James

Richard Bauckham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134850044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Richard Bauckham explores the historical and literary contexts of the Epistle of James, discussing the significance of James as the brother of Jesus and leader of the early Jerusalem church. He gives special attention to the aphorisms which encapsulate James' wisdom, and to the way that James' teaching closely resembles that of Jesus.

Chapter 1

An encyclical from James to the Diaspora

[The words of James 1:17] are by one of the Lord’s apostles, and if we ourselves have not deeply perceived their meaning, we nevertheless dare to trust that they are not casual and idle words, a flowery expression of a flimsy thought, but that they are faithful and unfailing, tried and tested, as was the life of the apostle who wrote them.

(Kierkegaard 1990b: 32)

For [James] the thought of God’s unchangeableness [1:17] is one of pure and unmixed comfort, peace, joy, happiness. And this is indeed eternally true. But let us not forget that the Apostle’s joy has its explanation in the fact that the Apostle is the Apostle, that he has already long since wholly yielded himself in unconditional obedience to God’s unchangeableness. He does not stand at the beginning, but rather at the end of the way, the narrow but good way which he had chosen in renunciation of everything, pursuing it invariably and without a backward look, hasting towards eternity with stronger and ever stronger strides.

(Kierkegaard 1941: 230)

1 EPISTOLARY FORM AND EPISTOLARY SITUATION

Is the letter of James really a letter? It certainly purports to be. It begins with the stereotypical form of letter-opening with which all Greek letters began, consisting of the ‘parties formula’ (‘X to Y’) and a salutation (‘Greetings!’). But scholars have often challenged its right to be considered a ‘real’ letter. Here two different issues, often confused, need to be distinguished: (1) Does James have the form and content of a real letter? (2) Did it function as a real letter, i.e. was it really sent, by the hand of a messenger or messengers, from an author resident in one place to recipients living elsewhere?

With regard to the first issue, James has the only formal feature of the ancient letter form which was essential: the letter-opening. It is true that most ancient letters had both a stereotyped letter-opening and also a somewhat less stereotyped letter-closing (in Greek letters usually at least ‘Farewell!’). James lacks a formal letter-closing. But the letter-closing, though normal, was not essential. Some private letters surviving in autograph from the New Testament period lack any letter-closing formula. Like James, they just end. In the case of James, it is also quite possible that scribes who copied the letter for subsequent use, when it no longer functioned as a letter, omitted a conventional letter-closing formula (such as ‘Farewell!’) which had no interest or function for later readers, while retaining the letter-opening because it identified the author. The important point is that the letter-opening is quite sufficient to make James formally a letter.

As for the so-called ‘body’ of the letter (everything between the opening and closing formulae), formal characteristics, though identifiable in some letters, were flexible and dispensable. Material of any form or content could be made into a letter by prefixing to it the formal letter-opening which specified that it was being sent by person or persons X to person or persons Y. This means that the content of a letter could belong to another literary genre. If one wished to send a legal document to a person in another place, one merely needed to prefix a letter-opening. The book of Revelation is generically an apocalypse, but it is also a letter, because the author wished to send it as a circular letter to the seven churches of the province of Asia, and by including a formal letter-opening in the introduction (1:4–5a) he made it a letter. James could have been written, without its first verse, as a work of paraenesis (ethical exhortation or advice) or wisdom instruction. It would then have been a work generically comparable to such Jewish and early Christian writings as the Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sira or the Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides or the Didache or the Teachings of Silvanus. It does indeed resemble such works, in form and content, but its first verse makes it also a letter.

It is not, of course, a personal letter, in which an author addresses the specific situation and concerns of a singl recipient or a small group of recipients. Rather it is an official letter or encyclical, in which James as head of the Jerusalem church addresses all of his compatriots and fellow-believers in the Jewish Diaspora. This makes it a different kind of letter from personal letters between friends or relatives, or even from the major Pauline letters which address the needs and contexts of specific Christian communities and so share some of the personal letter’s closeness to oral communication between people who know each other. But an official letter or encyclical is no less a ‘real’ letter, i.e. a document which could have been actually sent, by the hand of a messenger or messengers, from an author resident in one place to recipients living elsewhere. If it was really sent, no doubt several copies would have been dispatched to important communities of Christian Jews in the Diaspora, where further copies would have been made for circulation to other communities.

An appropriate term for the kind of letter James is might be ‘paraenetic encyclical’. The usual form of paraenetic letter (a letter offering exhortation or advice on the conduct of life) in the ancient world was addressed to an individual (Stowers 1986: 91–124), but Jews and Christians wrote paraenesis in letter-form to communities or to circulate among communities. This is the kind of letter James is. In form and content it is a ‘real’ letter of this kind, but whether it functioned as a real letter is another issue. Its form and content cannot tell us whether it was actually sent from its purported author to its purported recipients. In the ancient world there were both real letters, actually sent from their authors to their recipients, and also fictional imitations of real letters. These might be by an author writing under his own name but using the letter-form as a literary convention, though in fact it is very difficult to distinguish a letter actually sent to its named recipient, but with a view to future publication for a general public in a collection of the author’s letters, from a letter in which the named recipient is only a literary convention. In addition to such purely literary letters written under an author’s own name, there were also many types of pseudepigraphal letters (Bauckham 1988), written under pseudonyms, usually attributed to illustrious figures of the past. But all such letters are fictitious imitations of real letters. They are formally indistinguishable from real letters.

So the letter of James could have actually functioned as a paraenetic encyclical, sent from James himself to the Diaspora, or the form of the paraenetic encyclical could be a literary convention adopted either by James himself or by some later author who attributed his work to James. The first alternative is the one that will be adopted here. It cannot be conclusively proved, but it can be shown to be very plausible. An important, usually neglected factor is the plausibility of the epistolary situation which a paraenetic encyclical actually sent from James himself to the Diaspora presupposes. In order to explore this epistolary situation, we need to give more attention to the way the sender and the addressee are specified in the parties formula: ‘James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes in the diaspora’ (Jas. 1:1a).

The only natural interpretation of the phrase ‘the twelve tribes in the diaspora’ is that it refers to all members of the people of Israel who lived outside the land of Israel. The phrase distinguishes from those who lived in the land of Israel, who are not addressed, those who lived in the Diaspora, who are addressed. By this period, as a result of deportations and emigration from as early as the eighth century BCE onwards, a large majority of Jews lived outside Palestine. Jewish writers of this period sometimes claimed, with only a little exaggeration, that there were Jews in every part of the known world. It is these that James addresses.

Two widespread misunderstandings of the phrase need to be dispelled. One is that it could easily be understood as a reference not to Jews but to Christians (including both Jewish and Gentile Christians). It is true that, from the time of Paul (Gal. 6:16) onwards, the term ‘Israel’, and with it a whole range of Old Testament terminology for Israel, could be used of the church as the new, Messianic people of God, consisting of both Jewish and Gentile Christians. But the terms James uses were not so used. Reference to the tribal constitution of Israel, which had no equivalent in the new Israel, seems inherently unsuitable for transference to the church. The term ‘Diaspora’ is also unsuitable, since in Jewish usage it was uniformly associated, not simply with the condition of exile, but more specifically with God’s scattering of his people as punishment for their sins.¹ It is therefore not surprising that, with only one apparent exception (1 Pet. 1:1), it is never used of the church in the Christian literature of the early centuries (van Unnik 1983, 1993).²

While unnatural as a reference to the church, the phrase is a natural way of referring to Israel outside the land. But the second prevalent misunderstanding that needs to be countered is that, in this period, reference to Israel as ‘the twelve tribes’ was purely ideal. This is based on the erroneous notion that the northern tribes (variously reckoned as ten or nine and a half by Jewish writers of this period) had long ago disappeared. They had not. Descendants of those who had been deported by the Assyrians in the eighth century BCE were still living in the lands to which they had been deported – north Mesopotamia and Media – and formed an important part of the eastern Diaspora. In the first century CE contact between these people and Jerusalem was well maintained (see Bauckham 1997a). They sent their temple tax to Jerusalem and came themselves on pilgrimage when possible. Rabbi Nahum the Mede – who must have originated from the Israelite communities in Media³ – was a well-known Pharisaic leader in Jerusalem (m. Naz. 5:4; b. Ket. 105a). The Gentile royal house of the kingdom of Adiabene – which was the most important area of settlement of the exiles of the northern tribes – converted to Judaism at about the same time as the apostle Paul converted to Christianity, and members of this royal house became very well known in Jerusalem.

New Testament scholars and students, and even historians of early Judaism, tend to think of the Jewish Diaspora as primarily the western Diaspora: the Jews who lived in the Mediterranean area, subject to the Roman Empire. But to Jews of the time, the eastern Diaspora in the lands across the Euphrates, to the east of the Roman Empire, was just as important. The western Diaspora consisted largely of descendants of the tribes of Judah, Benjamin and Levi, but the eastern Diaspora consisted not only of descendants of these southern tribes, in Babylonia, but also – probably in at least as large numbers – descendants of the northern tribes, in the lands to the north of Babylonia. To encompass the whole Diaspora, ‘the twelve tribes in the diaspora’ was precisely the phrase needed. Of course, ‘the twelve tribes’, with its echo of the ancient constitution of the people of Israel as a whole, could probably never be a purely matter-of-fact term in Jewish ears. In particular, it evoked the hope of the regathering of all the tribes in the land of Israel by God in the Messianic age. But even this hope referred, not to lost tribes, but to known communities of people living in well-known parts of the world. All this suggests that, if James 1:1 does indicate the addressees of a real letter, it must have been intended to circulate in the eastern Diaspora as well as in the west. A letter intended only for the eastern Diaspora would more naturally have been written in Aramaic than in Greek (just as Josephus wrote the first edition of his Jewish War, now lost, in Aramaic for the eastern Diaspora). But Greek was well used in the Parthian Empire, and is the language which would have to be used if the same letter were to circulate to any part of the Diaspora.

James 1:1 does not specify that it is addressed to Christian members of the twelve tribes in the Diaspora. Yet the letter presupposes its readers’ allegiance to Jesus the Messiah. It is not Christian missionary literature which could be aimed at non-Christian Jews. The reason the addressees are not distinguished as Christians is that early Jewish Christians thought of themselves, not as a specific sect distinguished from other Jews but as the nucleus of the Messianic renewal of the people of Israel which was under way and would come to include all Israel. In a sense they were the twelve tribes, not in an exclusive sense so as to deny other Jews this title, but with a kind of representative inclusiveness. What James addresses in practice to those Jews who already confess the Messiah Jesus, he addresses in principle to all Israel.

From where would anyone address a letter to the twelve tribes in the Diaspora? Of course, from Jerusalem. Jerusalem was that centre from which the tribes had been dispersed throughout the world, to which they made every effort to return on pilgrimage, and to which they confidently expected to be regathered in the Messianic age. It was both geographically at the centre of the Diaspora and religiously the centre to which the Diaspora was bound by a variety of deeply felt spiritual ties. A letter to the Diaspora must come from Jerusalem. A Christian letter to the Diaspora could come from no one more appropriately than from James.

There is no doubt who the James is to whom the letter of James is ascribed, though there is dispute as to whether he is the real author or not. Since James (Jacob) was a common Jewish name, common even among early Christian leaders (cf. Mark 3:17, 18; 15:40), a particular James had usually to be distinguished from others, for example by reference to his father. Only one James was so uniquely prominent in the early Christian movement that he could be identified purely by the phrase: ‘James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ’ (cf. Acts 12:17; 15:13; 21:18; 1 Cor. 15:7; Gal. 2:9, 12). This James was the eldest of the four brothers of Jesus (Mark 6:3). He rose to prominence in the leadership of the Jerusalem church as the twelve ceased to fulfil that role (see Bauckham 1995a). He then occupied a unique position as head of the Jerusalem church for over a decade, from c. 49 CE until his martyrdom in 62. With Peter and Paul, James was one of the three most influential leaders in the first generation of the Christian movement. His position in Jerusalem gave him a role not only in Jerusalem, but in the worldwide Christian movement, since Jerusalem was the mother church, which for most Jewish Christians (as well as probably for many Gentile converts) occupied the position of centrality and authority they had been accustomed as Jews to attributing to Jerusalem and its temple. Since Paul had an unusual sense of his own apostolic independence from Jerusalem, and since many of the New Testament writings date from after 70 CE, when the Jerusalem church inevitably lost its role in the Christian movement outside Palestine, the impression the New Testament gives most readers does not do justice to the importance either of the Jerusalem church or of James himself in the period before 70. But we can glimpse the prominent role of James occasionally in the New Testament (Acts 15:13–21; 21:18–25; Gal. 2:12; Jude 1; cf. Rom. 15:25–31), and from his remarkable reputation in second- and third-century Christian literature, when his authority was claimed by Catholic, Gnostic and Jewish Christian writers alike (Martin 1988: xli–lxi; Painter 1997). Most of the later traditions about James are at least semi-legendary, but they are nevertheless a reflection of his historical pre-eminence.

When James was given a distinguishing epithet, he was either ‘James the brother of the Lord’ (Gal. 1:19; Hegesippus, apud Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 2.23.4), or (perhaps already before his death, certainly thereafter) ‘James the Righteous’ (Gospel of the Hebrews 7; Gospel of Thomas 12; Hegesippus, apud Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 2.23.4, 7, 16; etc.). The epithet ‘servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ’ in James 1:1 is not meant to distinguish him from other Jameses, but to indicate his authority for addressing his readers. ‘Servant’ is here a term for someone called to serve God and his people in a leadership role (cf. Rom. 1:1; Phil. 1:1; Titus 1:1; 2 Pet. 1:1; Jude 1; and see Bauckham 1983: 23–24). The use of the term is significant, since there was certainly a tendency in Palestinian Jewish Christianity to attribute a special status to relatives of Jesus on the basis of their family relationship to Jesus. In a pseudepigraphal work attributed to James in such circles we might have expected his authority to be indicated by the term ‘brother of the Lord’. That this is not the case is a minor pointer in the direction of the authenticity of the letter. The use, instead, of ‘servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ’ is not due to modesty, as commentators on James and on Jude 1 sometimes suggest, but recognition that natural relationship to Jesus is not a valid basis for authority in the church (Bauckham 1990: 125–130).

Luke’s account of the Jerusalem council and its ruling on the status of Gentile converts in the Christian mission outside Palestine (Acts 15), though its historical value is widely disputed, probably does reflect accurately the position of authority over the expanding Christian movement which the Jerusalem church leaders exercised in the period of James’ leadership in Jerusalem (Bauckham 1995a, 1996a). Paul had reservations about this authority, but there is no reason to think they were shared by the majority of those Christian Jews who spread the Gospel and founded Christian communities throughout the Diaspora. Many of these, such as Peter, Barnabas, Mark, the other brothers of Jesus (1 Cor. 9:5), and Andronicus and Junia (Rom. 16:7), had been members of the Jerusalem church and would naturally maintain close links with it. We should also not forget that the Jerusalem church would have played a unique role in the spread of the Christian Gospel in the Diaspora, not only by sending out its own members as missionaries, but also by preaching to the thousands of pilgrims from all parts of the Diaspora who came to Jerusalem every year for the festivals and who could take the Christian message back to their own communities. The church in Rome is an example of an extremely important Christian community whose origins had nothing to do with the Pauline mission, but probably much to do with the Jerusalem church. Its links with Jerusalem seem to have remained close (Rom. 16:7, 13; 1 Pet. 5:12–13).

Since we have noticed that the letter of James seems to be addressed to the eastern as well as the western Diaspora, it is important also to notice evidence of Jerusalem’s connection with the Christian movement there. The connections between the eastern Diaspora and Jerusalem would have ensured that the Christian message travelled east as quickly and easily as it travelled west, though we do not know the story any more than we know the story of the origins of the church in Rome or Alexandria. Already by the time of Paul’s conversions there was a Christian church in Damascus (Acts 9; 1 Cor. 11:32–33), first stop on the routes north-east to Edessa and Nisibis, the area where descendants of the northern tribes were living, and east to Babylonia, with its large Jewish communities descended from the exiles of the southern tribes. There is some reason to think that relatives of Jesus were active in the mission to the eastern Diaspora (Bauckham 1990: 68–70). But especially interesting is a saying attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, which reflects the Gospel tradition of the churches in the north Mesopotamian area around Edessa and Nisibis:

The disciples said to Jesus: ‘We know that you will depart from us. Who is it who will be great over us?’ Jesus said to them: ‘Wherever you shall have come, you are to go to James the Righteous, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being.’

(Gospel of Thomas 12...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Prologue: Looking into James as into a mirror
• 1 An encyclical from James to the Diaspora
• 2 The wisdom of James, disciple of Jesus the sage
• 3 James in canonical context
• 4 James in modern and contemporary contexts
• Epilogue: Through the looking glass and back
• Notes
• reference
• Index