Reading James with New Eyes: Methodological Reassessments of the Letter of James (review)

Reading James with New Eyes is a collection of seven essays originally presented at the Society of Biblical Literature "Methodological Reassessments" seminar 2005, revised for publication in light of discussions during that meeting. As the editors Webb and Kloppenborg explain in their introduction, the seminar focused on applying newer approaches to reading the so-called Catholic epistles of the Christian New Testament. These collected papers more specifically draw on either rhetorical criticism or sociological study.

Two of the papers might be best described as vocabulary studies informed by the social import of the terms on which they focus: Darian Lockett, "'Unstained by the World': Purity and Pollution as an Indicator of Cultural Interaction in the Letter of James," and Wesley H. Wachob, "The Languages of 'Household' and 'Kingdom' in the Letter of James: A Socio-Rhetorical Study."

Primary attention to the rhetorical "logic" of the text is the focus of the contributions by Margaret M. Mitchell, "The Letter of James as a Document of Paulinism?"; Duane F. Watson, "An Assessment of the Rhetoric and Rhetorical Analysis of the Letter of James"; John S. Kloppenborg, "The Emulation of the Jesus Tradition in the Letter of James." Watson's paper mainly makes the argument for coherence in James, contra Dibelius, based on its use of the moves characteristic of "deliberative" rhetoric (warning and advice). Kloppenborg and Mitchell, however, take attention to rhetorical coherence to a next level.

Kloppenborg, for example, reads a James that meditates and expands on an already written Jesus-sayings tradition. Arguing from analogies in the Hellenistic practice of paraphrase and emulation, he tabulates eleven sayings where James seems to be drawing on Q. He gives close study to four sayings in particular ("Seek and it will be given to you," "No one can serve two masters," "Woe to you rich," "and "Store up treasure not on earth, but in heaven"), concluding that James exhibits a skill with paraphrase equal to the best of its time.

Mitchell, on the other hand, reads James as a well-crafted response to an anthology of Paul's letters already in circulation. Here Mitchell applies her own close study of Paul's epistolary techniques to James, finding echoes across the Pauline corpus—Romans, Galatians, and especially 1 Corinthians. Of all the papers in this collection, Mitchell's conclusions are perhaps the most striking - for in James she reads a writer thoroughly at home in late first-century Paulinism, employing, like other Christian texts of its time, a "rhetoric of reconciliation" between two key figures of the earlier generation.

Sociological approaches are more obvious in the papers by Alicia Batten, "Ideological Strategies in the Letter of James," and K. Jason Coker, "Nativism in James 2.14-26: A Post-colonial Reading?" Batten focuses on the language of wealth and poverty in the first-century Roman world, and the society structured by its rationalization of economic disparity. Her paper focuses on three key paragraphs in James where she reads resistance to that rationalization: "Let the lowly boast in being raised up, the rich in being brought low," "Do you with your acts of favouritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus?," "Come, you rich, weep and wail." For Batten, James warns its Christian community against taking up the usual practice for a club of its time, of finding itself a rich patron.

Coker's paper is a useful extension of Batten's study of the "strategy" she reads in James's response to the dominant ideology of its time. Specifically, out of a review of the sociological studies done in colonized regions (the work of Said, Bhabha, Spivak, Fanon), Coker distinguishes James as reflecting a "nativist" response as opposed to Paul's "hybrid" formulation. The contrast in approach Coker is highlighting here is between one that draws clear distinctions between exploiter and exploited (James the...