Sigurvin Lárus Jónsson – författare

Dieser Band greift die aktuelle Debatte über das literarische Profil und den Autor des Jakobusbriefes auf. Die Aufsätze geben neue Einblicke in das literarische Konzept und das Autorenprofil des Jakobus und stellen den Brief in den Kontext einer entstehenden christlich geprägten Literaturkultur.

The rise of early Christianity was accompanied by a period of impressive literary production. Early Christian authors combined literary forms from Greco-Roman writings with the style and content of Hellenistic Jewish literature to create a tertium quid. Their literary works are therefore comparable to both Jewish and Greco-Roman contemporary writings, but they adopt, modify and transform literary conventions according to their needs and interests to communicate their message showing signs of literary innovation and creativity. This volume shows the innovative aspect of early Christian literature, by integrating adjacent fields of research as ancient history, classical studies, Jewish studies, patristics and religious studies. The analyses explore how and why early Christian literature unexpectedly established itself as a literary force in the early imperium.

This book gives attention to the language and style of the letter of James, with a hypothesis about its rhetorical purpose in mind. It focuses on what we can learn about the author of James, by reading the text in light of a guiding research question: How does the author establish and assert authority? The letter builds literary authority for a number of purposes, one of which is to address socioeconomic disparity, a major concern for the author.The author of James presents a speech-in-character in the shape of a letter to establish his ethos (Ch. 2), employing vocabulary and style to signal his education implicitly (Ch. 3 & 4) and includes himself in the categories of sage, teacher and exegete explicitly (Ch. 5). From this standpoint, the author can address the rich as equals, rebuke them and admonish both rich and poor to receive God''s wisdom (Ch. 6).The comparison with ancient literary criticism shows that the categories at play are the same. The insight that language and ethos are inseparable categories in antiquity provides us with renewed ways to interpret the literary production of early Christianity. Both James and ''the Classicists'' present a competing epic in the context of the early imperium, the former with an Israelite piety that is superior to contemporary economic and moral categories and the latter with the supremacy of Greek culture as a foundation for Rome.The letter of James emerges as a document that builds educational ethos as a balance against the rich and powerful, a strategy that calls for a revision of both its rhetoric and socio-economic situation.