James, the brother of the Lord, the Galilaean, and the Jerusalem Zealot for the Law, could have gained such an acquaintance with the wisdom of the Orphic mysteries. But the expression 'the wheel of nature' may be fully and fairly explained without having recourse to any such needless supposition, or to an acquaintance with any such wisdom; see note below in loco.

Moreover, this obscure 'James,' even if he could have carried weight in his own neighbourhood, as Pfleiderer apparently supposes, must not only have been a great unknown,' but it is difficult to believe that when, as time went on, it was desired to bestow upon his Epistle further authority, no title should be fixed upon for its author more illustrious than that of 'James the servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.' Attention has already been drawn to the recurring difficulty which meets us in this modest title. It has indeed been recently suggested by Grafe, in criticising Pfleiderer, that this title may have been assumed out of pure modesty, just as the writer of Jude calls himself 'Jude, the brother of James.' But the natural and simple explanation is that Jude could so style himself, because there could be no doubt as to the personality and authority of the brother whom he named.

Von Soden seems doubtful as to date, but he is inclined to adopt a period after the Domitian persecution, or possibly a period within the first thirty years or so of the second century. But even in von Soden's remarks we may notice that he not only admits the high value and excellent tact of our Epistle, but that he also inclines to account for the opening words by supposing the existence of some kind of affinity between the unknown author and the head of the Church at Jerusalem. In this connection we naturally pass to von Soden's own hypothesis of the origin of St James's Epistle. He regards this unknown writer as a Jewish-Christian, fully acquainted with Jewish literature and thought, and anxious to help to rectify by his letter the improprieties existing in the Christian circles known to him. For this purpose he calls chiefly to his aid reminiscences of his own Jewish period, while in ch. i. and ii. there are also reminiscences of Jewish and Christian influences. Thus, out of the whole Epistle, only i. 2-4, 12, 18, 21, ii. 1, 5, 8, 14-26, iv. 1-6, 10, remain as the writer's own, all the rest is of Jewish origin. Two sections, iii. 1-18, iv. 11-v. 6, are complete in themselves, and have no point of agreement with Christian ideas or writings (Hand-Commentar, 3rd edit. p. 176). In all this von

Soden, who, as we have seen, dismisses Spitta's hypothesis, adopts one no less arbitrary. No one has pointed this out more clearly than Grafe', as also the unlikelihood that a man of such marked culture as 'James' should issue such an extraordinary compilation as that which this hypothesis demands. It is e.g. very difficult to suppose that in a perfectly coherent section such as ii. 1-13, those verses 1, 5, 8, are to be ruled out as foreign elements.

Not less arbitrary than von Soden's is Harnack's description of the Epistle. It is, according to his account of it, wanting in all arrangement, it is a disconnected collection of prophecies, exhortations, instructions; the images follow each other in a kind of kaleidoscope; it is full of paradoxes from beginning to end; in some parts it reads like the very words of Jesus, deep and profound, in others it breathes the spirit of the old prophets; now it is written in the style of classical Greek, now in the style of a theological combatant. But in spite of all this it exhibits, like certain Old Testament prophetical books, a marked unity amidst so much diversity. The writer of all these different addresses originally composed them in no way with a view to the connection in which they are now found. He wrote about 125 A.D., and then, after his death, these addresses were edited, and finally published under the name of James at the end of the second or the beginning of the third century (Chron. I. 487).

But in the first place this account of the letter is as paradoxical as its contents are affirmed to be, since it attributes to the same document both unity and the utter want of it. In the second place we have to imagine some teacher of the second century who combines within himself all that Harnack requires; the unknown teacher is described as a powerful personality, bringing out of his treasures the old and the new, and deriving his homiletical addresses not less from Jewish adages than from the discourses of Jesus and the wisdom of the Greeks. He must indeed have been a wonderful personage who united in himself all the varying and often dissimilar elements of culture which Harnack's hypothesis demands. Once more, Harnack entirely fails to account for the ascription of the letter to 'James the servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ' (see further below).

Jülicher speaks more positively than von Soden for a late date, viz. 125-150 A.D., while he admits that there is much in the letter

1 Die Stellung des Jakobusbriefes, p. 45, and for further criticisms see Encycl. Bibl. 11. 2325, and Theologische Rundschau, 1. 1901.

which points to James 'the first bishop of Jerusalem' as the author. But when Jülicher, following Pfleiderer, proceeds to describe the Epistle of St James as the least Christian document in the N.T. and asks how such a writing could have been a product of primitive Christianity, we may fairly answer, how could such a document have been a product of any later period? (Einleitung, p. 143). The more we prove the absence of Christian phraseology or allusions, the more difficult does it become to suppose that a writer, who had behind him the Gospels, as Jülicher admits, would have contented himself with such scanty references to the Person and Work of the Lord. St Clement of Rome writes his letter to Corinth at the close of the first century. He too appeals like 'James' to the Old Testament examples of piety and endurance, but he refers in the same breath, and ever and again, to the blood of the Lord as the means of redemption; he refers definitely to the words of the Lord Jesus, and he speaks definitely of the same Lord as being made the firstfruits of the resurrection when God raised Him from the dead. We have already seen how Hermas, writing later, and it would seem in a document which clearly belongs to the same Roman Church, makes repeated references to the work of the Son of God.

But it may be further noted that while von Soden is inclined to regard Rome as the place of composition, Jülicher inclines against the claims of Rome, and expresses himself as entirely in the dark', while both critics are united in condemning the theory of Harnack, viz. that in the case of the Epistle bearing the name of James, and in the Epistles bearing the names of St Peter and St Jude, the name of an Apostle was interpolated in the opening words of the address to give prestige and authority to the writing. It is sufficient to remark as against this hypothesis that at least one other Catholic Epistle, the First Epistle of St John, was accepted by the Church without the recommendation of any name at all. And the more we emphasise the desire of the Church to bestow authority upon the document, the more inexplicable becomes its contentment with interpolating the simple title 'James.'

The most recent German critic of the Epistle of St James is

1 Grafe and others fix upon Rome because they assume that a likeness of spirit exists between the Epistle of James on the one hand, and Hebrews, the Pastoral Epistles, Clement of Rome, Hermas on the other, and that therefore all these writings were composed in the same place.

2 Dr Sanday, Inspiration, p. 381, and to the same effect von Soden, HandCommentar, III. (2nd part), p. 176, 3rd edit.

Dr Grafe, of Bonn'. His work has gained the high praise of Schürer, and some references have already been made to it.

Dr Grafe does his best to minimise any indications of Jewish Christianity in the readers of the Epistle, and we have seen how he deals with the word 'synagogue,' and the expression 'Lord of hosts (p. xi.). He is also at pains to minimise any references to our Lord, and even in v. 7 he declines to say whether the coming of the Lord' refers to God or to Christ. One would have thought that the phraseology in v. 7 and 8 was 'unmistakably Christian,' 'the coming,' i.e. the presence of the Lord,' as Dr O. Cone frankly admits, Encycl. Bibl. 11. 2325. Grafe asks how the name 'James' became attached to the Epistle, and he cannot get away from some association in the choice with James, the brother of the Lord, the head of the Church at Jerusalem. The other personages bearing the name of James cannot be considered, because they so quickly vanish out of the history. It is not so inconceivable, however, that a later writer should prefix the name 'James' to his letter, since his strong moral spirit had a certain affinity to that of the famous James. But in what this affinity could consist it is somewhat difficult to see when Dr Grafe tells us in the same breath that the letter is in no way animated by a Jewish or Jewish-Christian spirit. It can scarcely be affirmed that such a spirit was wanting in the illustrious James of Jerusalem, rather was it one of his chief characteristics. In this writer, according to Grafe, we have a man who does his best to warn his fellow-Christians at a time when the Church was becoming a Catholic Church against growing worldliness and laxity, and throughout his writing he breathes the spirit of Jesus, Who demanded of His disciples not the saying 'Lord, Lord,' but the doing of His will. And so although the writer preaches to us nothing of the work of salvation wrought by Christ, and has no word to say as to the significance of the blood of Jesus, his Epistle still edifies the Church to-day.

But if this is to be taken as an account of the writer's object, it is difficult to see why such a short Epistle full of earnest exhortation should not have met a practical need of the Christian life in the first century no less than in the second. In every age the Church has had need to 'remember still the words, and from whence they came, "Not he that repeateth the name, but he that doeth the will."

1 Die Stellung und Bedeutung des Jakobusbriefes, in der Entwickelung des Urchristentums; 1904.

Grafe would place the Epistle possibly as late as the second or third decade of the second century, and he would do so mainly because he holds that Hebrews, Clement of Rome, the Pastoral Epistles, and Hermas, are all the product of the same spiritual atmosphere. This conclusion cannot be said to be very satisfactory or illuminating, although it is a short and easy way of getting rid of difficulties raised by evidence of priority or of dependence.

We cannot pass from Dr Grafe's name without noting that his statements have received a prompt reply from the veteran B. Weiss in the Neue kirchliche Zeitschrift for May and June, 1904. Dr Weiss points out how frequently the expressions used in our Epistle can only be explained of unbelieving Jews, e.g. ii. 7 (cf. v. 3, 5). In this connection he lays stress upon the concrete relations of life which the letter presupposes, upon the peculiar faults which it blames, upon its vivid representation, so true to our knowledge of the social life of Palestine, of the strife between the rich and the poor, and he further shows that the judgment-seats, ii. 6, are not those of Gentile but of Jewish courts. As in his Introduction to the N.T. Dr Weiss strongly defends the address, i. 1, against any symbolical interpretation, and he urges the unfairness of supposing that we have no knowledge of any Jewish-Christian communities in the Diaspora, and that no such communities existed, in face of such a statement as 1 Cor. ix. 5, according to which Peter and the other Apostles and the brethren of the Lord made missionary journeys, in which it is absurd to suppose that their own countrymen were neglected.

In dwelling upon the Christology of the Epistle Dr Weiss rightly emphasises how much is presupposed in ii. 1, and how arbitrary it is of Dr Grafe to insist upon retaining this passage as against Spitta, whilst at the same time he refuses to refer v. 7 to Christ as the Judge. The force of such passages as i. 18, 25, is also dwelt upon, and Dr Weiss rightly refuses to depreciate the Christianity of a writer who could so express himself.

Other references to these valuable articles will be found elsewhere, and it must be sufficient to add that they present us with an admirable summary of the reasons for attributing a very early date to the Epistle before us'.

The objection that 'a simple Galilaean' could not have shown such a knowledge of Greek as the author manifests is fairly met by Dr Weiss, and attention is drawn to the fact that the love

1 The reply of Dr Weiss may now be obtained in a cheap and separate form.