difficulty of regarding the two unmistakable Christian references (i. 1, ii. 1) as interpolations, and of believing that a writer who wished to transform a Jewish document into a Christian one would content himself with these additions', we should also bear in mind how much these two statements presuppose and involve. Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ; in this the writer is at one with the earliest Christian preaching; Jesus is Lord; in this the writer is at one with the earliest form of baptismal confession, 1 Cor. xii. 3. But these claims so full of significance for a Jew could scarcely have been entertained without some full and definite acquaintance with the facts upon which they were based. Further, this belief that Jesus was the Christ involved for the writer not only the acceptance of the fulfilment of the splendid prophecies of his nation in a despised and crucified blasphemer, not only the admission of certain historical facts, but an obligation to entire service and devotion (i. 1). And the writer, who thus speaks of himself in the same breath as the bondservant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, speaks of his readers as brethren, and not only so, but as brethren united with him not only in a common nationality but in a common faith; cf. ii. 1, 7, v. 7. In the same manner, the phrase 'the Lord of glory,' ii. 1, not only invests Jesus Christ with a Divine attribute, but carries with it a belief in the Ascension, and in the triumph over death and the grave. St Paul in an Epistle in which he emphasises his agreement with the other Apostles in the great facts of the Christian Creed, as e.g. the Resurrection, 1 Cor. xv. 1-11, takes occasion to speak of Jesus by the same title, 'the Lord of glory' (or rather 'of the glory,' 1 Cor. ii. 8), and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the phrase might have become a recognised title (for St Paul like St James introduces it without any explanation as an expression well known) of the Incarnate, Risen, and Ascended Lord (cf. John xvii. 5 and note in loco). Moreover, as St Paul introduces the title, which he only once uses, to point a significant contrast between the philosophy of the world, the wisdom which he encountered in the schools of Greek and Jew alike, and the philosophy of God, so St James introduces the same title with an immediate and very practical purpose. He would thus mark decisively and unmistakably the pettiness of all distinctions of human and social life in presence of the fact that every

1 The Sibyllines, e.g. are no true parallels, for in these cases, as Dr Moffatt points out, interpolations were made, not to give the writings a Christian appearance and colour, but to transform them into prophecies or corroborations of Christian truth, Historical N.T. p. 705, 2nd edit.

K.

b

Christian was enlisted in the service of One Who shared in the Divine and eternal glory. Thus the only two passages which contain direct Christian allusions help to remind us of a truth, which we should never forget, viz. that in the Epistle of St James we are dealing not with an elaborate argument, or with a philosophical treatise, but with a letter full of exhortations to meet practical needs and daily questions'.

From the same practical standpoint the writer plainly regards the future coming of the Lord, His 'Presence,' a word which we can scarcely hesitate to refer to Christ (v. 8, 9). In view of that event men were to gain both hope and patience. And not only is the Lord standing at the door; He is amongst them, ready to heal and to save (v. 14, 15). And thus the writer delivers a counsel, specially adapted to the pressing needs of trial and persecution, whilst he would raise the daily burden of suffering and sin by recalling men to the abiding power of 'the Name,' which still conferred both forgiveness and health no less than in the earliest days of the Church's life. Christ had promised to be with His Church 'all the days,' until the consummation of the age, when He would return as Judge ; and the faith of St James for things present and things to come is centred in a Divine Person, Jesus the Christ, in Whose presence there is neither rich nor poor, Who is the same Lord rich unto all who call upon Him; and that faith was not abstract or theoretical, it was not to be gauged by the number of times which its possessor named the name of Jesus, as if, as Reuss put it, his Christian convictions were a matter of arithmetic.

Nor is there any occasion to affirm that in the Epistle before us, and in the Sermon on the Mount, the Son of God is concealed, as it were, in the Prophet of Israel. In that Sermon it is too often forgotten that Jesus claims not only to be greater than Moses, not only to possess a supernatural power which He can impart to others, but to be the future Judge of mankind (Matt. vii. 21, 22). And so

1 Nösgen has well pointed out how much the references in St James, and in the other Epistles of the N.T., to the Gospels are evidently based upon practical motives, and introduced for practical purposes; but he also shows, not only the fulness of these references, but how much they presuppose, when we consider the epistolary character of the writings in question: Neue Jahrbücher für deutsche Theologie, 1895.

2 Even if there is no allusion to any of our Lord's miracles (see however note on ii. 19), the Epistle was undoubtedly written at a time when miraculous powers were still working in the Church, and these powers were the result of the Divine energy of Christ, and successfully maintained in obedience to His commands, v. 14, 15.

too, in this Epistle of St James, it is too often forgotten that while Elijah, the great prophet of the Old Testament, is a man of like passions with ourselves,' Jesus is the 'Lord of glory,' the arbiter of human destiny, the bestower of a Divine strength.

It is sometimes urged that there is an almost total lack of the two controlling conceptions of our Lord's teaching, 'the fatherhood of God' and 'the kingdom of God.' But surely it is enough to point out that even in this short Epistle God is spoken of twice as Father, i. 27, iii. 9, to say nothing of the expression 'Father of lights,' and that He is also represented as begetting us of His own will by the Word of truth, i. 17, 18, and that the teaching of St James presupposes the same Divine kingdom as in the Sermon on the Mount, ii. 5'.

A further objection to the Christian character of the Epistle is often raised on the ground that no connection is traced by the writer between conversion and forgiveness and the atoning death of Christ, if indeed any reference at all can be found to the fact of His death. But even so, it must be remembered that the practical nature of the Epistle may help us to account for this. For St James, at all events, salvation is not only a new life coming from God, but it is 'the word of truth' grafted in our hearts which has the power of saving our souls; and if St James is not as explicit as St John in his doctrine of the new birth, he plainly anticipates the declaration of St Paul, 'the Spirit of life which is in Christ Jesus hath made us free from the law of sin and death.' Nor does it follow that St James knew nothing, or recognised nothing, of the validity of the atoning sacrifice made by our Lord in offering up Himself. The earliest speeches of St Peter lay stress upon repentance and conversion, but whilst undoubtedly they mention the fact, they too lay no stress upon the doctrinal significance of the death of Christ; and yet when St Paul writes to the Corinthians that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures (1 Cor. xv. 3), it is evident that he is not putting forward something new, but a statement in the acceptance of which both he and the earliest preachers of the Gospel were at one; he is only referring to an aspect of the death of Christ, which in his own earliest and undoubted Epistles he takes for granted as everywhere acknowledged and believed (cf. 1 Thess. v. 9, 10; Gal. i. 4). But if this Epistle

1 Beyschlag, Neutest. Theologie, 1. 344 (1891), rightly emphasises this fundamental conception common to St James and the commencement of our Lord's teaching.

XX

REFERENCES TO OUR LORD'S TEACHING

speaks less of Christ by name than any other Epistle, there is no Epistle which contains so many references to our Lord's teaching, and, one might fairly say, so many echoes of His words in the Gospels. That the Epistle is permeated with doctrine similar to that of the Sermon on the Mount is admitted without hesitation by Dr Schmiedel, but he proceeds to add that the parallels are closer to the Didache and to Barnabas, and draws a distinction between St Matthew's meaning in v. 37 and James v. 12, although he admits at the same time that the latter may be quoted from St Matthew. Spitta would attempt to explain these parallels by the fact that both the Gospels and Epistles are dependent upon older Jewish documents, but it cannot be said that this theory accounts for the close resemblance between James v. 12 and Matt. v. 34, 37, James v. 2, 3 and Matt. vi. 19, and the same might be said of other instances (see further below on list of resemblances between St James and our Lord's Sermon on the Mount); and Spitta is fairly exposed to the criticism that, whilst he weakens the force of the parallels between the Epistle and the Gospels, he eagerly clutches at any supposed or remote parallel between it and Jewish writings. Thus in James ii. 5, as compared with St Matt. v. 3, St Luke vi. 20, we are assured that there is no reminiscence of the words of Jesus, whilst every possible Jewish promise in favour of the poor may be cited as a likely origin for St James's language, even passages in which there is plainly no combination of the two conceptions of 'the poor' and 'the kingdom.' It is difficult too to see why Spitta should trace all kinds of verbal parallels between James and 1 Peter, and argue from them for the dependence of the latter Epistle upon the former, whilst he refuses to draw any conclusion of dependence from the number of obvious parallels between the Sermon on the Mount and the Epistle before us.

But we may proceed further. Even if the Name of Christ was removed from the Epistle, yet His Spirit abides in it, and one might well say that if every conscious reference to any particular words of Christ on the part of the author was denied to us, the more striking becomes the connection between the teaching of the writer and the teaching of Christ, between the moral elevation of the Epistle and that of the Sermon on the Mount.

Now these references which, as we believe, the Epistle contains to the teaching of our Lord, are undoubtedly of a marked and peculiar character. They are not in any case exact quotations,

although one could write in the margin of the Epistle a very considerable number of parallels, say for example with the Sermon on the Mount; they are references of such a kind as might have come from the fulness of a faithful memory, a memory retentive not merely of oral tradition but of words actually heard from the lips of Jesus. This is admitted even in quarters where we might not expect it. When,' wrote Renan, 'James speaks of humility, of patience, of pity, of the exaltation of the humble, of the joy which underlies tears, he seems to have retained in memory the very words of Jesus' (L'Antéchrist, p. 54, 3rd edition). So again he speaks of this little writing of James as thoroughly impregnated ♦ with a kind of evangelical perfume; as giving us sometimes a direct echo of the words of Jesus, as still retaining all the vividness of the life in Galilee' (ubi supra, p. 62). So too von Soden, although admitting the force of Spitta's strictures to some extent, is nevertheless constrained to acknowledge that some passages at least in the Epistle can be best explained as reminiscences of the words of Jesus.

It is commonly said, and with truth, that these reminiscences are most striking in relation to that part of our Lord's teaching which we call the Sermon on the Mount'. And it is important to remember that this likeness extends not merely, as in some cases, to the letter, but to a general harmony between the Epistle and those principles of His Kingdom which our Lord proclaimed from the Mount in Galilee. In the Sermon and in the Epistle the meaning of the old Law is deepened and spiritualised, and the principle of love is emphasised as its fulfilment; in each, righteousness is set forth as the doing of the Divine will in contrast to the saying 'Lord, Lord!'; in each, divided service is condemned as inadmissible; the choice cannot be God and the world, but God or the world; so too in each, God is the Father, Who gives liberally every good and perfect gift, the God Who answers prayer, Who

1 The following passages may be noted: Matt. v. 3, James ii. 5; Matt. v. 7, James ii. 13; Matt. v. 11, 12, James i. 2; Matt. v. 9, James iii. 18; Matt. v. 22, James i. 19; Matt. v. 34-37, James v. 12; Matt. vi. 16, James ii. 15, 16 (see Mr Mayor's note p. lxxxii.); Matt. vi. 19, James v. 2; Matt. vi. 24, James iv. 4; Matt. vii. 1, James iv. 11, 12, v. 9; Matt. vii. 7, 8, James i. 5, iv. 3; Matt. vii. 12, James ii. 8; Matt. vii. 16, James iii. 11, 12; Matt. vii. 24, James i. 22. In addition to Mr Mayor's full and valuable list, Salmon, Introduction, p. 455, 5th edit., C. F. Schmid, Biblical Theology of the N.T. p. 365, E.T., and Zahn, Einleitung, 1. p. 87, contain a helpful series of parallels; and instances besides those given above will be found in the notes. See also the valuable note in B. Weiss, Einleitung in das N.T. p. 390, 3rd edit.