PREFACE
I finished my exposition of Paul's letter to the Hebrew Christians yesterday, and today I will begin my exposition of the general epistle of James. I will continue to keep my exposition on each verse as simple and short as possible, in order that I don't bore you with needless or irrelevant detail. When I first begun my expositions on the New Testament some ten or eleven years ago, I find that sometimes I passed on some details that were interesting to me, but might not be of interest to you; the reason this happens is that these are my personal studies, and sometimes I get carried away with historical details, and sometimes I spend too much time explaining the Greek language, which is a help to me, but can also be very boring to someone looking to understand what the author is explaining. I will continue using the same format I have used from the beginning, by writing the verse out in the Authorized Version (KJV), and then my own translation from the Greek New Testament; I also use help from some notable Greek scholars such as Marvin R. Vincent, A.T. Robertson, The Expositors Greek Testament, J. Vernon McGee, John Calvin, Albert Barnes, and William Barclay. Whenever I quote others I will be very careful to note them. I pray that God will continue to bless us as we study and fellowship together in His Word.
INTRODUCTION
The epistle of James was most likely written by the half brother of our Lord. There are many theories set forth by the Latin side of the church and the Greek side, which is much too bulky, to review; besides, most of the historical data is crammed full of speculation. The Latin Church didn't accept the epistle of James until about the fourth century, while the Greek side accepted it almost immediately. It wasn't until the sixteenth century, when Martin Luther pulled away from the Latin Church, and was part of the protestant reformation, that he would not say that the epistle of James was inspired. Luther said the "epistle was an epistle of straw," because he did not understand that James was not contradicting Paul in mixing works with grace. We will see that James was in complete agreement with Paul on free from works, grace salvation.
James was written about A.D. 50. Because of the functional nature of this epistle, it has been compared to Proverbs and the Sermon on the Mount. The reason for this is that James was the leader of the Church in Jerusalem, and that he was speaking to Jews who had recently embraced Christianity.
James is considered a General Epistle because it was not addressed to any specific Church, but was addressed to all Christians everywhere. It is the first of the General Epistles; the others are 1 & 2 Peter; 1, 2, & 3rd John, and Jude.
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