It has been charged that James exaggerates the evil of the tongue, but one who knows life as it is must agree with James. Sirach says, “Curse the whisperer and the double-tongued, for such have destroyed many that were at peace” (28:13). Plummer quotes also a clause from the Syriac that is not in the Greek: “Also the third tongue, let it be cursed; for it has laid low many corpses.” Sirach (28:14 f.) continues: “A third [or backbiting] tongue hath unsettled many, and driven them from nation to nation; and strong cities hath pulled down, and overthrown houses of great men. A backbiting tongue hath cast out capable women, and deprived them of their labors.” The “third tongue” injures three classes (Plummer): the person who utters the slander, the one who listens, and the one of whom the slander is told. It is a triple sin and only sin. “Neither can salt water yield sweet,” James adds, and his conclusion falls with the force of a trip hammer. The crisp wisdom of James about the tongue makes one wonder afresh if his mother had not taught him some of these aphorisms as a child. IX The True Wise Man The connection between the paragraph about wisdom (3:13-18) and the preceding discussion of the perils of the tongue is very close. James is still thinking of the men who supposed that they had true faith but who did not practice it; “men who supposed that they had a deeper wisdom and a larger knowledge than their brethren, and who were continually asserting their claim to be teachers” (Dale). But Hort considers the passage on the tongue a “long digression,” a view hardly tenable. These ambitious teachers had overlooked the havoc wrought by tongue (and pen). James has given a needed warning about that phase of the subject and now turns to the subject matter itself. The ambitious teacher will do all the more harm if he is not merely a bungler of real wisdom but a disseminator of false wisdom. Already the air was full of all sorts of fads and fancies that appealed to the unthinking and the unwary. The Essenes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Epicureans, the Stoics, the Mithraists, the Gnostics, the Judaizers, the cult of emperor worship, with more or less distinctness were clamoring for a hearing. There were professional sophists who traveled over the country with patent solutions of all problems. Some appealed to the nervous or the neurotic, like Christian Science today; others to the ignorant, like Russellism or Mormonism. Paul will later discuss both speech and wisdom “as good things liable to grievous abuse” (Hort), in 1 Corinthians 1:5, 17; 2; and 3. The Call for the Wise Man (3:13a)