Recovering the Lost Letter of Jacob
March 15, 2013
(Gina Meeks)
It is high time the English-speaking church recovers the long-lost letter of Jacob. For 500 years, we have wrongly called this the letter of James, despite the fact that the Greek does not say James, but rather Jacob (as in Abraham, Isaac and Jacob), and despite the fact that in every other language, the letter of Jacob is rightly identified as such.
By calling this the letter of James, and by referring to the apostle James rather than the apostle Jacob (not to mention Jacob the brother of Jesus, also wrongly called James, who led the congregation in Jerusalem), we have produced theological confusion and cut off an important Jewish dimension to the roots of the Christian faith.
Consider for a moment that in German or Dutch Bibles, this is the letter of Jakobus, while in French it is Jacques and in Polish, Jakub. Check this out in 50 different languages, and in every one, you will find a variation of Jacob. Even the Spanish name “Santiago” comes from San Diego (Saint Diego, which is also a variant of Jacob). Only our English Bibles say James, completely without justification. (The name was corrupted as it passed from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to English, ultimately morphing into James.)
Consider also that when English translators of the Bible saw the name of the patriarch Jacob in verses like Matthew 1:2, they did not translate it to James. Otherwise, we would have had absolutely bizarre statements like, “Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of James, and James the father of Judah and his brothers,” or Jesus would have made reference to “the God of Abraham, Isaac and James” (see Matt. 22:32).
Yet, when it comes to the apostle Jacob or the letter of Jacob, virtually all English translations—with the primary exception of Messianic Jewish versions—refer to this Jacob as James. Why? Does it sound too Jewish?
If so, what do you do with the names of the twelve apostles, as listed in Matthew 10:2-4, which originally sounded like this: “First, Shim‘on, called Kefa, and Andrew [Andrai] his brother, Ya‘akov Ben-Zavdai and Yochanan his brother, Philip [Philippos] and Bar-Talmai, T’oma and Mattityahu the tax-collector, Ya‘akov Bar-Halfai and Taddai, Shim‘on the Zealot, and Y’hudah from K’riot, who betrayed him” (Complete Jewish Bible).
To be perfectly clear, I have no problem rendering the Hebrew name Ya‘akov (Iakobus in Greek) with the English name Jacob. In fact, that is the correct English translation. But I have a real problem calling him James. That is not who he was, and that is not how he should be known.
