James 1:19-20 – “Gnomic”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

¹⁹My beloved brothers, know [this], let every man be swift into the hearing, slow into the speaking, slow into anger, ²⁰for the anger of man is not producing [the] righteousness of God.

As seems to be the case with James, I have to note again there are many, many great commentaries already out there which address these verses. There is so much to learn here, so many supporting verses about good listening, about being slow to speak, about the dangers of anger, and, on the other hand, verses indicating those few instances where anger may be a good thing. For the most part, what needs to be said already has been. That being the case, I intend to simply jot down a teacupful of my own personal thoughts and leave the ocean of truth as available as it is to anyone interested enough to consult any of so many good commentaries.

One thing, for whatever it’s worth, I keep noticing in James. In Koine Greek their default tense was the aorist. In English ours is the present. In other words, if we don’t particularly intend to make any point about time, past, present or future, we use the present. Like in the familiar old title, “Everybody loves Raymond,” the point isn’t that it is happening in the present or past or future. It’s just true. Grammarians refer to this as a “gnomic” use of the present. It has been my personal observation after studying in Biblical Greek for years that they used their aorist in the same way. What is unusual to me is that I think James actually uses the present as a gnomic.

You see this in my translation of his proverbial statement: “…the anger of man is not producing the righteousness of God.” I translated it in a definite present tense form, “is not producing” only because I’m being literal (to remind myself later there is a present tense going on). My point is that probably a better translation of James’ thought would be, “… for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” That is a gnomic expression – something that simply is true all the time, everywhere.

I’m belaboring this point simply to say (in case anyone else is interested in the details of the text) that I have already seen James do this a number of times in just the first 20 verses of the very first chapter. Obviously that is how Greek “worked” in his head. Of course Greek was not his native tongue. I have a suspicion Paul probably grew up bilingual, growing up in Antioch, well away from Judea proper. But I’ll bet James did not, growing up apparently right in Jerusalem. Aramaic would have been his native tongue and if he was bilingual it probably would have included their traditional Hebrew, not Greek.

Thus I offer the observation that James is probably writing Aramaic/Hebrew in Greek. In other words, not being fluent in Greek, he is actually thinking in Aramaic/Hebrew, then (perhaps somewhat clumsily) recording those thoughts in Greek. The conclusion of it all, for anyone doing careful exegesis or wanting to translate James, is not to be too emphatic about occurrences of the present.

An example of this occurred back in v16. The opening command “Be not deceived,” is a present. That being the case, someone suggested it should be translated “Stop being deceived.” I think that would be true in almost any other book of the New Testament. The Greek man shouting at his dog, “Stop barking!” used the present tense. But, once again, it has been my observation so far in this book that James is using the present as his default tense, as the tense to express gnomic truth. That being the case, even though, “Stop being deceived,” would in fact be a technically correct translation, I don’t think it to be the case in James.

This example also demonstrates why I’m making all this fuss. Once again, the first job of the serious exegete is to determine exactly, in any given text, what God says and what He does not -- to rightly divide the Word of Truth. It is a different sense whether, in v16, James is saying, “Be not deceived” (gnomic sense) or “Stop being deceived” (a command to stop an action already in progress). Someone insisting on normal, technically precise Koine Greek could certainly make a case for the latter. But, once again, having already seen James using the present way more often than normal and in what I perceive to be a gnomic sense, I rather think we should understand his meaning as the former. Interesting that is the traditional translation. Men (who were far greater scholars than I’ll ever be) also thought a gnomic sense the proper understanding of the actual text.

And, finally, back to our text, the phrase should be properly translated, “The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (gnomic sense), rather than “The anger of man is not producing the righteousness of God” – something happening in the present. The latter translation leaves open the question, “Oh really? Did it used to produce the righteousness of God and right now, for some reason it is not?” or “Really? So if we work real hard, we could fix it and someday it would?” The gnomic sense leaves neither of these doors open and establishes the truth for all time, past, present, and future, that man’s anger does not (ever) produce the righteousness of God.

All of this is not to dismiss the existence of “righteous anger” which Jesus demonstrated is possible. What it does establish is that such anger, to actually be righteous, is something that simply does not originate from us. The “anger of man” is something godless and hopelessly sinister. Anger, like wealth, is something we should only use with the greatest of humility and fear of ourselves, prayerfully and very carefully keeping our gaze fixed on Jesus, lest it (so easily) devolve into “the anger of man.”

I think I still want to record some more practical thoughts on this text, so I’ll close here and address those in another post.