perseusomega9 wrote: ↑Sun Sep 13, 2020 8:21 am
Irish1975 wrote: ↑Sat Sep 12, 2020 8:37 am
The epistle of James isn’t railing specifically against those misreadings, but instead wants to challenge any reading of Paul that makes faith into an excuse not to live a holy life—a common concern in the post-Pauline epistles generally. We only have to think of the Reformation to see that Paul’s writings did in fact inspire people to take justification and the gift of the holy spirit and run with it into “unholy” directions. That Luke would have seen the danger here, and used the apostolic authority of James to set a limit, is entirely consistent with Luke’s usual MO.
How I'm reading this is you are saying the purpose of James (as a mask for Luke) is to set a limit to future readings of Paul that haven't taken place yet?
Well that’s not what I’m saying. There’s a lot more going on in James than just 2:14-26. But as for Luke’s possible reasons for that passage, who knows? He might have been aiming it at contemporary followers of Paul that he opposed. Or maybe, as I suspect, Luke was uncomfortable with certain aspects of Paul’s teachings. Both are possible, and likely, given what we see in Acts (a very toned down Paul), and in another of the general epistles:
2 Peter 3:16
and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation; just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you, 16 as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction..
The author of 2 Peter (very likely in the circle of Luke) expresses discomfort both with Paul’s own writings, and with how they are distorted by some who read them. And the two are deeply connected, of course. Paul’s words wouldn’t be so easy to distort unless there were something dangerous in them, like a fire that burns if you get too close.
It makes sense to suppose that a similar concern underlies James 2:14-26.