James 2:1—17
The first three books in the Christian Testament are known as the “synoptic gospels,” gospel in that they proclaim the good news about the life and ministry of Jesus, synoptic in that they tell that story in roughly the same way.
This is a little misleading. For one thing, Luke wrote a single work which was broken into two parts and separated in the Biblical canon, so that we have Luke’s gospel, then the Gospel traditionally attributed to John, then Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. Luke-Acts is meant to be one work, and should be read that way.
Also, only Matthew and Luke have Nativity narratives, and they are wildly different, despite what we remember from centuries of one mashed-up version in our children’s pageants.
Finally, the authors of Matthew are busy trying to turn Jesus into a new Moses, a covenant maker, so they re-arrange some things, re-locate others, and have that whole bit about dead toddlers and the flight to Egypt.
So maybe we should call the three the “sort of” synoptic gospels.
Scholars agree that both Matthew and Luke draw on Mark as a source. They also both use a source we have lost, one that we call Q after the German word for “source.” We know this because both gospels contain parallel text not contained in Mark.
Maybe one day we’ll dig up a copy of Q, something that really happened when the Gospel According to Thomas was discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945.
Mark does not claim to be a firsthand witness to the life and ministry of Jesus. There is a remarkable third century reference to a second century document which claims Mark was a follower of Peter after Jesus was murdered. In the same way, Luke is writing as a historian, and is associated with Paul, so he also does not claim to have witnessed the ministry of Jesus.
But the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew is represented as a firsthand account. The Matthew of the title is Matthew the tax collector who becomes a disciple. On the plus side, as a tax collector he was likely one of the few disciples who was literate. On the negative side, why would someone who was actually there need to draw on Mark, a secondary source? Even if we throw out the consensus on Q, assuming that Luke is using Matthew as a source, we still haven’t solved the problem of Mark.
The answer is simple. The Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew was not written by Matthew, former tax collector and disciple of Jesus. It is a pseudographic work, which is to say a work attributed to someone who did not actually write it.
This was a common practice in ancient times, before copyright, before journalism, before history was transformed from communal story telling to academic discipline.
Moses did not write the Torah. Much of the Book of Isaiah was written long after Isaiah Bin Amoz was dead. Several of the letters attributed to Paul were not written by Paul.
Most of you know this, but it bears repeating. Biblical texts were written, redacted, and accepted into the canon in very specific historic contexts and those contexts matter.
This morning, we are going to wrestle with how the failure to place scripture in context has influenced Protestant Christianity, and how we might move beyond a pernicious false binary.
The Epistle of James does not specify which James supposedly wrote it, for there are at least two prominent men of that name in the Christian Testament. The first, and better known, is James the son of Zebedee and brother of John, the two known as the Thunder Brothers. Luke tells us in the 12th chapter of Acts that this James was executed on Herod’s orders in 44 C.E.
The other James is the brother of Jesus, who became leader of the church in Jerusalem and played a key role in the council that authorized Paul’s mission to the Gentiles, those who were not Jewish. Since a letter is mentioned in that context, tradition links this James to the epistle.
You will not be surprised to learn that James, the brother of Jesus, did not write the letter. The author of the letter writes in the sophisticated Koine Greek of an educated native speaker of that language, while James was a Galilean craftsman who spoke Aramaic as a first language, likely had little education, and may well have been illiterate, like 95% of the population.
Whoever wrote the letter was in conversation with the letters of Paul, both authentic and pseudographic, that were in circulation in the early church. This is true about scripture generally. It is always part of a conversation that includes other texts. When it comes to scripture, 1+1=3.
In the case of this epistle attributed to James, it isn’t just in conversation with Paul. It is in contention with him. The false binary is between faith and works.
Paul, like all coverts, pushes back against who he was before, and for Paul, that was a Pharisee. I’m not interested in making Pharisees the bad guys in the way the authors of the gospels sometimes do, an interpretation that has fueled Christian antisemitism. Jesus pushed back against his tradition as well, at least as reported in the gospels, against the Pharisees, but also against the Scribes, functionally the lawyers and jurists for the Temple system, and by extension, against the Jewish Council, the Sanhedrin that managed intra-Jewish affairs with the blessing of the Roman occupier. For those more familiar with 20th century history, the Jewish Council or Sanhedrin was much like Vichy France, mostly powerless collaborators with a foreign invasion.
Jesus’s critique of competing religious sects in his time, a critique shared by other Jewish prophets, was that they followed the letter of the Law while missing the spirit of the Law, were showy in their religion in order to draw public praise but failed in mercy and compassion. When Jesus heals on the sabbath, he is criticized for breaking the Law. God, according to Jesus, wants way more than the Law. God wants justice and love and self-sacrifice.
Paul, who never met Jesus, picked up some of this spirit of selflessness and service, though he shifted the emphasis to belief in Jesus. This is evident in his battle to have Gentiles who followed Jesus exempted from the complex and strict Jewish religious law. It is evident in the way he pits faith against works, by which he means not only outward religious observance but also all faithful action. For Paul, what you believe is absolutely everything. He still calls for outward morality, it just isn’t as important.
The unknown author of James is saying “Of course it matters what you do!”
Fifteen centuries later, the Roman Church in Europe had become exactly what Jesus criticized. There were good people in the Roman Church, like Francis of Assisi, just as there had been good Pharisees, like Nicodemus, but as a whole it had become corrupted and performative.
Martin Luther, leader of the Reformation in Germany, picked up on Paul’s read of faith vs. works, making it the center of his theology. Not surprisingly, Luther’s attacks on the Roman church also provided a strong foundation for renewed Christian antisemitism.
Protestants accepted this faith vs. works binary wholeheartedly. It conveniently allowed them to draw a line between their inward faith and their outward behavior, made possible colonization and slavery and neoliberal capitalism and even the very short step between inward “personal Jesus” religion and the rise of the Nazi Party in Luther’s homeland.
Faith and action are a virtuous cycle. Faith as some abstract inward thing is absolute hogwash.
James might not have written the epistle, but whoever did was spot on, something the Park Church has known since it was founded. Paul famously says eloquent speech is just noise if there is no love. James says love is meaningless if there is no action. It was a call to action that led a group of “good trouble” causing Abolitionists to break away from First Presbyterian here in Elmira. We came to call this approach to faith lived into the world “practical Christianity.”
I cannot know what you believe. I’m not even always certain what I believe. God is amazing and mysterious and this creation is huge and I am, as the classic children’s book proclaims, a bear of very little brain. And that’s okay. Because Pooh has joy and wonder and most of all, community.
I can see what you do. And I can do good in the world. And maybe, just maybe, there is some truth to that saying “fake it until you make it,” because I believe if you keep doing justice, if you keep loving the world even when it does not always love you back, if you keep walk humbly with the mysterious holy that is walking with you, you will come to believe, not in some ancient creed, but in what is alive, already, in you.
The “Good Book” is a good book, but the Word of God is sitting there with you in the pews, is out there at the bake sale and applying for a grant and protesting in the park and letting the young mother with the flailing screaming toddler go ahead of you in line.
Live love, be loved, this day and always.
Amen.