James Overview • Epistle of James

Notes

James is a daunting book. It’s so practical. And therein lies the rub. We are prone to live below what we can and should live like as Christians.

James is so practical he sounds hard. But he is a pastor. Everyone he writes to he calls brethren, beloved brethren. So if he sounds hard, maybe that’s because he’s like the best teacher you ever had. The best teacher I ever had knew his subjects thoroughly, he commanded utmost respect. If you were out of line he would get right into your face. He made you want to excel, to be a better person. He inspired humility.

That’s James. He sounds hard, but he wants the best out of his readers, and he wants them to be the best.

1. The author is James, but which one?

A. Here in the first verse he calls himself simply, James, a bondservant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.

B. There are three men named James in the New Testament that we can say are not the author of this epistle.

1. In Luke 6:16 James is the father of one of the apostles named Judas, the other one, not Judas Iscariot. That James didn’t write this epistle.

2. One of Jesus’ disciples was James son of Alphaeus, also in Luke 6. He was known as James the lesser, or Little James. He was an obscure disciple, not that well known.

3. Another of Jesus’ disciples was James brother of John, the sons of Zebedee. He was put to death by the sword by Herod Agrippa I in Acts 12.

4. You remember that Peter was also arrested and was going to be executed as well. The night before his execution an angel released Peter and he went to the house of Mary the mother of John Mark. And Peter said, “Report these things to James and the brethren.” Not James the brother of John, he had been executed in the beginning of chapter 12. But this James was very well known in the churches. He is the one who wrote this epistle.

C. This was James, the Lord’s brother.

1. Technically he was Jesus’ half-brother, a natural son of Mary and Joseph after Jesus was born. He is found in a list of Jesus’ brothers and sisters in Matthew 13:55-56. “Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not His mother called Mary, and His brothers, James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And His sisters, are they not all with us?”

2. James was not one of the twelve disciples, he was not even a believer in Jesus during Jesus’ lifetime. It says specifically in John 7:5 not even his brothers were believing in Him.

3. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 that when Jesus rose from the dead He appeared to Peter, then to the twelve, then to over five hundred brethren at one time, then He appeared to James. Jesus appeared to His half-brother. At that point James was no longer an unbeliever. In Acts 1:14 a group of about 120 believers are gathered together in the upper room waiting on the promise of Jesus, the coming of the Holy Spirit. Mary the mother of Jesus was there, and with her were His brothers. James was there.

4. Although he was never called an apostle, James became the leader of the church in Jerusalem. He was their pastor. In Galatians 1:18-19 Paul says a few years after his conversion he went up to Jerusalem to become acquainted with Peter and he stayed with him for fifteen days. On that trip he also met James, the Lord’s brother. In Acts 15 we see James in a leading role during the Council at Jerusalem to work out a solution to having Gentiles in the church.

5. He was known as James the Just. He was famous for praying for the people while in the temple so that his knees became callused like a camel. He was stoned to death for his testimony to Jesus. And some ancient writers felt that the siege of Jerusalem that happened directly after his murder was the punishment of God for killing this righteous and holy man.

2. To whom it was written.

A. It says here, to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad.

B. It is true that the Jews were scattered all over the world. The Law of Moses required the Jews to be in Jerusalem three times a year to keep the feasts, Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles. On the Feast of Pentecost in Acts 2 there is a list of the places that the Jews had come from to be in Jerusalem: Acts 2:9-11 Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya around Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs.

C. But it’s not just Jews that James is writing to, they are Christian Jews and there is another scattering that happened to the Christian Jews in Jerusalem because of persecution. After the stoning of Stephen in Acts 7, it says in Acts 8:1 And on that day a great persecution began against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles.

D. So James is writing a general epistle to those Christians who were scattered everywhere as a result of persecution.

E. Other than that there is no specific church or group to whom this epistle is addressed. Not like Paul who would address his epistles to specific churches or individuals. Therefore this and six other epistles became known as the general or Catholic epistles. Not meaning Roman Catholic, but that these are meant for a wide audience.

1. On that subject I wanted to mention some strange teaching that came to my attention. A friend wanted me to check out this website he saw and he wanted to know, was it legitimate? The teaching was that from the Epistle to the Hebrews on to the end of the New Testament those epistles were only written to the Jews and not to the Gentiles. Like it says here, to the twelve tribes. 1 and 2 Peter are also directed to a Jewish audience, and Revelation is supposedly written for the Jews because the church won’t be in the Great Tribulation.

2. What do I think of that? I think that is too clever by half, and unbiblical. The word of God is for every man and woman of God. True, there are promises in the Old Testament for Israel. You have to take everything in context in order to interpret it rightly. But everyone is commanded to repent and believe in Jesus. That word about Jesus is for everyone. Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God. Not just Jews, but every man.

3. All that to say you don’t have to feel funny because you’re not in the twelve tribes. Paul the Apostle also had everyone read his epistles. He would have the original recipients pass the epistle around to other churches. You don’t say, well, this epistle was only written to the church at Corinth, so it doesn’t apply to me! This epistle, and the whole Bible, was written to you.

3. The combination of author and destination points to the date this epistle was written.

A. James was martyred either in 62 or 66 A.D., just before the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans. He had to have written his epistle before that. But how far back?

B. There is no evidence that James is writing to a mixed audience of Jews and Gentiles like happened later in the church. In the beginning the only Christians were Jews. The Messiah is Jewish, and Jesus said He came for the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

C. So in James it seems he is writing to an exclusively Jewish Christian audience, after the scattering of the disciples from Jerusalem, but before Antioch became the great center for Christianity that included Jews and Gentiles.

1. Believers are still meeting in synagogues, as it says in chapter 2.

2. There is no language that reflects any of the epistles of Paul or the gospels. There are allusions to all sorts of things Jesus talked about, but not in language we recognise from the published gospels.

3. There is no evidence of the possible tension between Jew and Gentile believers, or any hint of the question of the law as later came up in Antioch. Jews came down from Jerusalem as if from James and were teaching that if you didn’t keep the law of Moses you could not be saved. This led to debate and conflict. It was decided to go to Jerusalem to have a council to decide the question what do you do with the Gentiles who receive Jesus? Do they become like Jews? Do they stay Gentiles? What do the Jews do, then? There is a big council in Jerusalem and it looks as though James is presiding over the discussion and debate. They come to the right answer, but there is none of that tension in James.

D. So it’s after the stoning of Stephen, it’s before that council, which was held somewhere around the year 48 to 50 A.D. James probably wrote his epistle around 45-48.

E. That means James is probably the first writing in the New Testament, even earlier than Paul’s epistles, certainly earlier than any of the gospels.

F. The issues that James addresses have been with the church since the beginning!

4. What is James about? The short answer is: Faith in practice.

A. When you read through James you notice there are no in-depth theological discussions like you get in Paul.

B. There are a lot of practical exhortations to believe right, speak right, live right. Do this, don’t do that.

C. There have been people who ask, “Where is Jesus in all this?” Jesus gets mentioned at the beginning, in chapter 2, and a couple more times as “the Lord”. Some people dismiss James as a lightly Christianized Jewish morality exhortation.

D. James was accepted as Scripture by parts of the church early on, in areas closest to Jerusalem. But it was considered one of a group of books known as “disputed” for years even as people were quoting it as Scripture. It was officially recognised as Scripture by the church at the Third Council of Carthage in 397 A.D. You might think, that’s a little late. But there was something about this epistle that people could not get rid of. It endured through uncertainty and examination until it was acknowledged to be what it already was, the word of God.

E. Martin Luther did not like James and he let it be known.

1. In the preface to James in his 1522 German New Testament he called it, “an epistle of straw, for it has no true evangelical character.” That was removed in later editions but Luther did not like James.

2. Luther had known religious works in order to be saved all his life. He worked, fasted, suffered, made pilgrimages, prayed, confessed, and did not have peace with God.

3. Through his study and teaching of the Bible and grappling with what the Bible actually said he realised that by relying on what Jesus did on the cross, dying for his sins, he was forgiven, born again, declared righteous as if he had never sinned. That was when he made the formulation: only by faith, only Scripture.

4. Luther loved the Apostle Paul, he loved justification by faith. What irked Luther was James’ insistence that Abraham was justified by faith plus works. Luther felt that obscured the gospel, that there was a conflict. He didn’t want to return to dead works, a futile religious waste of time and energy.

5. Scripture is so interesting and puzzling because it doesn’t always do what we would like it to do. It’s not so neat as we would like it to be. Paul belongs in the Bible and so does James and there is no contradiction between them at all. That’s because Scripture doesn’t contradict itself, like you hear people say so often. The truth is, IF those people read the Bible, they read it to find problems and they read it wrong and don’t get the context right. Even Martin Luther got Scripture wrong. But he was honest with Scripture. If it was up to him he would have left James out of the New Testament he translated into German. But you can’t tailor the word of God to say what you would like it to say. You have to deal with what it does say. You have to handle it accurately. So the church recognised James as Scripture. Luther translated James and didn’t throw it out.

5. So what?

A. James is not everyone’s cup of tea. I get that because it wasn’t mine, either. When I first got the idea to teach James I quickly said, “No.” James has some things hard to teach. I don’t want to do James. But you can’t say, “No,” to the word of God. You can’t teach just what you want and not touch the hard parts or the parts you don’t understand. You can’t pick and choose. You must teach the whole counsel of God. That means you have to figure out what the Scripture is saying. Then you have to apply it.

B. James is about faith in practice.

1. When it comes to the practice of our faith, we get a little nervous. We know much more than we actually do. It’s easy to believe one thing and yet do another. Like our life is in different compartments. There is my spiritual life, there is my practical life. They don’t agree.

2. James says, I want you to be perfect. And we go, gulp! But Jesus said the exact same thing: You are to be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect. Sermon on the Mount.

C. James was writing to Jews, who knew all about religious works. And when they believed in Jesus they were freed from having to save themselves by their works.

D. But everything that James exhorts his readers to do is because a person believes and relies upon Jesus. A perfect person relies upon Jesus to will and to work in him. Everywhere in James the doctrine about Jesus dying for our sins and rising from the dead is assumed. It’s underlying. Everyone knows these things, but are we doing them? We all need the practical outworking of the doctrine of Jesus.

E. James reminds me of a great teacher I had. He commanded great respect. You were right to fear him. He did not tolerate any nonsense from his students. He demanded the best in you and made you want to be the best you could be. Sometimes you realised you just didn’t measure up. You were humbled. But he made you want to be better. That “hard” teacher is actually the best teacher.

F. These readers are James’ beloved brethren, and he wants them to be perfect in living out their faith. That’s what we’re going to be learning and studying. Are you up for that?

Let’s pray.