II. 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”: Vollkommenheit, 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).

closely 1 Peter and 1 John, both of which are also directed to wide audiences. James is therefore more a “literary” than a personal letter; the closest parallel to it in the NT is perhaps 1 John.15

Turning to the positive, then, four key features of James need to be considered when identifying its form and nature. First and most prominent (as we noted above) is the strong tone of pastoral exhortation. His purpose is clearly not so much to inform as to command, exhort, and encourage. Yet James issues his commands, for the most part, in a tone of tender pastoral concern, addressing his readers fifteen times as “my brothers and sisters” or “my beloved brothers and sisters.” A second well-known feature of James is the looseness of its structure. The author moves quickly from topic to topic, and the logical relationship of the topics is often not at all clear. Recent scholarship, influenced by modern literary techniques and insights, has reopened the question of structure with a vengeance, and we will consider this matter more carefully later. But the very number of suggestions for the outline of the letter betrays the point we are making here: the letter has no obvious structure, nor even a clearly defined theme. Moral exhortations follow closely upon one another without connections and without much logical relationship.

James’s extensive use of metaphors and illustrations is another feature that arrests the attention of the reader (see, again, above). These images are universal in their appeal and go a long way toward accounting for the popularity of James among ordinary readers. A final striking feature of James is the degree to which it borrows from traditional teaching.16 James depends more than any other NT author on the teaching of Jesus.17 It is not that James directly quotes Jesus—although Jas 5:12 is virtually a quotation of Jesus’s teaching about oaths in Matt 5:33–37. It is, rather, that he weaves Jesus’s teaching into the very fabric of his own instruction. Again and again, the closest parallels to James’s wording are found in the teaching of Jesus—especially as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew.18 And the topics he addresses as well as the particular slant that he takes

15. See esp. F. O. Francis, “The Form and Function of the Opening and Closing Paragraphs of James and 1 John,” ZNW 61 (1970): 110–26; P. H. Davids, “The Epistle of James in Modern Discussion,” ANRW 2.25.5 (1988): 3628–29. 16. For surveys and discussion, see Johnson, 34–46; R. Bauckham, James: Wisdom of James, Disciple of Jesus the Sage (London: Routledge: 1999), 74–111; Painter and deSilva, 34–39. 17. See esp. D. B. Deppe, “The Sayings of Jesus in the Paraenesis of James” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 1990). 18. Allison, 59–61, thinks that there is a real possibility that James has used Matthew; however, if I am right about the date of James (see below), that is impossible.

on these topics mimic Jesus’s own emphasis. The author of the letter seems to have been so soaked in the atmosphere and specifics of Jesus’s teaching that he can reflect them almost unconsciously. As Richard Bauckham puts it, “[James] does not repeat it; he is inspired by it.”19 The OT also figures prominently in James. To be sure, he does not often formally quote the OT (only in 2:8 [Lev 19:18]; 2:23 [Gen 15:6]; and 4:5 [a summary of OT teaching]). But his language is thoroughly permeated with OT ways of speaking, and he regularly appeals to OT people and stories (e.g., the history of Abraham [2:21–24]; Rahab [2:25]; Job [5:11]).20 The letter also betrays a striking number of similarities with the words and emphases of a certain segment of Hellenistic Judaism, represented to some extent by the Alexandrian philosopher Philo, but especially by the apocryphal book Sirach and the pseudepigraphical book Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.21

Taking these features, and others, into account, scholars have sought to give a specific classification to the material in James. James Hardy Ropes, writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, argued that James was a diatribe, a colloquial genre used to instruct general audiences and which featured short sentences, rhetorical questions, conditional sentences, and repetition of material.22 However, while James certainly uses some of the techniques of diatribe, the letter as a whole cannot be classified as a diatribe. In the mid-nineteenth century, Martin Dibelius proposed a genre identification that became more widely accepted: paraenesis. This genre, Dibelius argued, features exactly some of those features that characterize James: references to traditional material, strung together without much structure, used to exhort a general audience. Paraenesis can be found in a wide variety of ancient sources, including some NT epistles (cf. Rom 12–13; Heb 13).23 This genre identification has problems, however. For one thing, scholars since Dibelius have generally seen much more logical structure in the letter than he did. Some parts of James do indeed

19. Bauckham, James, 82; see his discussion on 81–111. 20. The legal stipulations in Lev 19 appear to have been especially influential. See my comments on several passages and the summary in Cheung, Genre, Composition and Hermeneutics, 101–4. 21. For a survey of literature in the Greco-Roman world that has parallels with James, see J. R. Strange, The Moral World of James: Setting the Epistle in Its Greco-Roman and Judaic Environments, SBL 136 (New York: Lang, 2010). 22. Ropes, 10–16. 23.Dibelius, 5–11. L. J. Perdue suggests a slightly different list of characteristics of paraenesis; “Paraenesis and the Epistle of James,” ZNW 72 (1981): 241–56. Failure to agree on the characteristics of paraenesis suggests that we may not be dealing with a well-defined genre.

move rapidly from one topic to another (e.g., 1:1–18); others, however, develop a single topic at some length (e.g., 2:1–13, 14–26; 3:1–11). Moreover, paraenesis is itself so broad that it could apply to an extraordinary variety of material and therefore loses much of its helpfulness as a classification.24 More fundamentally, as is the case with diatribe, paraenesis may be more accurately termed a form or style that an author uses rather than a genre.25

Perhaps the most popular recent option for the genre of James is wisdom.26 James refers directly to wisdom in a central passage (3:13–18; cf. 1:5), and the brief, direct, and practical admonitions found at many places in the letter resemble the style of wisdom books from the OT (e.g., Proverbs) and the intertestamental period (e.g., Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon). At the same time, the practical ethical focus of James is similar to wisdom literature, and some of the themes of that literature are also prominent in James (e.g., speech, dissension, wealth, and poverty). This is not, however, to dismiss paraenesis; it could be viewed as a style within the wisdom genre.27 However, it is difficult to make “wisdom” the central concept of the letter. This, of course, does not mean we have to dismiss wisdom as the genre of the letter: genre has more to do with style than with substance. Even here, however, there are problems with viewing James as a wisdom book. As we noted above, while the letter at places resembles the series of short, pithy sayings we find in books such as Proverbs, it elsewhere develops topics at some length. Moreover, the style of some passages (e.g., 4:4–10; 5:1–6) is much more similar to the prophets than to wisdom authors. It is better, then, to characterize wisdom as a style James uses in his letter rather than the genre of the letter.28

24. E.g., F. Hahn attributes “paraenesis” to James but defines it very broadly: it presupposes baptism/conversion, it is directed to believers, and it embodies a central concern for the love command. Die Vielfalt des Neuen Testaments, vol. 1 of Theologie des Neuen Testaments, 3rd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 395–96. 25. E.g., Perdue, “Paraenesis”; W. H. Wachob, The Voice of Jesus in the Social Rhetoric of James, SNTSMS 106 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 36–52. 26. See, e.g., Frankemölle, 80–88; W. R. Baker, Personal Speech-Ethics in the Epistle of James, WUNT 2/68 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck), 7–12; B. Witherington, Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 238–47; D. A. Hagner, The New Testament: A Historical and Theological Introduction (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 671–76; Bauckham, James, 29–60; Cheung, Genre, Composition and Hermeneutics, 5–52. 27. J. G. Gammie, “Paraenetic Literature: Toward the Morphology of a Secondary Genre,” Semeia 50 (1990): 43–51; Hartin, 21–80; D. R. Lockett, Purity and Worldview in the Epistle of James, LNTS 36 (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 76–92. 28. See, e.g., K. H. Jobes, Letters to the Church: A Survey of Hebrews and the General Epistles (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 162.