The final work that “Christ Before Jesus” looks at is the Epistle of James. As with previous texts, Britt and Wingo again claim that it’s a second-century work, yet they don’t have evidence for that. As we’ve already seen, their stylometry evidence holds no actual water.
Before we even get to the text though, we have to first realize something important. We don’t know what James this letter is from. Most assume that the letter was attributed to James, the brother of Jesus. Because of this assumption, many scholars have labeled it as a forgery because it doesn’t fit within that time frame.
I was guilty of that same view. It wasn’t until I was listening to a discussion with Steve Mason that I realized my own assumptions here. In the discussion, Mason made a brief comment that some scholars were beginning to look at James as if it weren’t a forgery, simply because we aren’t told what James was being referred to. James simply opens with, “James, a servant of God, and of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
So we must temper our assumptions here. James was a very common name, and since we don’t have a qualifier, we can’t really say anything in particular about who this individual is. Meaning that Britt’s and Wingo’s previous discussion on James is irrelevant here. We simply can’t conflate the two.
Now, one of the means in which the authors use in order to argue that James is late is that it’s not until Origen of Alexandria, in the third century, that we get the first explicit reference to James. They do mention that maybe Irenaeus has a line referencing the text, but even if he did, that only pushed James to around the 180s.
Does that hold up though? Not at all. While 1 Clement doesn’t specifically mention James, we can be certain that it is in part dependent on such. Once again, turning to the New Oxford Annotated Bible, in its discussion on the date of James, it states that 1 Clement 29:1 and 30:1-5 are dependent on James 4:1-10, while 1 Clement 30:3 and 31:2 are dependent on James 2:14-16.
As discussed above, while Britt and Wingo attempt to push 1 Clement into the second century, their argument was incredibly flawed. But even they place it in the 130s, which would in turn place James even earlier, more than a century before they claim we have a reference to it.
When I deal with chapter 5, I will go into more detail about the dating of 1 Clement, but suffice it to say here that it is generally dated to the 90s. This would push James back to at least that time.
What is of interest here is that Britt and Wingo seem completely unaware of this. They make no mention of 1 Clement here, which is a standard text when it comes to discussing the dating of James. That they ignore this really brings into question their research. It’s a rather major oversight.
It’s an oversight that once again invalidates their argument. They argue that a late dating of James shouldn’t be a surprise because there was an explosion of New Testament texts after Marcion’s canon was published in 144 AD. However, even by their own dating of 1 Clement, which dictates that James is earlier, their supposed explosion of texts would have no bearing here. After all, this would have placed the writing of James at the very latest to the 130s.
This causes other issues for Britt’s and Wingo’s claim for an explosion of text, because as they discuss, James seems to be aware of the Pauline letters. This in turn would push these letters back to at least the 130s, again, prior to this supposed explosion.
The authors try to use this awareness of the Pauline Letters, and what they claim are direct counters to some Pauline beliefs, to say that James is “removed from the original publication of Marcion’s canon by quite some time.” Which actually is true, but not in the manner they mean. After all, we see above that James precedes Marion’s canon by at least a decade according to their own dating scheme. Something that stood out to me here is the possibility that Britt and Wingo don’t seem to keep their own arguments in mind. As in, they don’t seem to remain consistent with their arguments. That, or their background knowledge here is just lacking, which causes serious issues to their overall arguments, as we saw here.