The Epistle of Straw?

James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes in the Dispersion: Greetings.

James 1:1

Why Start Here?

Most Bible studies begin with the text. This one begins with a question.

The question is one that anyone who has spent time in confessional Lutheran circles has probably heard, often in the same breath as Luther’s name: didn’t the great Reformer call the Epistle of James an “epistle of straw”? And if he did, why are we about to spend ten weeks studying it?

The question deserves a real answer, not a dismissive wave. It gets at something important about how we read Scripture, how we understand the Gospel, and how we navigate the apparent tensions within the Bible itself. More than that, it gets at what the Church has always done with texts that are harder to place: texts that do not preach Christ as directly as John’s Gospel, or unfold the doctrine of justification as systematically as Romans. What do we do with such a book?

The short answer, which this session will unfold at greater length, is that we read it as Scripture. Luther’s famous remark, made in a particular moment for particular reasons, has echoed down through five centuries and sometimes been taken to say far more than Luther meant. The longer answer requires us to meet the author, understand the audience, hear Luther’s concern on its own terms, and settle on a way of reading James that lets him speak as the Spirit-inspired witness he is, a witness who, rightly understood, stands beside Paul rather than against him.

So before we open James at chapter one, verse one, we need to do the work of introduction. Who wrote this letter? When? To whom? Why did it end up in our Bible, and why did it end up on the edge of Luther’s list? Those are the questions this session sets out to answer.

Who Wrote James, and to Whom?

The Author

Four men named James appear in the New Testament, so some detective work is needed. Two of them can be ruled out quickly. James the son of Zebedee, the brother of John, was martyred around A.D. 44 (see Acts 12), almost certainly too early to have written this letter. James the father of Judas (not Iscariot) is known to us only as a name (see Luke 6:16).

That leaves two possibilities. One is James the son of Alphaeus, a shadowy figure about whom the New Testament tells us little beyond his place in the list of the Twelve. The other is James the Just, the brother of our Lord Jesus Christ. The weight of evidence, from the earliest centuries of the Church down to modern scholarship, points to the second. (Jerome and some later writers took these two to be the same man, reading “brother” in the wider sense of “cousin.” Most interpreters today keep them distinct. Either way, the author of this letter is the James whom the New Testament calls the brother of the Lord.)

The evidence for this identification is striking when you gather it. Matthew’s Gospel names James first among the brothers of Jesus (see Matthew 13:55). John records that during Jesus’ earthly ministry, his own brothers did not believe in him (see John 7:5), which means James was not one of the disciples during Jesus’ public ministry. Paul tells us, however, that the risen Christ appeared specifically to James (see 1 Corinthians 15:7), likely the moment of his conversion, and a moment Paul lists with the same seriousness as the other resurrection appearances. By the time we reach the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, James is unmistakably the leader of the church in Jerusalem, and Paul himself calls him “the Lord’s brother” (see Galatians 1:19).

The Jewish historian Josephus records that James was stoned around A.D. 62 at the instigation of the high priest Ananus. A second-century Christian writer, Hegesippus, whose account is preserved by Eusebius, adds that James was first thrown from the pinnacle of the temple and then stoned. The man who had grown up in the same household as Jesus of Nazareth (who had perhaps watched his Brother go out to the Jordan to be baptized, who had surely heard him teach, who had come to believe only after the resurrection) gave his life for the faith he had once rejected.

Consider, then, how this man introduces himself at the opening of his letter. He does not claim to be the brother of Jesus. He does not claim apostolic authority in the Pauline sense. He calls himself simply a servant (the word in Greek is the word for slave) of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ. The man who shared a roof with the Son of God takes the most modest title available to him. The humility is unmistakable, and it sets the tone for everything that follows.

The Audience

James writes, as the opening verse tells us, to the twelve tribes in the Dispersion. The phrase is a technical one, referring to Jews living outside the land of Israel, a diaspora community scattered across the Roman world and beyond. But these are not Jews in general; they are specifically Jewish Christians.

We can see this in the texture of the letter itself. James addresses his readers as brothers, a term Jewish Christians used of one another. He refers to their gathering as a synagogue, which was the natural word for a Jewish-Christian assembly in the earliest days of the Church, before the word ekklesia (church) had fully taken over. He speaks of the Lord Jesus Christ and of the honorable name by which his readers have been called, that is, the name placed on them in Baptism.

These were the original Jewish Christians, scattered under the pressure of the persecution that began with the martyrdom of Stephen (see Acts 8). They were often poor. They were sometimes oppressed by wealthier landowners who dragged them into court. They were facing real trials, the kind that test faith and reveal what it is made of. This is the congregation James pastors from a distance with his letter.

The Date

Here is something that may surprise students who have not encountered it before: the Epistle of James may well be the earliest New Testament document ever written.

If James was martyred in A.D. 62, his letter must date from before then. And there are good reasons to place it considerably earlier. The letter reflects a time before the great questions about Gentile inclusion had come to a head, questions that dominated the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, which James himself presided over. The letter’s audience seems to be almost entirely Jewish-Christian; the Gentile mission is not yet on the horizon. The language and concerns are profoundly Jewish, rooted in the wisdom tradition of the Old Testament and in the teaching of Jesus.

A date in the mid-40s A.D. is quite plausible. That would place James’s letter before Paul’s first missionary journey. Before most of the questions Paul would later address had even been raised. Before any of the Gospels were written down. If this dating is correct, and many careful scholars think it is, then James is not responding to Paul. He cannot be. He is writing pastoral wisdom to a scattered Jewish-Christian community at the dawn of the Church’s life, before the theological controversies of the later decades had fully taken shape.

This matters enormously for how we read the letter. We are not watching James argue against Paul, or Paul against James. We are reading the pastoral wisdom of the brother of our Lord, shepherding his people through trials, temptations, economic oppression, and the ordinary struggles of living as Christians in a fallen world. What he writes stands on its own terms.

The Genre

One more piece of the introduction before we move on to the harder question. The Epistle of James is not structured the way Paul’s epistles are structured.

Paul typically makes a sustained theological argument that moves from premise to premise, building toward a conclusion. You can outline Romans or Galatians. You can follow the logic of the argument across chapters. James does not work that way. He jumps from topic to topic, returns to earlier themes without warning, and weaves his concerns together in a tapestry rather than a linear argument.

This is because James is writing wisdom literature. The closest parallels in the rest of Scripture are the book of Proverbs and the Sermon on the Mount, and indeed James seems to have absorbed the Sermon on the Mount so thoroughly that echoes of his Brother’s teaching appear on nearly every page. He writes in the voice of a wise pastor, circling his themes, illustrating with vivid images, and returning to his central concerns again and again rather than treating them exhaustively in one place.

This genre has implications for how we read James. If we try to read him like Paul, looking for a tight theological argument, we will be frustrated. If we read him like Proverbs (letting the wisdom accumulate, letting themes echo across the letter, expecting the same concerns to surface repeatedly in new forms) we will find a coherent and deeply pastoral book. James has coherence, but at the level of theme rather than at the level of logical argument.

Luther and the Epistle of Straw

Now to the question that probably brought some of you to this study in the first place. Did Luther dismiss James? And if he did, what are we doing here?

What Luther Actually Said

The famous phrase comes from Luther’s 1522 Preface to the New Testament, written as part of his German translation of the Bible. In comparing the various New Testament books and assessing how clearly each one proclaims the Gospel, Luther wrote that, compared to the Gospel of John, the first epistle of John, the epistles of Paul (especially Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians) and the first epistle of Peter, the epistle of James was, in his famous phrase, a right strawy epistle. His measure was Christ: does this book preach Christ to me in such a way that I am grounded in the Gospel?

Notice, however, what Luther actually said and what he did not say. He did not say it should be removed from the canon. He did not say Christians should not read it. What he said was that compared to the books that most clearly and powerfully preach Christ, James seemed thin, strawy, because it does not, in Luther’s judgment, preach Christ with the same directness and fullness as the books he listed.

You can disagree with Luther’s ranking. Many godly Lutherans have. But it is crucial to hear his comment as a ranking of relative clarity about the Gospel, not as a verdict that James is sub-biblical or dispensable.

In fairness, the straw remark was not Luther’s sharpest word on the subject. In his separate 1522 preface to James and Jude, he wrote that James is “flatly against St. Paul and all the rest of Scripture in ascribing justification to works,” and he said plainly that he did not regard it as the writing of an apostle. He also moved James, together with Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation, to the back of his New Testament, apart from what he called the “true and certain chief books.” We should not soften those judgments. But we should see them for what they are: the opinions of one great theologian about a book the early Church had counted among the “disputed” writings. They were never the confession of the Lutheran Church, and the Church that bears his name did not follow him here.

Why Luther Said It

To understand Luther’s comment, you have to understand the moment in which he wrote it.

In 1522, Luther had just emerged from years of spiritual agony. As a young monk, he had tried to earn God’s favor through every kind of work the medieval Church prescribed: fasting, vigils, confessions, pilgrimages, penances without end. His conscience remained tormented. No matter how much he did, it was never enough. God remained, in his experience, a wrathful Judge whose righteousness condemned him.

And then, in his study of the Psalms and of Romans, Luther discovered (or rather, was given) the heart of the Gospel. The righteousness of God in the Gospel is not the righteousness by which God judges us, but the righteousness God gives us as a gift, received by faith, on account of Christ. He later described this discovery as being born again and entering paradise through open gates. The Gospel is the free gift of Christ’s righteousness to sinners who could never earn it.

And now, as Luther proclaimed this rediscovered Gospel across Germany, his Roman Catholic opponents were using James 2 against him. They pointed to the phrase about being justified by works and not by faith alone and wielded it like a club: see, James refutes your doctrine of justification by faith alone. The Roman apologists had found what they thought was a proof-text for works-righteousness, and they were deploying it against the very heart of the Gospel Luther had staked his life on.

You can hear the frustration in Luther’s 1522 Preface. It is the voice of a pastor who has seen consciences crushed under the weight of works-righteousness, who has himself nearly been destroyed by it, and who is now watching opponents misuse a biblical text to push people back into that prison. His sharp language about James is the language of a man fighting for the Gospel against what he perceived as its enemies.

This context does not settle whether Luther’s ranking was correct. But it helps us understand where the ranking came from. Luther was not conducting a detached academic evaluation of the canon. He was a pastor in the heat of battle, and his assessment bore the marks of that battle.

What Luther Did Not Do

Here are the things Luther did not do, and they matter every bit as much as the famous quote.

He did not remove James from the Bible. He translated it. He published it. He included it in every edition of his German Bible from 1522 onward. Whatever his reservations, he placed the book in the hands of ordinary German Christians for them to read.

He did not keep the famous phrase in print. The epistle-of-straw sentence appears in the 1522 Preface and was quietly dropped from later editions of his Bible, even though his reservations about the letter itself remained.

And he did not deny that the apparent tension between James and Paul could be resolved. Luther simply was not the man to work out the resolution in a satisfying way himself; that task fell, providentially, to the next generation of Lutheran theologians, who would articulate it with great care in the Formula of Concord.

What Confessional Lutherans Say Today

The Lutheran Church receives James as canonical Scripture. The Book of Concord, the collection of confessional documents that defines confessional Lutheran theology, quotes James as Scripture alongside the rest of the New Testament. The Formula of Concord, which we will study in depth in Session Five, directly addresses the apparent tension between James and Paul and resolves it, building on what the Apology of the Augsburg Confession had already said about James 2.

The resolution, stated briefly and to be developed at length later in this study, is this: Paul and James use the same words with different meanings. When Paul says a person is justified by faith apart from works of the Law, he is answering the question of how a sinner is declared righteous before God. That answer is faith alone, on account of Christ alone, by grace alone. When James says a person is justified by works and not by faith alone, he is answering a different question, the question of how genuine, saving faith is recognized and demonstrated. That answer is that living faith always produces fruit. A bare, fruitless profession is not saving faith at all.

Paul and James are not contradicting each other. They are asking different questions and answering each according to its own concern. Paul looks at the root; James looks at the fruit. Both are concerned with the same tree, the tree of genuine Christian faith, and both are needed. We need Paul to tell us how a sinner is saved. We need James to tell us what saving faith looks like when it is alive.

This is how the Lutheran Church reads James. Luther himself, for all his reservations, expressed the same essential truth in his famous description of faith from his 1522 Preface to Romans, a passage worth quoting at some length:

O it is a living, busy, active, mighty thing, this faith. It is impossible for it not to be doing good works incessantly. It does not ask whether good works are to be done, but before the question is asked, it has already done them, and is constantly doing them.

That is Luther on faith. And that, essentially, is James. The man who called James an epistle of straw, when he turned to describe what living faith actually is, described it in terms James would have recognized at once.

How We Will Read James

With the groundwork laid, we can set out the interpretive framework for the whole of this study. Three commitments will guide us as we read this letter over the weeks ahead.

First: We Will Keep Justification and Sanctification Distinct

This is the key distinction that unlocks James and keeps him in harmony with Paul. Write it on a card and keep it beside your Bible through this study.

Justification is God’s verdict over us. It is the declaration that we are righteous on account of Christ, received by faith alone, apart from works of the Law. It is the answer to the question, how does a sinner stand before a holy God? The answer is: only by faith in Christ, whose righteousness is given to us as a gift. This takes place in the heavenly courtroom. Theologians sometimes use the Latin phrase coram Deo, before the face of God.

Sanctification, or what the Lutheran Confessions often call the fruits of faith, is the new life that flows from that verdict. It is the works of love that the justified sinner now performs, not to earn God’s favor, but because God’s favor has already been given. It is visible before the world. Theologians sometimes use the Latin phrase coram mundo, before the world.

Paul’s primary concern is the first. James’s primary concern is the second. Neither concern can be collapsed into the other, and neither can be denied. The Gospel creates both the justified sinner and the fruit-bearing Christian, and we need both Paul and James to see the whole.

Second: We Will Read James as Pastoral Wisdom

James is not writing systematic theology. He is writing the wisdom of a pastor to his flock. We should not expect from him a developed doctrine of the atonement, or a fully articulated ordo salutis, or a Pauline treatment of justification. What we should expect, and what we will find, is the practical, penetrating, sometimes uncomfortable counsel of a wise shepherd to Christians under pressure.

This means we will read James the way we read Proverbs. We will let the wisdom accumulate. We will let themes echo across the letter. We will not demand that James address every theological question we might want to put to him, because he is not attempting to address every such question. He is doing something more specific and, in its own way, just as necessary.

Third: We Will Read James in Light of the Whole Scripture

The Lutheran Church has always read individual passages of Scripture in the light of the whole. We do not set James against Paul, or Paul against James, or James against Jesus. We read them together, trusting that the one Spirit who inspired them has given us a coherent witness.

Where apparent tensions arise (and they will, especially in Session Five) we will not rush to resolve them by suppressing one voice in favor of another. We will do the harder work of understanding each voice on its own terms, and then listening for how they speak together. This is how the Formula of Concord reads James and Paul. This is how we will too.

And underneath all of it, we will remember that James (the brother of our Lord, servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ) is speaking the Word of God to us. Whatever our questions, whatever our initial hesitations, we are not sitting in judgment over his letter. We are sitting under it, asking the Spirit to teach us through it.

Gathering the Threads

We have done a great deal of introductory work in this session, and it is worth gathering the threads before we open the letter itself.

We have met James: the brother of our Lord, the leader of the Jerusalem church, the pastor who calls himself simply a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ. We have located his readers as scattered Jewish Christians under social and economic pressure, possibly the earliest community for whom any New Testament document was written. And we have heard Luther’s famous concern about the letter on its own terms, recognizing that his “epistle of straw” remark was a moment of pastoral worry against the works-righteousness of his day, not a final verdict on the Spirit-inspired witness of James.

Above all, we have settled the question of whether we should read James as Scripture. We should, and we will. The Lutheran Church has always done so. The Book of Concord quotes James as Scripture. The Apology and the Formula of Concord address the apparent tension with Paul and resolve it within the same framework that has nourished the faithful for nearly five centuries. Our confidence in opening the letter is the Church’s confidence: that the Spirit has spoken through this man, and that what He has said belongs in our Bible because it speaks to our lives.

The interpretive framework is now in place. We will read James in canonical order, passage by passage. We will read him as a pastor giving wisdom, not as a systematician constructing a doctrine of justification. And we will read him in light of the whole of Scripture, listening for how his voice harmonizes with Paul’s rather than rushing to set them against each other. With these commitments named, we are ready to open chapter one.

For Discussion

The following questions are for group discussion or personal reflection.

1. Before this session, what had you heard about the Epistle of James? What had you heard about Luther’s attitude toward it? How did those prior impressions sit with you?

2. The Epistle of James may well be the earliest New Testament document, written perhaps before any of Paul’s letters, and long before any of the Gospels were written down. Does that change how you approach the letter? Why or why not?

3. James introduces himself as a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, without mentioning that he was the Lord’s own brother. What do you make of that humility, and what does it suggest about the kind of pastor James was?

4. The distinction between justification (how we stand before God) and sanctification (how saving faith shows itself in life) is going to be the interpretive key for this whole study. In your own words, how would you explain that distinction to someone who has never heard it?

5. Luther had real pastoral reasons for his sharp reaction to James in 1522. Does understanding those reasons change your assessment of his “epistle of straw” comment? Does it make you more sympathetic, less sympathetic, or neither?

6. What questions do you bring to this ten-week study? What do you hope to learn, understand, or resolve by the time we finish James?

Looking Ahead

Next week, we open the letter itself. James wastes no time; his first chapter launches directly into the themes that will occupy him throughout: trials, wisdom, the poor and the rich, temptation, and the saving Word. Before next session, read James 1:1–18 at least twice. Read it slowly. Notice what James returns to, what surprises you, and what raises questions.

And as you read, remember the ground we have laid. James is not Paul’s opponent. He is Paul’s brother, and, of course, the Lord’s. He is writing pastoral wisdom to a scattered church under pressure, calling the baptized to live out the faith they have already received. Whatever Luther’s reservations, the Church has always received this letter as Scripture, and we will read it as what it is: the inspired Word of God, given for our instruction, comfort, and correction in the life of faith.

Closing Prayer

Almighty God, heavenly Father, You have given us Your Word as a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. As we open the Epistle of James, grant us ears to hear, hearts to receive, and minds to understand. Keep us from pride that would dismiss what is hard, and from laziness that would skim over what is demanding. By Your Holy Spirit, lead us into all truth, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.