Loading...Here I conclude my string of posts dealing with whether James the brother of Jesus wrote the book of James as the book itself implicitly claims. Again this is taken from my more academic study Forgery and Counterforgery, but I’ve edited it a bit for an audience of regular folk instead of irregular scholars.
In my previous post I talked about how our ancient sources everywhere talk about the major concerns and interests of the the historical James and his focus on the Torah and keeping the law. Does this book reflect any of his widely known interests?
******************************
The book of James hints toward a James-like audience, as it is addressed to “the twelve tribes” (that is, faithful Jews scattered throughout the world). What is striking is that none of the cultural or cultic concerns of James of Jerusalem is in evidence in the book. Just the opposite. The book is thoroughly concerned about the “Law,” but not about the aspects of the Law that James himself is reported to have been interested in.
Here, in the book of James,
Get access to Dr. Ehrman's library of 4,000+ articles plus five new articles per week about the New Testament and early Christianity. It costs as little as $2.99/mth and every cent goes to charity!
Unlock 4,000+ Articles Like This!
My subscription pays for itself every time I read an article. Wow.
I know you touch on this in your popular book Forged, but what if James’s original Aramaic letter (which he dictated) was then translated into Greek by a zealous translator who exceeded his remit by titivating it slightly? Could that account for the polish one would not expect from an illiterate carpenter?
Yes, I deal with that at length in my book. That would make perfect sense in the modern world. Unfortunately we have no record of such things ever happening in the ancient, at least that I have been able to find after digging as deeply as I could to find it. If you look up “secretaries” on the blog you’ll see some of my more extended discussoins of it.
“Parousia”
I learned a new word today!
James is a facet of what drives me crazy about the NT: narratively, Mark is very different from Matthew, which is very different from Luke, which are all very very different from John, which are different from Paul, which is very different from John’s Revelation, which is very different from Acts, which is very different from the ascribed authors at the “end” of the NT, including James.
Pick a lane guys.
James is 100 observant in Acts and then under his “authorship” he’s like, nah, that ain’t it.
What lies behind the retcon? Cuz it’s bewildering.
Retconning seems to be the entire thrust of the NT. Jesus dies alone in despair in Mark, then it gets turned 180 in the other gospels. James in Acts is like, nope, gotta observe The Torah, then in the book ascribed to him is just like, yeah that’s not what I meant.
What the hell is happening? It feels schizo, and I’m confused as to how the church fathers cobbled all this together to make 27 books that are – as stand alone – internally contradictory, and vis a vis each contradictory. In psychiatry that’s called poor historians.
Make it make sense.
The New Testament once struck me as a postmodern ‘solar system’ orbiting…the Son.
That is to say, there is no central, objective narrative framework, even in theory, to enable agreement between the various authors on many major points. It reminds me of Kurosawa’s Rashomon (I highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it), wherein each character has to give their account of a single event resulting in irresolvable conflicts. Which is correct?
Considering the NT accounts are themselves individual interpretations, sometimes of other interpretations or filtered through them, layered with various presuppositions and value judgments; does it even make sense to say there is an objective truth to it all? If you were there yourself, you’d still have to ascribe meaning to the various elements and make your own connections.
This can make scholarship or the pursuit of a ultimate meaning frustrating, as we find ourselves running in hermeneutical circles, gathering Easter eggs (is that a pun?) various scholars have identified, though with the unfortunate tendency to undermine each other’s theories. Postmodern philosophers argue that there is no “God’s eye view”. I could be wrong – at least I hope I am – but that could be what’s going on here.
Absent the Epistle of James, there is nothing in the canon positive about the Law (“good works” or otherwise); indeed, it’s the Epistle of James and “good works” that first made me question “justification”, and I suspect many other Christians as well. So I spent time studying Paul and “justification”, including the little book What Paul Meant by Garry Wills (and many others). In other words, my study focused on Paul not James even though the Epistle of James triggered my study. Fast forward many years and the books and papers written about the Dead Sea Scrolls and there is James in a leading role. I suppose I focused on Paul not James because I just assumed the Epistle of James wasn’t written by James, so what would be the point. But here I am all these years later and I cannot get James out of my mind. Not the Epistle, but the historical James the Just. BTW, I mention the little book by Wills because he had a simple explanation about “justification”: by one having “faith” Paul subsumed being all in, which would include what we today would call “good works” (including the “good works” in Torah).
“That rich members of the community formed a sizeable minority is evident from the charge of James 5:1-6. And how early in the history of the Christian communities could this have been a problem? Surely not in the first decades.”
Why not in the first decades? We have those with at least some riches potentially already in or about to join the Jesus movement, Zacchaeus, Joseph of Arimathea, Mary Magdalene, Phoebe and maybe, per John’s gospel, Nicodemus. The various circulating stories about them could have presented other rich people with an appealing ‘resistance project’ in and around Jerusalem as soon as a community was established by them.
It is certainly not hard to imaging a ‘newbie’ with financial power joining a Christian community and then, almost immediately, trying to leverage their status to try to influence the community it to become ‘less poor’. To survive in those first decades, the proto-Christians would have needed plenty of financial assistance to feed and protect their communities. Unless there were more great miracles that we have not learned of yet, that financial assistance clearly occurred, and it seems to have been a love/hate situation for ‘James.’.
I strongly agree—moreover, I think Paul’s letters clearly show that this was the case.
Even though the bulk of Paul’s communities were certainly the “weak in the world” (1 Cor 1:26–27),
Paul received substantial financial aid for his work.
We know from Philippians, for instance, that while Paul was in Thessalonica, the Philippians
“sent [him] help for [his] needs once and again” (Philippians 4:16).
When Paul was in jail (in Ephesus? Rome?), the Philippians sent Epaphroditus back and forth from Philippi
to the city where Paul was imprisoned, in order to support him (Philippians 2:25; 4:10–14).
So the Philippians made all those trips carrying financial aid for Paul—something that would have been impossible
for a small group of slaves and freedmen. Some wealthy people must have collaborated.
Sometimes, the financial aid received by Paul and his collaborators is not as clearly expressed in translations as it is in the original Greek.
In Romans 16:2, Paul speaks about “Phoebe, a servant of the church … she has been a patron of many and of myself as well.”
The original Greek word translated as patron is προστάτις (prostatis).
Many scholars have pointed out that this term implies Paul and others received financial support from her.
Also, as an aside, I looked up the pronunciation of parousia. French and Italian speaker with a five year old’s grasp of Spanish I defaulted to par-ooshya. Nope. Par-oozie-yah.
Can’t imagine how things got mistranslated in the ancient world.
/sarcasm
Dr. Ehrman,
Many times in the New testament, writers are seen as more Jewish or less Jewish or misunderstanding something Jewish. in light of Yonatan Adlers findings, isn’t it possible that,
This is because the understanding and following of those rules was just not that well established by common people ?
An off topic question please, Dr Ehrman.
I read an article recently which suggested that Matthew 19:24 contained an error in the famous passage about a camel and the eye of a needle. It alleged that the word ‘camel’ had been miscopied early on from a similar Greek word, kamilos, meaning rope or cable, which perhaps makes a little more sense. Is this correct?
A question for Bart:
In Mark and Matthew we find a tale about Jesus cursing a fig tree. Lots of theological sources claim that this story is about Jesus pointing out the lack of ‘fruit’ produced by his fellow Jews.
Why? Is it possible Jesus just really liked figs and got hangry? It doesn’t really feel like a parable and Jesus never explains it as such to his disciples. Instead, he uses it to point out how little faith they have, like the water walking or the rooster predictions with Peter.
Hello Bart/Dr Ehrman.
I am aware of your view of end times and The Book of Revelation. What do you think the Book of Revelation means in Revelation? Thanks.13:13-15
13 And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men
Hello Bart/Dr Ehrman.
I am aware of your views that people at the time of Jesus believed body and soul were one and that souls didn’t immediately go to punishment or reward after death. My question is how could ancient Israelites have no conception of the Soul existing after death in light of Saul Conjuring up the spirit of the prophet, or God claiming that he is the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? Thanks.