The Catholic Epistles and Apostolic Tradition: A New Perspective on James to Jude

Chapter 3 - James in the Minds of the Recipients: A Letter from Jerusalem

43 Chapter 3 JAMES IN THE MINDS OF THE RECIPIENTS A Letter from Jerusalem Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr What did the addressees of the Epistle of James imagine when they received and read this letter from Jerusalem? This rather speculative question could be better based, according to my view, on features of the transmitted text than the question most often discussed in research into historical identification of the author of the letter. Starting with a definition of the letter genre and a reconstruction of the communication from which it originated, I will attempt to draw some contours of the portrait of the implied author of the Epistle of James. I will relate particular features of the text to a view of the origins of the early Jesus movement that seems to be accepted in most parts of current New Testament research, being based itself on observations of the transmitted texts, rather than depending on a systematic reconstruction of the history of early Christianity. Aside from the personal traits of James in the epistle, I will also draw some lines of a theology of the brother of the Lord that could arise with the recipients of his letter. Unlike the paraenesis of the Epistle of James, which was always in the focus of New Testament research, for a long time the theological contexts of those paraenetic sections were neglected, with the exception of the argumentation in 2:14-16, which mostly was treated from a Pauline point of view. But in this respect, a change can be observed in recent research, which I have delineated recently under 44 KARL-WILHELM NIEBUHR a somewhat provocative heading.1 Some of the considerations brought forward in this article, and in an earlier one,2 I will try to carry on here. The Epistle of James in Recent Research Recent research on the Epistle of James has been characterized by removal of the “Pauline spectacles.”3 The interdiction to look for a coherent argumentation4 or for the context of the distinct statements of the letter,5 which was in effect since the famous commentary by Martin Dibelius,6 has been superseded during the last decades. Today, most exegetes no longer even keep in mind the interdiction of looking for theology in the letter.7 But removing the Pauline spectacles means more than just realizing some specific theological arguments or even a distinct theology of the letter within the New Testament canon.8 There is almost a new perspective from which the letter and its author are perceived. And with the new view on James, as is the case with the “new perspective on Paul,”9 different perspectives and the shifting of lights lead to a new and more exact overall picture, with foreground and background, with sharp contrasts and some more faint structures, with colors and gray areas.10 If one did not read the letter from a Pauline perspective, one would hardly get the idea that the argumentation in 2:14-26 is the theological core of the epistle, belonging to the early Christian debate regarding the specific Pauline argument on justification by faith.11 Rather, one would choose the beginning at the starting point for understanding the text: the text opening, where the author introduces himself to his addressees as “James, slave of god and of the Lord Jesus Christ,” saluting them as “the twelve tribes in the dispersion” and approaching them with a paraenetic address regarding their faith, in which they are supposed to persevere (1:1-4). The letter form, particularly the prescript, is characteristically different from, and probably not influenced directly by, the Pauline form.12 What can be seen about the addressees from the Letter of James is almost without any consonance with what we know about the communities that received the Pauline Letters—and this is quite a lot! In particular, there is not the slightest hint of problems or arguments with regard to Torah observance by Jews and non-Jews in Christian communities. Still, there exists the danger of mirror-reading and introducing Pauline problems into the situation of the addressees of the Letter of James, or even missing the problems there and drawing conclusions from their absence. The Epistle of James as a Jacobian Letter Thus, by removing the Pauline spectacles and reading the Epistle of James as what it wants to be, the questions arise of what it means and what are JAMES IN...