In my previous post I tried to show what the author of James is almost certainly claiming to be “that” James, the actual brother of Jesus.  In this post and the next will be explaining why it probably (well, almost certainly was not, in my view) written by him.

I’ve decided, as is my occasional wont, to get down into the weeds a bit here; sometimes that’s important because it’s oh so very easy to give broad and general reasons for a view that are so general and broad they’re not convincing to anyone who wants to get the real low down.  So here we go, down low.  (This taken from my book Forgery and Counterforgery, but I’ve edited it a bit to make it more user friendly, including by removing the academic footnotes).

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There are solid reasons for thinking that whoever wrote this letter, it was not James, the brother of Jesus.  The first, as already mentioned, is that James of Nazareth could almost certainly not write.  That of course, needs to be demonstrated.

Whoever produced this letter was a highly literate native speaker of Greek, grounded in Hellenistic modes of discourse and able to use abundant rhetorical devices and flourishes. It is often noted that the book employs a sophisticated use of participles, infinitives, and subordinate clauses.  Even Luke T. Johnson, a supporter of authenticity, points out that the language consists of “a form of clear and correct koine with some ambitions toward rhetorical flourish… comparable in quality if less complex in texture, to that of Hebrews.”

Johnson also notes that the author makes vigorous use of rhetorical devices found in many Greco-Roman moral discourses, but associated especially with the diatribe.  Matt Jackson-McCabe, concurs:  not only does the author evidence a “relatively high proficiency in Greek grammar, vocabulary, and style”; he “is “more generally at home in literate, Hellenistic culture,” using commonplaces of Greco-Roman moralistic literature (horses with bits, ships and rudders, controlling the tongue in order to control the body, and so on).

It seems unlikely that an Aramaic-speaking peasant from rural Galiliee wrote this.  We don’t know how James earned a living, but he was almost certainly a day-laborer (was he an apprentice carpenter?)  But the remote little hamlet of Nazareth has been excavated and archaeologist have turned up no public buildings, let alone signs of literacy.  Even if James’s well-known brother could read – and so was considered highly exceptional by his townsfolk (Luke 4:16; cf. Mark 6:2) – it would have been Hebrew; nothing suggests that Jesus could write; if he could do so it would have been in Hebrew  or Aramaic, not Greek.  And by all counts he was the star of the family.

This was a part of the world where literacy was likely 1-2% or even less (I’ve discussed that earlier in the blog, basing my views on the authoritative study of Catherine Hezser, Literacy in Roman Palestine).  Where would James have learned to write Hebrew?  Or to read Greek?  To write Greek?  To write literary Greek?  Greek that shows knowledge of the diatribe? And that uses rhetorical flourishes known from Greco-Roman moralists?

All of that would have taken many years of intensive education, and there is precisely zero indication that James, the son of a local tekton (a word that refers to someone who works with his hands; possibly a carpenter but also perhaps a stone or metal worker), would have had the leisure or money for an education as a youth.  Moreover, there were no adult education classes to make up the deficit after his brother’s death years later.

One should not reason that James could have picked up Greek after Jesus’ death on some of his travels.  If he did learn any Greek, it would have been of a fumbling kind for simple conversation; writing literacy was not (and is not) acquired by sporadic conversations in a second language – especially writing literacy at this level.   And James certainly would not have mastered the Scriptures in Greek, as the author of this letter has done (see James 2:8-11, James 23; 4:6).

And so, despite the remarkably sanguine claims of some scholars about the Greek-writing skills of uneducated rural peasants of Nazareth, it is virtually impossible to imagine this book coming from the pen of James.  The conclusion of  Matthias Konradt is understated at best: “it remains questionable . . . whether one might expect the rhetorical and linguistic niveau of James from a Galilean craftman’s son.”

More apt is the statement of Wilhelm Pratscher:  “Even if one assumes a widespread dissemination of Greek in first century C.E. Palestine, one will nevertheless scarcely consider possible the composition of James by the brother of the Lord, especially when one compares it to the markedly simpler Greek of the Diaspora Jew Paul.”

Other arguments support the claim that James the brother of Jesus almost certainly did not write the letter.  Of key importance is the fact that precisely what we know about James of Jerusalem otherwise is what we do not find in this letter.   The earliest accounts of James – one of them from a contemporary – indicate that he was especially known as an advocate for the view that Jewish followers of Jesus should maintain their Jewish identity by following the Jewish Law.

This seems to be the clear indication of Gal. 2:12 in the famous Antioch incident.  “Certain men from James” influenced Cephas no longer to eat with the Gentiles, out of “fear of those from the circumcision.”   The most sensible construction of the incident is that these “men” were representatives of James’s perspective, that he was a leader of the so-called circumcision party, and that this group of Christians, with him at the head, insisted on the ongoing importance of Jews maintaining their Jewish identity, which meant, in light of concerns stemming from rules of kashrut, not eating with Gentiles.

So too, the book of Acts.  Despite its concern for the Gentile mission and its insistence that Gentiles not convert to Judaism to be followers of Jesus, Acts portrays James as a Jew deeply concerned that Jewish followers of Jesus maintain their Jewishness.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the incident in Acts 21:18-24, where James, after agreeing with Paul about Gentiles, nonetheless wants Paul, as a Jew, to demonstrate to other Jews that he has not at all abandoned his own commitment to keeping the Law.  The incident is obviously to be suspected historically, as an invention of “Luke.”  But even as such, it confirms the traditional view that James, a Jewish follower of Jesus, was intent not to violate anything in the rituals prescribed in the Jewish Law.

So too in the fragmentary report of book 5 of Hegesippus’s now lost Memoirs, quoted by Eusebius (H.E. 2.23), possibly dating to the early second century.  Here James is said to have remained a Nazirite his entire life, to have had special access to the Jewish Temple, and to have prayed there so regularly that his knees became as calloused as a camel’s. Moreover, according to this account, James’s concern was entirely for the Jewish people, many of whom he converted to the consternation of the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, leading to his martyrdom by the sanctuary.

Hegesippus indicates that this happened immediately before the siege of Jerusalem; Eusebius claims that it is what led (theologically) to the destruction of Jerusalem. What all of these early accounts suggest about James of Jerusalem is that he was known to be particularly invested in seeing that Jewish followers of Jesus maintained their distinctiveness, vis-à-vis the rest of the world, by holding fast to their Jewish identity culturally and cultically.

I will conclude this discussion in my next post, where I show that precisely the concerns and interests our various sources attribute to James the brother of Jesus are noticeably missing from this letter.