What Does The Book Of James Say About Rich People?

What does the book of James say about rich people?

James 2:1-7

Rabbi Rev. Dr. Michael H. Koplitz

James 2:1 My brethren, do not hold your faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ with an attitude of personal favoritism. 2 For if a man comes into your assembly with a gold ring and dressed in fine clothes, and there also comes in a poor man in dirty clothes, 3 and you pay special attention to the one who is wearing the fine clothes, and say, “You sit here in a good place,” and you say to the poor man, “You stand over there, or sit down by my footstool,” 4 have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil 1motives? 5 Listen, my beloved brethren: did not God choose the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him? 6 But you have dishonored the poor man. Is it not the rich who oppress you and personally drag you into court? 7 Do they not blaspheme the fair name by which you have been called?

The book of James is not read very often in the church and only shows up three times in what we call the three-year lectionary. There is a superb reason for this, especially in the Protestant churches, because Martin Luther did not like James. He had a lot of concerns about this book, and he wanted to discard it from his Protestant German Bible. However, his associates told him he already eliminated the 16 books which we call the Apocrypha, and it would be difficult to get his followers to accept more deletions from the Scripture.

A couple of reasons Martin Luther did not like James were because he felt James did not follow the nature of the Gospels. He also believed that James contradicted several of Paul’s teachings. Also, Jesus is it mentioned in the book very often. But since James is in the Bible, we need to consider what it has to say. So now the question becomes why the church does not like to talk about the book of James, especially in industrialized first world countries.

It’s probably because in chapter 1 and a large part of chapter 2, James tells us he dislikes rich people. Since most churchgoers in the United States and Western Europe are financially secure, they probably would not like to hear sermons about how bad they are just because they have money. If we go by the United Nations’ definition of rich, there are very few people in the United States, even those below our poverty level, who would be poor. Again, the book is in the Bible, and we need to deal with it and as one who looks for the original meaning of the Scripture, I can’t just let it go.

What we must understand first is that economics were different during Jesus’s day and for centuries after then they are today. Let’s talk about the economy of Judea and the Galilee when James was writing his book. First, let me note scholars believe James was written around 40 CE. That means James was written even before Paul started writing his letters and over 20 years before the first Gospels were written.

The economy of Judea and Galilee I referred to as a zero-growth economy. There was no growth in the Near East. There was economic growth in other places in the Roman Empire, but not in the Near East. The economy of the Near East was based on agriculture mainly. There were no advances in being able to grow more crops on an acre of land like there is today. Farming in the United States can grow because we learned ways to enrich the soil so that we can get more plants to grow on the same amount of land.

What a zero growth economy means is let’s say you and your neighbor each harvested 100 bushels of wheat each year. If your neighbor wanted to harvest more bushels, let’s say one hundred and 50, then you would have to harvest 50 less. In that way between the two of you, you’ve harvested 200 bushels, which is the same as the year before and will be the same for the next few years. I know that’s a crude example, but I hope you see what I’m saying.

Therefore, in order to get rich in the ancient world, you had to exploit people and basically steal their wealth. There were many ways that could be done. I will not get into all the ways, but the understanding that rich people in Jesus' day got rich by exploiting other people, usually the class underneath, is what James was upset about.