It must be because it’s September and the High Holy Days are afoot, but I’m in a bit of a biblical studies mood, with my mind turning for the time being to Christian Origins and Ancient Judaism. It started with “There Is No Paul Without Plato,” clarifying that Christianity is the embrace of “Hebrew” and “Hellenic” cultures, is indelibly defined by both, and that this is a consequence of Judaism’s existence as a Greco-Roman religion in antiquity. Then, I talked about Christianity as a kind of “Judaism for Gentiles,” and the different approaches that Ancient Jews in general and Jewish members of the Jesus Movement in particular took to the question of gentile inclusion in God’s future promises of redemption for Israel. I described the careful position taken by Paul towards his gentile converts, whom Paula Fredriksen terms “ex-pagan pagans”: by faith and baptism, these gentiles became children of Abraham and part of the commonwealth of Israel without, however, becoming Jews. They were “eschatological gentiles,” the children of Abraham through Christ, Abraham’s seed, and so Paul thought not only that it was not necessary for them to “convert to Judaism” (which is a somewhat anachronistic way to describe how conversion was understood by Ancient Jews) but also that it was impossible for them to do so. Paul’s gospel to gentiles was that Israel’s God had made a way to include them by grace in the eschatological mercy he had provided to his own people through Jesus, Israel’s Messiah, provided they abandoned idolatry and immorality and embraced ethical monotheism and messianic allegiance to Jesus as their true king. Paul invited them, effectively, to embrace a Jew-ish identity: in an ancient world where ethnicity was defined in no small degree by the gods one inherited and the cultural customs given by those gods in the mythical past, Paul asked his gentile converts to embrace an ethnic liminal space between the Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern cultures of their origin and full participation in the national life of the Jewish people. If one employs “religion” as a conceptual filter here, however helpful or unhelpful it might be, then Paul asked his gentile converts to adopt new beliefs and new behaviors, but fashioned a brand new category of belonging for them.
I also asked the question, as frankly as possible, of whether or not Paul’s solution to “the gentile problem” was in the long run a good thing. It depends on whom one asks, of course: Paul’s tertium quid for gentile converts between Judaism and Hellenism allowed for the formation of Christian identity and the long-term existence of Christianity as a continuation of the Jesus Movement long after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, the Bar Kokhva Revolt from 132-136 CE, and the increasing alienation between Jews, Jewish Jesus-followers, and gentile Christians (all across the board, in fact: none of these groups liked each other) was already in full swing. In this sense, Paul’s “rule in all the assemblies” (1 Cor 7:17-24) that Jews remain Jews and gentiles remain gentiles might appear a positive thing from a later Christian perspective, since it is a likely explanatory candidate for why anyone is Christian today. If one were to ask the Jewish community, separately, whether the “bicameral ecclesiology” of Paul’s wing of the Jesus Movement (to borrow Mark Kinzer’s language) was a good strategy or not, I suspect that the contemporary Jewish answer might not be much different than the answer of the ancient Diaspora synagogues to Paul’s mission, which was that the policy was fundamentally dangerous to the Jewish community. In Hellenistic and Roman antiquity, the specific danger was the attention it attracted to the unique status of Jews in the empire, as exempt from paying cultus to the deities of the state and to the Roman Emperor by virtue of their ancestral, ancient monolatry. By asking gentiles to abandon worship of their gods and become “ex-pagan pagans,” “eschatological gentiles,” or “Jew-ish” gentiles, Paul was inviting people with no legal precedent for this religious exemption into a middle ground that would alarm Roman authorities on the one hand and endanger Jewish communities on the other by association.
Contemporary Jews would likely add to this that while nascent Christianity was not a cause of Roman persecution of Jews in antiquity as far as we can tell, Paul’s policy would prove disastrous for Jews and Judaism in other ways in the aftermath of Paul’s life, insofar as Christianity would define itself in contradistinction to Judaism in its literature, its rhetoric, and, after imperial sanction, in its laws. The anti-Judaism of the Church Fathers and the medieval Churches was not wholesale invented by them, but it was so substantially imprinted by them that it is not incorrect to think of later European antisemitism, especially the kind that led to Nazism and the Holocaust, as being at least a byproduct of residual Christianity in Europe if not a full-scale Christian phenomenon.
The other Jewish follower of Jesus in the first century whose writing provided the grounds for the Christian reconceptualization of the movement was John. Scholars debate if there was a “John” who stands behind the Johannine literature—John’s Gospel, Epistles (especially the first one), and Apocalypse, which all share some common language, themes, and seem to emanate out of a shared geographic zone in Asia Minor—and if there was a John, he was certainly John the Elder, not John b. Zebedee.1 We can reconstruct various aspects of the prosopography of John the Elder from our available data, assuming that there is in fact such a source for the Gospel of John in particular: he seems to have been a Judean, not a Galilean, follower of Jesus; he seems to have been knowledgeable about the Temple, its rituals, its calendar, and its politics; he seems to have a better knowledge of the chronology of Jesus’s ministry than the Synoptics (most scholars seem to concur on this point); and he seems to have been well-acquainted with both Jewish apocalypticism similar to that found at Qumran, particularly ideas about cosmic dualism between sons of light or sons of God and sons of darkness or the Devil, on the one hand, as well as with Jewish appropriation of Greek philosophy on the other, especially the figure of the Logos as a divine intermediary between God and the world especially connected to the Jerusalem Temple and its worship (whom John may well take directly from Philo of Alexandria, if he did not develop it directly out of the sophiological tradition which suggested the same; i.e., Sir 24, 50; Wis 7). All of this, combined with the memory that he was the “high priest” of the paschal mystery, and the one who even instituted the feast of Pascha as a Christian observance among his communities (that is, who introduced a specifically Christian form of Passover to Christian communities), could imply that John was a priest and that he was educated, not unlike his contemporary Josephus.
John, too, is “within Judaism” insofar as his negative comments about Judeans/Jews in the Gospel of John are intelligible in the first century as a kind of intra-Jewish rhetoric, no matter how harsh. John does not say anything particularly more egregious against fellow Jews than the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran does; that does not exonerate him, necessarily, in Modern Jewish eyes (Modern Jews are not necessarily any more convinced about Qumran as a mainstream, normative form of Judaism than Ancient Jews were), but it does mean that on his own terms John, like Paul, is a Jew who is likely a.) observing Torah (and its festivals) and b.) thinks that the religion of Jesus’s followers is and should be Judaism, even if it is a kind of Judaism that is creating conflict with local synagogues. But in the second and subsequent centuries, John’s extreme language, however contextualized, causes him, like Paul, to be read as an arch-supersessionist, proposing to replace Judaism and Jewish observances with the new “Christian” religion (a word John does not use). As John and Paul are the most clearly “Hellenized” of the New Testament authors, it became easy for later non-Jewish Christians to emphasize their Hellenism at the expense of their Judaism; in reality, their Hellenism was a function of their placement in the Jewish world, just as their Judaism was a function of their placement in the Hellenic world.
It is of interest to note that things written by, attributed to, or forged in the names of, John and Paul collectively make up 18 of the 27 New Testament documents, leaving just nine (the Synoptic Gospels, Acts, 1-2 Peter, Hebrews, James, and Jude) other canonical texts. In a real way, “Christianity,” the theology of which is and has been primarily shaped by John (“the Theologian,” traditionally) and Paul (the Apostle, traditionally), simply is the afterlife of the Pauline and Johannine “schools” or “movements” or “missions” or “wings” (whatever we want to call them) of the broader Jesus Movement. It is these communities which were not directly impacted by the disastrous, near genocidal Jewish-Roman Wars; it is these communities who were near to the centers of imperial power in the late first, second, third, and early fourth centuries and therefore well-placed to multiply, proliferate, and ingratiate themselves to Roman society, and to be favorably received by soldiers, teachers, magistrates, and eventually emperors in Roman society. From one angle the idea that Christianity is a different religion from Judaism seems odd, given how it got its start; from another angle, though, it is literally the survival of the Jesus Movement not among Jesus’s own people but among the gentiles, constructed as a post-Jewish, anti-Jewish religion.
What happened to the Jewish wings of the Jesus Movement? The reader may be surprised to see that I say “wings” in the plural, but that is only because first-century Judaism was irreducibly plural in expression and the Jesus Movement reflected that diversity. It is not just that Jesus’s original followers and the communities they founded were primarily made up of Jews: it is that they were drawn from many different quarters and schools of thought in Jewish society, from different parts of Judea and Galilee, from different regions of the Jewish Diaspora, from different theologies and priorities among the available options of Ancient Judaism. Jewish men, Jewish women, Jewish sectarians, “common Jews,” Hebrew-speaking, Aramaic-speaking, and Greek-speaking Jews, (Latin speakers too?)—folks from many quarters of Judaism found their way into the Jesus Movement. Jesus himself does not seem to have belonged to any of the major sectarian divisions—Essenes, Pharisees, or Sadducees—but he shared enough in common with the sentiments, methods, beliefs, and practices of the first two to ensure that there were, at least, Pharisees involved in the Jesus Movement for quite awhile, as well as, Luke tells us, several priests (Acts 6:7). The picture that Luke paints for us of the earliest community is one that is a.) headquartered in Jerusalem, b.) Temple-pious and Torah-observant, and c.) under the firm headship of James the Just, adelphos or brother of Jesus.
Why not Simon Kepha/Cephas or Peter? Peter does receive prominence in Paul, in the Synoptic tradition, the Johannine tradition, and in Acts; two letters are attributed to him in the New Testament, but almost certainly neither of them was written by him. In Paul, Peter is acknowledged as a key tradent of the kerygma and a pillar of the Jesus Movement, and Paul fronts that he himself has had personal contact with Peter (1 Cor 15:1-4; Gal 1:18-24; 2); in all three Synoptic Gospels, Peter is the clear head of the Twelve and of the inner circle that also includes James and John b. Zebedee; in John, the beloved disciple has a greater intimacy with Jesus than Peter, but Peter is still acknowledged as charged with the chief pastoral role by the risen Jesus (Jn 21:15-17); and in Acts, Peter is presented as the leader of the apostolic community and the main actor in the history of the early Church for the first half of the narrative, until he is succeeded by Paul. Acts also suggests Peter’s complicity with/approval of the gentile mission without requiring conversion (Acts 10-11; 15:6-11).
This material allows us to say some things about Peter with relative confidence: we can know, for instance, that Peter was a real person, that he really knew Jesus and was a member of Jesus’s inner circle, that Peter continued to be involved with the Movement after Jesus’s death, having experienced his resurrection, and that Peter was involved in a mission, Paul tells us, “to the circumcision” (Gal 2:7). This appears to mean that Peter’s mission was to other Jews, while Paul’s mission was to gentiles; interestingly, just as Acts has Peter affirming Paul’s gentile mission first implicitly and then explicitly during the Jerusalem Council, it also has Paul preaching in Diaspora synagogues just as Peter seemingly is enjoined to do. In Paul’s case, this seems historically plausible: Paul admits to having received synagogal punishment (2 Cor 11:24), and this only makes sense if he is in and around synagogues; Diaspora synagogues are also the most likely places for him to find gentiles who are open and sympathetic to Judaism and to the gospel, and it is typically in these contexts that Paul seems to find his gentile converts in Acts; though it is disputed, I at least feel convinced that the primary social location for Paul’s gentile communities must have been in or around Diaspora synagogues, where the Jesus Movement must have seemed to some tolerant but unaffiliated Jews like a gentile outreach program, first and foremost to proselytes and Godfearers and second to unaffiliated gentiles. But while Paul himself tells us that Peter approved his mission to the uncircumcised, Peter’s patronage of the gentile mission seems more questionable, and more like an apologetic attempt on Luke’s part to stress strict continuity between the earliest community and its later mutation into a primarily gentile movement as a result especially of Paul’s labors. Especially when one considers the fight between the two that Paul reports in Galatians 2:11-14, and the fact that Paul does not say that Peter conceded the point, which implies that Peter most likely maintained in deference to the “people from James” a separation between Jews and gentiles in the Movement, the whole episode with Cornelius seems to smack of spin. What we know about Peter from our other sources does not seem to support the idea that Peter was either himself involved in the gentile mission or that he fully agreed with Paul’s belief in gentiles staying gentiles.2
Consider, for instance, that the most prominent statement of Petrine authority in the New Testament is in Matthew 16, where Peter is called the rock of the assembly because of his apocalypse concerning the identity of Jesus as the Messiah Son of God. And yet Matthew is also the most Torah-affirming of the four Gospels: Jesus insists that one has to practice Torah even more strictly than the Pharisees and scribes if one wants greatness in the Kingdom of the heavens (Matt 5:17-20), though he also teaches his followers to respect the authority of the Pharisees as Mosaic successors (21:1-3), and then, crucially, commands the disciples to teach the nations to obey all that Jesus had commanded them—presumably, also, the practice of a Pharisaic-style Judaism. Matthew’s Gospel and community, located in northern Galilee/southern Syria and close to the emergent Pharisaic tradition with which it competed in a spirit of begrudging respect, was probably a community that required full conversion of gentile members to Judaism: Jesus nowhere in that Gospel lays out a Law-free path for gentiles into the community, and the most straightforward reading of the Great Commission in the context of the Gospel as a whole is that this is a missionary, proselytizing form of Jesus-focused Judaism.
So the memory of Peter is of an apostle whose focus was on the Jewish community, both in Judea and probably abroad. The memory of the later gentile churches of Peter as the founder of multiple communities—of Antioch especially, and by martyrdom of the assembly in Rome, though the notion that Peter founded that community itself seems suspect, and through Mark of Alexandria—is appropriated from Peter’s activity among Diaspora synagogues in those places; as Christianity became more gentile, the memory of Peter’s activity among other Jews was transferred to the gentile congregations that survived. Jewish-Christians, though, continued to see Peter as the arch-apostle, and, probably in response to the weaponization of Paul by the gentile communities as the apostle of Christianity over-against Judaism, subsequently demonized Paul. Again, I think the scholarship bears out that this is an unfair shake for Paul, who remained a Jew from the beginning to the end of his life and was neither apostate nor the founder of a new Christian religion; but in terms of how Paul was being read and understood by second century Christians, “orthodox” and “heretical,” it makes sense that this would become Paul’s reputation for enduring communities of Jewish Christians that had been planted by Peter and, like Peter, looked to the authority of James.
We have circled Ya’akov, Jacob or James the Just, the adelphos of Jesus, as long as possible, but we cannot avoid talking about him. Earlier scholarship attempted to: in 2006, Matti Myllykoski could rightly say that James “remained an unjustly forgotten figure in the history of early Christianity.”3 He is the only person connected to Jesus to receive explicit mention in Josephus other than Josephus himself, in Antiquities 20.197-203, where we learn that James was killed at the behest of the high priest Ananus, who was later deposed for the decision, in the year 62 CE. The famous, or infamous, James Ossuary also claims to be the box that held his bones, though the debate turns over whether the Aramaic inscription on it that reads “James son of Joseph the brother of Jesus” is authentic. I take no position, not being qualified to decide, and consensus seems to shift over time. He receives scant explicit mention in the Gospels (Matt 13:55; 27:56?; Mk 6:3); he appears sparingly but significantly in Acts (Acts 12:17; 15:13ff; 21:17ff); Paul mentions him (1 Cor 15:7; Gal 1:19; 2:9, 12); and there is a letter, possibly by James but also possibly psuedonymous, attributed to him in the New Testament.4 Other mentions of a James in the Gospel tradition may originally have been him, as John Painter contended. James is also mentioned in a variety of non-canonical writings, including Gospel of Thomas saying 12, where Jesus says that “heaven and earth came into being” for him, and in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and Recognitions. He is also given attention by patristic authorities: Eusebius says that he was the “bishop” of the church in Jerusalem (an anachronistic construction but reflecting the memory of his leadership, at least; Eccl. Hist. 2.1.2-3; 2.23.1), and that the desposynoi, or other family relatives of Jesus, succeeded James in Jerusalem (3.11, 32; 4.22.4). And he was a favorite of Jewish-Christian gnostic literature circulating in Syria.
Multiple questions surround our understanding of James. While it is possible that the use of adelphos to describe his relationship to Jesus could mean that he is either Jesus’s “kinsman” (one can use “brother” to speak of an extended family member in antiquity), it must be squarely faced that the most straightforward meaning is simply “brother.” So, is this Jesus’s blood relative? And did James write the Epistle of James? If he did, then James deserves a far more prominent place in the New Testament canon than it holds: it is in that case the only text we have straight from someone that actually knew Jesus, with no filtration of witness, testimony, or tradition by later generations, in the entire New Testament. If James wrote James, then we have insight into what the Jesus Movement was about from someone who grew up with Jesus, knew him as an adult, and led his community after his death and resurrection.5
James is, crucially, acknowledged in all these sources as the anchor of the community in Jerusalem, and to whom Peter and Paul both are deferent. The strong implication is that James, not Peter and certainly not Paul, is the true leader of the original Jesus Movement after Jesus. A variety of scholars have made this argument in different monographs and articles. It was, for example, the contention of Bruce Chilton and Jacob Neusner in The Brother of Jesus: James the Just and His Mission; James Tabor in The Jesus Dynasty; it was Robert Eisenmann’s argument in James, the Brother of Jesus; Jeffrey J. Butz, The Brother of Jesus and the Lost Teachings of Christianity; Pierre-Antoine Bernheim, James, Brother of Jesus; and John Painter, Just James. The problem, I think, with getting James scholarship straight is that several (not all, to be clear: Chilton, Neusner, Bernheim, and Painter all review critically well) of these works end up making bold, hyperbolic claims about the role of James or the character of the earliest community whose outlandishness sometimes helps to obscure the otherwise correct claim for James’s crucial significance. Older scholarship identified James as the kalifah of the community, but Neusner and Painter have offered instead the nasi, the patriarch of emergent rabbinic Judaism, as the more immediately relevant social parallel. James as the nasi, the patriarch of the Jesus Movement, is far more contextually credible than either James the caliph or, frankly, James the “bishop.”
How was James perceived by other Jews beyond the Jesus Movement? His mention by Josephus and the report of the reaction to his death leaves only the conclusion that James was a beloved figure of first-century Jerusalem to the majority of Jews whether they believed in Jesus or not. This also implies something about the Jesus Movement’s presence in first-century Jerusalem: while not all Jews shared their convictions about Jesus’s resurrection and/or messianic significance, Jesus and his Movement must have been respected by common people, in a manner similar to the respect with which many Jews a generation earlier held John the Baptizer whether they belonged to his Movement or not (e.g. Mk 11:32). And it fits well with the image of James that we get in Early Christian literature as Torah and Temple-pious and as zealous for his ancestral traditions. James does not, however, seem to have been a rabble-rouser or a rebel, and therefore not to have been a member of the various groups that would lead to the war just four years after his death. Our traditions about James’s purity, holiness, and martyrdom all come from later sources that break unevenly across many related fields in Christian Origins; Myllykoski again: “Texts that transmit valuable traditions and pieces of information on James the Just are related to various central themes in the study of early Christianity: Jesus, the so-called Hellenists, Jewish Christianity, Paul and Peter, the making of the Gospels, Gnosticism, the theology of the early Church Fathers, and so on.”6
How did James conceptualize his authority? The rabbinic nasi claims, after all, to be a Davidic scion and to carry a kind of quasi-messianic authority in the Jewish community.7 Was James, as James Tabor suggested, the “dynastic” successor to Jesus in the minds of his community? After all, if James was Jesus’ adelphos, it stands to reason that, especially given the common tradition of Jesus’s celibacy and the subsequent fact that he died childless, James would be Jesus’s nearest successor to the throne. (And that James should be next in line is probably logical given that it is James and not any of the other brothers or sisters of Jesus who rises to this position in the Jerusalem assembly.) Yet if the Epistle of James is by James, James himself does not seem to intimate any sense that he has now assumed the role of messiah for the community, and his statement that Jesus is both Lord and Christ (Jas 1:1; there’s no variation in the manuscript tradition on the use of this title and honorific) almost certainly reflects a belief in Jesus’s resurrection, to which Paul also testifies for James in 1 Corinthians 15. It seems more likely that James thought of himself as sharing in Jesus’s messianic and royal authority in a specialized way as his adelphos, his blood kinsman and therefore heir to the same house, than as merely his emissary (apostolos).
Where did James stand on “the gentile problem”? The issue turns on how we understand the evidence of Galatians 2 and Acts 15, which are the only indication we get of James’s views on the matter. And, incidentally, neither of these texts seems to fully support the idea that James either approved the full inclusion of gentile Christ-allegiants on the basis of faith without the adoption of Torah in the community together with Jewish followers of Jesus nor that this was his primary concern in the first place. In Galatians 2:7-9, we are told that James and the other pillars agreed that Paul and Barnabas had been given the grace of a mission to gentiles, while they were focused on the mission to other Jews; but this is Paul’s account, and even if Paul is telling us the truth that James and the apostolic leadership in Jerusalem approved of his mission, we do not get their side of the matter to clarify the way in which they approved of it. It is perfectly possible for James and the apostolic leadership to have approved Paul’s mission as an outreach program whose ultimate significance they understood differently than Paul. James’s own words in Acts 15 (which disagrees with Galatians 2 in various ways on the timing and character of the Jerusalem Council but which also seems to think that the meeting was about gentile inclusion) would seem to support that reading:
After they finished speaking, James replied, “My brothers, listen to me. Simeon has related how God first looked favorably on the gentiles, to take from among them a people for his name. This agrees with the words of the prophets, as it is written, ‘After this I will return, and I will rebuild the dwelling of David, which has fallen; from its ruins I will rebuild it, and I will set it up, so that all other peoples may seek the Lord—even all the gentiles over whom my name has been called. Thus says the Lord, who has been making these things known from long ago.’ “Therefore I have reached the decision that we should not trouble those gentiles who are turning to God, but we should write to them to abstain only from things polluted by idols and from sexual immorality and from whatever has been strangled and from blood. For in every city, for generations past, Moses has had those who proclaim him, for he has been read aloud every Sabbath in the synagogues.” (Acts 15:13-21 NRSVUE)
So, on the one hand, James does here seem to understand the apparent success of the gentile mission of Peter (not, crucially, Paul: again, Luke in Acts is trying to suggest that Paul’s gentile mission has more deeply rooted precedents) as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy; but on the other hand, James does not seem to think that faith ends the matter. For one thing, he enjoins the four restrictions on gentile behavior against idolatry, sexual immorality, strangled meat, and blood. Older scholarship saw these as the later rabbinic concept of the Noachide Commandments, but more recent scholarship points out that we do not have evidence that this concept of a universal moral law given to Noah was known to Second Temple Jews and that the restrictions here have more in common with the Holiness Code’s requirements for foreigners living in Israel’s midst. But moreover, that does not seem to conclude things either, since James then mentions that “in every city, for generations past, Moses has had those who proclaim him, for he has been read aloud every Sabbath in the synagogues.” The direct implication is that James thinks the requirements for foreigners are sufficient for now, because obviously, Christ-believing gentiles would want to learn Moses, Torah, and eventually embrace full conversion to Judaism. Hence, as Myllykoski summarizes, “The speech of James (15.13-21) indicates that he accepted Gentiles as a people of God in addition to the restored Israel: their status as Gentiles does not change….otherwise, it cannot be plausibly explained why the men of James who came to Antioch insisted on separation between Jewish and Gentile believers.”8 This also helps to make sense of the different ways in which Paul and James spin the significance of Abraham’s faith in relation to his circumcision (Rom 4:1-12; Jas 2:14-24): this is essentially midrashic competition between James and Paul to establish appropriate halakha for gentiles, with Paul taking the position that gentiles are fully included by faith, just as Abraham’s original covenant was based on faith, and James taking the position that Abraham’s faith led to his circumcision, and so logically it should for gentiles, too.9
In other words, when we read Paul in his letters advocating for his gospel’s answer to the gentile problem, we need to read understanding that he doth protest too much. We are only getting Paul’s side of the story in those letters: when we zoom out and consider the Jesus Movement in all of its earliest diversity, we are looking at a Movement whose primary leaders were James and Peter, that tolerated the mission of Paul and his colleagues in the Diaspora to gentile groups, and that may or may not have been aware of the communities surrounding John the Elder. (If John’s Gospel is anything to go on, there’s a kind of friendly competition between Peter and the beloved disciple that might imply that John was known to Peter and that their respective levels of authority was a point of contention among Jewish Jesus-followers.) Paul can say whatever he wants to people on different continents from James’s Jerusalem-based community who only speak Greek and can present himself and his authority however he likes in relation to these “pillars.” We should refrain from the radical skepticism of Paul expressed by later generations of Jewish Christians, who are reacting more to second century Paulinism than to Paul’s own gospel, which did not require Jews to abandon the Torah.
But of course, Pauline and Johannine Christianity simply is Christianity. James died in 62 and his people, more likely than not, in the flames of 70; Peter died, perhaps in Rome, but was quickly reappropriated by a majority gentile Christian network. The question of what to make of this is one that every Christian has to grapple with in a world long since shaped by the consequences of the fortunes and misfortunes of these leaders of the earliest Jesus Movement.
The most cogent argument for this reading of John in recent literature is John Behr, John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
Bruce Chilton is the first person I know to have made this argument: see Chilton, Rabbi Paul: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Image, 2005), 6-13.
Matti Myllykoski, “James the Just in History and Tradition: Perspectives of Past and Present Scholarship (Part 1),” CBR 5 (2006): 73; and also “James the Just in History and Tradition: Perspectives of Past and Present Scholarship (Part 2),” CBR 6 (2007): 11-98.
Pseudonymity is still perhaps the mainstream assumption of many biblical scholars, going back to Dibelius’s commentary, but Luke Timothy Johnson has made arguably the best case for James’ authenticity in his Anchor Yale Bible Commentary. See also Johnson, Brother of Jesus, Friend of God: Studies in the Letter of James (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). Johnson gives the argument for authenticity in summarized form in footnote 14 of the prologue to that second work, which I unfortunately have only in Kindle and thus can only give Location 3222 as the citation for (there is a special place in purgative hell for the formatters of Kindle books that do not include page numbers): “In light of recent scholarship on Hellenism in Palestine…there is no a priori reason for excluding an early Palestinian provenance on the basis of language. Other factors: a) James lacks any sign of late pseudonymous authorship according to the criteria usually employed (fictional elaboratoin of author’s identity, rationalization for delay of the parousia, doctrinal development, accommodation to society, emphasis on tradition as a deposit, polemics against false teaching, developed institutional structure); b) James reflects the social realities and outlook appropriate to a sect in the early stages of its life: it reflects a face-to-face, intentional ekklēsia with intesne bonds of social solidarity rather than a highly evolved organization; c) James makes use of Jesus traditions at a stage that is earlier than is found in the late-first century Synoptic Gospels…d) across a broad range of language and issues, James most resembles our earliest datable Christian author, the Apostle Paul; e) James is used by at least two late-first- or early-second-century writings, 1 Clement and Shepherd of Hermas; f) James’s language (especially his use of ‘Gehenna’ in 3:6) suggests local knowledge even more than literary influence.”
See also the commentary on James by friend of APD Addison Hodges Hart, The Letter of James: A Pastoral Commentary (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018).
Myllykowski, “James the Just in History and Tradition (Part 2),” 83.
See Matthew V. Novenson, The Grammar of Messianism: An Ancient Jewish Political Idiom and Its Users (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 187-216.
Myllykowski, “James the Just in History and Tradition (Part 2),” 85.
See Magnus Zetterholm, “‘And Abraham Believed’: Paul, James, and the Gentiles” Nordisk judaistik/Scandinavian Jewish Studies 24 (2003): 109–122.
Reading the gospel of John lately, it struck me that when Lazarus became ill Jesus was told the one you love is sick. Is there any support for the idea of Lazarus being the beloved disciple?
Interesting commentary on James identity. My catholic formation has made me strain to view him as anything more than a friend or a cousin, but obviously that’s my own bias. I’d be interested to learn more on that. Maybe a trivial matter, but I think it’s kind of intriguing.
Also, a personal side note… I’ve really been enjoying your “how to think about” series! I was curious as to if you had a “how to think about Mary” in the works? You write so beautiful about her when you do, I can sense your devotion. I’d love to see your vision of the Theotokos expanded upon.
Thanks for another great read!