James 1:1-4

Trials and their Purpose

1. a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ The description which the writer gives of himself throws no light on his identity. The term "servant," better slave, as one who had been bought with a price (1 Corinthians 6:20; 1 Corinthians 7:23), was used of themselves by both St Peter (2 Peter 1:1) and St Paul (Romans 1:15 Titus 1:1). It might be claimed by either of the Apostles who bore the name of James, or by the brother of our Lord, or indeed by any believer. (1 Peter 2:16).

It may be noted that this and ch. James 2:1 are the only passages in which St James names our Lord, and that the form in which the Name appears is identical with that in the Epistle from the Apostles and Elders assembled under St James's presidency, in Acts 15:26.

to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad Literally, that are in the dispersion. The superscription is interesting as shewing that the ten tribes of the Kingdom of Israel, though they had been carried into a more distant exile than Judah and Benjamin, were thought of, not as lost and out of sight, but as still sharing the faith and hope of their fathers. So St Paul speaks of "the twelve-tribed nation" as "serving God day and night" (Acts 26:7), and our Lord's promise that His twelve disciples should sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel (Matthew 19:28), and the Apocalyptic vision of the sealing of the tribes (Revelation 7:5-8) imply the same belief. The legend as to the disappearance of the Ten Tribes, which has given rise to so many insane dreams as to their identification with the Red Indians of America or our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, appears for the first time in the Apocryphal 2 Esdras (13:39 47), a book probably of about the same date as the Revelation of St John.

The term, "the dispersion," the abstract noun being used for the concrete, had come to be a technical term for the Hellenistic and other Jews who were to be found within, or beyond, the limits of the Roman Empire. So the Jews ask whether our Lord will go "to the dispersionof (i. e. among) the Greeks" (John 7:35). So St Peter writes to "the sojourners of the dispersion" in the provinces of Asia Minor (1 Peter 1:1). The term had probably come into use from the LXX. of Deuteronomy 28:25 ("There shall be a dispersionin all the kingdoms of the world"). So in Jdt 5:19, Judah and Benjamin are said "to have come back from the dispersion," and the prayer of Nehemiah in 2Ma 1:27 is that "God would gather together his dispersion,"

greeting The salutation is the same as in the Epistle purporting to come from the Church over which St James presided, in Acts 15:23. The literal meaning of the word is to rejoice, and the idiomatic use of the infinitive is a condensed expression of the full "I wish you joy." It was primarily a formula of Greek letter-writers, but it had been used by the LXX. for the Hebrew "peace" in Isaiah 48:22; Isaiah 57:21, and appears in the superscription of the letters of Antiochus in 2Ma 9:19. It is the word used in the mock salutations of the soldiers in the history of the Passion, "Hail, King of the Jews" (Matthew 26:49; Matthew 27:29; Matthew 28:9). In 2 John James 1:10-11 it is rendered by the colloquial English of "bidding God speed." It is not used in any other of the Epistles of the New Testament, St Paul and St Peter using the formula "grace and peace."