Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (81 page)

Understanding the polemic of James requires one to place him in relation to the tradition he is opposing. That is the problem with the position taken by scholars such as N. W. Niebuhr, who argues that one should read James on “its own
terms” without importing a knowledge of Paul. Margaret Mitchell’s response is apt: in order to read James on its own terms, one
must
read it in light of Paul, “if Paul was one of those terms!”
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Even though James has picked up phrasing, concepts, contrasts, and Scriptural proofs from Paul, his actual position, as often noted, may not be contradictory to Paul’s. True, he certainly sounds contrary to Paul. For James a person is justified by works, not by faith alone; for Paul a person is justified by faith, not by doing the works of the Law. The problem is that Paul and James appear to mean different things by both “faith” and “works.”

I do not need to provide a lengthy disquisition on Paul’s use of the two words. Faith, for Paul, refers to a trusting relationship with God through Christ, or a trust in Christ’s death for justification. It is a relational term. But not for James. When James speaks of “faith” he refers to an intellectual acknowledgment of theological claims: “You believe that God is one? You do well. Even the demons believe, and they shudder” (2:19). For James, the intellectual assent to what we might call propositional truths cannot put a person into a right standing before God. One needs to do “works.”

But what he means by “works” also differs from Paul. Paul’s “works of the Law” are the demands that the Law makes on Jews qua Jews. In Paul’s view, justification does not come by keeping these demands. If it did, then there would have been no reason for Christ to die. This does not mean, of course, that Paul thought that “doing good deeds” was unrelated to a right standing before God. Much of his surviving correspondence, after all, involves urgent paranesis. Believers are still to “work out their salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12). But there is nonetheless an important terminological difference from James. For James, “works” are not the demands of the Law placed on Jews. They are good deeds. One needs to do good deeds in order to be justified. And so, the terse summary of Pratscher: “Indeed, Paul in no way represents the understanding of faith that James attacks.”
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For Paul, too, there is no such thing as (“true”) faith without obedience (Rom. 1:5) or active love (Gal. 5:6).

One can well argue—and for centuries, competent scholars have done so, with some vehemence—whether the real, historical Paul would have disagreed with the views set forth by the author of James. My guess is that the answer is yes, since for Paul justification does not come by doing good deeds (either instead of or in addition to faith) but by faith in Christ. But the question is of no moment for my present discussion. One might also ask whether the author of James would have disagreed with the conception of justification put forth by the real, historical Paul. My guess here is that the answer is no, once the terms of the debate were clearly laid out. But again, it is beside the point for the present discussion. The point here is that the author of James is clearly dependent on Pauline formulations for his contrasting views, whether he understood Paul rightly or not, and yet he attacks these formulations in terms that are not actually commensurate with Paul’s conception of them. Why is that?

One obvious solution, and the one most frequently suggested, is that James simply misread Paul. This is always a possibility, but another one presents itself as well. What is most interesting is that the Pauline notion that “works of the Law” cannot justify was eventually transformed precisely in the Pauline tradition itself into a teaching about “good deeds.” We have seen this already in both Eph. 2:1–10 and Tit. 3:5–8. In these instances, later Paulinists took Paul’s teaching about the Jewish Law, and either unwittingly or knowingly altered it—or at least extended it—into a teaching about engaging in meritorious action. For the forger of Ephesians, for example; it is not doing good deeds that brings salvation; it is grace alone (2:1–10).

James is not attacking the position of Paul himself, as scholars have reconstructed him today on the basis of the undisputed letters.
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But he does seem to be attacking a position that could be read out of the Deutero-Pauline epistles. Or to put it differently, the author of James is reading Paul—either the Pauline letters themselves (Gal. 2:16; Rom. 3:28, 4:2), or Pauline traditions circulating orally, based on those letters—through the lens provided by later Paulinists, as evidenced in the Deutero-Pauline letters. If he actually had access to literary forms of the later Pauline tradition, for example, the letter of Ephesians itself, then his writing is not just a forgery. It is a counterforgery.

Why then did this counterforger choose the name James for his attack on a later Pauline position on faith and works? Dibelius saw the choice of the pseudonym as ideologically innocent.
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Unlike the Deutero-Pauline letters, which invest considerable effort in convincing their readers that it is indeed Paul who is writing, this author simply states his name in 1:1 and provides no attempt at verisimilitude. Since James of Jerusalem was known for his “righteous” living, and since this book wants to stress the importance of living out one’s faith, the connection was obvious. This view, however, overlooks the early traditions of conflicts between the historical James and the historical Paul. It can scarcely be an accident that this anti-Pauline letter is put on the pen of one of his best known early opponents.

Other more recent authors have gone too far in other directions. Most recently David Nienhuis, for example, advances the creative argument that the author of the book of James was the same person who compiled the seven-letter corpus of the Catholic epistles in order to complement the seven-letter canon of Pauline writings then in circulation, these others produced by the “pillars” of the Jerusalem church.
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This happened, according to Nienhuis, at the end of the second century, as there is no knowledge of the book of James before Origen. The author in particular was interested in countering the growing influence of Marcionism on the church, and its rabid Paulinism. There are enormous problems with this reconstruction. Irenaeus already shows evidence of knowing the book of James, for example,
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and little in the writing could be seen as directed against distinctively Marcionite teachings.
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On the contrary, the views the book counters are easily situated in the post-Pauline situation of the church at the end of the first century. Of more importance for the present discussion, Jude was not one of the “pillars” of the Jerusalem church. The collection could scarcely have been made in order to have writings of the “pillars” set in opposition to Paul. As a corollary, the author of the present epistle did not choose the name James for that reason.

At the end of the day, the simplest explanation of the authorial claim is probably the best. James was considered an impeccable authority in the early church as the “brother of the Lord” and the leader of the church in Jerusalem. Moreover,
he was known to be an opponent of Paul, whether or not the tradition is rooted in a historical conflict. And so, an author who wanted to attack a “Pauline” position—possibly not knowing that it was not Paul’s own, but a position that had later developed within some Pauline communities—chose his pseudonym wisely. In the letter of James we have a forger attacking a Deutero-Paul for views that Paul himself, so far as we know, never held. In doing so it stands in sharp contrast with pro-Pauline works that we have already considered. These include such works as the book of Acts, which shows Paul and James completely on the same page—theologically, practically, and every other way—and, interestingly, the book of 1 Peter, with which, as M. Konradt in particular has shown, the book of James has a number of striking similarities, even though their stand on Paul was precisely at odds.
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Jude is the shortest forgery of the New Testament, and like many of the others, it is filled with invective against its opponents, even if scholars have found it difficult to discern what, exactly, these enemies of truth were thought to have proclaimed.

An initial question to be addressed concerns the book’s authorial claim. There are a number of persons named Jude/Judas in the New Testament : Judas Iscariot (Mark 3:19 and parallels; twenty-two occurrences altogether), Judas the son of James (the apostle, Luke 6:16), who may also be Judas “not Iscariot” of John 14:22, Judas the Galilean in Acts 5:37, Judas who owns a house in Acts 9:11, Judas who is called Barsabbas in Acts 15:22. There are solid reasons for thinking that the author of this letter is claiming to be one specific and arguably the best-known Jude of the early church, the brother of Jesus mentioned in Mark 6:3 (along with James, Joses, and Simon). The author identifies himself as the “brother of James” in v. 1, and Mark 6:3 provides us with the only James-Jude brother relationship in the New Testament. Moreover, one would normally identify oneself in relationship to one’s father, not one’s brother. The brother in this case must be an unusually well-known person to serve as an identity marker for the author—in this case, a well-known Christian. By far the best known James of
the early church, of course, was James the brother of Jesus, head of the church in Jerusalem. The author of this short text, therefore, is almost certainly claiming to be a brother of both James and Jesus (cf. Mark 6:3; Matt. 13:55).

In a moment we will see why the author may have wanted to identify himself in relation to James rather than Jesus. Some scholars have objected that Jude was too obscure a name for an author to choose as a pseudonym.
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The objection has more rhetorical than substantive force, however. On one hand, how many “nonobscure” figures were there to choose from in the early church? The objection seems to assume that everyone writing pseudepigraphically would choose the names Peter or Paul. On the other hand, and more pressing still, how could Jude be thought of as obscure (leaving Hardy out of the equation)? He was widely known as extraordinarily well connected: his one brother was “the” leader of the earliest Christian community; his other brother was the Savior of the World. Not bad credentials for an early Christian author.

More than that, as J. Frey and others have shown, the author is claiming not just to be a brother of James (and thus a brother of Jesus) but also to be closely connected to the letter written by this brother, the New Testament book of James. The connection to this earlier letter is suggested already by the author’s use of the same identifying formula,
. Moreover, J. Daryl Charles has noted the inordinately large number of verbal parallels between the two books: 93 cases of verbal agreement out of 227 different words used, 27 of these terms occurring two or more times in both letters: “Astonishingly,
each
of the twenty-five verses of Jude averages approximately four words found in the epistle of James—an extraordinary rate of verbal correspondence.” His conclusion: “Aside from Jude–2 Peter and Colossians-Ephesians comparisons, the verbal correspondence in James and Jude, considering the brevity of the latter, is unmatched anywhere else in the New Testament.”
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The writer of the letter of Jude, then, is claiming a derived authority; as Vögtle has put it, Jude’s reference to his literary predecessor gives him a status as “einen zweiten Jakobus.”
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Jude was rejected by some proto-orthodox and orthodox writers. Eusebius indicates that like the book of James, it was thought by some to be forged (
,
although it was publically read in many churches and thus, possibly, canonical: