The formation of “the canon,” meaning the authoritative collection of writings that now make up our New Testament, happened over the course of roughly 200 years. Some books were accepted by the early church immediately, others took more time.
Highly regarded New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham once wrote: “In the process of reception by which the Christian churches of the second to fourth centuries came to recognize as canonical the various early Christian writings that now compose our New Testament, James was one of the slowest to gain general recognition.”[1]
In fact, even after gaining acceptance into the New Testament, there were committed Christian thinkers that had doubts about James. There are several reasons for this, the two most important reasons being: that James seems to discuss the ideas of “faith” and “works” in ways that are quite different from Paul, and some Christian thinkers had difficulty making sense of the differences. Secondly, James writes to Jewish Christians, and the largely Gentile early church struggled with James’ relevance to their own expression of Christianity.
Still, James was accepted into the Bible, and Scholars and teachers have struggled to make sense of it ever since. For example, James reads as a letter, but it doesn’t function as one. Scholars have long recognized that it often functions as a “diatribe,” which is a writing focused on challenging an idea or opponent of some kind. But what, exactly, is James challenging? Also, because of their perceived differences, James is often read in comparison to Paul’s letters.
However, scholars have long recognized that James does not write the way that Paul does, rather, his writing is much more like Matthew, and his teaching style is much closer to Jesus’ style as recorded in the four Gospels. Therefore, it is much more helpful to compare James to Matthew than to Paul’s letters. Understanding this helps us along the path of understanding that Paul and James are not as different as some have argued, they simply use very different language to say basically similar things.
Understanding James’ manner of teaching is important. James fits in with what scholars call “the wisdom tradition.” Some wisdom writings, such as Proverbs, fit into what we can call “the wisdom of order.” This takes wisdom that has already been established in the past by Jewish and Christian communities, and finds the beauty in it, and teaches it in a fresh way.
Conversely, Ecclesiastes is a book that is famous for taking the parts of the “old” wisdom that do not work, and are not consistent with God’s wisdom or with the Scriptures, and challenging those ideas. This can be called “the wisdom of counter-order.” James, like Jesus, fits in well with the counter-order. James wants us to see old ideas not in a fresh way, but in a different way – he wants to take ideas that have been twisted around, and he wants to set them right again.
If it seems like I’m opening a lot of questions and not really providing answers to them, this is my intention. Solving the important issues surrounding James cannot be done in a short blog, but I’m hoping to reveal how deeply problematic it can be to understand James, if we do not ask the right questions of the text, so that we might be motivated to take steps to engage with the text at a deeper level.
Renown 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard enjoyed the book of James immensely, and acknowledged its difficulties. However, he used a passage from within James to encourage readers to do the hard work of understanding the text rightly. James 1:22-25 states:
22 But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.23 For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. 24 For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. 25 But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.
Kierkegaard believed that the problem was not simply that we often look at the word on the surface, and then walk away from the word and then forget the word. He thought the problem ran deeper than that. He believed that the analogy to the reflection of the mirror was not only an analogy, but that it is also meant to tell us that the word itself acts as a mirror; we forget the word because we fail to perceive ourselves in the word – we fail to see the ways in which the Scriptures are meant to penetrate through our exteriors and peer deep inside of us. As it states in Hebrews chapter 4, the word pierces through the intentions of the heart and exposes our true selves. If the word is meant to function this way, we must do the difficult work of handling it rightly.
To handle James rightly, there are a lot of questions that must be explored, and this blog mentions just a few of them.
Dealing with tough questions is done best in groups. Therefore, we are offering a seminar to anyone desiring to dig into questions regarding James that do not fit the sermon series. We hope you’ll come along.
[1] Richard Bauckham, James, pg 112.
Author: Danny Daley
On Sunday, 28th May, after the service (6.15pm – 7.45pm), Danny will be holding a seminar to discuss some of the aspects of James. In this seminar we hope to discuss issues such as genre, structure, the theology of the book, and its overall contribution to the Bible as a whole. Please come with thoughts and questions. Reading James all the way through would be helpful, but in no way required. Pizza and Refreshments will be provided.