point to a Jewish atmosphere of thought, and a Jewish mode of expression.
From all that has been said, therefore, it must be clear that the author of our Epistle was a Jew; as far as it goes, this evidence is in the direction of favouring the authorship of St. James; though it is, of course, far from being in any sense conclusive. But while the internal evidence, so far, speaks distinctly in favour of St. James being the writer of the Epistle, there are some other weighty considerations which point in the opposite direction. Firstly, one might reasonably have expected in an Epistle written by St. James that the fact of his having been the brother of the Lord would have been specially men- tioned ; this, one might think, would have been insisted on for its own sake, quite apart from the authority and prestige which the mention. of it would have conferred upon the writer. Though the fact would have been well known in his immediate surroundings, or even through- out Palestine, and would therefore not have necessitated mention in an Epistle addressed to Palestinian congregations, it was different when, as in the present case, the scattered churches of the Dispersion were being written to; the more authoritative the name of the person who addressed them, the more effective would be the influence of the Epistle uponthem. The occurrence of the Lord’s name in the open- ing verse of the Epistle—‘‘a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ ’—offered a natural and obvious opportunity for the mention of the writer’s close tie to Him. In reply to this it may well be said that after the resurrection of Christ, and the consequent proclama- tion of His Divinity to all the world, there would be a natural and very seemly hesitation, on the part of those who were His relations after the flesh, to assert this tie; but this argument is to some extent weakened by the words in John xix. 25-27, which were written later than our Epistle (on the assumption of St. James authorship): “ But there were standing by the Cross of Jesus His mother and His mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus therefore saw His mother, and the disciple standing by whom He loved, He saith unto His mother
”; if St. John could record thus distinctly the relationship between our Lord and the Blessed Virgin so long after, there does not seem sufficient reason why St. James should not have referred to his own relationship with our Lord. Apart, however, from the non-mention of this relationship, one might, at any rate, have expected a reference to apostleship in the opening verse of the Epistle ; for that St. James was regarded as an apostle in the early Church is clear from 1 Cor. xv. 7, Acts xv. 22, Gal. ii. 8, 9. A second reason.