The so-called "Letter of James" has never gotten very good press. It suffers from scholarly and spiritual slights on almost every count. Scholars dispute both its actual authorship and its intended authorship (i.e., not only are they not sure what person or persons wrote these texts, there is some debate over what "James" this supposedly came from).

Even if this James is "the Lord's brother" (Galatians 1:19), there is little to suggest that he or any other one person wrote these texts. These five chapters refuse to hang together with any sort of coherence, making their existence as a formal letter to some community highly doubtful. Instead of seeing the work of James as epistolary then, it is more accurately described as a paraenesis - that is, a text that "strings together admonitions of…