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Voice of Jesus in the Social Rhetoric of James, The

The Voice of Jesus in the Social Rhetoric of James. by means of Wesley H. Wachob. Society for recently made known Testament Studies Monograph Series, 106 Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 2000 xiv + 251 pp $5995 (cloth)

This revised Emory University dissertation (under V K Robbins) argues that James 2:1-13 in particular and James as a whole are coherent and effective as persuasive discourse. Wachob also examines the ways James uses sayings of Jesus and from this analysis identifies the social location of the idea expressed in James.

Wachob occupys socio-rhetorical criticism as it is lay opened by Vernon Robbins. Thus Wachob investigates what Robbins calls the inner contexture the intertexture, and the social and cultural contexture of the passage. Under the heading of inner fabric Wachob engages primarily the disciplines of textual criticism and rhetorical criticism. In the latter he draws heavily in succession the progymnasmata to explicate the argumentative texture of the passage. He sometimes brings syllogistic arrangements of these arguments.

Next Wachob examines the intertexture of the passage, i.e., the relationship of James to antecedent themes Allusions are seen as "rhetorical performances" of earlier material which James reformulates to persuade the readers, given their acknowledge cultural and social location, of the point he is making. Wachob finds that this proper sphere of James is also influenced according to the progymnasmata. He identifies the saying in 2:5 about the rich and the poor with a saying of Jesus in Matthew's version of Q and then reasons that the "socioideological voice" of that saving is resounded in James (p. 153).

Wachob's analysis of the social and refinement contexts finds conflicts between those of different social classes, with the rich receiving preferential treatment. He inflicts these disparities in the adjoining matter of the patron-client system. Here those favoring the wealthy are following social convention and may smooth see themselves securing the benefaction of the patron for the temple James seeks to change this situation through making God the patron of the poor and thus changing their social identity. This argument fixs out a "communitarian social rhetoric" (p 195) which reframes the community's selfunderstanding and requires just discovered ways of relating to the same another within the community.

Wachob has demonstrated that James 2:1-13 can be seen as coherent through showing how James employs well-known strategies of argumentation and for what reason its changes in subject fit reasonably into schemes of elaborations of a thesis. There are places at which Wachob fills in ultimate parts of James's argument without sufficient evidence in the way that that he can give it an enthymematic manner of making (e.g., p. 108). So in the midst of explicating the argumentative arrangement as something other than what we might reckon upon he himself fails to break completely at liberty from our expectations and in such a manner seems to assume that the argument must be deductive. It is also a curiosity that Wachob would spend great effort to identify which version of Q the saying of Jesus in 2:5 is closest to when his larger point is that James reformulates and uses in his concede way the preformed material he finds at hand. Wachob's confess thesis makes suspect any argument about the social or theological position of James which is based upon the form of the antecedent saying. Despite these difficulties, Wachob has produc a surpassingly helpful study that advances our understanding of James, its argumentative manner of making and its social/ideological location.

JERRY L SUMNEY

Lexington Theological Seminary Lexington, Kentucky