The Messiah Jesus in the Mythic World of James

I It has often been observed, sometimes with consternation, that there is little in the Letter of James that could not have been written by a non-Christian Jew. Beyond its spare references to Jesus, concepts that form central pillars in the mythic thought of other early Christian works are not obviously important in James. Most notably, James lacks any reference to Jesus' death and resurrection (let alone the formers atoning significance), while allusions to the closely related ideas of the Holy Spirit1 and new creation or rebirth2 are controversial at best. Especially when seen alongside its infamous insistence on the importance of "works" as opposed to "faith alone" for attaining "righteousness" (2:14-26), these omissions raise fundamental questions about James's thought and particularly about the nature of the letter's interest in the figure twice referred to as "the Lord Jesus Christ" (1:1; 2:1). Interpreters have generally explained these perceived lacunae in various ways. Several interpreters from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century found in this silence sufficient cause to posit that James was not originally a Christian composition at all and thus to excise its two references to Jesus as the work of a later, Christian hand.3 When the text is approached in this way, the problem simply evaporates: the figure of Jesus Christ plays no integral role in the thought of the work as originally composed. With no textual support for such excisions and ample evidence, on the contrary, of the letter s composition within a Christian milieu, this position has found few advocates.4 A second approach to the perceived problem is to deny that any coherent mythic or theological system informs the text at all. This approach is associated particularly with Martin Dibelius, whose influential commentary on James presents a running argument that James is simply a collection of savings, admonitions, and treatises of diverse origin.5 Dibelius contends that one cannot legitimately combine the various "isolated texts" that are assembled here "for the purpose of constructing a theology." The Letter of James, Dibelius states flatly, "has no 'theology,'" let alone a consistent and developed conception of the significance of Jesus. Since the presence or absence of this or that concept may only be accidental in such a collection, the lack of reference to any given idea "does not justify the assertion" that it has "no value" for the author. Dibelius thus concluded that, while the author himself likely presupposes a theology of some sort, "we cannot determine with certainty how much [he] presupposes" given the composite and eclectic nature of the text he produced.6 Though Dibelius's commentary has enjoyed enormous influence,7 this explanation, too, has been largely abandoned in recent decades. The initial indications of a significant paradigm shift came as several scholars began reading James as a "wisdom writing"-a model that allowed interpreters to posit an integral "wisdom theology" even while accepting the essential features of Dibelius's literary analysis.8 More fundamentally important in this respect, however, have been two broader trends in NT studies. With the general shift, since the 1960s, toward reading strategies that emphasize coherence and connections in texts-redaction criticism, rhetorical criticism, and, more recently, literary and structuralist approaches-has come a steady erosion in the hegemony of Dibelius's atomistic, form-critical approach to James.9 At the same time, the intensive study of the Synoptic sayings source that John S. Kloppenborg's pioneering Formation of Q inspired has raised important questions regarding the possibility of early Christian kerygmata that were not centered on Jesus' death and resurrection.10 Whatever the precise reasons, the prospect of delineating the basic features of James's religious thought is being taken with increasing seriousness in the ever-expanding literature on the letter. …