In teaching the letter of James, one should walk to the front of the room and write these words in big letters on a chalkboard: Read James!
Under that the person then needs to write: First, read James in light of James!
Scholars today are obsessed by the "historical James" and his place in Jewish Christianity, obsessed by Jewish and Roman and Greek parallels, and impressed by those who find the most parallels or parallels no one has noticed before.
Indeed, reading James in comparison with his contemporaries and sources and — not to be forgotten — the earliest Christian documents, aids the interpreter, sometimes dramatically.
Sometimes, however, reading James in light of another text leads the reader to see James in light of that text and to conclude that they are related . . . which is, of course, what we call circular reasoning.
"Indeed," the one at the front of the room might say, "it's fine to compare James with others as long as you read James in light of James first."
Which is just what we intend to do in this commentary because thus we will discover the particular messianic profile James gives to anything he has acquired from his cultural environments.
In this way the historical work gives way to exegesis, or perhaps it is better to say that exegesis sheds light on historical work.
Having set a stake now in the ground, I stand next to Margaret Mitchell's sagacious warning: Yes, she argues, read James on his own terms, but if Paul happens to be one of the terms in James's world, then read James in interaction with Paul.
1.We ought not, in other words, pretend that James
1. M. M. Mitchell, "The Letter of James as a Document of Paulinism?" in lived alone in his world. In what follows we will cite parallels throughout to texts connected in some way to James.
But we do need to learn to read James on his own terms in that world — in that order — and to learn that studying this letter is not simply reconstructing the "historical James" or "Jewish Christianity."
