James 1.1 and 2.1.

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Ben C. Smith
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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

Post by Ben C. Smith »

Ken Olson wrote: Wed Mar 21, 2018 7:18 pmIt is true that the opening of the letter addresses the twelve tribes in the dispersion and some of taken this to mean that James is addressing Jews. But as Sophie Laws observes, there hadn’t been twelve tribes since the Assyrian destruction of the northern kingdom in 721 BCE....
I will not claim to know all of the historically plausible ins and outs of the "ten lost tribes" of Israel; all I can say is that, if those tribes were gone, the Jewish people seem not to have always been aware of it. Lots of people, of course, claimed to be of the tribes of Judah and Levi; no issue there. And of course others, like Paul, claimed to be of the other southern tribe, that of Benjamin (Romans 11.1; Philippians 3.5). But the northern tribes are also represented. Tobit claims to be of the tribe of Nephtali (Tobit 1.1, though I know this story is set immediately after the deportation). The prophetess Anna is said to be of the tribe of Asher (Luke 2.36). Judith is said to be of the tribe of Simeon (Judith 8.1 Vulgate; 9.2). A Messianic figure was still expected from the tribe of Ephraim. In Acts 26.6-7 Paul speaks on behalf of the twelve tribes as extant. In Antiquities 11.5.2 §133 Josephus, writing of entire political entities rather than of individuals, claims that the ten deported tribes remain in vast numbers even "till now" across the Euphrates. According to the Letter of Aristeas, the translators numbered 72 because there were six from each of the twelve tribes. And did not the Samaritans claim descent from Joseph?
There is nothing in the letter about circumcision, dietary requirements, Sabbath keeping or observing holidays. There is no concern about the temple, sacrifice, or Jerusalem, nor with the land promised to the patriarchs and Moses.

....

There is no concern about the lineage of the priesthood, nor, for that matter, with the priesthood at all.

The “royal law” in 2.8 is “love your neighbor as yourself.” That, and the rest of the laws discussed are moral laws, there seems to be no concern about ritual and purity laws.

The issue James wants to dispute in 2.14 is whether one can be saved by faith alone apart from works. The people holding that position do sound like they hold a particular interpretation of Paul. But if James is a Jewish sectarian, why is that paramount among the disputes he needs to address? Isn’t he concerned with whether one should build a fence around the law or what renders vessels impure or who can serve as high priest or whether those who have nocturnal emissions ought to be punished? Why is the faith alone issue the only one that needs to be addressed in James’ community?

...if this is a function of genre, what kind of Jewish literature do you think James resembles?
Well, to me the epistle of James bears resemblance to Jewish wisdom literature, of which there are examples (such as Ecclesiastes) which seem to fret no more about your list of typically Jewish concerns than James does. As John mentions, there are also resemblances to some of the Dead Sea scrolls (4QInstruction comes to mind, but I believe there are others). There are also overlaps with Essene practice (the prohibition against oaths, for instance).
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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

Post by John2 »

Ben wrote:
Would you answer my question about Matthew and Mark in the same way? Is it that they know Paul, too? What about John?

A parallel question for you is whether you think that Mary the mother of James and Joses, in Mark 15.40, 47; 16.1, is Jesus' mother.
I think Mark knew (at least of) Paul because I think he knew Peter, like Papias says. And I think whoever translated the original Hebrew Matthew into Greek and combined it with Mark may have known of Paul since the Hebrew Matthew seems to; perhaps they were an in-betweener like Mark and to some extent like Peter as well, meaning they were in between the Pauline and Jewish Christian camps and this was their motive for combining Matthew with Mark (and for translating it into Greek). I can't really prove any of that, it's just my guess.

That the author of the original Hebrew Matthew may have also at least known of Paul or was non- or anti-Pauline is argued by several scholars (notably Sim). As Zangenberg writes in his chapter "Matthew and James" in Matthew and His Christian Contemporaries:
... both writings [Matthew and James] have developed in a distinctly non-Pauline milieu, and even if they came into contact with ... positions that might or might not have been known to them as 'Pauline', they commented on them and rejected them on the basis of their own, independently grown convictions ... a common theological outlook and a common pool of semantic tools to express it clearly bind Matthew and James together. Matthew and James represent a type of Christianity that sees itself as a perfect way to fulfill the Law, in a way as 'perfect Judaism'.

https://books.google.com/books?id=_ALUA ... ne&f=false
I haven't done much research on the Gospel of John so I have no comment about that. And I'm not sure who Mary the mother of James and Joses is in Mark. I haven't given it much thought before but am curious to take a look at it now.

Regarding Luke/Acts and James, I think the smoking gun of their bias against James is that Mark mentions James as being Jesus' brother and Luke apparently chose not to mention it (unlike the Greek Matthew).
Last edited by John2 on Thu Mar 22, 2018 5:25 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

Post by FransJVermeiren »

lsayre wrote: Sun Mar 18, 2018 4:49 am I wonder how, where, and when a Jesus who fit the bill of being the awaited Christ (Messiah) began to retroactively appear upon the scene (or stage)? The million dollar question.
IMO there are two different how, where and when’s: one about Jesus appearing as the long-awaited messiah, and one about the start of propagation of this ‘realized messianism’ message.

1. Jesus’ appearance as the long-awaited messiah
It is utterly improbable that in 1st century Palestine a ‘single man (= Jesus) messianism’ emerged around the thirties, simultaneously with a powerful stream of Essene messianism that debouched into the great messianic war of 66-70 CE. I believe that Jesus-the-messiah can only be understood within the belligerent Essene messianic ideology. This ideology has been described extensively in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it consists of three paradigmatic elements, the when, where and how questions raised above.
When: The DSS expression for the decisive moment of the turn of the era is the ‘day of revenge’, which is identical with the ‘day of the Lord’ of the New Testament (but more neutrally worded). This turning point would be the end of the final battle between the Jews (the Essenes in particular) and their enemies, the Romans. The Essenes expected to win the war, but the pivotal day they were looking forward to would equally dawn when they would lose the war (which happened). In other words: the paradigmatic time for the arrival of the messiah and the start of the messianic ear is the end of the war against the Romans.
Where: The paradigmatic messianic place is clear: Jerusalem
How: The paradigmatic characteristic of the messiah was of course that he would be victorious over the Romans.

So the paradigmatic triad which the Essenes designed was as follows: end of the won war – Jerusalem – victorious Jewish leader (who would defeat the Romans). Reality was slightly different but the paradigmatic messianic triad equally applied : end of the lost war – Jerusalem – victorious Jewish leader (personally ‘defeating’ the Romans by surviving a certain death from their hands).
In other words: if the Essenes were to be consequent with themselves, they could only realize their messianic expectation through a victory in Jerusalem at the end of the war. They were looking for God’s help, and this is how God intervened.

2. The start of the propagation of messianism realized in Jesus
When: Shortly after the end of the war. Jesus’ small victory was of utmost importance to brace up the depressed Essenes who survived the war.
Where: inside the Roman empire anyway – this explains Mark’s cunning method.
How: Mark defused the explosive content of the story by antedating it. ‘Retroactively’ really is the appropriate word.

It is difficult to make modern parallels with Jesus’ fate at the end of the war. Therefore, just some questions:
• If Adolf Hitler would not have committed suicide but would have escaped to a far off country without ever have been run in by the allies of the 2nd World War, wouldn’t he have gained a heroic status with all neo-Nazi’s in the world despite the crushing defeat of the Third Reich?
• If an important American politician would have been rescued unharmed from under the debris of the Twin Towers, wouldn’t he have become a powerful icon for the war against terrorism?
• Wasn’t the fact that Nelson Mandela regained freedom upright and unbroken after 27 years of imprisonment something that attributed to a considerable degree to his legendary fame?

Could we call this the fame of invincibility?
www.waroriginsofchristianity.com

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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

Post by John2 »

Frans wrote:
1. Jesus’ appearance as the long-awaited messiah
It is utterly improbable that in 1st century Palestine a ‘single man (= Jesus) messianism’ emerged around the thirties, simultaneously with a powerful stream of Essene messianism that debouched into the great messianic war of 66-70 CE. I believe that Jesus-the-messiah can only be understood within the belligerent Essene messianic ideology. This ideology has been described extensively in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it consists of three paradigmatic elements, the when, where and how questions raised above.

• When: The DSS expression for the decisive moment of the turn of the era is the ‘day of revenge’, which is identical with the ‘day of the Lord’ of the New Testament (but more neutrally worded). This turning point would be the end of the final battle between the Jews (the Essenes in particular) and their enemies, the Romans. The Essenes expected to win the war, but the pivotal day they were looking forward to would equally dawn when they would lose the war (which happened). In other words: the paradigmatic time for the arrival of the messiah and the start of the messianic ear is the end of the war against the Romans.
• Where: The paradigmatic messianic place is clear: Jerusalem
• How: The paradigmatic characteristic of the messiah was of course that he would be victorious over the Romans.

So the paradigmatic triad which the Essenes designed was as follows: end of the won war – Jerusalem – victorious Jewish leader (who would defeat the Romans). Reality was slightly different but the paradigmatic messianic triad equally applied : end of the lost war – Jerusalem – victorious Jewish leader (personally ‘defeating’ the Romans by surviving a certain death from their hands).
In other words: if the Essenes were to be consequent with themselves, they could only realize their messianic expectation through a victory in Jerusalem at the end of the war. They were looking for God’s help, and this is how God intervened.

2. The start of the propagation of messianism realized in Jesus
• When: Shortly after the end of the war. Jesus’ small victory was of utmost importance to brace up the depressed Essenes who survived the war.
• Where: inside the Roman empire anyway – this explains Mark’s cunning method.
• How: Mark defused the explosive content of the story by antedating it. ‘Retroactively’ really is the appropriate word.
Amen, Frans! I agree wholeheartedly with this. Only I would see Essenism as but one of the possible messianic streams that developed into the various Fourth Philosophic factions (in which I include Jewish Christians). I see Pharisaism as being the more dominant source of them all now (despite their opposition to the Pharisee's oral Torah; e.g., as Josephus puts it in Ant. 18.1.6: "They agree in all other things with the Pharisaic notions"). But pretty much everything else you said seems right on to me. Very good presentation of your view point, in any event.
Last edited by John2 on Thu Mar 22, 2018 1:48 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

Post by John2 »

I look at the big picture this way. The majority of the DSS are dated to the Herodian era, as Vanderkam and Flint note here:
Archaic (250-150 BCE) 21 manuscripts
Archaic to Hasmonean (200-150) 20 manuscripts
Hasmonean (150-ca. 50) 224 manuscripts
Transition to Herodian (ca 75-1 BCE) 5 manuscripts
Herodian (50 or 30 BCE-68 CE) 418 manuscripts

https://books.google.com/books?id=SBMXn ... ts&f=false
And they're messianic; and they talk about "works" (and use an expression that only they and Paul use, "works of the Law"); and they practice "the way" and "the new covenant" (something only the DSS and Christianity are known to do), in a place called the Land of Damascus (which in my view correlates with the region Judas the Galilean was from and the Damascus that Paul mentions in Galatians). And they were into Daniel, like Christians and Josephus and in my view other Fourth Philosophers were, e.g., the square Temple and world ruler prophecies (half of the eight -which is a relatively high number- DSS Daniel's are dated to the Herodian era as well as other Daniel-related writings). And they reject the Pharisees' oral Torah (as did Jesus and in my view other Fourth Philosophers who Josephus says in Ant. 18.1.1 had altered "the customs of our fathers," an expression that is used elsewhere to describe the oral Torah). And what kings do the NT mention? The Herodians, from the first one to the last. The majority of the DSS and the earliest parts of the NT were written during the Herodian era. If the DSS that mention the new covenant aren't Jewish Christian then they are the writings of some other Fourth Philosophic faction. If the Teacher of Righteousness isn't James then he was some other Fourth Philosopher.
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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

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If some other Fourth Philosophic faction had had a Paul we might be talking about, say, Theudism today (or a similarly renegade "Pauline" version of it).
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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

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My thesis will be that the epistle originally lacked any reference at all to Jesus and that its author was not a Christian by my definition (see below), but was rather a putative member of the kind of sectarian Jewish group from which Christianity originally emerged.
Ben, I don't think it's been treated elsewhere in the thread, but I wondered what you make of the allusion of James 5:12 to Matthew 5:34, and how it fits it with you view that James has not sprung from a truly Christian community.
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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

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gmx wrote: Thu Mar 22, 2018 2:56 pm
My thesis will be that the epistle originally lacked any reference at all to Jesus and that its author was not a Christian by my definition (see below), but was rather a putative member of the kind of sectarian Jewish group from which Christianity originally emerged.
Ben, I don't think it's been treated elsewhere in the thread, but I wondered what you make of the allusion of James 5:12 to Matthew 5:34, and how it fits it with you view that James has not sprung from a truly Christian community.
I did not deal with that parallel in particular, but that is because there are so many more such parallels to deal with, especially between James and the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. In the OP I wrote:
As for the overlap of sayings between James and the synoptic tradition, I readily grant that those overlaps are there by the boatload to be examined. If we assume that Jesus uttered those sayings, as the gospels depict him doing, then James got them either directly or indirectly from Jesus and is, in some sense, following Jesus. That is not exactly the same thing as being a Christian yet, by my definition, but it would certainly go a long way toward confirming James as a Christian, since one very good reason to treat Jesus' sayings as authoritative would be that one feels Jesus to be the Christ. One could point out that most other people who treated Jesus' sayings as authoritative were Christians; therefore, James is also probably a Christian.

The option I would like to leave open, however, cuts through all of this in a very different way. James nowhere attributes the sayings to Jesus (not that he has to do so in order to prove their origin, but it is an observation). What if they are, in fact, Jacobian sayings instead, sayings which have been placed on Jesus' lips in the gospels, but which were originally the teachings of James? Alternately, but similarly, perhaps Jesus did utter them, but he himself got them from James. I do not think that this option is necessarily any better or more provable than the traditional option (that Jesus uttered the sayings and then James, or whoever wrote the epistle in his name, took them as his own); but I do not think it is any worse or less provable, either.
According to Josephus, the Essenes forbade the taking of oaths, as well.
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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

Post by John2 »

The Shem Tov Hebrew Matthew (for whatever it may be worth) has an interesting variant of Mt. 5:34, as noted here:
The Greek translation of Matthew inadvertently dropped the word falsely from the Hebrew Matthew. This erroneously made it appear Jesus said one is never to take an oath. (Nehemiah Gordon, Hebrew Yeshua v. Greek Jesus (Hilkiah Press, 2006) at 59, 65-66, 68.)

But God commands people to take oaths in God's name. "Thou shalt fear YAHWEH thy God;... and by his name shalt thou swear." (Deu 10:20 ASV.)

Gordon, a Jewish scholar, notes the Pharisees evidently taught you could violate an oath as long as not sworn in Yahweh's name. In other words, false oaths were acceptable to them, as long as God's name was not brought into the statement. This was based upon twisting the Bible which prohibited any false swearing in God's name. (Lev. 19:12.) But would false swearing truly be OK if God's name was not invoked? Not likely.

Jesus' criticisms imply the Pharisaic quibbling with Lev. 19:12 led the Pharisees to sanction false oaths as long as not in God's name. Implied from Jesus' criticisms is that the Pharisees obviously said Lev. 19:12 meant one could falsely swear even if you invoked objects closely associated with God, like the Temple. You supposedly would transgress the command only when God's name is actually used.

However, Jesus was invoking the broader principle in Zechariah 8:17 which said "love no false oath: for all these are things that I hate, saith YAHWEH." Thus, you were not allowed to dupe others if you worded your oath carefully. Thus, the Pharisees diminished the Law once more. Gordon detected the difference in the Hebrew version of Matthew (i.e., the Shem-Tov) where Jesus corrected them, saying `do not swear falsely at all,' whether by the temple or anything else. The Greek translation inadvertently dropped the word falsely. This led us to misapprehend Jesus' meaning.

Then Gordon explains the instruction ending `anything beyond this is evil' was an Hebraism used in the Original Testament to mean that anything beyond (added to) the Torah was evil.

https://www.jesuswordsonly.com/books/21 ... iants.html
This makes a lot of sense and makes me wonder if the Letter of James was harmonized with the (erroneously translated?) Greek Matthew.
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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

Post by John2 »

It would be in keeping with the rest of Matthew 5, where Jesus says don't add to or take anything away from the Torah, for why would he then go on to take away something from the Torah (i.e., that is okay to swear by God's name)?

But what to make of James 5:12 then (if it wasn't harmonized)? Maybe it is pseudonymous after all and from the same community or area that used the (erroneously?) translated original Hebrew Matthew (which would be one way of explaining all the other parallels between James and the Greek Matthew too).
Last edited by John2 on Thu Mar 22, 2018 5:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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