day, and break bread and offer the Eucharist; but first make confession of your faults” (14, 1). In this regard, Franz Mussner, following Rudolf Knopf, says: “In both places a short, public, individual confession is envisaged” (Jakobusbrief, p. 226, n. 5). Admittedly, one cannot equate this confession of sin, found in the life of early Christian communities in areas influenced by Jewish Christianity, with the sacrament of Confession as it was to develop in the course of later Church history: it is