James, the name of at least three persons who took an active part in the foundation of the early Christian church: (1) James the Elder, son of the fisherman Zebedee and brother of John, one of the three chief among the twelve apostles, put to death by the sword under Herod Agrippa, 44 A.D. His day falls on July 25; in the Greek Church, on April 30. According to a baseless legend he journeyed to Spain: whence, as Santiago, he is reverenced as the patron saint of that country. (2) James the Younger (the Little, not the Less), son of Alphæus, was likewise an apostle, and is honoured in the Greek Church on October 9; by the Catholics, along with Philip, on May 1. (3) James the Great, the eldest among the 'brethren' of Jesus, according to Josephus (Ant. xx. 9, 1) was stoned to death by command of the high-priest Ananus in 62 A.D., during the interval between the departure of Festus and the arrival of a new procurator. The last is identical with the James mentioned in Acts xii., xv., xxi., and Gal. i. 19, who was the head of the Christian community of Jerusalem, and, according to Hege-sippus, bore the surname of the Just. His day falls in the Greek Church on October 23. Most theologians consider him the author of the epistle which bears his name, although it has been ascribed to both the others, to the son of Zebedee so late as 1876 in an able commentary by the Rev. F. T. Bassett.
The Epistle of James stands first among the catholic epistles, and is a kind of encyclical addressed in the first place 'to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad,' to the Jews of the Dispersion. It was written by a Jew for Jewish readers, all of whom are supposed to be subject to the Jewish law, and it was undoubtedly written early, perhaps about 50 A.D. at latest, certainly before the destruction of Jerusalem. It cannot, however, be proved, though generally assumed, that the epistle must have been written before Paul's first missionary journey, or before the Apostolic Council. Those who read into it a desire to counteract the effects of a misconstruction of St Paul's doctrine of justification by faith of course demand, as will be seen, a later date. The epistle was not admitted into the canon without some difficulty, and it is not much quoted by the earlier writers, Origen indeed being the earliest we find quoting it by name. Eusebius places it in his list of books controverted but recognised by most (Antilegomena), and Jerome expresses the doubt more strongly still. Clement of Alexandria is silent about it, as also is Tertullian, nor is it mentioned in the Muratorian Fragment. But it was early acknowledged by the Syrian Church, and it is found in the Peshito; while there is abundance of less direct proof, as we find startling parallels and coincidences too numerous to be accidental in The Shepherd of Hermas, the Epistle of Clemens Romanus, and Irenæus. It was finally declared canonical by the third Council of Carthage (397), and already we find it acknowledged by Cyril of Jerusalem, Epiphanius of Cyprus, Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus, and all later theologians, down to the time of the Reformation, when it was rejected by Erasmus and Cardinal Cajetan, and stigmatised by Luther as 'a downright epistle of straw . . . with nothing evangelical about it,' from its supposed contradiction to his fundamental Pauline dogma of justification by faith alone. Calvin disputed this judgment, and maintained that the epistle was not unworthy of an apostle.
The aim of the epistle is throughout ethical rather than doctrinal, Christianity being prominently put forward as the ethical fulfilment of the law, the perfect man being he whose faith has constantly proved itself in practice, and who is patient under all tribulation. It echoes closely the language and method of Christ himself; as Beyschlag says, 'essentially it is the teaching of Christ, and thus there is little teaching about Christ.' Besides the discourses of the Master, especially his Sermon on the Mount, we find distinct traces of familiarity with the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Ecclesiasticus of the son of Sirach. Formalism, greed of gain, respect of persons, falsehood, evil-speaking, boasting, wrangling and bitterness in debate, attention to dogmatic definitions instead of holiness of life—such are the sins against which the author inveighs with vivid and abrupt invective. His Greek is unusually pure, and some scholars, as Schmidt, Bertholdt, and Bishop Wordsworth, have supposed that the epistle was first written in Aramaic and afterwards translated.
The passage in the second chapter (14-26) has been interpreted by many theologians as a direct attack on the Pauline view of faith and justification, that Christ by his death had accomplished a new order of salvation, in which the law, which was merely temporary, was now abrogated, and that thus Christianity had fitted itself to become a universal religion. But the undoubted difference of tone is rather that of a different point of view than of conscious contradiction, and had the writer had Paul's epistles before him we might well have expected that he would have said much more. Indeed the whole treatment suggests want of acquaintance with Paul's epistles far more than a criticism of his doctrine, and the works required by James are not at all the works of the law condemned by Paul. Paul's conception of faith is a complete spiritual communion with the Redeemer, effected by the free gift of God, in consequence of a profound conviction on the sinner's part of the saving merits of Christ's death, the source of a new holy life in Christ and of love at once to God and man. To James, again, faith is an assent of the thinking mind to the oneness of God and the Messianic work and vicarious sacrifice of Christ, a preliminary condition indeed of justification and eternal salvation, but yet something still to be made perfect by the good works which are the outward fruit of inward love. Good works are an external addition to faith, uniting with it and completing it, regarded as a necessary corollary to justification, rather than, as with Paul, a spon- taneous and visible fruit of the consciousness of a completely new relation to God attained through an antecedent justification. To Paul, says Weiss, this is an act of grace in which righteousness is imputed to the sinner; to James, the act of a judge who by a judicial decision attests the righteousness as proved (Matt. xii. 37), and thus procures deliverance from destruction. Paul's conception is more philosophical and comprehensive, but it by no means excludes the conception of James, which is at once earlier in time and adapted in the first instance to a narrower circle of readers. Paul's emphatic definitions were meant to oppose the Judaising party, who would have narrowed the largeness of Christian liberty by emphasising the necessity for the works of the Mosaic law; James meant to strike at the lingering Jewish notion that to be a child of Abraham was the most important consideration, and that besides this an intellectual assent to the special claims of Christ was sufficient. His faith without works is not Paul's justifying faith at all, but the profitless faith without love condemned in 1 Cor. xiii.
The Tübingen school, as might have been expected from its central assumption of an early opposition between the Jewish and Gentile parties in the Christian church, claimed the Epistle of James as a polemic against Paul, and made its author a pseudonymous writer of later time, who employed the name of James as an accepted type of spiritualised Jewish Christianity. Schwegler elaborated this view of the epistle much more fully than Baur himself, regarding it as a parallel to the Clementine Homilies. He makes the antithesis between rich and poor in the epistle refer to secularised Pauline Gentile Christianity, as contrasted with primitive Christian Ebionism, and further reads into the epistle polemical references to Gnosticism and the persecutions of the time of Trajan. Hansrath refers it to the same period, and considers it a direct answer of Jewish Christianity to the Epistle to the Hebrews. Hilgenfeld, again, pushes it back to the time of Domitian, explaining the wisdom attacked as Paulinism which had thrown the church into disunion by its doctrinal disputes, and the Christianity of the writer as Essene and Orphic in character. Holtzmann declares for the same date, maintaining the dependence of the epistle on the Pauline epistles together with the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Apocalypse, on the first Canonical Gospel, First Peter, and the Epistle of Clement, and explaining the rich as distinguished aspirants to Christianity. Similarly Von Soden places the epistle in the time of the Domitian persecutions, and pronounces the author, whom with Holtzmann and others he transfers to Rome, as of a kindred spirit with Clement and Hermas.
Besides the general introductions of Bleek, De Wette, S. Davidson, Hilgenfeld, Holtzmann, Salmon, Dods, and Weiss, and the works on the New Testament canon by Kirchofer, Overbeck, Westcott, and Zahn, may be consulted the special commentaries by F. T. Bassett (1876), Reuss (1878), Erdmann (1881), Schegg (1883), E. H. Plumptre (1884), Beyschlag (1888; 5th ed. of the comm. in the Exeg. Handbuch); R. Johnstone (2d ed. 1888); and J. B. Mayor (1893). The question of the Brethren of the Lord is discussed under JOSEPH.