1 Dr. Dave Mathewson: NT Lit. Lecture #30, 4/20/11 © 2011, Dr. Dave Mathewson and Ted Hildebrandt James and PaulAlright, let's get started. What I want to do today is wrap up our discussion of James and spend most of the time focusing on one particular text, for two reasons: one is because it seems to lie at the heart of James and summarize what is distinctive and uniqueabout his letter. But second, it has caused a fair bit of question and controversy as far as how we read it and what this says about James’ relationship to Paul's letters and teaching.So I want to spend a little time looking at that text in particular, but very briefly summarize two of the other things we talked about. We said that one way to understand the way James is put together is to see the letter of James as continually cycling through three different themes, sometimes looking at them from slightly different perspectives, the theme of testing and endurance, the theme of wealth and poverty, and then wisdom and speech. I want to say a couple things about all of those things. We’ll focus primarily on chapter 2 in James and James’ teachingin relationship to faith and works, and what he’s trying to emphasize and how we might read that in light of what Paul has said as well, but before we do, let’s open in prayer: Father, we ask for your presence with us and your enablement as we think about and discuss what is nothing less than your very words and revelation to us. I pray we maybetter grasp what this text meant to and how it would've been received by the first readers, but at the same time may we continue to hear it as the ongoing revelation of yourself to your people today, and may we understand better how to respond in light of that. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen. Alright, one of the issues when it comes to interpreting James that we've seen and in your notes—I’m talking now about the theme of faith and works, but to kind of introduce that—we said that the book of James is often read in a post-Pauline context. That is, we have been taught to read it or we’re used to reading it in light of having come to grips with Paul's letters and what Paul wants to emphasize, especially due to the legacy2of Martin Luther and his emphasis on justification being solely by God's grace through faith, and not dependent on any works that we do to merit or earn that. In a sense, that then has become the essence of the pure Gospel that now becomes a filter, or at least a measuring stick, by which we measure all the other books of the New Testament. That would certainly also perhaps lend itself to the fact that the Pauline epistles are situated very nicely right in the center of the New Testament. In a sense, you have the Gospels and Acts before it, but then everything else coming after it, so that at the center of the New Testament canon stands Paul's letters that kind of function as a measuring stick for how we read and understand everything else. So due to the fact that, at least in a sequential reading, the fact that we come to Paul's letters first seems in a sense to set us up for how we have to read the rest of the New Testament. So we come to Hebrews and we come to James and the other letters having Paul's Gospel thoroughly ensconced in ourminds that is that God has provided a way for salvation and justification that is based not on any works that I perform to merit or earn that, but based solely on God's gracious action in Christ and the only appropriate response is faith in Jesus Christ. So, we’re savedby God's grace through faith, and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. It doesn't come from human works, so that no one will boast, to use Paul's words from the book of Ephesians. Now again, that becomes a lens then through which we read the rest of the New Testament, and probably I would suggest that most of us probably subconsciously do that. We seem to give a primacy of place to Paul's letters and that becomes kind of the grid through which we read the rest of the New Testament, and therefore what happens when we come to a book like James is: number one, James will either be completely rejected or at least neglected as Martin Luther did when you stand it up against Paul. James either gets rejected or at least neglected and relegated to the back of the New Testament canon. Or we reinterpret James—we kind of rescue James from James. We want to make him sound like Paul, so we reinterpret or read James in a way that he sounds just like Paul's message of “your saved solely by God's grace and through faith and not based on any human works.”3 New Testament students often call this establishing a canon within the canon so within the larger canon of New Testament Scripture. There's one set of works that kind ofemerges as the measuring stick for all the other books within the canon—kind of an emerging canon, a measuring stick that has central place in the canon by which all the other books should be read and interpreted, and those are usually Paul's letters. Again, a lot of that goes back to the legacy of Martin Luther, which we learn a lot of good things from, but one of the things that has been passed down I think to us often is that we’re taught to read the New Testament through the lens of Paul's letters. So again, either Jamesis ignored or rejected at worst or else James is re-configured and reinterpreted in light of Paul's letters such as Romans and Galatians. However, a couple things: number one, as I said, there were a number of early New Testament lists of New Testament books that actually, intriguingly, put James beforePaul's letters, and I think that simply suggests that the early church was not interested in ordering the books in terms of importance or how that should affect the way we necessarily read them. It would be interesting to ask though if sequentially (and this is impossible because we have been so been influenced by this way of thinking about the New Testament) what would happen if we came to James first and then we read Paul's letters later. Would that make a difference in the way we interpret Paul? Would we read Paul instead, in light of James, as opposed to vice versa? But I doubt that the early churchwas interested in ordering the books in a way that gave the primacy of place and focus to any particular books. The reason Paul's letters easily follow Acts is most likely because most