Justified True Belief

(●) The brother who thought Jesus had lost his mind, and who died three decades later rather than deny that he was the Christ. + Most families have someone who will tell you the truth about you. They grew up in the same rooms, they remember the ordinary years nobody else saw, and they are not impressed by the version of you that strangers get. James grew up in the same house as Jesus of Nazareth. During the years when crowds were walking miles across Galilee to hear his brother teach, James was not among them, and the Gospel of John gives the reason in eight flat words: "For not even his brothers believed in him" (John 7:5). Then something happened to him. Within a few years of the crucifixion this same man is at the center of the church in Jerusalem, and Paul, who had no reason to flatter him, calls him one of its pillars (Galatians 2:9). Three decades after that, in the year 62, a high priest named Ananus took advantage of a gap between Roman governors and had him stoned to death. That last fact does not come from a Christian source at all. Josephus, the Jewish historian, was not a believer and had no interest in helping the movement along, and he recorded the execution anyway, identifying the victim as "the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, whose name was James." That sequence is the reason a skeptical brother has a place on a Christian apologetics shelf. Whatever else is disputed about the origins of Christianity, the turn in the middle of this life is hard to account for. The family skeptic became the man a high priest broke the rules to kill, and the man the church would remember as standing on the pinnacle of the temple, saying that his brother sits at the right hand of God, and being thrown down for it. One ordinary detail is missing, and always will be. Nobody wrote down the year he was born, so the dates of his life have to be run backward from the other end, from a death that Josephus can place inside a gap of a few months in 62 AD.

(●) Before 30 AD: He grew up in Nazareth as one of four brothers of Jesus, and nobody wrote down the year he was born. + The village of Nazareth in the first century was small enough that the neighbors knew everyone’s trade and everyone’s siblings, the way people in a small town still know whose boy fixed the fence and whose brother moved away. That is exactly how the Gospels introduce the family. When Jesus began teaching in his home synagogue, the people who had watched him grow up tried to cut him down to size by listing his relatives: "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?" (Mark 6:3). Matthew gives the same four names in a different order and spells Joses as Joseph (Matthew 13:55). James is named first in both lists, and in an ancient list of brothers the first name is usually the eldest of them. What "brother" means here has been argued about since the fourth century, and the argument is still live between the great branches of the church. Christians have taken it three ways. Some read it plainly, as later sons of Mary and Joseph born after Jesus. Some take them as sons of Joseph by an earlier marriage, which would make James a stepbrother older than Jesus rather than younger. Others take them as cousins, on the ground that the family words of that world stretched further than ours do. Nothing in the story of his life turns on which reading is right, and all three have been held by Christians who confess the same creed. On any of them, James lived in the same household, watched the same brother year after year, and did not believe him.

(●) c. 28 to 30 AD: While the crowds gathered, the family went out to bring Jesus home. + Mark tells a scene that no later admirer would have made up. Jesus is drawing crowds so dense that he and his disciples cannot even eat, and word reaches his relatives. "And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, He is out of his mind" (Mark 3:21). A few verses later his mother and brothers arrive, standing outside, sending word in, and Jesus answers by looking around at the people sitting with him and saying that whoever does the will of God is his brother and sister and mother (Mark 3:31–35). John is blunter still, and he sets the scene at the Feast of Booths, the autumn pilgrimage week when Jerusalem filled up with visitors who camped out in leafy shelters to remember the years Israel spent in the wilderness. It was the busiest stage in the country, and the brothers tell Jesus to use it. Go up to Judea, they say, do your works where people can actually see them, because nobody who wants a public reputation works in a corner. Then John adds a line in his own voice, and it is the same eight words: "For not even his brothers believed in him" (John 7:5). Historians have a name for a detail like that. They call it the criterion of embarrassment, which means only that the people passing the story on had every reason to leave it out and passed it on anyway. Consider who was telling it. The four Gospels were written and circulated in a church where James was a famous and revered figure, the man in charge in Jerusalem, and they preserved without softening the fact that he had once thought his brother was out of his mind. Nobody invents that about the head of their own church.

(●) c. 30 AD: Paul reports that the risen Jesus appeared to James, and after that the brother is inside the movement. + Writing to Corinth in the mid-fifties, Paul hands on a list of resurrection appearances that he says he did not compose but received, a summary already fixed and being passed along before he wrote it down, and older in all likelihood than his own conversion. It is the sort of thing a congregation learns by heart. In the middle of it, between the five hundred and the apostles, sits one short line: "then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles" (1 Corinthians 15:7). That is all. Nothing is described, no conversation is recorded, and the oldest Christian tradition simply notes, in three words of Greek, that the risen Jesus went to see his brother. The next time James turns up he is in the upper room. Luke lists the hundred and twenty waiting in Jerusalem after the ascension: the eleven, the women, "Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers" (Acts 1:14). Somewhere between the needling at the Feast of Booths and that room, something turned him around, and the only explanation the earliest sources offer is the one line in Paul’s list. A later story tried to fill in that silence, and it is a lovely one. The Gospel according to the Hebrews, a Jewish-Christian gospel now lost except for the pieces other writers quoted, told that James had sworn he would eat no bread from the hour he drank the Lord’s cup until he saw him risen, and that Jesus came to him, called for bread, blessed it and gave it to him, saying "My brother, eat thy bread, for the Son of Man is risen from among those that sleep." Jerome preserved the passage around 393 AD in his catalog of Christian writers (On Illustrious Men 2, Richardson translation). It is worth reading for what the early church liked to imagine about that meeting, and it is not evidence for what happened at it. The evidence is the bare line in Paul.

(●) c. 35 to 48 AD: He became the recognized head of the church in Jerusalem, and the apostles reported to him. + Nobody in the New Testament announces that James is now in charge. The rise shows up instead in small procedural details, which is usually how real authority shows up in any document: not in a title, but in who gets told things. Watch it happen in three moments. Paul, describing his first visit to Jerusalem after his conversion, says he saw Peter and then adds one exception: "But I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord’s brother" (Galatians 1:19). Around 44 AD, Peter escapes from Herod’s prison at night, knocks at the door of a house full of Christians who are praying for him, startles them half to death, and before he disappears into hiding leaves a single instruction behind him: "Tell these things to James and to the brothers" (Acts 12:17). By the time Paul comes back with his collection for the poor, the leadership has a settled shape and Paul names it: "James and Cephas and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given to me, they gave the right hand of fellowship to Barnabas and me, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised" (Galatians 2:9). Cephas is simply the Aramaic form of Peter’s name, Aramaic being the everyday language of Judea. Notice the order. James is named first. Later writers called the office he held the bishopric of Jerusalem, meaning the overseer of that one city’s church, though the word carried far less machinery then than the office would grow into. Clement of Alexandria, writing around 200 AD, reported that after the ascension Peter, James and John "strove not after honour, but chose James the Just bishop of Jerusalem" (Eusebius, Church History 2.1.3), and Jerome says he ruled that church for thirty years (On Illustrious Men 2). His reputation there was built on two things, prayer and a scrupulous Jewish piety that nobody in the city could fault. Our fullest description comes from Hegesippus, a Christian writer of the second century whose own book is lost and survives only in the passages Eusebius copied out of it. Hegesippus says James drank no wine and ate no meat, that no razor ever came upon his head, and that he spent so many hours on his knees in the temple that they had grown hard "like those of a camel." He was called the Just, Hegesippus adds, and also Oblias, which he glosses as "Bulwark of the people" and "Justice" (Church History 2.23.4–7). Some of that is the language of legend. The unshorn hair belongs to the Nazirite vow of Numbers 6, in which an Israelite consecrated himself to God for a season and let no razor touch his head, and the vegetarian and lifelong-Nazirite details are exactly the sort of thing admirers add to a holy man’s memory. What no source disputes, friendly or hostile, is the reputation itself. Even the men who eventually killed him had to build a charge of law-breaking to do it.

(●) c. 49 AD: At the council in Jerusalem he ruled that Gentiles could come in without becoming Jews. + This is the hinge on which the whole later history of Christianity turns, and it is easy to miss how close it came to swinging the other way. Men had come down from Judea to Antioch teaching that unless converts were circumcised according to the custom of Moses they could not be saved (Acts 15:1). Circumcision is the physical mark of the covenant God made with Abraham, cut into the body of every Jewish boy on his eighth day, and requiring it of a Greek convert meant, in practice, requiring him to become a Jew before he could become a Christian. Paul and Barnabas fought it, and when the argument would not settle, the question went up to Jerusalem. Peter spoke first. Then Paul and Barnabas told what God had done among the Gentiles. Then James spoke, and the room went quiet for him. He quoted the prophet Amos on the rebuilding of the fallen tent of David so that "the rest of mankind may seek the Lord," and he gave his ruling: do not make trouble for the Gentiles who are turning to God. He asked only four things of them, a short list about food and sexual conduct designed to let Jewish and Gentile believers sit at the same table without disgusting each other (Acts 15:13–21). Now consider who was saying it. The most rigorously observant man in the room, the one who prayed in the temple daily and had every personal reason to keep this new movement safely inside Israel, was the one who opened the door and then held it open. The letter that went out to Antioch afterward carried his fingerprints all over it, and it is the reason there is a church among the nations at all. One scholarly loose end is worth naming. Whether the meeting Luke describes in Acts 15 is the same meeting Paul describes in Galatians 2 has been argued for a long time and is not settled. It changes neither the ruling nor what followed from it.

(●) c. 57 AD: On Paul’s last visit, James asked him to pay for four men’s vows and prove the rumors false. + Paul came back to Jerusalem with money from the Gentile churches and a problem. "On the following day Paul went in with us to James, and all the elders were present" (Acts 21:18). They listened to his report and praised God for it, and then told him what was being said about him in the city: that he was teaching Jews among the Gentiles to abandon Moses. Their solution was practical, and a little awkward, the way most solutions are when a leader is trying to answer a rumor rather than an argument. Four men in the congregation were under a vow, most likely that same Nazirite vow of Numbers 6, a season of consecration to God that ended with shaving the head and bringing the required offerings at the temple. Those offerings cost money. James proposed that Paul join the four, go through the purification with them, and pay their expenses out of his own pocket, so that the whole city could see with its own eyes that he still lived in observance of the Law (Acts 21:23–24). Paul agreed and did it. It did not work. Days later he was recognized in the temple courts, a riot broke out, and the Roman garrison came down the stairs and arrested him. He never went free in Judea again. There is something very human in that scene: a church leader trying to hold two constituencies together, choosing a gesture that ought to have settled things, and watching it go wrong for reasons nobody in the room could have predicted. The advice was not bad advice. It simply did not work.

(●) 62 AD: A high priest used a gap between Roman governors to have him stoned, and lost his own office for it. + The best account of the death comes from a source with no stake in it. Josephus, writing his Antiquities of the Jews around 93 AD, explains the opening first. The Roman governor Porcius Festus had died in office, his replacement Albinus was still on the road, and for a few months nobody in Judea held the power to review a death sentence. Into that gap stepped the new high priest, Ananus the younger, whom Josephus describes as bold and insolent and a Sadducee. The Sadducees were the priestly families who ran the temple, and Josephus says of that party that they were "very rigid in judging offenders," harsher on the bench than their Pharisee rivals. Ananus, he writes, "assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, whose name was James: and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned" (Antiquities 20.200, Whiston translation). The sanhedrin was the council of chief priests and elders that tried cases under Jewish law, and calling it into session during the gap was the whole trick. The sequel tells you what the city thought of the trick. The most equitable of the citizens, Josephus says, were offended by it. Some of them went out along the road to meet Albinus on his way up from Alexandria in order to complain before he even arrived, and King Agrippa II responded by taking the high priesthood away from Ananus, who had held it three months. Sit with that a moment. A high priest lost his office over the killing of a Christian, and the Jewish historian who reports the affair plainly thought the complaint against him was justified. Hegesippus tells a fuller and far more dramatic version, preserved for us by Eusebius. In his telling the authorities set James up on the pinnacle of the temple, in front of the crowd gathered for Passover, and asked him to use the height and the hush to talk the people out of their faith. He used it to answer that the Son of Man sits at the right hand of the great Power and is coming on the clouds. So they threw him down. He survived the fall and was stoned where he lay, praying as the stones came, "I entreat thee, Lord God our Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." A fuller finished him, a fuller being a man whose trade was cleaning and thickening cloth, using the heavy club he beat the cloth with (Church History 2.23.11–18). That prayer is the one his brother prayed from the cross (Luke 23:34). It may be memory, and it may be the church shaping a martyrdom to match the one it already knew by heart, and there is no way to tell from here which it is. The two accounts agree on the core: he was killed in Jerusalem, by stoning, on a decision of the temple authorities. They differ on the year, since Hegesippus puts the death immediately before the Roman siege rather than in 62, and they differ on the charge, which Josephus gives as breaking the law and Hegesippus as confessing Christ in public.

What He Taught

(T1) A faith that does nothing is not a weak faith, it is a dead one. + Picture a man standing in a doorway on a cold morning, looking at someone with no coat, and saying warmly, "Go in peace, be warmed and be filled." Then he shuts the door. That is James’s own illustration (James 2:15–16), and the sting of it is that the man has said nothing false. He genuinely wishes the other man well. He simply has not done anything, and James asks what use his good wishes were. From that small scene he draws the claim the letter is famous for. Faith without works is dead. A faith that produces nothing is not faith held feebly, it is faith that has stopped being alive, the way a body with no breath in it has stopped being a person and become a corpse (James 2:26). He is generous enough to grant that his opponent believes all the right doctrine, and then he turns that concession into a joke at the man’s expense: you believe that God is one, and you do well, the demons believe that too and shudder (James 2:19). Read carelessly, this sounds like the flat opposite of Paul, who insists that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the Law (Romans 3:28). To be justified is to be declared right with God, acquitted, the way a defendant walks out of a courtroom with the charge answered. Hold on to that picture, because the two men are answering two different questions with the same vocabulary. Paul is asking how a guilty person gets right with God in the first place, and his answer is that nobody earns the verdict. James is asking a question that comes afterward, namely how you can tell whether the faith somebody claims is the real thing, and his answer is to look at the life. Both men quote the same verse about Abraham believing God and having it credited to him as righteousness (Genesis 15:6), and neither of them thinks a person is saved by being nice. Calvin, commenting on the letter, drew the line where it belongs: Paul means the free crediting of righteousness at the tribunal of God, and James means the showing of that righteousness in a life other people can watch.

(Q) "In the same way, faith also, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself." + Source: James 2:17 (ESV). The sentence comes directly after the man in the doorway. "In the same way" points back to the well-wisher whose kindness cost him nothing and warmed nobody.

(T2) God tempts nobody, and every good thing a person has came down from him. + People under pressure go looking for somewhere to put the blame, and God is the largest target available. James heads that off early and without much sympathy. "No one say when he is tempted, I am being tempted by God, for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one" (James 1:13). Then he traces the sequence back where it belongs, into the person: desire conceives, sin is born, sin grows up and brings death. It is a family tree, not an excuse. Having said where the pull downward does not come from, he turns the picture over and says what does come from God. Everything good, nothing else, and it never varies. The image he reaches for is astronomical, and anyone who has watched a patch of sunlight travel across a wall over an afternoon can see it. Sunlight and moonlight shift all day and all month, shortening and lengthening, sliding along the plaster and going out. With the Father of lights there is no such shifting. He is not brighter on some days than others, and he has no dark side that comes around. Christian theology later gave that idea a name, the immutability of God, which means simply that God does not change in his character or his purposes: the God you pray to on a bad Tuesday is not a different God from the one who answered on a good Sunday. The point matters pastorally more than the long word makes it sound. If God’s goodness varied like weather, prayer would be a matter of catching him in a good mood.

(Q) "Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow." + Source: James 1:17 (ESV). "Father of lights" means the maker of the sun, moon and stars. The point of the contrast is that the lights he made all move and dim, and he does not.

(T3) The tongue is a small thing that sets the whole course of a life on fire. + James builds this point out of three ordinary objects before he says anything abstract at all. A bit in a horse’s mouth, a few inches of metal lying on the animal’s tongue, turns a creature that outweighs its rider many times over. A rudder small enough for one man to hold swings a whole ship through a gale. A spark no bigger than a fingernail takes a hillside of forest. Then the third image turns around and becomes the subject itself: the tongue is that spark. What follows is the least flattering paragraph about human beings anywhere in the letter. Every kind of animal has been tamed by humanity, James says, and no one can tame the tongue. Out of the same mouth come blessing and cursing, and he refuses to let his readers file that away as normal. A spring does not run fresh water and salt water from the same opening, and a fig tree does not produce olives (James 3:9–12). Anyone who has sung about the goodness of God in a service and then said something cutting in the car park on the way home knows the exact experience he is describing. He is not merely scolding, though. Earlier in the letter he had said that a person who thinks himself religious and does not bridle his tongue has a worthless religion (James 1:26), which is a striking place to put speech: right alongside sacrifice and prayer, as a test of whether anything real is going on inside. And the remedy he offers is not a technique but a tempo. Quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger (James 1:19).

(Q) "See how great a forest is set aflame by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, the very world of unrighteousness; the tongue is set among our body’s parts as that which defiles the whole body and sets on fire the course of our life, and is set on fire by hell." + Source: James 3:5–6 (ESV). The word rendered "hell" is Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, where children had been burned in sacrifice under the later kings of Judah and which Jesus used as a picture of final judgment. James is saying the damage a tongue does has a source further down than bad manners.

(T4) Religion God accepts looks after widows and orphans, and a church that flatters the rich has already judged wrongly. + James asks his readers to picture two men arriving at the same meeting. One has a gold ring and fine clothes, the other is poor and shabby, and the congregation gives the rich man a good seat and tells the poor man to stand at the back, or to sit down on the floor by somebody’s feet (James 2:2–4). Notice what James does not say about the man who showed them in. His verdict is not that the usher was tactless or that he handled it clumsily. The man has made himself a judge with evil motives, sorting people by a standard God does not use. Then he names the two people such a standard always overlooks. In a world with no pension, no insurance and no welfare office, a widow with no sons and a child with no father were the likeliest people in any town to fall through every floor there was. James makes going to see about those two the definition of the religion God accepts, and the word translated "visit" carries the old sense of the phrase: not dropping in, but going to find out what is wrong and doing something about it. He presses harder in chapter five, where he turns and addresses rich landowners directly, telling them that the wages they held back from the men who cut their harvest are crying out, and that the cries have reached the ears of the Lord of armies (James 5:1–6). None of this is new with him, and he would have been the first to say so. It is the prophets of Israel, Amos and Isaiah, carried into a Christian congregation, and it is also his own brother’s teaching almost word for word. Here is the curious thing: the letter never once quotes the Sermon on the Mount, and it echoes the Sermon constantly. Do not swear. Ask and it will be given. Blessed are those who endure. The poor are heirs of the kingdom. It reads like a man who had listened to those sermons for years and absorbed them so thoroughly that it no longer occurred to him to cite them.

(Q) "Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world." + Source: James 1:27 (ESV). Those are two halves that usually get pulled apart and handed to opposite kinds of Christian, the ones who care about mercy and the ones who care about purity. James joins them with a single "and" and treats the pair as one definition.

(Q) "Therefore, it is my judgment that we do not cause trouble for those from the Gentiles who are turning to God." + Source: Acts 15:19 (ESV). His ruling at the council in Jerusalem, and the only words of his outside the letter that anyone wrote down. The sentence runs straight on into the four requests he then made of the Gentile churches (Acts 15:20). The strictest man in the room decided the question in favor of the outsiders, and every Gentile Christian since has lived on the other side of that sentence.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The early church remembered him as the Just, and counted him the first bishop of Jerusalem. + Within a century and a half of his death, James had become the pattern of a certain kind of holiness: the man of prayer who stays in the city, keeps the fasts, and is trusted even by people who do not share his faith. Each of our early witnesses adds a piece of the portrait. Hegesippus supplies the camel’s knees and the linen garments. Clement of Alexandria supplies the election to the bishopric. Eusebius, gathering both of them into his Church History around 325 AD, says the ancients surnamed him the Just "on account of the excellence of his virtue" (2.1.2). His name also became the safest place in the ancient world to put a book. Over the following centuries a whole shelf of writings appeared under it. There is an infancy gospel about the birth of Mary. There are secret revelations from Nag Hammadi, the town in upper Egypt near which a jar of Coptic manuscripts was dug up in 1945 and gave the modern world its own library of Gnostic gospels. There is a eucharistic liturgy, an order of service for the Lord’s Supper, still celebrated in Jerusalem and among the Syriac churches. None of them are his. All of them are evidence of how much weight the name carried. He is still on the calendar, and the churches have never quite agreed on the date. The Eastern churches keep his memory on 23 October as the first hierarch of Jerusalem, hierarch being their word for the bishop of a city, and Anglicans and Lutherans keep the same day for James of Jerusalem. The Roman calendar commemorates him on 3 May alongside Philip, following the old Western habit of identifying him with James the son of Alphaeus. Something of his liturgy is still sung in English, too. The Advent hymn "Let all mortal flesh keep silence" is a Victorian translation of a prayer out of the liturgy that bears his name.

(†) The skeptical brother who died a martyr is a fact every account of the resurrection has to fit. + Historians who study the origins of Christianity, believing and unbelieving alike, tend to agree on a short list of things that are very well attested. Jesus died by crucifixion. His followers had experiences they took to be appearances of him alive. Paul the persecutor changed sides. And James the brother changed sides. That last item is anchored unusually well, because the two ends of it come from opposite directions and neither end helps the people reporting it. The Gospels, written inside the church, admit that he was once an unbeliever. Josephus, writing outside the church and with no motive to advertise its martyrs, records that he was executed as one of its leaders. Skepticism inside a family is a particularly stubborn thing, which is why the change matters. James had a lifetime of ordinary evidence about his brother, the quiet years in Nazareth before any crowd ever gathered, and all of that evidence had produced unbelief in him. Any proposal about what changed his mind has to work against that weight. Legend, for instance, needs time and distance in order to grow, and Paul’s list in 1 Corinthians 15 supplies neither: it is a set formula that Paul says he received rather than composed, circulating within a very few years of the crucifixion, and it names James specifically. The usual alternative is grief hallucination, the idea that a bereaved friend saw what he longed to see, and it is a proposal worth taking seriously. The trouble is that it fits a devoted follower far better than it fits a brother who had publicly written the man off as out of his mind. None of this proves the resurrection by itself, and nobody should pretend otherwise. It is one item that any competing explanation has to account for, and the honest way to weigh it is alongside the rest of the case rather than as a knockdown blow on its own.

(†) His letter took centuries to win its place in the New Testament, and Luther nearly let it go again. + The Epistle of James had a slow road into the Bible. Eusebius filed it among the antilegomena, the "spoken against" books, meaning writings that were widely read in the churches but whose place on the shelf was still being argued. His own verdict on it runs: "it is to be observed that it is disputed; at least, not many of the ancients have mentioned it," though he adds that it was read publicly in very many churches (Church History 2.23.25). It settled into the canon in the fourth century, the canon being the agreed list of books the church receives as Scripture: the letter appears in the list Athanasius sent out in 367 AD and in the councils of North Africa that followed. Twelve centuries later Martin Luther reopened the question. In his 1522 preface to the German New Testament he ranked the books by how plainly they preach Christ, and about this one he wrote: "Therefore 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." That line gets quoted far more often than it gets placed. Consider where Luther was standing when he wrote it. He had just spent years fighting a system in which salvation was something a person accumulated by degrees, and here was a letter saying that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone (James 2:24), landing on the exact nerve. It is worth saying what he did not do. He never removed the book from his Bible. He said he would not stop anyone from valuing it, he preached on it, and he went on quoting it for the rest of his life, and the comparison to straw quietly disappeared from later editions of that preface. The Reformed tradition took the other road and defended the letter head on. Calvin wrote a full commentary on it, insisted that James is describing the fruit that grows out of justification rather than the cause of it, and refused to let two apostles be set against each other. That is still the standard answer, and it works.

(†) Christians still divide over what "brother of the Lord" means, and over the men who came from him to Antioch. + Two honest disagreements sit on this life, and neither one is settled by wanting it settled. - What "brother of the Lord" means. Three readings have been held by serious Christians for sixteen centuries, and each is named after the man who argued it hardest. The first, named after Helvidius, a Roman writer of the 380s, takes the brothers as later children of Mary and Joseph, born after Jesus; it is the plain sense most Protestants read, and the one the Gospel wording most naturally suggests. The second, named after Epiphanius of Salamis, takes them as sons of Joseph by an earlier marriage, which would make James an older stepbrother rather than a younger brother; this is the Eastern Orthodox position, and the story told in the second-century Protevangelium of James. The third, argued by Jerome against Helvidius around 383 AD, takes them as cousins, on the ground that the Greek word for brother can stretch that far and that a "Mary the mother of James" appears at the cross (Mark 15:40); this is the usual Roman Catholic reading. Underneath the three readings is one doctrine: the perpetual virginity of Mary, the belief held by the Eastern and Roman churches that she remained a virgin for the whole of her life and bore no other children. The first reading rules that out, and the other two protect it, which is why the argument has lasted. It is worth saying plainly that Scripture never asserts the doctrine and never denies it in so many words, that the argument is an old one conducted between people who confess the same creed, and that the story of his life reads exactly the same on all three. - Antioch, and the men "from James." Paul reports that Peter had been eating freely with Gentile Christians in Antioch until some visitors turned up, "for before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision" (Galatians 2:12). Paul says he opposed Peter to his face over it. Whether those men carried James’s authority with them or merely his address, Paul never says, and the New Testament never tells us what James himself made of the incident. This is the one place in the record where a shadow falls across him, and the honest thing to say is that we do not know. What we do know is that the same James had ruled for the Gentiles at the council, and would rule that way again. One further limit is worth naming, and it belongs to the letter rather than the life. James says almost nothing about the cross, the resurrection, or the Spirit, and he names Jesus only twice in five chapters. Some readers take that as the mark of an early Jewish-Christian sermon addressed to people who already believed all of it and needed to be told how to live; others have simply found it thin. What nobody disputes is how the author introduces himself. He could have opened by calling himself the brother of the Lord, and every reader would have sat up. He opened instead by calling himself a bond-servant of the Lord Jesus Christ (James 1:1).