Paul among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology beyond Christendom and Modernity

by Douglas Harink

Brazos, Grand Rapids, 2003. 283 pp. $23.99. ISBN 1-58743-041-X.

The front cover of Douglas Harink’s book bears a remarkable testimonial from George Lindbeck: “This book is changing my mind on more themes . . . than any publication since Hans Frei’s The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.” This is an attention-grabbing statement, for Frei’s book inaugurated the current interest in narrative hermeneutics and helped to establish a new paradigm for a “postliberal” approach to theology. Thus, the reader opens Harink’s volume with high expectations: will this book be of comparable paradigm-shifting significance?
Paul among the Postliberals is not quite that sort of book; rather than crafting a new paradigm, Harink seeks to synthesize the work of other scholars who have already developed fresh ways of reading Paul. The book’s outstanding contribution is to bring the work of postliberal theologians such as John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas into stimulating dialogue with recent scholarship that has challenged and transformed older Reformation-era readings of Paul. Harink gets beyond the interminable methodological throat-clearing that seems to plague so many interdisciplinary efforts and boldly articulates answers to his key heuristic question: “What is a Pauline theology for our time?” (p. 21).

The book opens with a chapter on “Justification” that deftly summarizes several recent developments in Pauline scholarship: the “new perspective” on Paul’s relation to Judaism, Louis Martyn’s interpretation of Pauline apocalyptic, the debate over the “faith of Jesus Christ,” and the recent exploration of Paul’s counter-imperial politics. Harink shows how these various interpretive advances cohere to produce a powerful new reading of justification as “God’s rectifying justice,” which liberates and transforms the world and brings human beings into “a way of life that corresponds to the pattern of Jesus Christ’s own faithfulness.”
Following this summary, Harink argues in two insightful chapters that Hauerwas is best read as a radical apocalyptic theologian, like the Paul of Galatians, and that Yoder gives a compelling account of “Paul’s theology as a political theology focused on the cross of Jesus Christ.” The chapter on Hauerwas argues that he should be interpreted as an apocalyptic voice pronouncing anathema on an idolatrous false gospel (American liberalism) that seeks to co-opt the gospel of Jesus Christ into another religious-cultural system. In fact, however, Hauerwas himself very rarely uses apocalyptic language or categories; Harink is in effect showing, though he does not put it like this, that Hauerwas would be a clearer and more effective theologian if he did appeal more directly to Galatians and to Pauline theological categories.

Harink’s fourth chapter mounts a sharp attack on the alleged “supersessionism” of N. T. Wright, and champions a reading of Pauline theology that highlights God’s irrevocable election of Israel. Unfortunately, this chapter is the weak link in Harink’s book. Two questions must be asked: does Harink fairly represent Wright’s position, and is Harink’s counterreading of Paul convincing? The answer on both counts is no.

Harink repeatedly asserts that, according to Wright, God replaces Israel with the church and that “historical Israel’s role after Christ simply ceases to be of any theological significance” (p. 161). But Harink has got Wright wrong. We often find Wright saying that God has “redefined Israel” through the cross and resurrection, or that in Christ the old covenant has come to its “climax” (note: precisely not its termination, but its dramatic consummation). Indeed, Wright emphatically contends that Paul thinks Jesus Christ has brought the exile of Israel to an end. Surely this hardly means that Israel is no longer of any significance! Rather, it means that God has acted decisively to constitute a new, restored “Israel of God” (Gal 6:16) which both embraces and expands Israel kata sarka. In his Romans commentary, Wright puts it this way: “Abraham’s family, Israel, the Jews, the circumcision, are neither reaffirmed as they stand, nor ‘superseded’ by a superior group, nor ‘replaced’ with someone else—that is what he is arguing against in 11:13–24—but transformed, through the death and resurrection of Israel’s own Messiah and the Spirit of Israel’s own God, so that Israel is now, as was always promised, both less and more than the physical family of Abraham: less, as in 9:6–13; more, as in 4:13–25” (N.T. Wright, The Letter to the Romans, NIB, 10 [Nashville: Abingdon, 2002] 690).

But the more fundamental problem is that Harink offers a one-sided view of Paul’s statements on the judgment and salvation of Israel. Following the lead of some post-Holocaust scholars, Harink discerns a Paul who does not think Jews need to believe in Jesus as Messiah in order to be saved. Barth’s radical doctrine of election is the foundation for this claim, and of course Romans 9–11 is the parade text in Harink’s argument. The difficulty is that he simply fails to grapple with many crucial Pauline texts that do not fit his program. (For example, Rom 9:6–8, 10:1–13, 11:23, Phil 3:2–11, and so on.) It is at least uncharitable, and at worst intellectually dishonest, for Harink to bludgeon Wright with the epithet of “supersessionist” without giving any indication of how he would read texts such as these, which are the basis for Wright’s position.

It seems to me that Harink has misdiagnosed the problem. The problem is not that Wright thinks God has been disloyal to Israel; rather, the problem is that Wright tends to overemphasize the “already” pole of Paul’s dialectical eschatology. Precisely to the extent that the exile is ended and the promises already fulfilled in Christ, it becomes more difficult to give substance to the not-yet-seen redemption that is promised to Israel. When eschatological fulfillment is collapsed into the present, the ongoing existence of a historical people of Israel who reject the gospel’s messianic claims about Jesus can only be seen as an anomaly. But Paul insists that redemption remains in the future (Rom 8:18–25) and that the present status of elect but unbelieving Israel is a mystery that can be resolved only eschatologically (Rom 11:25–36). Harink’s account underplays the tragedy of Israel’s present disobedience, while Wright’s account may underplay the hope of their future reconciliation.

One final conceptual difficulty in Harink’s work must be noted. He is deeply influenced by J. Louis Martyn’s reading of Paul’s gospel as the news of God’s apocalyptic invasion of the enslaved cosmos. Yet, as Martyn’s magisterial commentary on Galatians emphatically indicates, this reading of Pauline apocalyptic leaves no room at all for the continuing validity of the Mosaic covenant with Israel, or for any continuing claim of fleshly Israel to be the authentic people of God on the basis of physical descent or cultural/religious continuity. Thus, Harink’s espousal of Martyn’s apocalyptic reading of Galatians clashes with his rejection of supersessionism. Martyn’s interpretation of Paul is actually far more strongly supersessionist than Wright’s. Harink is aware of the problem (see 179 n. 34), but he needs to do far more to explain how he can have his cake and eat it too on this issue.

The last part of Chapter Four traces Yoder’s fascinating late reflections on diaspora Judaism as a model for the Christian ekklesia. Once again, though, questions must be posed. Harink is surprisingly uncritical of Yoder’s proposal that Diaspora is the appropriate permanent form of existence for the people of God. How does this tally with the OT’s pervasive promise and expectation of the end of exile as the focus of Israel’s hope (e.g., Isaiah 40–55)? Yoder’s proposal offers a fascinating alternative to the ecclesiology that grew out of the Constantinian establishment, but it cries out for a fuller engagement with the biblical texts that seem to stand in tension with it.

The final chapter of Harink’s book draws together some concrete proposals about the political form of a church formed in accordance with Paul’s vision, as a community of noncoercive witness that reconciles different peoples into a single new culture. Lastly, Harink appends a series of provocative and salutary proposals about how to preach the Pauline gospel as he has interpreted it. This will enhance the value of the book for those who preach and teach the gospel in the church.

In sum, Harink’s book deserves the accolades it has received from Lindbeck and others for catalyzing an exciting conversation about Pauline exegesis, theology, and community praxis. As a student of Paul, I am grateful to Harink for his lucid theological exposition of the paradigm-changing findings of recent Pauline research. Further, his normative proposals about the church’s preaching and mission are, in large measure, right on target and of crucial importance for the church in imperial America. Precisely for that reason, it is the more urgent for Harink’s future work to come to grips with the exegetical problems surrounding his account of the election and destiny of Israel. A closer reading of the texts will show, I believe, that Paul’s apocalyptic gospel is more radically critical and transformative of Jewish ethnic identity than Harink’s program allows.

Richard B. Hays
The Divinity School, Duke University
Durham, North Carolina

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1 & 2 Samuel

by Tony W. Cartledge

Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary. Smyth & Helwys, Macon, 2001.
748 pp. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN 1-57312-064-2.

1 Samuel

by Antony F. Campbell, S.J.

FOTL, 7. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2003. 350 pp. $55.00.
ISBN 0-8028-6079-6.

Because a biblical text is a culture-bound artifact from a dead world, Jewish and Christian readers seek words to explain their Word, to make the dead come to life once again. The venerable genre called “the com- mentary” reflects the needs of the reader, not the intention of the biblical authors. This is no surprise. The intention of a long dead author is difficult to discern in any case, and the Bible’s status as sacred scripture has obliterated any hope the ancient authors might have harbored that their words will be taken at face value. It is all the Word of God now, for better and for worse.

Nowhere is the ironic artifice of the genre more visible than when the subject of a commentary is the books of Samuel. Commentators treat Samuel’s god as the God, the supernatural being who, one presumes, created and sustains the universe. The fit between textual god and actual God is unnatural, for Samuel’s god is fiction, a capricious story-world character, at this moment destroying a priest who dares to protect a holy object, at that moment murdering some 70,000 people to punish the sin this same god seduced his anointed king to commit. Like the book of Job, Samuel seems designed to undermine all piety, all theodicy, all doctrine. Unlike Job’s reader, Samuel’s reader is not forewarned that it is all a test. Thus, there is no textual guidance for parsing a literary god who is neither the reliable covenantal partner of Deuteronomy nor the majestic Holy One of Isaiah. An author of the commentary genre faces a formidable task when writing on 1 and 2 Samuel.

Antony Campbell and Tony Cartledge are two recent scholars rising to this challenge. Each has produced a serviceable commentary with flashes of brilliance. But like every commentator before them, these two scholars, in this reviewer’s view, fail to tame the capricious god of Samuel.

Complete with CD-ROM and packed with sidebars illustrating various aspects of the text, the massive tome penned by Cartledge is part of the Smyth & Helwys series, which strives to become a standard resource for every pastor’s Sunday sermon preparation. To that end, Cartledge consistently rehabilitates Samuel’s god, finding excuses for the god’s excessive behavior and packaging the deity as the Christian God, ready for Sunday morning congregational consumption.

Cartledge’s methods can be illustrated with the tale of King David, Uriah the Hittite and Bathsheba. The god of 2 Samuel 12:8 boasts that he has delivered other men’s women into David’s control (as well as an entire kingdom) and would have been happy to deliver more. Samuel’s god punishes David not for taking another man’s wife, but for taking the wrong man’s wife. This story’s god prefers the dirty work of eliminating men (1 Sam 16:14; 25:38), while David is permitted Saul’s women and Nabal’s wife, but not Uriah’s. In Cartledge’s reading (pp. 513–21), this aspect of the story is ignored, and Samuel’s god becomes a more transcendently righteous God who stays above the earthy deeds, punishing David for more generalized sins of adultery and murder, but sparing David from full punishment. That this divine “grace” (p. 518) results in a divine command to rape several women publicly (2 Sam 12:11) is whitewashed by Cartledge. He mentions it only briefly (p. 517) before changing the subject by inserting a word study devoted to “Troublesome Terms” (p. 518), such as whether David’s son Absalom (who will perform the public rape in 2 Sam 16) can be considered a “neighbor” as the divine prediction requires. Cartledge completes the public relations make-over by hinting that the death of Bathsheba’s baby in 2 Sam 12:18 is a kind of typology for Christ (p. 519), and then finishes with a flourish of evangelical rhetoric in semi-pelagian mode (pp. 520–521).

The cosmetic surgery performed on Samuel’s god is no minor element of Cartledge’s commentary. It is the central concern, and Cartledge is a master of the game. His skill in this regard will render the book useful to innumerable pastors who seek safe topics for their sermons. Cartledge can not be accused of malfeasance. He has delivered what the genre requires, what those who purchase commentaries most urgently desire, and he has done so with the finest craftsmanship and scholarly expertise. This reviewer would prefer a commentary (and a preacher, for that matter) to admit freely that the Bible’s god is a fictional character and any resemblance to actual deity is purely coincidental. That is unlikely ever to occur in print or pulpit, so Cartledge’s commentary represents something close to the finest that this genre can produce.

More satisfying to this reviewer is the shorter work by Campbell, who has issued another installment in the FOTL commentary series. In the twenty-first century, the notional foundation of the FOTL series seems almost quaint, though it constituted cutting-edge research when introduced about a generation ago. The idea was to provide the pastor with a handbook outlining the fruits of historical criticism, especially hypotheses dealing with the earliest stages of the Bible’s formation, the form or genre of the text, and its presumed life setting. Campbell has modified these original goals by paying greater attention to the final form of the text, and eliminating speculation about historical circumstances that honest historians must admit are beyond available evidence.

Two features of Campbell's commentary are worthy of emphasis. On the one hand, Campbell values what might be termed an ethics of reading. He does not pretend to offer the correct interpretation of 1 Samuel, but an interpretation that is both “responsible and adequate” (p. xvii, and passim). That is to say, the interpretation refuses to go beyond what the text actually says. For this reason, sermonizing is at a minimum, and the pastor who seeks material for Sunday morning will need to work a little harder than will be the case with Cartledge's commentary. A second feature in Campbell's approach is his thesis of “reported stories” (p. 30, and passim). What Campbell intends by this term is his very cogent hypothesis that 1 Samuel does not pretend to be a completed literary work. Rather, it is an assemblage of brief story summaries, complete with variant details, from which an ancient Israelite story teller was free to choose for each oral performance. With this model of an anthology in mind, Campbell’s interpretation of each passage is far more open-ended than one usually encounters in the commentary genre.

Ultimately, however, Campbell, like Cartledge, is concerned about the relationship of Samuel’s story-world god to the God of Jewish and Christian devotion. His approach is more subtle than Cartledge’s, but no less determined to find resolution. For Campbell, the Bible is not a source of doctrine, but a “participant in dialogue” (p. 11), and as such, provides “glimpses of God” (p. 11). Those glimpses often involve ancient values that Campbell deems repugnant and he pauses to wrestle with them, sometimes successfully, other times less so. Like Cartledge's, Campbell’s superb scholarship is ultimately no match for the capricious god of this ancient narrative. Samuel’s politically incorrect deity refuses to be tamed.

K. L. Noll
Kentucky Wesleyan College
Owensboro, Kentucky

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Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making; Volume 1

by James D. G. Dunn

Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2003. 1019 pp. $55.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8028-3931-2.

The Christian movement obviously owes its origins to the one its adherents identified as the Christ. One could reasonably try to tell the story of Jesus and his people by starting with the man himself. Dunn, however, states the obvious by insisting that we cannot do that. We cannot begin with Jesus and move forward, he argues, because the only evidence we have about the man comes via the communal memory of his followers. Consequently, “the only realistic objective for any ‘quest of the historical Jesus’ is Jesus remembered” (p. 882; emphasis his in all quotations).

But how accurately was he remembered? Or, to fine tune the question, how reliable are the recollections of Jesus which are enshrined in the Synoptic Gospels? Although most New Testament scholarship runs on the assumption that everything must be decided on the basis of textual and literary norms, Dunn argues that it would be better to focus more on oral patterns. We can imagine that the earliest followers of Jesus gathered as small house groups, that they needed some foundation story to explain themselves, that their stories included anecdotes about Jesus and samples of his teachings, that the stuff of their stories was repeated and shared orally, and that this oral process continued to shape the traditions after they had been written down. If so, says Dunn, then “informal, controlled oral tradition is the best explanation for the oral transmission of the Jesus tradition” (p. 209).

This, of course, calls into question the value of much of the form-critical and redaction-critical work of the past century. Even granting the priority of Mark and the existence of a Q document, it does not necessarily follow, for example, that Matthew or Luke’s reworking of Markan materials is a re-editing of texts. Rather, “what we today are confronted with in the Gospels,” says Dunn, “is not the top layer (last edition) of a series of increasingly impenetrable layers, but the living tradition of Christian celebration which takes us with surprising immediacy to the heart of the first memories of Jesus” (p. 254).

It remains to be seen whether Dunn’s oral rather than textual paradigm will gain acceptance in the guild of New Testament scholars. Less controversial is Dunn’s description of the historical Jesus, which he treats under three broad headings: first, the mission of Jesus (including the central place of “the Kingdom of God” and the character of discipleship), then Jesus’ own self-understanding, and finally the climax of Jesus’ mission (i.e. his crucifixion and resurrection).

Historians incline toward one of two camps. On the one hand, there are those who are skeptical about ancient texts and tend to admit them as evidence only if their reliability can be confirmed on other grounds. On the other hand, there are those who are more likely to accept the evidence of ancient texts unless their reliability is severely questioned on other grounds. In the case of historical Jesus research, American scholars—especially those associated with the California-based Jesus Seminar—tend toward the former camp. British scholars, however, tend toward the latter. Dunn, who teaches at the University of Durham in England, clearly belongs in the latter category. There is little in the Synoptic narratives of Jesus’ public ministry that he feels compelled to exclude from his data base.

Dunn accounts for differences between accounts as the natural variations that inevitably occur when a story is repeated and reshaped orally. Thus he is able to avoid making hard decisions about historical details. Instead, he is content to focus on the broad picture and to sketch the “characteristic Jesus” which the various materials suggest. His criterion is: “any feature which is characteristic within the Jesus tradition and relatively distinctive of the Jesus tradition is most likely to go back to Jesus, that is, to reflect the original impact made by Jesus’ teaching and actions on several at least of his first disciples” (p. 333).

The result is that Dunn sketches a Jesus who is an “eschatological prophet.” The core of his teachings centers on the arrival of the Kingdom of God. His authoritarian style of teaching (e.g. “Amen, I tell you. . . .” rather than “Thus says the Lord. . . .” or even “The Scriptures say. . . .”) marks him as a spokesperson for the Kingdom. His healing miracles were perceived as divine intrusions into the affairs of human. Whether or not we can affirm them “historically” from a modern scientific perspective is beside the point, argues Dunn. The fact is, “there were various incidents during Jesus’ mission which were experienced/witnessed as miracles, understood as healings brought about by divine power flowing through Jesus” (p. 683). His self-understanding as a “son” who stands in a special relationship to God as his Abba, and his ambiguous self-designation as “son of man” combine to confirm that Jesus was remembered as the one who was intent on bringing God’s Kingdom to consummation.
That consummation, of course, climaxes in the story of Jesus’ passion and re

urrection. More skeptical scholars question the historical accuracy of many details in the narrative; Dunn accepts almost all of them. The temple incident (whether it occurred on the day of or after the “Palm Sunday” parade is irrelevant, according to Dunn), Judas’s motive, the last Supper (whether it was a true Seder or not, whether the bread or the cup came first—again, the details are immaterial), the makeup of the Jewish arresting party and hearings, the role of Pilate, the cry of despair, the entombment—all are reliable remembrances of details that actually occurred. Furthermore, Jesus likely anticipated such a fate and traveled to Jerusalem (for the last time?) fully expecting that his death would inaugurate the arrival of God’s Kingdom.

One cannot help avoiding the suspicion that Dunn has accommodated the evidence to match his preferred picture of Jesus, rather than let the evidence lead to a compelling portrait of the man. To his credit, Dunn frequently qualifies his conclusions—literally thousands of times in 900 pages!—with phrases like “it is presumably significant that. . .” (p. 345) and “it is also likely that Jesus was remembered as saying something about. . . .” (p. 514) and “the uncomfortable conclusions probably has to be that. . .” (p. 780). Underlying every conclusion is a tentative demurral. Whether this represents modesty in the face of less-than-compelling evidence or something else, the reader will have to decide.

Of particular interest is the thorny problem of the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. Again we see a kind of vacillation. On the one hand Dunn makes a statement that seems positive and affirming: “What we should recognize as beyond reasonable doubt is that the first believers experienced ‘resurrection appearances’ and that those experiences are enshrined . . . in the traditions which have come down to us” (pp. 861–862). On the other hand Dunn concludes with a set of demurrals: “In short, [the] resurrection of Jesus is not so much a historical fact as a foundational fact or meta-fact. . . .” and “to say that ‘the resurrection of Jesus’ is a metaphor is to recognize that the phrase is saying something which could not otherwise be said.” (p. 878)

The bottom line is that Jesus Remembered is a magisterial assessment of the massive material that has been compiled in the past three decades on the subject of historical Jesus research. Dunn treats the material fairly and respectfully, even when he disagrees with others. His picture of Jesus as an eschatological prophet is compelling and consistent, even if it may not ultimately prove completely convincing to some readers. What will be of greater impact will be to see how this leads into his assessment of the history of the Christian community in his next two volumes.

Mark I. Wegener
Woodlake Lutheran Church
Richfield, Minnesota

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James

by Patrick J. Hartin

SP, 14. Liturgical, Collegeville, 2003. 319 pp. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8146-5816-4.

At its best, the Sacra Pagina commentary series has served its intended readers well by providing up-to-date critical scholarship on the books of the New Testament in a reasonable length and readable prose. P. J. Hartin comes well-equipped to his commentary on James, having worked extensively on James and the sayings of Jesus and having written A Spirituality of Perfection: Faith in Action in the Letter of James (Collegeville: Liturgical, 1999). His commentary, which draws on his own original work as well as on the best of recent scholarship, is a substantial and worthy addition to the series and is sure to be useful to a wide range of readers.

Most readers of this journal are by now familiar with the commentary series’ format, but a word of reminder may be helpful. Each volume begins with an introduction and select bibliography. An original translation of the text is displayed by section, with each passage accompanied by a series of notes, which take up technical issues, and an interpretation, which takes up the issues of meaning. Hartin also makes liberal use of excurses to develop even broader topics. Indices to Scripture, ancient writers, and authors close the book. The readability of the series as a whole in enhanced by the lack of footnotes—all references are internal to the text.

Consonant with much recent scholarship, Hartin reads James as a form of wisdom writing that is at home both in Greco-Roman and Jewish worlds, and that addresses a Jewish Christian readership in the diaspora from the perspective of a deep loyalty to Torah and to “the faith of Jesus Christ,” calling readers to a deeper and more consistent covenantal loyalty. He considers James to be a form of protreptic discourse in the form of a letter (pp. 10–16). The “James” to whom the letter is inscribed must be the James whom Paul calls “the brother of the Lord.” Hartin also argues for an early dating of the letter. But for reasons that are not altogether clear, he suggests either that James wrote with the assistance of a scribe, or that the composition was sent out in his name shortly after his death (pp. 24–25).

In terms of perspective, Hartin wishes to read James on its own terms (rather than in conversation with Paul), to stress its focus on communal even more than individual integrity, to appreciate its theocentric rather than christocentric language, and to maintain the challenge of the composition for contemporary readers, especially concerning issues of wealth and poverty (pp. 4–5). In the Introduction, Hartin provides a helpful sketch of James’ convictions concerning faith, God, Christ, eschatology, and—themes that Hartin stresses repeatedly—prayer and social concern. James writes to restore “the twelve tribes of the diaspora” by calling them to a more wholehearted and consistent “friendship with God,” a friendship in question because of the readers’ double-mindedness that seeks a “friendship with the world” (James 4:4).

As all scholarly commentaries on James must, Hartin engages Dibelius, but it is remarkable how many good things he draws from Ropes and Mayor as well. Beyond the expected conversation with these commentators (as well as Laws, Davids, Mussner, Johnson, and Wall), Hartin brings to James the perspective of two additional recent scholarly developments that enhance the basic historical-critical approach: social-scientific criticism and rhetorical criticism (pp. 2–4). Although Hartin’s employment of these perspectives is deft and illuminating, his generous acknowledgement of scholarly colleagues at times threatens to clog his otherwise clear expositions. The value of these approaches is evident, however, in Hartin’s rich analysis of specific passages, above all 2:1–26 and 3:13–4:10. He not only shows how a knowledge of the social realities and ideals of antiquity—for example, the premises of an honor-shame culture—enables a more nuanced understanding of James’ language, but he also demonstrates how James works out real arguments according to accepted rhetorical conventions. While his enthusiasm for the enrichment offered by such perspectives is justified, however, he overstates the case when he declares, “It is not possible to understand the letter of James and particularly 2:1–13 without a clear understanding of the cultural and social scripts outlined above” (p. 146). It depends, to be sure, on what we mean by “understand.” Certainly such knowledge is precious and leads to greater scholarly insight. But I think Hartin would agree that readers do not require such knowledge to understand the moral argument James makes in 2:1–13.

Hartin eschews complex structural analyses of James, opting instead for a simple threefold breakdown: (1) Chapter one has a double introduction (1:2–11, “Testing, Wisdom, and the Lowly,” and 1:12–27, “Testing, Hearers and Doers of the Word”) and also serves as something of a table of contents for the rest of the composition.

(2) The body of the composition (2:1–5:6) consists in a series of six essays which have strong thematic and often linguistic links: 2:1–13 (Do not show favoritism), 2:14–26 (Doers of the word/ faith and works), 3:1–12 (The tongue and speech), 3:13–4:10 (Call to friendship with God), 4:11–12 (Speaking evil against one another), and 4:13–5:6 (Judgment on the rich because of friendship with the world).

(3) The conclusion (5:7–20) consists of 5:7–11 (call to patient endurance), 5:12 (Call to avoid oaths), 5:13–18 (Prayer), and 5:19–20 (the great commission).
Hartin’s notes take up issues of textual criticism and the problems presented by James’ diction and syntax. He provides a judicious selection of parallels from Greco-Roman and Jewish writings to illuminate James’ usage, and the usefulness of such parallels is enhanced by his practice of citing in full whenever feasible. He provides seven excurses that provide background discussions to which he can frequently refer: 1) the twelve tribes of the dispersion; 2) James and the heritage of Israel; 3) the wisdom of James; 4) James and the heritage of Jesus; 5) the perfect law of liberty; 6) honor, shame, patronage and grace; and 7) faith and works in James and Paul.

The commentary is constantly engaged with scholarship, but Hartin has worked through the text carefully for himself and his judgment on specific exegetical issues is independent and supported by careful argument. Readers may find some of the scholarly cross-referencing a distraction, and may also discover a fair amount of repetition as Hartin moves from notes to interpretation to excursus. But these are cavils. Hartin succeeds in reading James on its own terms and does a fine job of opening up some of the richness of this small but powerful composition. The commentary deserves attention from scholars and should prove useful as well to students and pastors.

Luke Timothy Johnson
Emory University
Atlanta, Georgia

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