Introduction

James and His Letter

The Church has long received this letter as the work of James, called “the brother of the Lord,” who governed the church at Jerusalem and presided at its council in the days of the apostles. He wrote, as Theophylact notes at the head of his commentary, to the twelve tribes scattered abroad—Jewish believers dispersed among the nations—and he wrote in a plain, sententious style closer to the wisdom literature of the Old Testament than to the argumentative prose of Paul. Short exhortation follows short exhortation: on trial and temptation, on hearing and doing the word, on the tongue, on the rich and the poor, on prayer. A reader coming to James after Paul’s epistles notices the change of register at once; this is not sustained argument but a string of counsels, each weighed and each meant to be carried away and used.

Theophylact’s own summary, set at the opening of his exposition, catches the letter’s shape accurately: James teaches the difference between the trials that come from God and those that arise from a man’s own heart; he insists that faith must show itself in deeds and not in profession alone; he warns the rich against presuming upon their wealth; and he closes by commending patience, the example of Job, and the calling of the elders to pray over the sick. It is a letter for the whole of the Christian life rather than for one controversy in particular, and Theophylact’s commentary follows it point by point, in the same unhurried, practical spirit.

A Commentary Without Chrysostom

Something should be said here, at the threshold of the seven letters James opens, about the shape of the Greek patristic record behind them. For the four Gospels, Acts, and the letters of Paul, Theophylact’s habit is to distill the vast preaching of Saint John Chrysostom into a form a reader can take in at a sitting. On James, the two epistles of Peter, the three of John, and Jude, that resource largely fails him: Chrysostom left no homilies on these letters at all. The principal Greek exposition of the Catholic Epistles before Theophylact’s own time was instead the work associated with Oecumenius, a compiler who had gathered and arranged the scattered patristic comment on James through Jude a century or so earlier. Theophylact’s relationship to that material is close—closer, in places, than his relationship to any single predecessor in the Gospel commentaries—though he writes throughout in his own voice and with his own pastoral concerns. The result is that the Catholic Epistles show Theophylact working in a different register than the volumes on Matthew or Luke: less the distiller of one towering forebear, more the last link in a shorter and thinner chain of Greek commentary.

Faith Perfected by Works

The best-known passage in the letter is also its most contested: James’s declaration that faith without works is dead, and that Abraham was justified by his works when he offered Isaac upon the altar. Read against the Apostle Paul’s teaching that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law, the two statements have often been set against one another. Theophylact will not have it so. He distinguishes two senses of “faith”—the bare assent to a truth, which even demons possess, and the faith joined to a settled disposition of the soul, which cannot help but issue in good works—and two senses of “works,” the moral works that faith of the second kind naturally produces, and the ritual works of the Mosaic law from which Paul frees the believer. On this reading Paul and James answer different questions rather than contradicting one another, and Theophylact sums up the point in a single phrase worth carrying away from the whole letter: in Abraham, he says, “faith was working together with his works, and by works faith was made perfect.” Faith and effort are not rivals for credit but partners in a single life, each incomplete without the other—a reading of the passage that keeps James and Paul, and grace and human striving, bound together rather than pulled apart.

The Prayer of Faith

The letter closes with the instruction that a sick believer should call for the elders of the church, who are to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord, so that the prayer of faith may save him and the Lord may raise him up. Theophylact treats this not as a novelty but as a continuation of what the apostles themselves did while the Lord was still among men, anointing the sick and healing them—the letter’s closing counsel resting, in his reading, on a practice as old as the Gospel itself. He joins to it the confession of sins one to another and the example of Elijah, whose prayer closed and opened the heavens: ordinary men, he insists, and not only apostles, may pray with like effect if their striving is joined to the same earnestness. Read in that light, James’s brief, plainly worded letter—so unlike the sustained argument of Paul, so close in tone to the Wisdom books that formed its author—asks to be taken up the way Theophylact himself takes it: verse by verse, each counsel weighed and carried into practice before the reader moves on to the next.