James: My Brother’s Letter

At a Glance

Who wrote it: It says James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ (1:1). Tradition says this is my brother James, who led my followers in Jerusalem after I died. Many scholars think a later writer used his name, mainly because the Greek is polished. Others think it could be his, perhaps with help.

When: If my brother wrote it, before he was killed in 62. If not, perhaps between 70 and 100.

Written for: Jewish believers living scattered outside the land of Israel. Some were poor and some were rich, and the church was favoring the rich. James wrote to say that faith has to show in what you do.

What it remembers of me: It names me only twice, and it tells no story from my life. But it is closer to my teaching than any other letter in your Bible. It echoes the Sermon on the Mount again and again, without ever saying it is quoting me.

How close it stays to me: Very close, especially on the poor.

If you only read three chapters: James 1, James 2 and James 5.

Words to Know

James — in Hebrew, Ya’akov, the same name as Jacob. It was one of the most common names among my people.

The Dispersion — Jews living outside the land of Israel, scattered across the empire. The letter is addressed to the twelve tribes which are in the Dispersion.

Works — deeds. What you actually do.

Justified — counted as right before God.

The royal law — the letter’s name for love your neighbor as yourself.

The Book in Brief

James writes as a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ to the twelve tribes scattered abroad. It is a letter of short, sharp pieces of advice, not one long argument.

Chapter 1 tells the readers to count their trials as joy, because testing builds endurance. Anyone who lacks wisdom should ask God for it. God tempts no one, and every good gift comes from him. The readers must be doers of the word and not only hearers, and pure religion is to care for orphans and widows and keep oneself unstained by the world.

Chapter 2 forbids favoring the rich. A man in fine clothes and a poor man in filthy clothes come into the meeting, and the poor man is told to stand. The writer then argues that faith without works is dead, and gives Abraham and Rahab as examples.

Chapter 3 says the tongue is a small fire that can burn down a forest. It sets the wisdom from above, which is peaceful and merciful, against jealousy and selfish ambition.

Chapter 4 blames quarrels on cravings, tells the readers to humble themselves before God, and warns those who plan to make a profit as though they were sure of tomorrow.

Chapter 5 begins with a warning to the rich, who have kept back their workers’ wages. It then urges patience until the Lord comes, forbids swearing oaths, and speaks of prayer for the sick and for one another. It ends by saying that whoever turns a sinner back from error saves a soul from death.

The gospels remember it plainly. When I was going around Galilee, my family thought I had lost my mind and went out to seize him; for they said, “He is insane” (Mark 3:21). John says, For even his brothers didn’t believe in him (John 7:5).

My hometown knew all of us by name. Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James, Joses, Judah, and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us? (Mark 6:3). James comes first on that list, which probably means he was the oldest after me.¹

Then something changed him. In the oldest list of the people who saw me after my death, Paul writes, Then he appeared to James (1 Corinthians 15:7). A few years later, when Paul went to Jerusalem, the leaders he met were Peter and James, the Lord’s brother (Galatians 1:19). By the time the great argument over circumcision came to Jerusalem, James was the one who gave the decision.

Go deeperWere they really my brothers?

The gospels call James and the others my brothers. The Greek word is adelphoi, and it usually means brothers and sisters by birth. But Christians have never agreed about what it means here, and the disagreement is old.¹

Brothers by birth. On this reading they were children of Mary and Joseph, born after me. It is the plainest way to read the gospels, which name four brothers and mention sisters (Mark 6:3). Most Protestants hold it.

Joseph’s sons. On this reading they were Joseph’s children by an earlier marriage, so Mary had no other children. It appears in the Protevangelium of James, a second-century story about Mary, and the bishop Epiphanius defended it in the 300s. It is common in the Eastern churches.

Cousins. The scholar Jerome argued in 383 that brothers meant cousins. In the Hebrew scriptures the word for brother can stretch to cover other relatives, as when Abram speaks to his nephew Lot: we are relatives (Genesis 13:8; the Hebrew there says “brothers”). Jerome’s view became the usual one in the Catholic Church.

The Catholic and Orthodox churches teach that Mary stayed a virgin all her life, which is why they read the verses this way. The gospels do not settle it. What nobody disputes is that Paul calls James the Lord’s brother (Galatians 1:19), and that Josephus, who had no stake in the argument, calls him my brother too.

How he died

You can read about my brother’s death outside the Bible. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing around 93, tells it.

In the year 62, the Roman governor of Judea died in office. Before the next one arrived, the high priest, a man named Ananus, seized his chance. He called a council and brought before it the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, whose name was James, with some others, charged them with breaking the Law, and had them stoned.

Josephus adds that the most fair-minded people in Jerusalem, the ones most careful about the Law, were offended. They complained to the new governor and to the king, and Ananus was removed after only three months as high priest.²

Later Christians called my brother James the Just. Even people who were not his followers, it seems, thought he had been wronged.

Go deeperAnother story of how James died

Josephus is not the only one who tells how James died. In the late 100s, a Christian writer named Hegesippus told a very different story. We know it because the historian Eusebius copied it out more than a century later.²

In this telling, James was holy from his mother’s womb. He drank no wine and ate no meat, never cut his hair, never anointed himself with oil, and wore only linen. He went alone into the Temple to pray for the people, and he knelt there so long that his knees grew hard as a camel’s. At Passover, the scribes and Pharisees stood him on the pinnacle of the Temple and told him to turn the crowd away from me. Instead he told them that I am the Son of Man, who sits at the right hand of God. They threw him down. He was still alive, so they began to stone him, and he prayed for them as the stones fell. At last a fuller, a man who cleaned cloth for a living, struck him on the head with his club.

Historians do not weigh the two accounts equally. Josephus grew up in Jerusalem and wrote within about thirty years of the event, and his details fit the politics of the time: a gap between two governors, a high priest acting without permission, a council called to judge. Hegesippus wrote more than a century after the event, and his James is partly a portrait of the ideal holy man. Most historians trust Josephus for what happened. They read Hegesippus as a legend that may still preserve a true memory of how strictly James kept the Law.

Did he write this?

The letter is written in good Greek, with a wide vocabulary and some fine turns of phrase. That is the main reason many scholars doubt that my brother wrote it. We grew up in a village of a few hundred people. Our trade was building. Our language was Aramaic.

There are answers. Galilee had Greek-speaking cities nearby, and a leader in Jerusalem could have used a secretary or a translator. And if a forger wanted to borrow James’s authority, he did not do much with it. The letter never claims to be from the brother of the Lord. It just says James.

The churches were slow to accept it. Origen, in the 200s, is the first writer known to quote it as scripture by name. Around 325, Eusebius listed it among the disputed books, noting that not many of the early writers had mentioned it.³

Whoever wrote it knew the earliest Jewish followers of mine and their teaching better than almost anyone else in the New Testament. When the letter describes the poor man walking into a meeting, it calls the meeting a synagogue (James 2:2). That is what my first followers were. A synagogue that believed I was the Messiah.

Faith without works

This is the passage everyone knows.

What good is it, my brothers, if a man says he has faith, but has no works? Can faith save him? And if a brother or sister is naked and in lack of daily food, and one of you tells them, “Go in peace. Be warmed and filled;” yet you didn’t give them the things the body needs, what good is it? Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead in itself (James 2:14–17).

And then the sentence that has caused centuries of argument: You see then that by works, a man is justified, and not only by faith (James 2:24).

Paul wrote, We maintain therefore that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law (Romans 3:28). Both of them use the same example, Abraham, and the same verse from Genesis, Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him as righteousness (James 2:23; compare Romans 4:3). One says Abraham was justified by faith. The other says he was justified by works.

Are they contradicting each other? Read them closely, and they are not talking about the same works. When Paul says works of the law, he means, many scholars think, above all the things that marked a man as a Jew: circumcision, food laws, holy days. He was arguing that Gentiles did not need those to belong to God. When James says works, he means feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. He was arguing that a faith that leaves a brother cold and hungry is not faith at all.

Many scholars think James was answering people who had taken Paul’s slogan and run with it, people who said, We are saved by faith, so what we do does not matter. Paul would have hated that as much as James did.⁴

My own teaching was simple about this. Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven; but he who does the will of my Father (Matthew 7:21). And at the judgment, the question was what you did for the hungry, the thirsty and the stranger. On that question, my brother and I agreed.

Go deeperWhy James and Paul both pick Abraham

James and Paul choose the same man and the same verse of Genesis. One reason is that every Jewish teacher in my day talked about Abraham.

Abraham was the model of a faithful man, and his story was told in a certain way. The book of Sirach, written about 180 BC, says that when Abraham was tested he was found faithful. The first book of Maccabees, written about a century before I was born, has a dying priest ask his sons whether Abraham was not found faithful when he was tested, and so counted righteous. Another book, Jubilees, written in the 100s BC, retells Genesis with the offering of Isaac as one of a series of tests that Abraham passed.⁵

In all three, Abraham’s faithfulness under testing and his being counted righteous belong to one story, and in Jubilees the great test is plainly the offering of Isaac. That is how James reads it. For him, Abraham’s faith and Abraham’s obedience were one thing seen from two sides, and the offering of Isaac showed the faith to be real (James 2:21–23).

Paul reads the same story with a different question in mind. He asks when Abraham was counted righteous, and he points out that it was before he was circumcised (Romans 4:9–10). That matters if you are arguing about whether Gentiles must be circumcised, as Paul was. It matters less if you are arguing, as James was, about a believer who will not feed a hungry brother.

So the two letters answer different questions about the same man. That does not settle every difference between them, and scholars still argue about how far each knew the other’s teaching.⁴ But James was not inventing a new idea about Abraham. A hearer in a synagogue would have recognized it at once.

An epistle of straw

Martin Luther did not like this letter.

He was building his reformation on Paul’s words about faith, and James seemed to stand in the way. In the preface to his New Testament of 1522, he called James an epistle of straw compared with the letters he loved, because, he said, it had nothing of the nature of the gospel about it. Elsewhere he said he would not count it among the chief books of the Bible.⁶

The line about straw was dropped from editions after 1537. But as late as 1542 he still joked about throwing the letter into the stove. Either way, the judgment says more about what Luther was looking for than about the letter. A letter that tells you to feed your hungry brother has a great deal of the gospel in it.

My words, without my name

Here is the thing about this letter that I notice most. It is full of what I taught, and it never once says Jesus said.

I said, don’t swear at all … But let your “Yes” be “Yes” and your “No” be “No” (Matthew 5:34, 37). The letter says, don’t swear … but let your “yes” be “yes”, and your “no”, “no” (James 5:12).

I said, Don’t lay up treasures for yourselves on the earth, where moth and rust consume (Matthew 6:19). The letter says, Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and your silver are corroded (James 5:2–3).

I said, Blessed are you who are poor, God’s Kingdom is yours (Luke 6:20). The letter says, Didn’t God choose those who are poor in this world to be rich in faith, and heirs of the Kingdom? (James 2:5).

I said, Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy (Matthew 5:7). The letter says, judgment is without mercy to him who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment (James 2:13).

I said, Ask, and it will be given you (Matthew 7:7). The letter says, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally (James 1:5).

There are more.⁷ It reads like someone who had absorbed my teaching so deeply that he no longer needed to say where it came from. It had become simply the way you talk. That is how sayings live in a family.

The poor man in filthy clothes

The second chapter has a scene you could film.

For if a man with a gold ring, in fine clothing, comes into your synagogue, and a poor man in filthy clothing also comes in, and you pay special attention to him who wears the fine clothing and say, “Sit here in a good place;” and you tell the poor man, “Stand there,” or “Sit by my footstool” haven’t you shown partiality among yourselves? (James 2:2–4).

Every congregation that has ever existed has been tempted to do exactly that. The rich man can help the church. The poor man needs help from it.

The letter does not just call it bad manners. Don’t the rich oppress you, and personally drag you before the courts? (James 2:6). It reminds the congregation who the rich man is outside the building. Then it calls partiality a sin against the royal law, You shall love your neighbor as yourself (James 2:8–9).

Weep and howl

And then the fifth chapter, which is as fierce as any prophet in my scriptures.

Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming on you … Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you have kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of those who reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Armies. You have lived in luxury on the earth, and taken your pleasure (James 5:1, 4–5).

That is the Law of Moses speaking. You shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy … In his day you shall give him his wages, neither shall the sun go down on it; for he is poor and sets his heart on it; lest he cry against you to the LORD (Deuteronomy 24:14–15).

Wage theft is not a modern sin. My brother named it, and he said God hears the workers who cry about it.

The chapter before has a warning for people who make plans to get rich: Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow let’s go into this city, and spend a year there, trade, and make a profit.” Whereas you don’t know what your life will be like tomorrow (James 4:13–14). I told a story about a rich man who planned to build bigger barns and take life easy, and God said to him, You foolish one, tonight your soul is required of you (Luke 12:20).

Pure religion

If you want the letter in one verse, it is this one.

Pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained by the world (James 1:27).

Not a creed. Not a ceremony. Orphans and widows, and a clean life.

My brother and I did not always agree. When I was alive, he thought I was out of my mind. But on the things that matter most, the letter that carries his name says what I said. It says it without needing my name on it.

Check It Yourself

Look up: James 2:14–17, then Romans 3:28.

You will find: faith without works is dead in one, and justified by faith apart from the works of the law in the other. Ask what each writer means by works.

Then read James 5:1–6 beside Deuteronomy 24:14–15.

The Short Version

• James was my brother. He did not follow me in my lifetime, then led my followers in Jerusalem until he was stoned in 62.
• Whether he wrote this letter is debated. It is in polished Greek, and the churches were slow to accept it.
• It says faith without works is dead. Its works are feeding and clothing people, not the rituals Paul argued about.
• Luther called it an epistle of straw. It is the letter closest to my own teaching.
• It condemns partiality to the rich and stolen wages, and defines pure religion as caring for orphans and widows.