Earlier I suggested that I might post some of the notable interpretive issues I’m working with in my James commentary. The first is more a complex of problems, having more to do with interpretive convention than with puzzling out the sense of the text.
A variety of cultural factors combine to produce a Christian document named “The Letter of James” where I see a profoundly Judaic document named “The Letter of Jacob.” The issue arises in the first verse, where one confronts not only the (alleged) author’s name,* but also the address “to the twelve tribes in the Diaspora.” First, the decision to render this author’s as “James” (Iakobos in Greek) obscures the vital connection between the name in question and the subsequent address: the biblical Jacob is the father of the twelve** tribes: “Now the sons of Jacob were twelve. The sons of Leah: Reuben (Jacob’s firstborn), Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun. The sons of Rachel: Joseph and Benjamin. The sons of Bilhah, Rachel’s maid: Dan and Naphtali. The sons of Zilpah, Leah’s maid: Gad and Asher” (Gen 35:22-26). So it’s very hard to hear the resonances of Genesis, of the very identity of Israel, when we translate the author’s name as “James.”
Is it better to translate the Greek Diaspora to “Dispersion,” or to leave it in the now-familiar transliteration? Probably six of one, half-dozen of the other. Either way, though, the cumulative force of the first verse indicates in flashing neon letters that we’re talking about a Judaic context — which message is muted, if not quite extinguished, if we render Iakobos as “James.”
* I don’t have a big stake in whether the author of this letter was Jacob, Jesus’s brother, or some other Jacob, or someone pretending to be Jacob, or someone named Ermintrude whose name has been supplanted by the present ascription. Luke Johnson makes an intriguing case that the letter actually came from Jesus’s brother (in his recent Brother of Jesus, Friend of God); I’m more sympathetic with the implied early date of the letter than with the obligation to identify the author with that Jacob/James, for reasons such as those I described yesterday. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll operate here on the premise that the author is suitably identified as James (or Jacob).
** Okay, it gets complicated because he takes on Joseph’s sons, born in Egypt (Manasseh and Ephraim), in Gen 48:5, and “Joseph” turns out not to have a tribe of his own, and Levi remains a tribe but without territory.
I'm totally with you on the first point. The issue, of course, is one which developed in the history of the English Bible. The only reason I could possibly see to continue with the whole "James" nomenclature is to maintain that continuity which exists in our minds. I have no idea how important that is or what people wouold think if they got a new Bible translation with a book of "Jacob" in it.
As to your first note, James Jordan made the argument that the author is James the brother of John. I continually wonder why this position is so routinely discarded. While we certainly know that that James was killed, there also seems to be some consensus that the book is pretty early among NT writings, so I don't see why that has to be a problem. No particular stake in that issue for me either, but it seems reasonable that the author was someone with some existing prominence within the church, so why not tie him to the gospel traditions?
Posted by: Paul Baxter at August 20, 2004 02:35 PMI like the Ermintrude hypothesis myself, but reckon that in a translation one ought to render it "Jacob" with a marginal note that the Greek version of the name is usually Anglisised as "James".
Posted by: Tim at August 20, 2004 04:55 PMWhile I can't back my case with big words and extensive research, I say Jacob.
Posted by: tk at August 21, 2004 11:11 AM