Is James’s Greek Really That Good? Evaluating the Quality of James’s Greek and the Probability of Secretarial Assistance for the Authorship Debate

Abstract

Most contemporary scholars maintain that James’s Greek is highly sophisticated. Those who understand James to be pseudepigraphical view the letter’s Greek as evidence against its authenticity, while many of those who defend the traditional view of the authorship of James account for the letter’s Greek by positing the amanuensis hypothesis. Underlying both of these approaches is a mostly unquestioned acceptance of a high view of the letter’s Greek. This article seeks to advance the debate over the authorship of James by challenging the standard view of the letter’s Greek and by evaluating recent work on secretarial assistance in Greco-Roman letter writing.