Here I sit on my own contemplating the last couple of days. My family is shattered, my mother is distraught. My brother has been put to death as a criminal. I am trying to work out where it all went wrong. I mean how can this be, how can we get through this? Lost in my memories, I reminisce of a time when we were a family. All of us together, our eldest brother a carpenter.

From the theologically honest, yet exegetically erroneous charge by Luther, labelling it the “epistle of straw”, to contemporary scholars relegating it to a secondary status within the canon, the Book of James has far and above survived the critique of many. Filled with direct, no-nonsense staments, exortations to prayer, saving faith, utterly pragmatic instruction, and my own personal favourite, taming the tongue, James remains one of my favourite epistles in the entire bible.

Imagine being a leader of a church where your people are being hunted down, imprisoned and killed for their faith. You appoint seven leaders and watch one of them get killed before your eyes, stoned to death. And as you turn your head to see the people responsible for killing your leader you see a man handing the coats of the assassins back to them and congratulating them on a job well done.

The book of James is such an intriguing, challenging and confronting book that has been able to endure high levels of scrutiny and remain a part of what we would now consider the New Testament canon. The book of James faced a large degree of resistance, even by major theologians such as Iranaeus and Luther, due to contentious areas such as authorship, date, but most importantly the theology contained within the book of James.