The Brother of Jesus: James the Just and his Mission

The previous reviewer's remarks regarding this book are to the point and informative. However, lots of water has run under the bridge since his review was written. Church History and all analogous issues, such as theology, Christology, archeaology, commentary, etc., that swirl around it make for a opaque discipline. Or, some would say a complete lack of discipline. Every student of the Bible and Early Church History owes it to themsleves to read this book. Both for its content which is important in the extreme if you are interested in James and the Jacobean movement, and for what it says about the academics that produced it. The Neusner and Chilton partnership has been productive for twenty years at least, and this book might be its culmination. It is a remarkable achievement delivering an immense quantity of valuable information in a small number of pages.The first thing I will note in the book is the disconcertingly different readings of the text of the Epistle of James. Peter H. David's work can be harmonized with the work of Wiard Popkes. Neither of them can be reconciled with the conclusions of the reading by Richard Bauckham. Popkes is a German scholar and reads everything in English as well as what is in German. There is a mass of relevant scholarship that is available only in German. And, what are the French writing about these matters? There is an English language centered bias in the United States and especially Britain that is long running. That it still exists is apparent in this volume. Therefore, we, monolingual English readers, miss an entirely different scholarly tradition in large measure. It would appear that British scholars in the main are content to read their fellow countrymen with an occassional nod to other English language works much to the detriment of readers and students.