James 1.1 and 2.1.

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John2
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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

Post by John2 »

Ben wrote:
According to Josephus, the Essenes forbade the taking of oaths, as well.
I've heard this somewhere too but as I take a fresh look at it I'm seeing things like this:

Taylor, The Essenes, the Scrolls, and the Dead Sea:
A newcomer [to the Essenes, according to Josephus] was not accepted without testing, and had to submit to a strict entry procedure ... consisting of a year of probation followed by another two years, after which he had to swear many oaths (Josephus, War 2:137-42).

https://books.google.com/books?id=C3dYC ... us&f=false
And this:
And before he is allowed to touch their common food, he is obliged to take tremendous oaths, that, in the first place, he will exercise piety towards God, and then that he will observe justice towards men, and that he will do no harm to any one, either of his own accord, or by the command of others; that he will always hate the wicked, and be assistant to the righteous; that he will ever show fidelity to all men, and especially to those in authority, because no one obtains the government without God's assistance; and that if he be in authority, he will at no time whatever abuse his authority, nor endeavor to outshine his subjects either in his garments, or any other finery; that he will be perpetually a lover of truth, and propose to himself to reprove those that tell lies; that he will keep his hands clear from theft, and his soul from unlawful gains; and that he will neither conceal anything from those of his own sect, nor discover any of their doctrines to others, no, not though anyone should compel him so to do at the hazard of his life. Moreover, he swears to communicate their doctrines to no one any otherwise than as he received them himself; that he will abstain from robbery, and will equally preserve the books belonging to their sect, and the names of the angels [or messengers]. These are the oaths by which they secure their proselytes to themselves.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Josephus_on_the_Essenes
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John2
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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

Post by John2 »

Ah, here it is (War 2.8.6, in the link just above the above citation):
... whatsoever they say also is firmer than an oath; but swearing is avoided by them, and they esteem it worse than perjury for they say that he who cannot be believed without [swearing by] God is already condemned.
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Ben C. Smith
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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

Post by Ben C. Smith »

It sounds like maybe they were supposed to take one final oath, a vow of initiation, and then all further oaths were forbidden.
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John2
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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

Post by John2 »

It sounds like maybe they were supposed to take one final oath, a vow of initiation, and then all further oaths were forbidden.
I agree. That makes sense, except for the fact that it essentially takes away from the Torah, which seems weird for an ostensibly Torah-true sect to do.
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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

Post by Nathan »

With respect to the question of James' author, I would just mention that James has several turns of phrase that suggest a Jewish authorship. Ken has already noted above, albeit dismissively, James' reference to "Abraham our father" (2:21), which is a very common Jewish way of referring to the biblical patriarchs. Rabbinic literature has innumerable references to "Abraham our father," "Jacob our father," and so on.

James 5:7 speaks of "the early and late rains." Philip Blackman notes in his translation of the Mishnah (vol. 1, p. 125):
The Palestine rains are (i) מלקוש, late rain ...; and (ii) יורה (or מורה), early rain or soaking rain ...
There's also some overlap with a (comparatively late) Midrash. The Midrash Proverbs suggests (along with James 2:10) that breaking a single commandment is tantamount to violating the entire Torah: "you will find that you have transgressed all the commandments of the Torah" (Mid. Prov. 1:10). Elsewhere the same Midrash encourages students to make "yes mean yes and no mean no" (19:1), obviously reminiscent of James 5:12 (and of course Matthew 5:37): "your yes is to be yes, and your no, no, so that you may not fall under judgment."
John2
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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

Post by John2 »

It's been awhile since I've read it so I thought I'd check out what good ol' Matthew, James and Didache has to say about James 5:12 and Mt. 5:34 and found this (footnote 25 on pages 325-326; and I don't want to reproduce the Greek so you'll have to click the link to see it):
Matt 5:33-37 has a parallel in Jas 5:12 but without the antithetic format. The first part of the premise in Matt 5:33-37 refers to swearing false oaths (5:33a), which is surpassed in the first part of the antithesis (5:34a) in the form of an apodictic command consisting of a negative infinitive ... Similar wording in a present imperative construction is found in Jas 5:12a ... While the premise 5:33a emphasizes that one should not swear a false oath, the first part of the antithesis in 34a warns not to swear at all. Matt 5:37a continues this negative prohibition with a positive demand: "Let your yes be yes and your no no." The clauses in Matt 5:33a, 34a and 37a all deal with an oath by which one affirms or denies having done something. This call for honesty is found with even more clarity in Jas 5:12c. The same passage of Matt 5:33-37, however, also expresses an appeal to the faithfulness of one's word. The second part of the premise (5:33b) is related to keeping one's vows made before God, a command that appears to link up with the second element of the antithesis (5:34b-36). There is a shift in diction and connotation here because the thought of vows is loosely connected to the heart of the antithesis in 5:33a, 34a, 37a. Since these promissory oaths (5:33b, 34b-36) are clearly intrusive in the original context of the passage, they probably represent a later interpolation. Was this material inserted by Matthew? It is not likely since unambiguous traces of a similar secondary extension is found in the same context in Jas 5:12b where it says "either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath" (cf. Matt 5:34, 35: "neither by heaven ... nor by earth ... nor by Jerusalem"). James shows familiarity with both the prohibition of swearing a false oath and the promissory oaths, which implies that the process of combining the two must have taken place in the pre-Matthean tradition.

https://books.google.com/books?id=CkRmO ... ut&f=false


Lots to chew on here.
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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

Post by John2 »

I took another look at Mt. 5:33-37 and it does seem like it would make more sense if it said "falsely" like in the Shem Tov Hebrew Matthew.
Again you have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.’ But I tell you, do not swear [falsely] an oath at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.
As the link I gave above about this variant says:
Jesus' criticisms imply the Pharisaic quibbling with Lev. 19:12 led the Pharisees to sanction false oaths as long as not in God's name. Implied from Jesus' criticisms is that the Pharisees obviously said Lev. 19:12 meant one could falsely swear even if you invoked objects closely associated with God, like the Temple. You supposedly would transgress the command only when God's name is actually used ... Jesus corrected them, saying `do not swear falsely at all,' whether by the temple or anything else. The Greek translation inadvertently dropped the word falsely. This led us to misapprehend Jesus' meaning.

Then Gordon explains the instruction ending `anything beyond this is evil' was an Hebraism used in the Original Testament to mean that anything beyond (added to) the Torah was evil.
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Ben C. Smith
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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

Post by Ben C. Smith »

John2 wrote: Thu Mar 22, 2018 7:18 pm I took another look at Mt. 5:33-37 and it does seem like it would make more sense if it said "falsely" like in the Shem Tov Hebrew Matthew.
Again you have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.’ But I tell you, do not swear [falsely] an oath at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.
As the link I gave above about this variant says:
Jesus' criticisms imply the Pharisaic quibbling with Lev. 19:12 led the Pharisees to sanction false oaths as long as not in God's name. Implied from Jesus' criticisms is that the Pharisees obviously said Lev. 19:12 meant one could falsely swear even if you invoked objects closely associated with God, like the Temple. You supposedly would transgress the command only when God's name is actually used ... Jesus corrected them, saying `do not swear falsely at all,' whether by the temple or anything else. The Greek translation inadvertently dropped the word falsely. This led us to misapprehend Jesus' meaning.

Then Gordon explains the instruction ending `anything beyond this is evil' was an Hebraism used in the Original Testament to mean that anything beyond (added to) the Torah was evil.
I think for that variant to work the text would have to have something about the name. Otherwise it comes across as: "You have heard it said, 'Do not swear falsely,' but lo, I say unto you, 'Do not swear falsely.'" There is no contrast.

The "falsely" looks to me like a clear case of (clumsily) disposing of the absolute prohibition. The saying went beyond the Torah, and the variant brought it back closer to the Torah.
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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

Post by Ben C. Smith »

John2 wrote: Thu Mar 22, 2018 11:11 am Ben wrote:
Would you answer my question about Matthew and Mark in the same way? Is it that they know Paul, too? What about John?

A parallel question for you is whether you think that Mary the mother of James and Joses, in Mark 15.40, 47; 16.1, is Jesus' mother.
I think Mark knew (at least of) Paul because I think he knew Peter, like Papias says. And I think whoever translated the original Hebrew Matthew into Greek and combined it with Mark may have known of Paul since the Hebrew Matthew seems to; perhaps they were an in-betweener like Mark and to some extent like Peter as well, meaning they were in between the Pauline and Jewish Christian camps and this was their motive for combining Matthew with Mark (and for translating it into Greek). I can't really prove any of that, it's just my guess.

That the author of the original Hebrew Matthew may have also at least known of Paul or was non- or anti-Pauline is argued by several scholars (notably Sim). As Zangenberg writes in his chapter "Matthew and James" in Matthew and His Christian Contemporaries:
... both writings [Matthew and James] have developed in a distinctly non-Pauline milieu, and even if they came into contact with ... positions that might or might not have been known to them as 'Pauline', they commented on them and rejected them on the basis of their own, independently grown convictions ... a common theological outlook and a common pool of semantic tools to express it clearly bind Matthew and James together. Matthew and James represent a type of Christianity that sees itself as a perfect way to fulfill the Law, in a way as 'perfect Judaism'.

https://books.google.com/books?id=_ALUA ... ne&f=false
I haven't done much research on the Gospel of John so I have no comment about that. And I'm not sure who Mary the mother of James and Joses is in Mark. I haven't given it much thought before but am curious to take a look at it now.

Regarding Luke/Acts and James, I think the smoking gun of their bias against James is that Mark mentions James as being Jesus' brother and Luke apparently chose not to mention it (unlike the Greek Matthew).
I have admitted and still admit that there is no smoking gun aimed against this reconstruction, which is very close to what I consider to be the mainstream option.

But what do you think of this alternative?
  1. James is the leader of a special group called "the brothers of the Lord." He is not related physically to Jesus, nor does he believe Jesus to be the Messiah. It is known as a conscious datum (and not merely by the lack of evidence to the contrary) that he does not believe in Jesus. He wields tremendous influence among Jewish sectarians (your Josephan Fourth Philosophy).
  2. The urge to make James a Christian in the tradition would have been intense, I imagine, given Paul's dealings with him and the reach of his influence. So some tradent(s) baptized him posthumously as a believer.
  3. At roughly the same time, some other tradent(s) thought that "brother of the Lord" meant "physical brother of Jesus," and brought Jesus into James' family accordingly.
  4. The above two moves were not made across the entire tradition equally and immediately. Some tradents (Luke, the authors of James and Jude, and Thomas) remained either uninformed or unconvinced that James was Jesus' physical brother, while other tradents (Matthew, Mark, John) remained uninformed or unconvinced that James was a believer and had to make out that the James in the triumvirate of Peter, James, and John was not actually the brother of Jesus; he was some other James (the son of Zebedee).
I imagine you will find my interpretation of "brother of the Lord" difficult, and that you will want to interpret Mark as standing, through Peter, closer to the original tradition than this theory would imply. Is that correct? Is there anything else?

This scenario would explain why, in your words, Luke "chose not to mention" that James was Jesus' brother: Luke was either not aware or not convinced that he was. Either his copy of Galatians lacked 1.18 (like some ancient copies apparently did) or Luke interpreted that line in the same way that my tentative reconstruction does; and it would be easy to assume that Jesus' brother James in Mark was a different James, since that was a pretty common name, especially given that Mark 15.40 calls him "James the Less" instead of something uniquely designating James of Jerusalem (James the Just or what have you).

ETA: In short, it seems possible to me that the authors/editors of our extant texts were not always sure which figures were the same and which were different, and they theorized on the matter as best they could given their biases, the same as we do given ours.
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Re: James 1.1 and 2.1.

Post by lsayre »

I can't add much sans to say that I'm riveted to this thread. Fascinating stuff here.
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