James 1:1 – Who Heard the Letter of James?

One of the first things to know about any New Testament letter is that while they were written on the page, most believers received them orally. We find evidence of this in Colossians 4:16 where Paul writes, “And when this letter has been read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans.” Paul wrote his letters to believers, but most would listen to them instead of reading them. We also see this in Luke 4:16-20 when Jesus enters the Synagogue and reads aloud from the scroll of Isaiah. Where most of us have a Bible, or ten, the early believers did not; they relied on listening, memory, and discussion.

With that being said, it might be helpful to listen to the letter of James like the early believers did. (You can find the letter of James being read here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfoYnpQwxuw.) I suggest you find a place where there are no distractions — no smartphones, no ESPN, no dogs, no crying children — and listen to the letter of James. And you may even want to do this a few times to get a better feel for how James’s letter was received by the early Jewish believers.

Now that you have (hopefully) taken the time to listen to the letter of James, let’s start discussing it. I have organized the letter of James into 15 sections and plan to write one post per section. This should mean that our initial discussion of the letter of James will take about 15 weeks. After completing those posts, I plan on discussing the structure of the letter of James in a way that may have been familiar to the early Jewish believers but most likely unfamiliar to us, a more modern audience.

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

James 1:1

Acts 8:1 says, “And there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles.” This persecution, at the hands of Saul, most likely occurred somewhere between 30 and 33 AD. Many of those to whom James wrote had once been living in Jerusalem. They had daily access to the temple, they gathered with the disciples to hear their teaching, they lived under the Mosaic Law, and they believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, the Christ. Most of them had been alive during the ministry of Jesus and had witnessed the events described in the first seven chapters of Acts. The Gospels and the first part of Acts are heavily Jewish, quite astonishing, and generally positive; it describes a time when there seemed like there was no stopping the ever-growing band of Jesus-followers. But that idyllic time in Jerusalem came to an end when Jewish leaders killed Stephen. And following Stephen’s death, Saul terrorized the church in Jerusalem. As a result, many people left Jerusalem to escape persecution and made their homes in faraway places like Judea and Samaria.

Some scholars debate which “Dispersion” James is referring to when he wrote “To the twelve tribes in the Dispersion,” but one highly likely possibility is that James is pointing to the scattering of Jewish believers that happened between 30 and 33 AD as a result of the persecution described in Acts 8:1. If that is the case, and I think the Biblical text seems to point to that, it is reasonable to believe that by the time James writes his letter between 45 and 48 AD that the church had spread into northern Syria and Cilicia. And while some Gentiles joined the church following Peter’s vision of the sheet in 38 AD, the church at this time was primarily Jewish. It wasn’t until Paul’s first missionary journey in 48 AD that large numbers of Gentiles began to join the ranks of believers.
Whew! That’s a lot of information!

So, let’s do a quick summary: the first recipients of the letter of James were Jewish believers who had fled Jerusalem in response to Saul’s persecution. These believers were living in Judea, Samaria, and in the uttermost parts of the earth (Acts 1:8).

Okay. So what?

Well, when I think about the circumstances of the recipients of James’s letter, I think we, a non-Jewish audience, often miss what these Jewish believers must have felt as they lived far away from Jerusalem. For the Jew, Jerusalem was the center of their world and the Temple sat in the center of Jerusalem; the Temple was the hinge upon which their entire life turned. To be driven from Jerusalem and the Temple meant that these Jewish believers felt like they were no longer living in their home. They had become, in Old Testament terms, sojourners; a people living away from their home. No longer could they go to the Temple and worship God on a daily basis, they were isolated and without access to the most important place in their life.

This is something that we, a modern-day, non-Jewish audience, don’t understand. We don’t have such a thing. We often move from place to place at a moment’s notice. We have no center to our lives other than our own friends and families. We often go to a church building on a Sunday, but rarely do we call that building our actual home. And our churches, while they have many events, are rarely the actual focal point of our lives. For many of us, our “home” goes with us wherever we are; we stay connected to the important people and groups in our lives via some kind of little electronic device; the center of our world rests at our fingertips.

But for these Jewish believers, their home was hundreds of miles away, perhaps thousands, and they knew they would most likely never see it again. So, when they received a letter from James, still residing in Jerusalem, who was one of the pillars of the Jerusalem church and the brother of their Lord Jesus Christ, it should be understood that they would have been quite excited. Everyone who was a believer would have gathered in one place, most likely the synagogue, and sat down to listen intently to the words of James. I imagine that some of them may have even closed their eyes and thought about James, Jerusalem, and Jesus. James’s letter was a longed-for taste of their long-lost home.

And when James calls himself a “servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ” they would have nodded in acknowledgment of the camaraderie between themselves and James. Many of them had lost friends and family members in the persecutions, and all of them were living in a place they couldn’t call their home. But these first words would also remind them that James, a man who was once antagonistic to his brother, was now a servant to Jesus just as they were. Repentance, forgiveness, and redemption clearly rang out from these first words and were a breath of fresh air following nearly two decades of isolation. These introductory words reminded them of the gospel to which they clung while they were living away from their home.

But, if we think about this for a moment further, do we not see that we are, in many ways, much like those early Jewish believers? We may not know it because we have numbed our sensitivity with toys and games and devices and events and everything else we find and buy, but we are not yet living in our home, are we? Are we not, like them, sojourners here on earth? Is not our real home in a far-off land, a land we have never seen yet we believe exists? Does not our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ live there? Does he not offer forgiveness and redemption as we repent? And, do we long to be with him? Do we not long to finally be home?

But we aren’t there yet.

When we read the opening words of James’s letter we should find a sense of homecoming with his greeting. From the pen of James, Jesus’s brother, comes a letter that has traveled from Jerusalem to the Jewish believers dispersed throughout the world in the first century. It has made its way to the European continent and has become part of our Bibles. The words of James remind us of forgiveness and redemption. James knows that our true home is with his brother Jesus and he wants to tell us how Jesus would have us live while we are away from him. James understands our situation and he encourages us to endure so that we will be ready for that day when Jesus, our brother, finally calls us home.