The Problem of Jacoben Interlocuter

John Christopher DelHousaye jdelhousaye at phoenixseminary.edu
Tue Apr 27 13:22:04 EDT 1999


After probing the varinant readings of James 2:18, I have concluded that 
the Majority Text preserves the best reading. I suggest that an early 
copyist within the Alexandrian text-type introduced a corruption into James 
2:18 by misunderstanding the length of the interlocuter's rebuttal (which I 
believe extends to the end of v19). The Western text-type (OL) followed 
suit, as evidenced by the Vulgate. The substitution of CWRIS for EK follows 
this scenario, since CWRIS ties what was thought to be James' rebuttal to 
his overall thesis that "faith without [CWRIS] works is dead" (2:6). James, 
in effect, would be responding: "Your clame is not demonstrable!" But the 
substitution did not resolve the ambiguity of how the interlocuter 
disagreed with James. He should be saying: "you have works and I have 
faith." The transposition (cf. the variant preserved by ff in Nestle-Aland 
27th)reflects this difficulty, and is hence spurious to the original text.
     The truncation of the interlocuter's rebuttal explains the ommission 
of SOU. The works are generalized to fit James' thesis. Faith is then also 
generalized. However, these ommisions disrupt the otherwise parallelism in 
the Majority Text (not also the chiasm):

          DEIXON MOI THN PISTIN SOU EK TWN ERGWN SOU
     KAGW
          DEIXW SOI EK TWN ERGWN MOU THN PISTIN MOU

     I am not a champion of the Majority Text. Nevertheless, it is the only 
reading that makes sense of the text and seriously deals with the fact that 
2:18 is an interlocution. I have submitted this brief sketch as an excerpt 
from a more developed paper. Please e-mail me if you would like a complete 
copy of the paper. Here, I am simply looking for some interaction with 
those who have worked with this particularly thorny textual problem.

John DelHousaye (jdelhousaye at phoenixseminary.edu)





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