In Reply to: Re: To Eva: The heart of the matter posted by MG on January 06, 2004 at 14:37:10:
Good question. Just a little history here: it's commonly believed that the book of James was written by James who was Jesus' brother, and who was head of the Jerusalem church in Paul's day. As the leader of the Jewish Christians, James was still a follower of the Mosaic Law and was called 'old camel knees' because he prayed so much. Eusebius (an early church historian) gives accounts from Hegesippus and Josephus who tell the story of James' martyrdom. They say that just before the Jewish revolt (66-70 AD) James was chucked off a temple roof for failing to renounce Jesus as the Messiah. He was really a very godly man and his epistle has been called a Christian book of proverbs. I personally belive that James contains many original verses from Q, the original Source doument (Quelle - Sayings of Jesus)not found in the Gospels.
The main dispute over James is that it appears to say that salvation is not just by grace, but by good works with grace, which I agree with. Some people object that it seems to contradict the "for by grace are ye saved" teachings of Paul. This is why Catholics enjoy the book of James more than Protestants, and why Marcion, in his canon, did not include James as a canonical book.
The first mention of the book of James in an official list of canonical books (those accepted by the church as Scripture) was in the list put out by Origen (185-254 AD). That would put Origen's list about 225-30 AD, and Origien was of the opinion that while other Christians accepted James, he disputed that it was Scripture. the next list it appears in is the one by Eusebius (260-340 AD) who again (!) disputes it. Only in Athanasius' day (296-373) is the epistle of James accepted for the first time as canonical, and was from then on. Athanasius was an extremely godly man who was persecuted for nearly 20 years by Arian (JW-like) Christians and lived in dry wells, deserts, closets etc to avoid being killed.
Interestingly enough, Paul's epistles were accepted as Scripture in the early part of the 100's AD, and the earliest canon in existence (Marcion's) accepts only the epistles from Paul and the gospel of Luke. There is strong internal evidence, IMO, that (with the exception of 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus) all of Paul's epistles were bound into one volume as early as 62 AD.