Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadHeinrich Meyer Commentary - James 2:17 - 2:17
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Jam_2:17. Application of the similitude. The verse forms one sentence, of which ἡ πίστις is the subject and νεκρὰ ἐστίν is the predicate; neither after πίστις (Pott) nor after ἔργα (Michaelis) is a colon to be put. After ἔχῃ the idea continually (Baumgarten) is not to be supplied. πίστις has here the same meaning as in Jam_2:14.
From the fact that James calls faith dead if it has not works, it is evident that by these works is not meant something which must be added to faith, but something which grows out of faith; the ἔργα here treated of are works of faith, in which are the germs of faith. νεκρά is here not to be explained by operibus destituta, but = inanima, equivalent to a dead body;[134] correctly, de Wette: “dead, that is, without the power of life; thus not primarily to be referred to its effects, but to be understood as its internal nature;” however, James thus designates a faith without works to prove that it οὐ δύναται σῶσαι and ΟὐΔῈΝ ὨΦΕΛΕῖΤΑΙ .
The more precise statement ΚΑΘʼ ἙΑΥΤΉΝ has been variously understood. Grotius considers it as simply pleonastic; some critics separate it from ΝΕΚΡΆ and take ΚΑΤΆ = against (Möller = ΚΑΘʼ ἙΑΥΤῆς , i.e. sibimet ipsi repugnat; Augusti: contra semet ipsam); others unite it with πίστις (Knapp = fides sola; Baumgarten: “in so far as faith is alone”). But ΚΑΘʼ ἙΑΥΤῆς belongs evidently, as its position shows, to ΝΕΚΡΆ (de Wette, Schneckenburger, Wiesinger, Lange). It is thus emphatically stated that a faith without works is not only dead in reference to something else, but dead in reference to itself. It serves for the intensification of the idea ΝΕΚΡΆ , yet not so that by it the existence of a ΠΊΣΤΙς without works was denied (against Schneckenburger).
[134] The comparison of faith without works to a dead body is found among the old interpreters in such a manner that it formed a controversy between Catholic and Protestant interpreters; whilst Lorinus says: mortnum corpus verum corpus est, nt sine operibus et charitate fides, Laurentius remarks: sicut homo mortuus non est verus homo, ita nee fides mortua vera fides.