingdom that would be
given to the “twelve tribes” at the parousia of the messiah, Jesus…the Letter of James provides important,
if all too rare evidence for a form of the Christian movement where soteriology centered not on rebirth
through “the Gospel,” but on observance of the Torah.11

In light of more recent scholarship on the messy borders (or lack of borders!) between Judaism and
Christianity in antiquity we could go further. Rather than seeing James as produced by Christians

9 For a discussion of the tensions between these arguments, see Matt A. Jackson-McCabe, Logos and Law
in the Letter of James: The Law of Nature, the Law of Moses, and the Law of Freedom (Boston: Brill,
2001), 1–2. Jackson-McCabe’s argument that James draws on Jewish, Christian, and Greek philosophi-
cal discourse begins to anticipate later arguments about the messiness of the boundaries between these
groups.
10 See discussion in Luke Timothy Johnson, The Letter of James, AB 37A (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1995), 150–52.
11 Jackson-McCabe, Logos and Law in the Letter of James, 253.
338 Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 74(4)

who value torah, we might rather see James produced by a group of Jews who observed torah and
believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah of Israel. Thus, they are neither “Christian” nor
“Jew” (by our modern definitions) but both or neither, “hybrids” in Daniel Boyarin’s estimation.12
We see James as a text that sits on the precarious and obscure border between the groups that
eventually became Judaism and Christianity. Boyarin reminds us, in haunting prose, given our own
contemporary conversations about borders and immigration in this 2020 election year: “Borders
are also places where people are strip-searched, detained, imprisoned, and sometimes shot. Borders
themselves are not given but constructed by power to mask hybridity, to occlude and disown it. The
localization of hybridity in some others, called the hybrids or the heretics, serves that purpose.”13
James and its original audience are situated near this precarious border.

Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity

The scholarship on when, how, and why Judaism and Christianity became separate religions is
complex. For simplicity, we will briefly summarize the main developments in that scholarly con-
versation in order to show how James might be understood in that context. Like many areas of
New Testament studies, the scholarship on the so-called “parting of the ways” between Judaism
and Christianity has been deeply influenced by the Holocaust. In the nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries, ancient Judaism was often described as a dry, ossified, dying system of belief that
demanded perfect adherence to the law of Moses.14 In contrast, Jesus and/or Paul preached a gospel
message of love that was antithetical to this dying Spätjudentum (“late Judaism,” the preferred
German term for ancient Judaism; even the idea of calling it “late” implies that it was on its way
out). In the wake of the Holocaust, many scholars acknowledged the anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic
bias inherent in this way of describing the origins of Christianity.15 They then attempted to account
for the separation of Christianity from Judaism in ways that did not disparage Judaism. For the
second half of the twentieth century, it became more common to speak of the different sects within
ancient Judaism, of which emerging Christianity was one. The discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls
and Nag Hammadi codices, both in the 1940s, have further complicated this picture by giving
evidence of the incredible diversity of ancient Judaism and Christianity. At the beginning of the
twenty-first century, scholars became more interested in the ways in which we might describe
ancient Judaism and early Christianity as closer and more intertwined than previously thought.16
This includes an emphasis on placing any definitive “parting” much later than previously under-
stood and generally emphasizing the messiness of that parting. Indeed, many scholars are invested
in finding a different model for understanding these groups; rather than “parted ways,” how might
we understand these various groups as diverse, overlapping, complicated, and entangled?

12 Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 15.
13 Ibid.
14 See, for example, Adolf von Harnack, Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten drei
Jahrhunderten, 2 vols., 3rd ed. (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1915) and Wilhelm Bousset, Die Religion des
Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter (Berlin: Reuther and Richard, 1903).
15 James Parkes anticipated this shift and is often credited with first using the phrase “The Parting of the
Ways”; see his The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Anti-Semitism
(London: Soncino, 1934).
16 Some of the key works here include Boyarin, Border Lines; Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed,
eds., The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); Lori Baron, Jill Hicks-Keeton, and Matthew Thiessen, eds., The Ways
That Often Parted: Essays in Honor of Joel Marcus (Atlanta: SBL, 2018).
Elkins and Bolin 339

The Letter of James in its Ancient Context

Rather than seeing James as a Christian letter in a community that cannot figure out which side of
the border it belongs on, we propose reading James as a Jewish letter in a community that sees Jesus
as the Jewish messiah; that is, this letter exists before any border between Judaism and Christianity
exists. Tobias Nicklas, naming some possibilities for future research on these ancient borders, writes,
“The Epistle of James, in addition, seems to come from a milieu where the Torah, understood as
the perfect law of freedom (1:25; 2:12) and the royal law (2:8), is observed and followers of Christ
can be addressed as members of the ‘Twelve Tribes in Dispersion’ (1:1).”17 There are many aspects
of the text that lead to this interpretation: its emphasis on wisdom (see below), its cosmology,18 its
address to the “twelve tribes in the diaspora” (1:1), and more. Here, we will mention two examples:
the discussion of law that pervades James and the brief reference to synagogue life in 2:2.

Throughout the letter, the author reminds the audience to value and keep the law (nomos). In
fact, “law” is used ten times in James, in a variety of contexts. One of the longer discussions comes
in 1:22–25, in which James famously admonishes the audience to:

be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For if any are hearers of the word and
not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going
away, forget what they were like. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere,
being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing” (emphasis added).

This is often read as a response to or argument with Paul’s letters, which assumes that Paul and
James are opposed, that James knows Paul’s letters or at least his ideas, and that James writes to
correct or oppose Paul’s teachings. If we do not assume that James and Paul are arguing here (that
is, if we can decenter Paul), then it is perfectly natural to read James as a Jewish author who is
reminding other Jews of the importance of being attentive to torah, the teachings that guide the
community.

In chapter 2, James warns against favoritism: “My brothers, in partiality do you have the faith
of our Lord, Jesus the messiah of glory?” (2:1, literal translation).19 Some translations obscure the
possibility that this verse reminds readers to imitate Jesus (the “faith of our Lord” which can refer
to the faith that Jesus showed or the faith that believers put in him). Then, James goes on to offer an
example: if a rich person and a poor person enter the synagogue and the rich person is honored while
the poor one is ignored, “have you not made distinctions among yourself and become judges with
evil thoughts?” (2:4). Here, James gives us information about the context for the community: they
meet in a synagogue and/or feel comfortable calling their assembly a synagogue. The vast majority

17 Tobias Nicklas, “Creating the Other: The ‘Jews’ in the Gospel of John: Past and Future Lines of
Scholarship,” in Perceiving the Other in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. Michal Bar-Asher
Siegal, Wolfgang Grünstäudl, and Matthew Thiessen, WUNT 394 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 63.
18 See, for example, Benjamin Wold’s discussion. He writes, “James appears to be indebted to a larger
cosmological framework in which other-worldly powers oppose God” (“Sin and Evil in the Letter of
James in Light of Qumran Discoveries,” New Testament Studies 65 [January 2019]: 90), https://doi.
org/10.1017/S0028688518000310.
19 This could remind us of the debate surrounding Paul’s use of the same phrase in his letters, which can
equally be translated as “the faithfulness of Christ” (that is, the faith that Christ himself had) or “the
faith in Christ” (that is, the faith that believers have in Christ). At issue in this translation of the genitive
as objective or subjective is whether Christ is the agent, or we are. See Matthew C. Easter, “The Pistis
Christou Debate: Main Arguments and Responses in Summary” CurBR 9 (October 1, 2010): 33–47,
https://doi.org/10.1177/1476993X09360725.
340 Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 74(4)

of translations have “assembly” or “meeting” for 2:2, though a few have “synagogue” (for exam-
ple, ESV, ASV, Darby). This word is not used in any other New Testament letter, but occurs twice
in Revelation, a handful of times in each Gospel, and nineteen times in Acts, usually to indicate a
Jewish synagogue. This use of “synagogue” (synagōgē) as a straightforward designation for their
community is but one example of the messy and, perhaps, non-existent border we are discussing.

James at Margins and Intersections

One of the supporting claims for the Jewish nature of James is the long-standing critique of the letter
as a text that omits so-called essential elements of Christian Scripture (e.g., reference to the saving
work of Jesus, or the importance of baptism). Here James intersects with the texts and scholarship
on what is broadly called the wisdom tradition. As a category, however, this doesn’t help much, as
scholars have argued for the influence in James of wisdom traditions from the Hebrew Bible, early
Judaism, Greco-Roman moral philosophy, and early Christianity.20 Looking specifically at the cat-
egory of wisdom literature in the Jewish Scriptures shows, as Will Kynes has recently argued,
that this label isn’t an ancient genre designation but one developed by nineteenth-century biblical
scholarship.21 Moreover, in Hebrew Bible studies, this category in part has been used to cordon
off biblical texts (i.e., Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes) which were judged to be missing the “essential”
elements of biblical theology: covenant, God’s saving acts in history, and the like. In other words,
the category of biblical wisdom literature is itself marginal, and for just the same reasons as the
letter of James is considered Jewish (as opposed to Christian) by many New Testament scholars—
absence of pre-determined essential elements found in other, more central, texts. What we want to
argue in this section is that, while James certainly contains sapiential elements, the letter’s author
has combined them with prophetic critique of the privileged which links the text to larger parts of
the Hebrew Bible than simply the modern category of wisdom literature.

The question of determining literary dependence, intertextual relationship, or the presence of

allusion is a thorny one, but we need not deal with it here.22 In a detailed, book-length study of the
intellectual, moral, and religious influences on the letter, James Riley Strange arrives at the conclu-
sion that James is a text fully imbued with the significant cultural influences of its day, from both
the Greco-Roman and early Jewish traditions, but that these influences are used to address a novel
situation facing this nascent Christian community.23 But the wisdom elements in James are not only
distinct because they are in a different context, they are also combined with prophetic traditions.
Here our metaphor can move from images of the periphery to that of the crossroads or intersec-
tion, as James offers a meeting place of wisdom and prophetic elements from the early Jewish and
biblical traditions. Specifically, James takes wisdom claims about universal human limitations and
combines them with prophetic critiques of the wealthy.

James 4:13–14 gives us a directive that critiques the desires of those who plan to travel in order
to “do business and make money.”

20 By way of example, Johnson sees significant Greco-Roman influence on the ethics of James (The
Letter of James, 27). Benjamin Wold draws comparisons between James and the Qumran wisdom text,
4QInstruction (Benjamin Wold, “James in the Context of Jewish Wisdom Literature,” in Reading the
Epistle of James, 73–86).
21 Will Kynes, An Obituary for Wisdom Literature: The Birth, Death, and Intertextual Reintegration of a
Biblical Corpus (New York: Oxford, 2019).
22 See the helpful overview in Cynthia Edenburg, “Intertextuality, Literary Competence and the Question
of Readership: Some Preliminary Observations,” JSOT 35 (2010): 131–48.
23 James Riley Strange, The Moral World of James: Setting the Epistle in its Greco-Roman and Judaic
Environments (New York: Peter Lange, 2010).
Elkins and Bolin 341

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there,
doing business and making money.” Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your
life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.”

James bursts these bubbles by showing them for what they are. We cannot plan even for tomorrow
because, quite simply, we have no guarantee that we will be here to see it. Humankind’s fundamen-
tal ignorance and impotence with regard to the future are also succinctly expressed in Proverbs:
“Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring (27:1).”24 In response
to his rhetorical question, “What is your life?” James tells his audience that they themselves—not
just their plans, nor their knowledge of the future, but their very existence—are nothing but mist
and smoke (atmis gar este). This comparison of human existence with an ephemeral substance that
disappears without warning or trace is perhaps the most significant theme of Ecclesiastes, which
describes the sum total of existence with a term usually translated as “vanity,” but which can also
denote either “mist” or “vapor” in Hebrew.25 James’s “you are mist,” then, is another iteration of
the sentiment expressed in Qoheleth’s “All is vanity/vapor” (Eccl 1:2). But the line in James has
a prophetic edge to it as well. In the LXX of Hosea 13, an oracle of doom addressed to Ephraim
foretells that “they shall be like the morning mist, or like the dew that goes away early, like chaff
that swirls from the threshing floor or like smoke (atmis) from a window” (Hos 13:3).26 This hint of
prophetic condemnation in James 4:13–14 is made explicit by the overt use of the prophetic taunt
in condemnation of the rich in James 5:1–6.

Another place in James where we see universal human transience qualified and targeted toward
the wealthy is 1:10–11:

The rich will disappear like a flower in the field. For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the
field; its flower falls, and its beauty perishes. It is the same way with the rich; in the midst of a busy life,
they will wither away.

The Hebrew Bible contains a rich tradition of imagery that captures the ephemeral nature of human-
ity. One of these is the picture of vegetation ending its short lifespan under the burning sun. Psalm
90 (the only one in the Psalter attributed to Moses) provides a striking parallel with James:

You sweep them away; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning; in the morning it
flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers. For we are consumed by your anger; by your
wrath we are overwhelmed. (Ps 90:5–7)

The burning wrath of God in Psalm 90 is directed to all those who are sinners. In James, this divine
anger is limited to the wealthy.27

24 mē kauchō ta eis aurion, ou gar ginōskeis ti texetai hē epiousa.

25 The LXX of Ecclesiastes renders this Hebrew term with mataiotēs, which tends to the more abstract
range of connotations, i.e., emptiness or vanity. For an example of cross-linguistic comparison between
James and Hebrew texts, see Wold, “James in the Context of Jewish Wisdom Literature.”
26 It is worth noting that in the Book of Wisdom, a text composed in Greek rather than translated from
Hebrew or Aramaic, atmis is the term used in 7:25 to describe Wisdom as an emanation of God, clearly
a positive connotation of the word.
27 Strictly speaking, the Psalter is not usually grouped with the wisdom literature, but that very category,
as mentioned above is problematic. It is better to speak of certain traditions or motifs rather than a set
corpus. Moreover, both the Psalter and Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes are all part of the ancient Jewish
literary category of Kethuvim (Writings).
342 Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 74(4)

James 4:928 contains another interesting intersection with both Qoheleth and prophetic texts:
“Lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejec-
tion.” This counterintuitive claim is also the thematic link between the small collection of prov-
erbs in Ecclesiastes 8, e.g., “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of
feasting … Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of countenance the heart is made glad”
(Eccl 8:2–3). In the same way as the general statement of human transience in Jas 4:13–14 is
qualified by a prophetic critique, so here too the audience for this advice of James are called sin-
ners and “doubleminded,” and the command to trade laughter for sorrow echoes what we find in
a text such as Isa 22:12–13 where God calls the people “to weeping and mourning … but instead
there was joy and festivity.” As in the case of Jas 4:13–14, here too, we can see a prophetic edge
in James because, unlike Qoheleth but very much like the prophets, the letter of James justifies
this embrace of lament by grounding it in eschatological claims.29

Any discussion of wisdom and James must include the explicit mention of Job in James 5:11,
where the biblical character is held up as a figure of endurance. Noteworthy is that James focuses
on Job’s endurance while glossing over his fantastic wealth that is restored by God at the end of the
book. This could in part be due to the emphasis on Job’s steadfast faith that comes to the fore in the
LXX of Job and the Testament of Job, both of which go to great lengths to portray Job as more pious
and faithful in his suffering than the Hebrew text of Job does.30 In this regard, however, it may also
be noteworthy that Job is the second example named by James for “suffering and patience,” the
first being “the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord” (5:10). While early Judaism had an
expansive understanding of “prophet”—Josephus used the term to describe all the biblical authors
(Ag. Ap. 1.37 )31—given what we’ve seen about how James recontextualizes wisdom elements
alongside prophetic motifs, the juxtaposition here of the prophets and Job is noteworthy.

How and Why this Matters for Us

Because James is in the New Testament canon, readers naturally read it for information about
Christian theology and the early church. This is not wrong, but to do so misses an opportunity:
to read for information about ancient Judaism and, in doing so, remind ourselves about the deep
connections between Judaism and Christianity. In a moment of rising anti-Semitism in the United
States and around the world, this reminder is more important than ever.32 Biblical interpreters,
whether those in ministerial or academic settings, hold a crucial role here: we can either give clear
and accurate information about Judaism in antiquity, confront anti-Jewish tropes when we see
them in readings of Scripture, and deliberately work to reduce anti-Semitism, or we can continue

28 James 4:9 is discussed here after the treatment of James 4:13–14 in keeping with the order of the similar
material found in Ecclesiastes.
29 Although some see eschatological language in Ecclesiastes, e.g., Choon Leong Seow, “Qohelet’s
Eschatological Poem,” JBL 118 (1999): 209–34.
30 On the theologizing tendencies of LXX Job, see Choon-Leong Seow Job 1–21 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2013). For the Testament of Job, see Maria Haralambakis, The Testament of Job: Text, Narrative, and
Reception History (London: Bloosmbury, 2012). For the theological and linguistic complexities of the
Hebrew of Job, see Edward L. Greenstein, Job: A New Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2019).
31 See the discussion of this in Bolin, Ecclesiastes and the Riddle of Authorship, 4–5.
32 Walter Reich, “Seventy-Five Years After Auschwitz, Anti-Semitism Is on the Rise,” The Atlantic,
January 27, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/seventy-five-years-after-
auschwitz-anti-semitism-is-on-the-rise/605452/.
Elkins and Bolin 343

to contribute to a culture that maligns and scapegoats Jews, both ancient and modern. How might
we respond to this important call when reading James?

First, we can remind Christians (especially people in the pews) that Jesus and his community
were Jewish. This means giving regular reminders that Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Mary Magdalene,
Peter, Paul, James, John the Baptist, and most of the rest of the characters in the New Testament
were Jewish, and that “Christianity” as such does not exist in the pages of the New Testament. So,
when talking about the letter of James, we can issue reminders that “James” (both the brother of
the Lord and the author of this letter, whether or not we take that to be the same person) was Jewish
and point to places where we see evidence of that, particularly his discussion of the law, his use of
Hebrew Scriptures, and his case study involving synagogue life. We can also remind people who
value Christian Scripture that the community to which James is writing is likewise Jewish.

Second, we can deliberately read James for information about ancient Jewish communities and
beliefs, rather than retrojecting later Christian questions onto a Jewish book. This may seem to be
a scholarly concern, rather than a pastoral one, but we argue that it can be both. It is a given that
historical-critical scholars of the New Testament should strive to avoid anachronism and should
value historical precision. Even pastoral and devotional readings of James might learn from this
concern though: we might be moved to see how God spoke to a community in the midst of transi-
tion and rupture. We may learn from the ways that an ancient community strove to remain com-
mitted to tradition while also acknowledging the ways that tradition might evolve and open itself
to the movements of God in our midst. And Christians benefit from being reminded of the beauty
and goodness of God’s law, especially in traditions that have falsely emphasized the liberation of
the gospel as something that denigrates the law.

Third, the presence of James in the canon reminds us that these borders are never closed off;
these intersections are never empty. This text is always a potential site for meaningful dialogue
between Judaism and Christianity, and a place of challenge for those of us with privilege who
encounter the letter’s deft combinations of the wisdom tradition’s universal claims about humanity
with prophets’ pointed critique of wealth.

Given the uncertain and rapidly changing times in which we are writing, these assurances might
move us to trust. We are writing in the first few months of what will apparently be a long-standing
coronavirus pandemic. Schools, religious communities, and non-essential stores are closed or have
moved to virtual services. It is easy to feel like these are unprecedented times and, in certain ways,
they are. But we read James as evidence of God’s presence with a community in the midst of tran-
sition and change, even as the community seeks wisdom in its traditions. The assurance that other
communities have lived through such losses and that God was present with them is hopeful indeed.