does not figure in the “ Cheltenham List”. The first time that the Epistle appears to have been officially recognised as canonical was at the council of Carthage 397 a.p.}
The balance of the historical evidence of the first three and a half centuries is thus distinctly against St. James having been the author of this Epistle. If we had external evidence alone to go upon we should assuredly be compelled to follow what seems to have been the opinion of Origen, Eusebius, and Jerome; that is to say that, while on the whole regarding the Epistle as canonical, it is difficult to believe that St. James can have been the author.
If the Epistle was written by St. James, it is almost universally granted that it must have been the St. James who presided at the council of Jerusalem—‘‘James the Lord’s brother ”—who was the author (see § 2 below), the claims of any other of this name being too inconsiderable to be seriously thought of; but in this case it is difficult to account for the fact that doubt was thrown upon the canonicity of the Epistle for so long, and still more difficult is it to account for the fact that the name of St. James was not connected with it from the beginning. The position of authority which the Apostle held in the early Church (Acts xii. 17; Gal. i. 18, 19), the important fact of his having already inspired an Epistle (Acts xv. 19, 20), and the traditions concerning him in later times (see Josephus, Antiq. xx. ix. 1; Eusebius, H.E. 11. 23), all lead to the supposition that if the Epistle had really been written by him it would have been accepted as genuine and canonical from the first, in which case the doubtful expressions of Origen, Eusebius, and Jerome, and the adverse testimony of the Old Syriac Version and the Muratorian Fragment would have been impossible.
_On the other hand, it must be allowed that there are strong a priori arguments in favour of St. James’ authorship. The position held by him in the early Church compels one to expect writings from him ; the head of the mother-Church of Christendom would, of all people, be the most obvious one from whom one would look for communications of one kind or another to daughter-churches. Still more within the natural order of things would be an Epistle of a general character—something in the form of an encyclical—addressed not to any particular local Church, but to the whole body of believers ; the fact that this one is addressed to the Dispersion only strengthens the argument, because, in the earliest days, the nucleus of the
1It was also accepted by the somewhat earlier but much less important Council of Laodicea, about 363 Α.Ὀ.