7 Nature and Genre
II. NATURE AND GENRE Several facets of the book of James need to be considered as we think about the kind of book that we have before us.13 First, the book’s opening words make clear that what James writes was sent by him to a particular audience in the form of a letter. The letter was a very broad literary category in the ancient world, encompassing everything from brief notes of information and request to long argumentative discourses. In addition, the particular content of a letter could take many different forms. The writer of a letter could take almost any kind of content, add to it an appropriate opening and/or closing, and send it off in the form of a letter to a particular audience. Two NT books illustrate the point very well. The ending of Hebrews reveals that the book was sent as a letter. Yet, as most scholars agree, the actual “form” of the book is a sermon. Similarly, the opening of Revelation shows that the material that follows was sent in the form of a letter. Yet that material itself takes the form of an apocalypse. James, then, is obviously a letter. But to identify the actual form of the contents of this letter requires a more careful examination of those contents. To begin, negatively, James does not include references to specific people or situations; all the issues he tackles are generic, the kinds of situations that could have arisen almost anywhere. At the same time, the ending of the book omits greetings, references to fellow workers, or travel plans—content that often marks NT (especially Pauline) letters. Also missing are references to specific people, places, or situations in the body of the letter. As we noted above, it was for these reasons that early Christians classified James as a “general” letter: one written to the church at large rather than to a specific church or group of churches.14 We will look at this question of audience further below. However, it seems relatively clear, both from the address of the letter—“the twelve tribes scattered among the nations”—and its content, that James writes to a large audience, probably including at least several assemblies of believers. The Letter of James therefore differs from Paul’s letters to individuals (Philemon, Timothy, Titus) and to specific churches (Rome, Corinth, etc.) and resembles most 13. For a survey of options on the genre of James, see L. L. Cheung, The Genre, Composition and Hermeneutics of James, Paternoster Biblical Monographs (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2006), 5–52. 14. A few modern scholars agree; see, e.g., M. Klein, “Ein vollkommenes Werk”: Voll kommenheit, Gesetz und Gericht als theologische Themen des Jakobusbriefes (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1995), 185–87; Vouga, 24–25. See also the discussion of the “diaspora letter” hypothesis below (p. 28).
