Mahatma Ghandi famously said:
“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
This quote captures the spirit of what many people think about the church and Christians in general; that what we believe about Jesus (doctrine) and our following of Jesus (discipleship) doesn’t have the beauty, generosity, humility, sacrifice, kindness and love that Jesus himself had. Something is wrong!
The book of James, in part, was written to correct this mistake. It’s a book about putting our faith to work, to make sure that what we believe about Jesus gets worked out in the nitty gritty of everyday life and community. Whilst we are justified (made right with God) through faith alone, faith is never alone…it is always accompanied by good works. As James 2:26 says: “faith without deeds is dead.”
One commentator on the book of James summarises this idea by saying,
Whenever faith does not issue in love, and dogma, however orthodox, is unrelated to life, whenever Christians are tempted to settle down to a self-centred religion, and become oblivious of the social and material needs of others; or whenever they deny by their manner of living the creed they profess and seem more anxious to be friends of the world than friends of God, then the Epistle of James has something to say to them which they reject at their peril.¹
The Context & Background
The author of the book was James the brother of Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:1-7, Acts 15:13-15), whom the Jewish historian Josephus tells us died in AD62. So most likely the book was written somewhere between AD50-60, which makes sense of why no mention is made of the Jewish and Roman tensions that came between AD60-66 and culminated in the Jewish War of AD66-67.
And there are two things internally to the book that fit with this dating and stand out. Firstly it has a very Jewish feel and James himself addresses his book to the ‘twelve tribes scattered among the nations’ (1:1) which refers to the Jewish diaspora (including Gentile converts) in Palestine, Syria and beyond (see Acts 11:29). So he is not writing to one church, but many scattered churches. Secondly, James deals a lot with wealth, addressing both the rich and the poor, and the inequality between the two groups. There are wealthy merchants (4:13-17) and rich farmers (5:1-17) who are oppressing the poor and that must change. This would fit with the famine, oppression and hardships in Judea around AD46 (see Acts 11:28, Galatians 2:10 and 2 Corinthians 8-9) where there was great economic strife for many. The limited agricultural land could not support a growing population and people deprived of land became hired labourers, rootless and vulnerable, whilst those outside used the opportunity to make money as wealthy traders and land owners.
In this context, if a wealthy landlord (who had stolen your land) or a wealthy merchant (living in ease and not connected to the pressures of the majority) visited or belonged your church, the church would be either:
(a) Be inclined to show favouritism towards the wealthy person and avoid offending him at all costs (Chapter 2)
(b) Be tempted to the join the Zealots fighting for justice against those same rich oppressors (Chapter 1 & 5).
Both reactions James condemns. Instead as David Field says², commenting on the final two verses of the book:
He tells his readers why he has written: it was to turn Christians who have erred back to the truth. He doesn’t want to criticise, but to cover sins by bringing people to repentance. This call to repentance characterises the letter and unifies the church, for it was James’s goal to speak to a church under pressure and call it to stand together against the force of the wagging tongue within and the pressures of the world without.
James’s unique literary style & his structure
Alongside the Jewish nature of the book, and it’s handling of the relationships between the rich and the poor, something else thats sets the book of James apart is its literary style. Is it an epistle (letter), wisdom literature, an exhortation or a sermon?
Moo* comments on four things that make James unique: the tone of his pastoral exhortation, the ‘looseness of structure’, his many metaphors and illustrations (sea, flowers, mirror, horse, ship, fire, animals etc) and his ‘borrowing’ from other places, not least the Old Testament and the sayings of Jesus.
One person³ summarises the book of James when he says:
It looks, then, as if the sermons and sayings of James (and perhaps Jesus as well) were edited together to form the letter. Unlike, for example Galatians, the letter of James does not look like a work dictated at one time.
The letter, then, is probably a collection of sayings of James editing into a unity. James himself may have requested someone with good Greek to put the letter together, perhaps to have something to share with the many Christians from the Greek-speaking world who were visiting Jerusalem, or else after his death the church had the letter written in order to persevere some of the central teachings of this major figure.
In terms of the structure of the book most commentators identify five sections within the letter, which go something like this:
- Trials and Christian Maturity
- Wealth and Charity
- The Tongue
- Wealth and Internal Divisions
- Perseverance and final exhortation
Our Series outline
As you can now see, this is a rich book and though short, it is not to be rushed. So here is the outline to our nine-week series:
- Trials (1:1-12)
- Temptations (1:13-16)
- Listening and Doing (1:19-26)
- Faith and Works (2:14-26)
- Favouritism (2:1-13)
- The Tongue (3:1-12)
- Wisdom (3:13-18)
- Quarrels (4:1-12)
- Patience & Prayer (5:7-20)
We will not be looking at James 4:13-17 (boasting) nor James 5:1-6 (greed) as we recently covered both in our series in Ecclesiastes. And in terms of the controversies around whether James and Paul disagree on the doctrine of justification or their use of the old testament law, or the question of how a Jewish Aramaic speaking man like James could have such good greek, or whether he really was the brother of Jesus, and a whole host of other interesting questions and controversies do go along to the ‘Going Deeper’ Seminar hosted by Danny on Sunday 28th May, after the service.
I hope you’ll come and join us as we look to learn these great life lessons from this great book.
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¹R.V.G Tasker in TNTC
²Peter Davids in The New Bible Commentary
³The New Dictionary Of The Bible
*Douglas Moo: James in TNTC – this will be the main commentary underpinning our series