The Epistle of James — Faith, Works, and the Letter Luther Called “Straw”

Part of the series: The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet

Of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament, exactly one was nearly thrown out by a man who shaped half of Western Christianity. In 1522 Martin Luther, in the preface to his German New Testament, ranked the books by how clearly each preached Christ, and at the bottom he placed the Epistle of James, which he called, in a phrase that has never left it, “really an epistle of straw.”⁠¹ He meant that it had nothing of the gospel in it. He would have preferred it gone.

What is less often noticed is that Luther was not the first to doubt this letter. Three centuries of the early Church had doubted it before him. When the historian Eusebius of Caesarea drew up his catalogue of Christian writings around the year 325, he did not place James among the books that were universally acknowledged. He placed it among the antilegomena—the “disputed” books, “spoken against”—alongside Jude, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John.⁠² The letter that would one day open with a serene greeting to “the twelve tribes in the dispersion” spent the better part of two hundred years on the margins of the canon, quoted by almost no one, defended by fewer still.

So the Epistle of James was doubted twice: once at the beginning, when the Church was slow to receive it, and once at the Reformation, when a Reformer tried to demote it. And the same fault line runs through both episodes—the relationship between faith and works, and the single sentence in all of Scripture that says a man is justified “not by faith alone.” This essay is about that letter: who wrote it, why the early Church hesitated, why Luther recoiled, and why the Catholic Church reads the very verse he hated as a key to the whole gospel rather than an embarrassment to it. The history of James cannot be separated from its theology. To understand why it nearly fell out of the canon is to understand what it teaches.

A letter doubted twice

The strangeness of James’s history is best felt by comparison. Within the New Testament there is a sliding scale of how warmly the ancient Church received each book. Eusebius, our best single witness to the state of the question at the start of the fourth century, sorted the writings into the homologoumena—the “acknowledged” books that no one doubted—and the antilegomena, the “disputed” ones.⁠³ The four Gospels, Acts, the thirteen letters of Paul, 1 Peter, and 1 John sat in the first class, beyond serious question. James sat in the second, with Jude, 2 Peter, and the shorter letters of John—received by many, but not by all, and not without hesitation.

This is the through-line of the whole story. James did not stride into the canon; it was carried in slowly, against a current of silence and suspicion, and only after the Church in the fourth century weighed it and judged it apostolic. Then, a millennium later, the question was reopened by the Reformation, which turned the Reformers’ new principle of Scripture alone into a reason to ask, with fresh urgency, exactly where the boundaries of Scripture lay. It is no accident that the man who insisted most loudly on the supreme authority of the Bible was also the man who most wanted to thin the Bible out.⁠⁴

To follow James from the margins to the center, we have to answer three questions in turn. Who was the James whose name the letter bears? Why did the early Church doubt it, and why did it finally decide? And what is it about the letter’s teaching on faith and works that made it a battleground in the sixteenth century and remains one today? We begin with the man.

Who was James?

The New Testament is crowded with men named James—in Greek Iakōbos, the same name as the patriarch Jacob. Sorting them out is the first task, because the letter’s authority in the early Church rose and fell with the question of which James stood behind it.

The several men named James

At least three are clearly distinguished in the Gospels and Acts. The first is James the son of Zebedee, brother of the apostle John, one of the inner circle who saw the Transfiguration. He was beheaded by Herod Agrippa I around the year 44, making him the first of the Twelve to be martyred.⁠⁵ Because he died so early, almost no one in antiquity proposed him as the author of the letter, and the point will matter later: when Luther argued the epistle came “long after” the apostolic age, he had confused his Jameses and assumed this was the author.

The second is James the son of Alphaeus, another member of the Twelve, an obscure figure about whom the New Testament tells us almost nothing. The third—and the one who matters—is James “the brother of the Lord,” also called James the Just. He was not one of the Twelve. He appears in the Gospels among the “brothers” of Jesus, and after the Resurrection he becomes the towering figure of the Jerusalem church: the man who presides at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, whom Paul calls one of the “pillars” alongside Peter and John, and to whom Paul reports on his last visit to the city.⁠⁶ It is this James to whom the letter has traditionally been ascribed, and whose authority gave it whatever foothold it had in the early centuries.

“The brother of the Lord”

The phrase requires care, because it has been read in different ways. Paul calls him plainly “James, the Lord’s brother” (Galatians 1:19), and the Gospels list “James and Joseph and Simon and Judas” among the adelphoi, the “brothers,” of Jesus (Matthew 13:55). To the modern ear this sounds like a denial of the perpetual virginity of Mary. But the Greek word adelphos, like the Hebrew and Aramaic behind it, ranges more widely than the English “brother”: it can mean a cousin, a kinsman, a half-brother, a member of an extended household. In the Old Testament, Lot is called Abraham’s “brother” though he was his nephew.⁠⁷

The Catholic tradition has therefore never read these passages as evidence of other children of Mary, and it has done so along two ancient lines. The Western position, associated with Jerome, holds that the “brothers” were cousins—children of “the other Mary,” a relative of the Virgin. The Eastern position, associated with Epiphanius, holds that they were stepbrothers, sons of Joseph by a marriage before Mary. Both preserve the perpetual virginity that the Church has always confessed; they differ only on whether the brothers were cousins or older stepbrothers. Against both stood Helvidius, a fourth-century writer who argued that the brothers were later children of Joseph and Mary—and it was precisely to refute him that Jerome wrote his treatise Against Helvidius around the year 383. The Catechism states the settled teaching plainly: “The Church has always understood these passages as not referring to other children of the Virgin Mary.”⁠⁸

The first bishop of Jerusalem

Whatever the precise kinship, the historical stature of James the Just is not in doubt. He led the mother church of Christianity through its first three decades, an authority so great that “men from James” could unsettle even Peter (Galatians 2:12). When the question of whether Gentile converts must be circumcised threatened to split the young movement, it was James who pronounced the decisive judgment at the Council of Jerusalem. The early sources remember him as a man of formidable personal holiness, given to such constant prayer in the Temple that he was nicknamed “the Just.” Here is a figure entirely capable of writing with the moral authority the letter assumes—a letter that issues commands, rebukes the rich, and addresses “the twelve tribes in the dispersion” as a recognized teacher of Israel-in-Messiah.

The death of a just man

James died a martyr’s death around the year 62. Two ancient accounts survive, and they differ in revealing ways. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing within a generation of the event, reports the bare facts: in the interval between two Roman governors, the high priest Ananus, “a bold man” of the Sadducee party, convened the Sanhedrin and “brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James,” and had him stoned as a breaker of the law.⁠⁹ The notice is brief and almost incidental, which is part of its value: a non-Christian historian, with no stake in the matter, casually confirms both the existence of James and his relation to “Jesus, who was called Christ.”

The second account, preserved by the Christian writer Hegesippus and quoted by Eusebius, is fuller and more dramatic. In it James is thrown down from the parapet of the Temple, and, surviving the fall, is stoned and finally clubbed to death by a fuller—a launderer—with the heavy wooden bar used to beat cloth, even as he kneels praying for his killers.⁠¹⁰ The scene is vivid, but it is the later and more embellished of the two, and the historian leans on Josephus for the date and the sober fact of the stoning. Eusebius preserves something else from this tradition worth noting: James, he says, “was called the brother of the Lord because he was known as a son of Joseph”—the Eastern, Epiphanian reading, embedded in the earliest narrative of his death.

Did James write James?

Tradition is one thing; the modern critical question is another. Did James the Just actually write the letter that bears his name, or does it come from a later hand writing in his name? The debate is genuine, and an honest treatment of the book has to face it.

The case against authenticity

The strongest argument against authorship by James of Jerusalem is the Greek. The letter is written in a relatively polished, even literary Koine, deploying rhetorical devices—the diatribe, wordplay, vivid metaphor—and drawing on the Greek Old Testament. Would a Galilean craftsman, the brother of a village carpenter, command such prose? Critics such as Martin Dibelius, whose 1921 commentary shaped a century of scholarship, and Dale Allison, whose magisterial 2013 commentary is the most thorough recent treatment, conclude that he probably would not, and that the letter is more likely a pseudonymous work composed in James’s name, perhaps after the year 70 and possibly into the early second century.⁠¹¹ They point also to the apparent engagement with a developed Pauline slogan in the faith-and-works passage, which seems to presuppose a later stage of debate.

The case for

The contrary case is not weak. The quality of the Greek can be explained without abandoning authorship: a secretary or amanuensis could have polished dictated material, as is commonly proposed for 1 Peter; first-century Galilee was substantially bilingual, far from a monoglot backwater; and James led the cosmopolitan, Greek-speaking Jerusalem church for some three decades, ample time and occasion to acquire a competent literary hand. Scholars such as Richard Bauckham, Luke Timothy Johnson, and Douglas Moo defend authenticity or an authentic core, reading the letter as the deliberate wisdom instruction of James the sage, steeped in the teaching of Jesus.⁠¹² There is also an argument from modesty: the author calls himself merely “a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,” not “the brother of the Lord” or “an apostle.” A forger trading on James’s name would more likely have advertised the relationship; the restraint reads as authentic.

The most suggestive evidence is the letter’s saturation in the sayings of Jesus. James never quotes his brother with a citation formula, yet his letter is threaded through with the content of the Sermon on the Mount—on swearing no oaths, on the blessedness of the poor, on hearing and doing, on the peril of judging. The closest verbal parallel in the New Testament to Jesus’s command “do not swear at all” stands in James 5:12.⁠¹³ This is the texture of a writer formed within the living oral tradition of Jesus’s words before the Gospels fixed them in writing—an argument that points toward the Jerusalem milieu and, for many, toward James himself.

The earliest book in the New Testament?

If the letter is authentic, it must have been written before James’s death around 62, and a number of scholars press for a date in the late 40s—before, or just at, the Council of Jerusalem in 49. On this reading the faith-and-works discussion is not a reaction to a finished Pauline doctrine but an early, parallel handling of a question both men inherited, and the church order the letter assumes looks primitive. Were that early date correct, James would be among the very earliest Christian writings to survive, perhaps the earliest of all—older than 1 Thessalonians, older than the Gospels.⁠¹⁴ It is a minority view, and it should be held as such; but it is a serious one, and it gives the letter a striking claim. The book the Reformation came closest to discarding may be the oldest book in the New Testament.

The long road to the canon

If the letter is early, its reception was strangely late. Here lies the central paradox of James: a book perhaps written first was among the last to be securely received. To trace its path into the canon is to watch the early Church think slowly, regionally, and without a central authority issuing decrees—until, at length, it does.

Silence at the beginning

The first thing to say about James in the second century is that it is almost absent. The Muratorian Fragment, a list of accepted books compiled at Rome around the year 170, names the Gospels, Acts, the letters of Paul, two letters of John, Jude, and the Apocalypse—but it does not mention James at all.⁠¹⁵ No church father of the first two centuries quotes the letter with anything like certainty. There are possible verbal echoes in writers such as Clement of Rome and the Shepherd of Hermas, but they are echoes, not citations, and scholars dispute even those. For a letter claiming the authority of the Lord’s own brother, the silence is striking, and it is the hard fact behind every ancient doubt about the book.

Origen and the first citations

The silence breaks with Origen, the greatest biblical scholar of the early Church, who around the year 230 becomes the first writer clearly to cite James as Scripture. Even he does so with a faint note of reserve: he refers to it as the epistle “in circulation” under James’s name, a phrase that registers the book’s contested standing even as he uses it.⁠¹⁶ From Origen onward the letter has defenders, especially in the Greek-speaking East, where his influence ran deepest. But a book that has to wait until the third century for its first secure citation has, by definition, traveled a long way through the dark.

Eusebius and the disputed books

By the early fourth century the situation could be summarized, and Eusebius summarized it. In his great history he gives the verdict that fixed James’s status for the ancient mind: the letter is reckoned the first of the so-called catholic epistles, “but it is to be observed that it is disputed; at least, not many of the ancients have mentioned it.” And then the crucial qualification: “Nevertheless we know that these also, with the rest, have been read publicly in very many churches.”⁠¹⁷ This is the honest position of a careful historian. The book is doubted by the learned, yet used by the faithful; its authority rests less on a chain of famous citations than on the fact that congregation after congregation read it as the word of God in their worship. That liturgical use, more than any scholar’s endorsement, is what carried James into the canon.

Jerome’s careful verdict

A generation later Jerome, the West’s master of Scripture, recorded both the doubt and its resolution in a single sentence. James, he wrote, “wrote a single epistle, which is reckoned among the seven Catholic Epistles, and even this is claimed by some to have been published by some one else under his name, and gradually, as time went on, to have gained authority.”⁠¹⁸ It is a remarkable admission from a Doctor of the Church: he knows the suspicion of pseudonymity, he does not hide it, and he describes the very process by which the letter won its place—not by sudden decree but gradually, as time went on. Jerome himself accepted James and included it in the Vulgate, the Latin Bible that would carry it to the whole West.

East and West

The geography of James’s reception is itself instructive. In the Syriac-speaking East the letter fared comparatively well: the Peshitta, the standard Syriac New Testament, included James as one of only three catholic epistles it received—James, 1 Peter, and 1 John—while omitting Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Revelation entirely.⁠¹⁹ James, in other words, fared better in Syriac than most of the disputed books. In the Greek and Latin worlds the turning point came in the second half of the fourth century, when the great canon lists fell into line. Athanasius of Alexandria, in his Festal Letter of 367—the first surviving document to name exactly the twenty-seven books of our New Testament—lists James first among the seven catholic epistles. The African councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) ratified the same list for the Latin Church. By the close of the century the question was effectively closed: James was Scripture, East and West.⁠²⁰ It had taken roughly three hundred years.

Faith and works: the fault line

We come now to the heart of the matter, the reason James was doubted at the Reformation and the reason it is read with such attention still. The letter contains a passage—James 2:14–26—that appears, on its face, to flatly contradict the apostle Paul on the most contested point in Christian theology: how a sinner is set right with God. Everything in the letter’s troubled history converges here.

What James says

James’s argument is blunt and concrete. “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?” If a brother or sister is naked and hungry and you offer only pious words—“keep warm, and eat well”—without the necessities of the body, your words are worthless. “So also faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”⁠²¹ Faith that produces nothing is not living faith at all. James presses the point with a mordant example: mere belief in God’s existence is no great thing, for “even the demons believe that and tremble.”⁠²² The demons have orthodox theology and are damned; assent is not enough.

Then comes the sentence that would echo through the centuries. James appeals to Abraham, who “was justified by works when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar,” and draws his conclusion: “See how a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.” He adds Rahab the harlot as a second example, and closes with an image: “For just as a body without a spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.”⁠²³ The phrase “not by faith alone”—in Greek ouk ek pisteōs monon—is the only place in the entire New Testament where the words “faith” and “alone” appear together, and the letter uses them to deny exactly the formula a later age would make its banner.⁠²⁴

What Paul says

The difficulty is that Paul seems to teach the opposite, and in nearly the same words. “For we consider that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law,” he writes to the Romans.⁠²⁵ And he too appeals to Abraham, and to the very same verse of Genesis. “If Abraham was justified on the basis of his works, he has reason to boast; but this was not so in the sight of God. For what does the scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.’” To the Galatians he is blunter still: “a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.”⁠²⁶ Set the two side by side—Paul, “justified by faith apart from works”; James, “justified by works and not by faith alone”—and you have what looks like a head-on collision in the inspired text itself.

One Abraham, two readings

The collision is sharpened by the fact that both men reach for the same proof. Paul and James each quote Genesis 15:6—“Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness”—and each makes Abraham the model of his case.⁠²⁷ But they fasten on different moments of Abraham’s life. Paul looks to Genesis 15, where Abraham simply believes God’s promise and is reckoned righteous, before he has done anything—before even circumcision. James looks to Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac, decades later, where Abraham’s faith is shown and completed in the supreme act of obedience. The same patriarch, the same verse, two different lessons. This is the clue to the whole puzzle: Paul and James are not answering the same question.

Dissolving the contradiction

The contradiction is verbal, not real, and it dissolves once three distinctions are made. First, “works” does not mean the same thing in each. Paul’s target is erga nomou, “works of the law”—circumcision, the food laws, the Sabbath, the boundary markers of the Mosaic covenant, and more broadly any human effort offered as a basis for boasting before God. James never uses that phrase; his “works” are works of mercy—feeding the hungry, clothing the naked—the lived fruit of a living faith. Second, “justify” is used at different moments. Paul speaks of how a sinner first enters a right relationship with God: by grace, through faith, not as wages earned. James speaks of how a faith already professed is shown to be real and is vindicated in the judgment—“you see,” he says, pointing to the evidence of a life. Third, they oppose opposite errors. Paul writes against those who would earn salvation or compel Gentiles to take on the Law; James writes against those who imagine that a barren intellectual assent, the faith of demons, is enough. They press opposite sides of one coin.

This is not a Catholic special pleading invented to escape an embarrassment. It is the reading embedded in the Church’s own approved Scriptures. The footnote to James 2 in the New American Bible, the translation used in the lectionary of the United States, states it directly: the apparent contradiction “can only be understood if the different viewpoints of the two authors are seen,” and adds that “many think he was seeking to correct a misunderstanding of Paul’s view.”⁠²⁸ James may not be opposing Paul at all, but a distortion of Paul—the antinomian who heard “justified by faith” and concluded that conduct no longer mattered. Against that distortion James and Paul stand together.

What the New Perspective adds

Modern scholarship has, if anything, narrowed the gap further. The “New Perspective on Paul,” launched by E. P. Sanders’s study of Second Temple Judaism in 1977 and developed by James Dunn and N. T. Wright, argued that Paul’s “works of the law” were not good deeds in general but the identity-markers—circumcision, Sabbath, food laws—that separated Jew from Gentile, and that what Paul opposed was not moral effort but the imposition of those ethnic badges on Gentile converts.⁠²⁹ If that is right, then Paul’s “works” and James’s “works” refer to different things altogether, and the supposed contradiction was always a confusion of categories. The New Perspective is itself contested, and it addresses Paul rather than James; but it has made it harder than ever to read the two writers as genuinely at odds. Catholic exegetes had in any case long read Paul as compatible with James, since the Catholic tradition never understood justification as a merely external verdict that left the works of love outside.

The one verse with “faith alone”

It is worth dwelling on the sheer oddity of the situation the Reformation produced. The slogan sola fide, “faith alone,” became the rallying cry of a movement that took sola Scriptura, “Scripture alone,” as its formal principle. Yet the one and only time the New Testament joins the words “faith” and “alone,” it is to say that a man is justified “not by faith alone.”⁠³⁰ The phrase the Reformers needed appears in Scripture exactly once, with a negation in front of it. That is not a decisive argument—a doctrine can be true though its precise wording is absent, and defenders of sola fide have always insisted they mean a faith that necessarily bears fruit. But it explains, better than anything else, why the Epistle of James became the most awkward book in the Protestant Bible, and why one Reformer wished it away.

Luther and the “epistle of straw”

Martin Luther’s quarrel with James is the most famous episode in the letter’s history, and it is widely misremembered. He did not strike James from the Bible. But he came closer to wishing it gone than any major figure before or since, and his reasons reveal exactly what was at stake.

The phrase and where it comes from

The notorious phrase appears not in Luther’s preface to James itself but in his general “Preface to the New Testament” of 1522, in a passage ranking the books by how plainly each preaches Christ. The Gospel and First Letter of John, the major epistles of Paul, and First Peter are “the books that show you Christ.” By that measure, Luther wrote, “St. James’ epistle is really an epistle of straw, compared to these others, for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it.”⁠³¹ It is a relative judgment—straw beside gold—but a withering one, and it stuck. Tellingly, Luther dropped the line, along with the whole ranking, from editions of his Bible printed after 1537. The verdict embarrassed even its author; but it had already entered history.

Three objections

Luther’s fuller case is in his separate “Preface to the Epistles of St. James and St. Jude,” and it is worth hearing in his own words, because it is more careful than the slogan suggests. He begins, in fact, with praise: “Though this epistle of St. James was rejected by the ancients, I praise it and consider it a good book, because it sets up no doctrines of men but vigorously promulgates the law of God.” Then the blow falls: “However, to state my own opinion about it, though without prejudice to anyone, I do not regard it as the writing of an apostle.”⁠³²

His reasons are three. The first is the faith-and-works passage: “In the first place it is flatly against St. Paul and all the rest of Scripture in ascribing justification to works.” The second is christological: the letter, in all its teaching, “does not once mention the Passion, the resurrection, or the Spirit of Christ,” and for Luther that is disqualifying, for “whatever does not teach Christ is not apostolic, even though St. Peter or St. Paul does the teaching. Again, whatever preaches Christ would be apostolic, even if Judas, Annas, Pilate, and Herod were doing it.” The third is historical, and here Luther stumbled: he thought the letter “came long after St. Peter and St. Paul,” reasoning from the assumption that its author was the apostle James the son of Zebedee—who, as we have seen, was martyred too early to have written it. Luther had the wrong James, and built an argument on the error.⁠³³

What Luther did not do

For all this, Luther did not remove James from his Bible, and the distinction matters. He printed it—and Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation with it—but he set the four apart at the end of the New Testament, after the other twenty-three, and left them out of the numbered table of contents, in a kind of appendix of doubt. In his preface to Hebrews, which heads the group, he explains the arrangement: “Up to this point we have had to do with the true and certain chief books of the New Testament. The four which follow have from ancient times had a different reputation.”⁠³⁴ It is a revealing compromise. Luther’s own principle of sola Scriptura gave him no authority above Scripture by which to cut a book out; the most he could do was relegate it. And even his polemic softened with age: the 1530 edition of the preface replaced “I will not have him in my Bible” with the milder “I cannot include him among the chief books.” The book he could not bring himself to expel, he could only push to the back.

He was not alone

It is sometimes supposed that Luther’s doubt was a Protestant novelty. It was not. The disputed status of James, Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation was a known fact of the late-medieval world, and Catholic scholars had aired it freely. Andreas Karlstadt, in a 1520 treatise on the canon, had already sorted the New Testament into ranks and placed James among the lowest. More striking, on the Catholic side, Erasmus had questioned the apostolic authorship of James in the annotations to his 1516 Greek New Testament, and Cardinal Cajetan—the same Thomas de Vio who had interrogated Luther at Augsburg—openly doubted the apostolic authorship of James, Jude, 2 Peter, and the shorter letters of John in his biblical commentaries.⁠³⁵ The boundaries of the canon had never been solemnly defined, precisely because under the Catholic system Scripture was read within a living tradition that had simply received these books in practice. The Reformation’s elevation of Scripture alone is what made a formal decision newly urgent—for both sides.

Calvin’s different road

Not every Reformer followed Luther. John Calvin, the most influential theologian of the Reformed tradition, accepted James as canonical and set himself to harmonize it with Paul rather than to demote it. In his commentary on the letter he located the resolution exactly where the Catholic tradition had: in the two senses of the word “justify.” Paul, he wrote, “means by it the gratuitous imputation of righteousness before the tribunal of God; and James, the manifestation of righteousness by the conduct”—justification before God in the one case, vindication before men in the other.⁠³⁶ Calvin’s calm handling is a useful reminder that the recoil from James was Luther’s, not Protestantism’s as such, and that the letter could be received as Scripture without abandoning a doctrine of justification by faith. The deeper Catholic answer, however, was given not by a commentator but by a council.

Trent and the closing of the question

When the Catholic Church finally responded to the Reformation at the Council of Trent, it did two things that bear directly on James—and the second is one of the quiet ironies of Church history.

The canon defined

On the eighth of April, 1546, in its fourth session, Trent did what no council before it had formally done: it issued a definitive list of the canonical books, Old Testament and New, and bound it with an anathema. The New Testament list runs through the Gospels and Paul and arrives, near its end, at “two of Peter the apostle, three of John the apostle, one of the apostle James, one of Jude the apostle, and the Apocalypse of John the apostle.” Then the canon closes with iron: “But if any one receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said books entire with all their parts… let him be anathema.”⁠³⁷ The very books Luther had pushed to the back of his Bible—James foremost among them—Trent named, without distinction of rank, as sacred Scripture. The three centuries of ancient doubt and the fresh doubt of the Reformation were answered with a single, deliberate definition.

The irony of Trent

Less than a year later, in January 1547, Trent turned to the doctrine of justification itself, the doctrine over which James had been fought. Its sixth session produced the most carefully argued of all the Council’s decrees, and its ninth canon struck directly at the Reformation slogan: “If any one saith, that by faith alone the impious is justified… let him be anathema.”⁠³⁸ The wording repays attention. Trent did not condemn the phrase “justified by faith,” which it affirmed; it taught that faith is “the beginning of human salvation, the foundation, and the root of all justification.” What it condemned was the construal of sola fide that made nothing else necessary—no cooperation, no charity, no works of love.

And here is the irony. In the chapter of that decree on the increase of justification, the Council reached for a proof text, and the text it reached for was James. Faith, the decree teaches, cooperates with good works, by which the justified “increase in that justice which they have received through the grace of Christ, and are still further justified, as it is written”—and then Trent quotes the very verse Luther had called straw: “Do you see that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.”⁠³⁹ James 2:24, the sentence that had made the letter an embarrassment to one Reformer, became at Trent a pillar of the Catholic doctrine of justification. The book the Reformation came nearest to discarding the Catholic Church set, by name, at the center of its answer.

Faith formed by charity

What Trent built on that foundation is the Catholic synthesis, and it is worth stating clearly, because it is what James was insisting on all along. Justification, the Council taught, is not a merely external verdict that leaves the sinner unchanged; it is a real renewal, in which “the charity of God is poured forth, by the Holy Spirit, in the hearts of those that are justified.” Faith justifies—but saving faith is never alone. It is, in the phrase Trent took from Paul, “faith which worketh by charity,” and the Council quoted James in the same breath: “faith without works is dead and profitless.”⁠⁴⁰ This is the doctrine the schools call fides caritate formata, “faith formed by love”—faith that is alive because charity animates it, faith that necessarily acts. The Catechism gathers it into a sentence, quoting James directly: “faith apart from works is dead.” Strip the love and the deeds from faith, and what remains “does not fully unite the believer to Christ.” That is James’s argument exactly, raised to the level of dogma.

A modern coda

The old battle has not been left where the sixteenth century left it. In 1999, after decades of dialogue, the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church signed a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, confessing together that “by grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works.”⁠⁴¹ The Declaration is a differentiated consensus, not a merger; real differences of emphasis remain, and Trent’s canons stand untouched. But it is a striking development that the heirs of Luther and the heirs of Trent could jointly affirm a faith that “renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works”—which is to say, a faith that bears the fruit James demanded. The letter that once divided them had become, in part, a place where they could meet.

What the Church gained from James

It would be a poor reading of this letter to know it only as the occasion of a quarrel. James is five chapters of dense, practical wisdom, and the Church that received it gained far more than a single contested verse. Consider what would have been lost had Luther had his way.

A sacrament for the sick

The most consequential gift is a sacrament. In his final chapter James writes: “Is anyone among you sick? He should summon the presbyters of the church, and they should pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord, and the prayer of faith will save the sick person, and the Lord will raise him up. If he has committed any sins, he will be forgiven.”⁠⁴² This is the chief scriptural witness to the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. The Council of Trent, in its fourteenth session, taught that this anointing is a true sacrament “instituted by Christ our Lord” and “promulgated by the blessed apostle James,” and the Catechism cites James 5 as the rite’s apostolic attestation. A church without James is a church missing the New Testament’s clearest charter for its ministry to the dying—a fact that ought to give pause to anyone tempted to thin the canon on theological grounds.

Pure religion and the royal law

The rest of the letter is a treasury of phrases that have entered the Christian conscience. It is James who defines true devotion in terms a comfortable Christianity is always tempted to forget: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” It is James who insists, against every cheap grace, “Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves.” It is James who calls the command to love your neighbor “the royal law,” James who teaches that “all good giving and every perfect gift is from above,” and James who gives the New Testament its most unsparing meditation on the tongue—“a restless evil, full of deadly poison,” with which “we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings who are made in the likeness of God.”⁠⁴³ His exhortation to “confess your sins to one another” stands as an early biblical witness to the confessing of sin, even as the Church grounds the Sacrament of Penance more directly in the Lord’s commission to the apostles. Strip these from the New Testament and it is poorer in exactly the register—the moral, the practical, the unglamorous demand of love—in which Christianity is most easily evaded.

The wisdom of a sage

There is, finally, a fittingness in what James is. The letter is wisdom literature, kin to Proverbs and Sirach, the counsel of a sage who has absorbed the teaching of Jesus so thoroughly that it surfaces on every page without a single citation formula.⁠⁴⁴ If the traditional authorship holds, this is the brother of the Lord handing on the Lord’s own ethic in his own voice—not preaching the Passion, as Luther complained, but doing something Luther undervalued: pressing the demand that faith become a life. The early Church was right to sense that such a book belonged in its Scriptures, even when it could not yet prove the case. The instinct of the worshipping congregations that kept reading James, against the hesitations of the learned, turned out to be sounder than the doubts.

What we know and what remains open

Strip away the disputes, and a stable core remains. The Epistle of James is a Jewish-Christian letter of moral wisdom, addressed to scattered believers, saturated in the teaching of Jesus, and traditionally ascribed to James the Just, the brother of the Lord and leader of the Jerusalem church. Its place in the canon, doubted for three centuries and demoted by a Reformer, has been settled teaching in the Catholic Church since Trent and is accepted, in practice, by virtually all Christians today. And its hard word about faith and works does not contradict Paul; it completes him.

The open questions are open in earnest. Whether James of Jerusalem actually penned the Greek we have, or whether a disciple gave his teaching its literary form, remains genuinely contested among serious scholars. The date hovers anywhere from the late 40s—which would make it the oldest book in the New Testament—to the end of the first century, without resolving. And the precise relationship between James’s argument and Paul’s continues to occupy exegetes, even as the old charge of contradiction has steadily lost its force.

What no one disputes is that this short, blunt, practical letter—barely quoted for two centuries, ranked as straw by the man who translated it into German—turned out to carry a sacrament, a definition of pure religion, and the one sentence in Scripture that holds faith and works together. The book the canon almost lost is the book that keeps faith honest.

Key scholarly works on James

For readers who wish to go deeper, the following works represent the essential scholarly library on the Epistle of James.

Major commentaries: Dale C. Allison Jr., James, International Critical Commentary (2013)—the most thorough recent critical commentary in English; Luke Timothy Johnson, The Letter of James, Anchor Bible (1995)—a vigorous defense of authenticity and unity; Douglas J. Moo, The Letter of James, Pillar New Testament Commentary (2000); Patrick J. Hartin, James, Sacra Pagina (2003)—a Catholic treatment; Ralph P. Martin, James, Word Biblical Commentary (1988); and Martin Dibelius, James, Hermeneia, revised by Heinrich Greeven (1976)—the classic form-critical study that set the terms of modern debate.

Key monographs and studies: Richard Bauckham, James: Wisdom of James, Disciple of Jesus the Sage (1999); John Painter, Just James: The Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition (1997); Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans, eds., James the Just and Christian Origins (1999); Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (1987); and F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (1988).

Frequently Asked Questions

Who wrote the Epistle of James?

The letter identifies its author only as “James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ” (James 1:1). From antiquity this has been understood to mean James the Just, the “brother of the Lord” and leader of the Jerusalem church—not the apostle James the son of Zebedee, who was martyred around the year 44, too early to have written it. Modern scholars are divided: some defend authorship by James of Jerusalem (or an authentic core), pointing to the letter’s saturation in the teaching of Jesus and its primitive outlook; others regard it as written in James’s name by a later disciple, citing its polished Greek. The Catholic Church receives it as the inspired and canonical letter of the apostle James while leaving the historical-critical question to scholarship.

Why was the Epistle of James disputed in the early Church?

James is one of the antilegomena—the “disputed” books listed by Eusebius around 325—because it is barely attested in the first two centuries. It is absent from the Muratorian Fragment (c. 170), and no church father clearly cites it as Scripture before Origen, around 230. Eusebius acknowledged the doubt but noted that the letter was “read publicly in very many churches,” and that liturgical use carried it forward. By the late fourth century—Athanasius’s Festal Letter of 367, the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397)—it was firmly received. Its canonical status was settled long before the Reformation reopened the question.

Does the Epistle of James contradict Paul on faith and works?

No, though it appears to. James says a person is “justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24); Paul says a person is “justified by faith apart from works of the law” (Romans 3:28). The tension dissolves once three things are seen: Paul’s “works of the law” (circumcision, food laws, the Mosaic boundary markers) differ from James’s “works” of charity; the two use “justify” of different moments (Paul of entering a right relationship with God, James of the vindication of a living faith); and they oppose opposite errors (Paul against works-righteousness, James against dead, fruitless assent). The New American Bible’s own footnote observes that James “many think… was seeking to correct a misunderstanding of Paul’s view.” They complement rather than contradict each other.

Why did Martin Luther call James an “epistle of straw”?

In the preface to his 1522 German New Testament, Luther ranked the biblical books by how clearly each preached Christ and judged that, beside the Gospel of John and the letters of Paul, “St. James’ epistle is really an epistle of straw… for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it.” His objections were that the letter ascribes justification to works (against Paul), that it never mentions the Passion or Resurrection of Christ, and that it was, he wrongly believed, written too late to be apostolic. Notably, Luther did not remove James from his Bible; he placed it, with Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation, at the end, and he dropped the “epistle of straw” line from editions printed after 1537.

Is the Epistle of James in the Catholic Bible?

Yes. James is one of the seven “catholic” (universal) epistles and stands in every Christian New Testament, Catholic and Protestant alike. The Council of Trent formally defined it as canonical in 1546, listing “one of the apostle James” among the sacred books and attaching an anathema to any rejection of them. Unlike the Old Testament deuterocanonical books, which Catholic and Protestant Bibles number differently, the twenty-seven-book New Testament—James included—is shared by all.

What is the Epistle of James about?

James is a letter of practical Christian wisdom, addressed “to the twelve tribes in the dispersion,” concerned throughout with how faith must show itself in action. Its major themes are the testing of faith, the danger of partiality toward the rich, the relationship of faith and works, the discipline of the tongue, the vanity of worldly ambition, and patience in suffering. It gives the Church the scriptural basis for the Anointing of the Sick (James 5:14–15), its definition of “pure and undefiled” religion as care for orphans and widows (James 1:27), and its call to “be doers of the word and not hearers only” (James 1:22).

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This post is part of an ongoing series covering every book in the New Testament canon and the early Christian texts that nearly joined them. See the full series at The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet.

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Footnotes

1. 1. Martin Luther, "Preface to the New Testament" (1522), in Luther's Works, vol. 35, ed. E. Theodore Bachmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1960), 362. The book-ranking passage and the "epistle of straw" line were dropped from editions of Luther's German Bible printed after 1537.

2. 2. Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History 3.25.3, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 1; newadvent.org/fathers/250103.htm. James is grouped with Jude, 2 Peter, and 2–3 John among the "disputed" writings (antilegomena).

3. 3. On Eusebius's distinction between the homologoumena ("acknowledged") and antilegomena ("disputed") books, see Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.25, and Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

4. 4. On how the Reformation principle of sola Scriptura made a formal definition of the canon's boundaries newly urgent for both sides, see F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1988).

5. 5. Acts 12:1–2 (NABRE). The martyrdom of James the son of Zebedee under Herod Agrippa I is conventionally dated to c. AD 44.

6. 6. Galatians 1:19; 2:9; Acts 15:13–21; 21:18 (NABRE).

7. 7. On the breadth of Greek adelphos (translating Hebrew ’aḥ), see Genesis 13:8 and 14:14–16, where Lot, Abraham's nephew, is called his "brother" (NABRE).

8. 8. Catechism of the Catholic Church 500; vatican.va. On the two ancient Catholic readings—the Hieronymian ("cousins") and the Epiphanian ("stepbrothers")—see Jerome, On the Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed Mary, Against Helvidius (c. AD 383), in NPNF, 2nd ser., vol. 6; newadvent.org/fathers/3007.htm.

9. 9. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.1 (§200), trans. William Whiston; penelope.uchicago.edu/josephus/ant-20.html. The execution is dated to c. AD 62, in the interval between the procurators Festus and Albinus.

10. 10. Hegesippus, quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23.4–18 (the martyrdom narrative) and 2.23.2 (James "known as a son of Joseph"), trans. McGiffert; newadvent.org/fathers/250102.htm.

11. 11. Martin Dibelius, James, rev. Heinrich Greeven, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976); Dale C. Allison Jr., James, International Critical Commentary (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013). Both regard the letter as most likely pseudonymous; Allison favors a date after AD 70, perhaps in the early second century.

12. 12. Richard Bauckham, James: Wisdom of James, Disciple of Jesus the Sage (London: Routledge, 1999); Luke Timothy Johnson, The Letter of James, Anchor Bible 37A (New York: Doubleday, 1995); Douglas J. Moo, The Letter of James, Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).

13. 13. Compare James 5:12 with Matthew 5:34–37; James 1:5 with Matthew 7:7; James 2:5 with Matthew 5:3; and James 4:11–12 with Matthew 7:1. The parallels are noted in the cross-references of the NABRE; bible.usccb.org/bible/james/5.

14. 14. For the late-40s dating and the argument that James may be among the earliest New Testament writings, see Moo, The Letter of James, and Johnson, The Letter of James. It is a defended minority position, not the scholarly consensus.

15. 15. The Muratorian Fragment (c. AD 170), trans. Bruce M. Metzger; bible-researcher.com/muratorian.html. James is absent from its list of accepted books.

16. 16. On Origen (c. 230) as the first writer clearly to cite James as Scripture, referring to it as the epistle "in circulation" under James's name, see Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament.

17. 17. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23.24–25, trans. McGiffert; newadvent.org/fathers/250102.htm.

18. 18. Jerome, Lives of Illustrious Men (De viris illustribus) 2, in NPNF, 2nd ser., vol. 3; newadvent.org/fathers/2708.htm.

19. 19. The Peshitta included James, 1 Peter, and 1 John, while omitting 2 Peter, 2–3 John, Jude, and Revelation. See "Epistle of St. James," The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910); newadvent.org/cathen/08275b.htm.

20. 20. Athanasius, Festal Letter 39 (AD 367); bible-researcher.com/athanasius.html. The councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) ratified the same list for the Latin Church; bible-researcher.com/carthage.html.

21. 21. James 2:14–17 (NABRE); bible.usccb.org/bible/james/2.

22. 22. James 2:19 (NABRE).

23. 23. James 2:21–26 (NABRE).

24. 24. The Greek ouk ek pisteōs monon ("not by faith alone"), James 2:24, is the only place in the New Testament where the words "faith" and "alone" stand together.

25. 25. Romans 3:28 (NABRE); bible.usccb.org/bible/romans/3.

26. 26. Romans 4:2–3; Galatians 2:16 (NABRE); bible.usccb.org/bible/romans/4.

27. 27. Genesis 15:6, cited at Romans 4:3 and James 2:23 (NABRE). Paul appeals to Genesis 15 (Abraham's faith reckoned as righteousness); James to Genesis 22 (the binding of Isaac).

28. 28. Note on James 2:14–26, New American Bible (Revised Edition); bible.usccb.org/bible/james/2.

29. 29. E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977); James D. G. Dunn, "The New Perspective on Paul," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 65 (1983): 95–122; N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997). For the critical response, see D. A. Carson, Peter T. O'Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid, eds., Justification and Variegated Nomism, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001–2004). For a Catholic reading of Paul compatible with James, see Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, Anchor Bible 33 (New York: Doubleday, 1993), and Brendan Byrne, Romans, Sacra Pagina 6 (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1996).

30. 30. James 2:24 (NABRE).

31. 31. Luther, "Preface to the New Testament" (1522), Luther's Works 35:362.

32. 32. Luther, "Preface to the Epistles of St. James and St. Jude" (1522), Luther's Works 35:395–97; full text at bible-researcher.com/antilegomena.html.

33. 33. On Luther's mistaken identification of the author with the apostle James, son of Zebedee (martyred too early, per Acts 12:2), see the editorial note in Luther's Works 35:395, n. 4. The 1530 edition of the preface softened "I will not have him in my Bible" to "I cannot include him among the chief books."

34. 34. Luther, "Preface to the Epistle to the Hebrews" (1522), Luther's Works 35. James, Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation were placed last in Luther's New Testament and left unnumbered in the table of contents.

35. 35. Andreas Karlstadt, De canonicis scripturis libellus (1520); Erasmus, Annotationes to his Greek New Testament (1516); Cardinal Cajetan (Thomas de Vio). On the Catholic-side doubts before Trent, see "Canon of the New Testament," The Catholic Encyclopedia (1908); newadvent.org/cathen/03274a.htm.

36. 36. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles, on James 2:21–24, trans. John Owen; ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom45.

37. 37. Council of Trent, Session 4 (8 April 1546), Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures, trans. James Waterworth; bible-researcher.com/trent1.html (Denzinger-Hünermann 1502–1504).

38. 38. Council of Trent, Session 6 (13 January 1547), Decree on Justification, Canon 9 (DH 1559); traditionalcatholic.net. On faith as "the beginning of human salvation, the foundation, and the root of all justification," see Chapter 8 of the same decree.

39. 39. Council of Trent, Session 6, Decree on Justification, Chapter 10 (DH 1535), quoting James 2:24; traditionalcatholic.net.

40. 40. Council of Trent, Session 6, Decree on Justification, Chapter 7 (DH 1528–31), citing James 2:17 ("faith without works is dead and profitless") and Galatians 5:6 ("faith which worketh by charity"); and Catechism of the Catholic Church 1814–1815; vatican.va.

41. 41. Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church, signed 31 October 1999), §15, §25, and §40–41; christianunity.va (Holy See).

42. 42. James 5:14–15 (NABRE); bible.usccb.org/bible/james/5. The Council of Trent, Session 14 (1551), taught that the Anointing of the Sick was "instituted by Christ our Lord" and "promulgated by the blessed apostle James" (DH 1695; canons DH 1716–19); see also Catechism of the Catholic Church 1510–11, 1526; vatican.va.

43. 43. James 1:27; 1:22; 2:8; 1:17; 3:6, 8–9; 5:16 (NABRE). On confession, the Council of Trent grounds the Sacrament of Penance chiefly in the Lord's commission of John 20:22–23 (Session 14, Doctrine on the Sacrament of Penance), so James 5:16 is best read as an early biblical witness to the confessing of sin rather than as the institution text of the sacrament.

44. 44. On James as wisdom literature steeped in the Jesus tradition, see Bauckham, James: Wisdom of James, Disciple of Jesus the Sage, and the genre discussion in Dibelius, James.