The Expositor's Bible: The General Epistles of St. James and St. JudePlummer, Alfred
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The General Epistles of St. James and St. Jude
Plummer, Alfred
Bible. James -- Commentaries; Bible. Jude -- Commentaries
Dr. Salmon justly observes, "To a disciple of Baur there is no more
disappointing document than this Epistle of James. Here, if anywhere
in the New Testament, he might expect to find evidence of anti-Pauline
rancour. There is what looks like flat contradiction between this
Epistle and the teaching of St. Paul.... But that opposition to Paul
which, on a superficial glance, we are disposed to ascribe to the
Epistle of James, disappears on a closer examination. I postpone for
the moment the question whether we can suppose that James intended to
contradict Paul; but whether he intended it or not, he has not really
done so; he has denied nothing that Paul has asserted, and asserted
nothing that a disciple of Paul would care to deny. On comparing the
language of James with that of Paul, all the distinctive expressions
of the latter are found to be absent from the former. St. Paul's
thesis is that a man is justified not by works of the law, but by the
faith of Jesus Christ. James speaks only of works without any mention
of the law, and of faith without any mention of Jesus Christ, the
example of faith which he considers being merely the belief that there
is one God. In other words, James is writing not in the interests of
Judaism, but of morality. Paul taught that faith in Jesus Christ was
able to justify a man uncircumcised and unobservant of the Mosaic
ordinances.... For this Pauline teaching James not only has no word of
contradiction, but he gives no sign of ever having heard of the
controversy which, according to Baur, formed the most striking feature
in the early history of the Church.... Whatever embarrassment the
apparent disagreement between the Apostles has caused to orthodox
theologians is as nothing in comparison with the embarrassment caused
to a disciple of Baur by their fundamental agreement."[60]
We may, therefore, safely abandon a theory which involves three such
difficulties. It assigns a date to the Epistle utterly incompatible
with its contents. It makes the writer warn Jewish Christians against
teaching which they, of all Christians, were least likely to find
attractive. And after all, the warning is futile; for the writer's own
teaching is fundamentally the same as that which it is supposed to
oppose and correct. Besides all which, we may say with Reuss that this
Tübingen criticism is mere baseless ingenuity. It "overlooks the
unique originality of the Epistle;" and to ascribe to the writer of it
"any ulterior motives at all is simply a useless display of
acuteness."[61]
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