The Stoic Paradox of James 2.10

Abstract

‘For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.’ This hard saying has been attributed by the consensus of commentators in this century to rabbinical teaching. Obedience or disobedience to certain laws, such as that about fringes and phylacteries, had the status in late Judaism of observing or transgressing the entire code. The rule of the epistle, then, merely repeats current midrash. In an earlier century, however, the association of this verse was Hellenistic rather than Judaic. Corresponding with Jerome concerning his perplexity about its meaning, Augustine indicates the affinity of James 2. 10 with the Stoic paradox that all virtues and vices are equal, and its corollary that he who has one virtue has all while he who lacks one has none. A Stoic source for this verse was still evident more than a millennium later to the editor of the first Greek New Testament to be published (1516), Erasmus of Rotterdam. In the same era another distinguished exegete, Martin Luther, likely considered James 2. 10 a Stoic paradox. At the turn of this century Joseph B. Mayor reported Augustine's attribution neutrally and catalogued numerous resemblances between the theories and maxims of Stoicism and this epistle. Martin Dibelius deliberated to indecision about its source, conceding that while the Stoic paradox and the rabbinical praxis were in origin distinct, by the time of Philo at least they had become indistinguishable teaching.