This thread is about the book of James and Paul's epistles complementing each other.
I have yet to read anything in James that even remotely contradicts or is less than complementary to Paul's epistles.
The only passage that some say contradicts is the one in my OP which I clarify to my satisfaction. Maybe not yours. There is more that could be said.
It is said to have been written about 7-8 years before the first of Paul's epistles.
It fits within the book of Acts while the leadership at Jerusalem was dealing with the growth of the church which was scattered out from Jerusalem
The early Church most assuredly did not think there was a division where the Gospel Christ gave to the Jews who wrote the Gospels and catholic epistles, was somehow "revised" when Christ converted and then sent forth Paul after blinding him on the road to Damascus...
And indeed, when Peter writes of Paul, he affirms his works, while giving the caution that some of what he writes is difficult to grasp and weak men can twist his meaning to their own destruction, as they do with the rest of the Bible...
His words are true even now, some 2000 years later...
Look - The crisis was real, and God sent Paul in to confront it head on... The Jews, as a Nation, had failed to receive Christ as their Anointed Savior... They killed Him, which is understandable, and then they did not repent and turn back to Him even when it was shown to them what they had done... God gave them a very long time to do the repentance needed... Paul himself, plucked out of the middle of persecuting Christians, established in himself the HABIT of, at least at first, going to the Synagogues and preaching Christ to the Jews... He only succeeded in converting some, and there was treachery and division following him everywhere... He was beaten and plotted against... But finally he had to come to grips with the fact that the conversion of the Jews had failed, and that it was time for him to convert the Nations, the Gentiles, the Ethnoi...
And this he did... Without consulting with the Church leadership in Jerusalem, for some time, and was a wonder-working and lovely man who spread joy among the faithful and converted many to faith in Christ...
But here is the rub - The Jews who had the Faith of Christ were in large part from among the most pious and holy sect of the Jews, the Pharisees... And they believed, very reasonably, that because Christ was a Jew, converts had to become Jews in order to be baptized into Christ... They needed circumcision and obedience to the Law of the Jews...
And this is where Paul met them head on, and explained that the Law had not saved them before, and could not save them now, but only faith in Christ and in the living of lives that followed Christ in the Faith of Christ which is obedience to Christ through obedience to the elders in the Church that is the Body of Christ Who is Her Head...
There is even a passage that contrasts the two approaches to Christ, where the Jews simply need faith in Christ, because they have been prepared by their obedience to the Law, and the Nations need to believe in THE Faith of Christ, which is discipled by obedience to Christ in His Body, the Church, for which Paul suffered so much... I don't remember the passage, but can find it if anyone asks... Contrasting faith in Christ with
the Faith of Christ - The first without an article, and the second with the article "the"...
MADers confuse Paul's dismissal of the Law of the Jews with obedience to any law at all, when we are to be obedient to Christ... And they say that while Christ did disciple obedience, He ONLY did so to the Jews, and then revised His teaching for the Gentiles who just had to believe in Christ without any obedience whatsoever...
I think I have it now...
MADist's, please correct me if I am wrong...
Arsenios
