“brother,” and “brethren” and “sisters,” in the passages above referred to.  If we take them in their literal sense, as some do, then James the son of Alpheus and James the Lord’s brother are different persons.  But others understand them in the general sense of kindred or cousins, believing that our Saviour was the only child of Mary.  A statement at length of the arguments and objections that are urged on both sides does not come within the compass of the present work.  Nor is it necessary.  The author of the present epistle is beyond all reasonable doubt the James who gave the final opinion in the assembly of the apostles and elders at Jerusalem (Acts 15:13-21), whom Paul names with Cephas and John as one of the “pillars” there (Gal. 2:9), and who elsewhere appears as a man of commanding influence in the church at Jerusalem (Acts 21:18; Gal. 2:12).  If any one doubts his identity with James the son of Alpheus, who was one of the twelve, this cannot affect the canonical authority of the epistle.  The position of this James in the church at Jerusalem and his relation to the apostolic college is such that, even upon the supposition that he did not belong to the number of the twelve, his writings must have to us the full weight of apostolic authority.  See above chap. 30, No. 42.

3.  The place where this epistle was written was manifestly Jerusalem, where James always resided; and the persons addressed are “the twelve tribes who are in the dispersion” (chap. 1:1); that is, as the nature of the case and the tenor of the epistle make manifest, that part of them who had embraced Christianity.  There is no allusion in the epistle to Gentile believers.

The dispersion is a technical term for the Jews living out of Palestine among the Gentiles.  We need not hesitate to understand it here literally.  The apostle wrote to his Jewish brethren of the dispersion because he could not visit them and superintend their affairs as he could those of the Jewish Christians in and around Jerusalem.  Some take the term in a wider sense of the Jewish Christians scattered abroad in and out of Palestine, but this is not necessary.

4.  With regard to the date of this epistle also different opinions are held.  Some place it early in the history of the church—­earlier, in fact, than any other of the apostolic epistles—­before the origin of the controversy respecting circumcision and the Mosaic law recorded in Acts, chap. 15; others quite late, not long before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans.  The latter view best agrees with the contents of the epistle.  The doctrine of justification by faith, for which Paul had contended, would naturally be abused precisely in the way here indicated, by the substitution of a barren speculative faith, for the true faith that works by love and purifies the heart and life from sin.  The age preceding the destruction of Jerusalem was one of abounding wickedness, especially in the