Letter of James 2

¹ My brothers, do not try to combine faith in Jesus Christ, our glorified Lord, with the making of distinctions between classes of people.

² Now suppose a man comes into your synagogue,[*a] beautifully dressed and with a gold ring on, and at the same time a poor man comes in, in shabby clothes,

³ and you take notice of the well-dressed man, and say, ‘Come this way to the best seats’; then you tell the poor man, ‘Stand over there’ or ‘You can sit on the floor by my foot-rest’.

⁴ Can’t you see that you have used two different standards in your mind, and turned yourselves into judges, and corrupt judges at that?

⁵ Listen, my dear brothers: it was those who are poor according to the world that God chose, to be rich in faith and to be the heirs to the kingdom which he promised to those who love him.

⁶ In spite of this, you have no respect for anybody who is poor. Isn’t it always the rich who are against you? Isn’t it always their doing when you are dragged before the court?

⁷ Aren’t they the ones who insult the honourable name to which you have been dedicated?

⁸ Well, the right thing to do is to keep the supreme law of scripture: you must love your neighbour as yourself;[*b]

⁹ but as soon as you make distinctions between classes of people, you are committing sin, and under condemnation for breaking the Law.

¹⁰ You see, if a man keeps the whole of the Law, except for one small point at which he fails, he is still guilty of breaking it all.

¹¹ It was the same person who said, ‘You must not commit adultery’ and ‘You must not kill’.[*c] Now if you commit murder, you do not have to commit adultery as well to become a breaker of the Law.

¹² Talk and behave like people who are going to be judged by the law of freedom,

¹³ because there will be judgement without mercy for those who have not been merciful themselves; but the merciful need have no fear of judgement.

¹⁴ Take the case, my brothers, of someone who has never done a single good act but claims that he has faith. Will that faith save him?

¹⁵ If one of the brothers or one of the sisters is in need of clothes and has not enough food to live on,

¹⁶ and one of you says to them, ‘I wish you well; keep yourself warm and eat plenty’, without giving them these bare necessities of life, then what good is that?

¹⁷ Faith is like that: if good works do not go with it, it is quite dead.

¹⁸ This is the way to talk to people of that kind: ‘You say you have faith and I have good deeds; I will prove to you that I have faith by showing you my good deeds – now you prove to me that you have faith without any good deeds to show.

¹⁹ You believe in the one God – that is creditable enough, but the demons have the same belief, and they tremble with fear.

²⁰ Do realise, you senseless man, that faith without good deeds is useless.

²¹ You surely know that Abraham our father was justified by his deed, because he offered his son Isaac on the altar?[*d]

²² There you see it: faith and deeds were working together; his faith became perfect by what he did.

²³ This is what scripture really means when it says: Abraham put his faith in God, and this was counted as making him justified;[*e] and that is why he was called ‘the friend of God’.

²⁴ You see now that it is by doing something good, and not only by believing, that a man is justified.

²⁵ There is another example of the same kind: Rahab the prostitute, justified by her deeds because she welcomed the messengers and showed them a different way to leave.

²⁶ A body dies when it is separated from the spirit, and in the same way faith is dead if it is separated from good deeds.