About This Translation
This is a fresh English translation of the Letter of James, produced directly from the Greek critical text. It aims to stay as close to the original language as clarity permits — preserving the force of James's exhortations, the texture of his Greek, and the depth of his Jewish roots, while remaining readable as modern English.
Every chapter is accompanied by extensive translator's notes. These include analysis of key Greek vocabulary and syntax, historical and cultural context, connections to the Old Testament, the teachings of Jesus, and the broader New Testament, and theological interpretation. The notes are designed to make visible the choices involved in translation and to open up the richness of a text that has challenged and shaped Christian thought for two millennia.
This letter was very likely written before any other document in the New Testament. When James put stylus to papyrus in the mid-to-late 40s AD, the world he addressed had no written Gospels, no letters from Paul, no book of Revelation. Mark had not yet composed his Gospel — Peter was still alive and actively preaching, and the urgency to create a written record of the eyewitness accounts had not yet arisen. Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians, usually dated around AD 49–51, was still years away. The Jerusalem Council of Acts 15 had likely not yet taken place. James wrote into a world where the Christian faith was transmitted entirely by word of mouth, in communities still worshipping in synagogues, still figuring out what it meant to follow a risen Messiah.
The author identifies himself simply as "James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ" — no title, no claim of authority beyond servanthood. Yet this is James the brother of Jesus, the man who grew up in the same household as the Messiah and did not believe in him during his ministry (John 7:5; Mark 3:21). Something changed him. Paul tells us that the risen Jesus appeared to James specifically (1 Corinthians 15:7), and by the time of Acts, James has become the leader of the Jerusalem church — the figure to whom even Peter and Paul defer (Acts 12:17; 15:13; 21:18; Galatians 2:9). His other brothers — Joses, Simon, and Judas (Mark 6:3) — also became believers after the resurrection; Judas (Jude) would write his own New Testament letter.
James was martyred in AD 62, stoned to death at the instigation of the high priest Ananus during a gap between Roman governors. The historian Josephus records that even many law-observant Jews were outraged by the act. The letter he left behind is a window into the earliest stage of the Christian movement — a community still deeply Jewish, still shaped by the synagogue, still hearing Jesus's voice echoed in the practical, prophetic, uncompromising moral teaching of his own brother.