Mercy Triumphs Over Justice

Abstract

"Ever since Luther’s Prefaces to the New Testament (1522) the book of James has suffered a great deal of abuse at the hands of Bible scholars. Some have come to the point of doubting whether the book is Christian. Bultmann says of James in his Theology of New Testament: ‘Every shred of understanding for the Christian situation as that of “between-ness” is lacking here. The moralism of the synagogue has made its entry.’1 At the same time recent advances in New Testament studies have illuminated many aspects of the setting and character of the epistle. M. Dibelius pointed out in 1920 the indebtedness of James to the Greek and Jewish paraenetic traditions. He claimed that James is best understood as a ‘text which strings together admonitions of general "