to be written by Adam, Moses or Abraham. However, the issue of genre plays a significant role here. Expectations about the meaning of a claim such as ‘James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes scattered among the nations’ are determined by genre. James is clearly a letter; yet we have no evidence from the early church that claims to authorship in letters were treated as a ‘transparent literary device’. If the claim about authorship was determined to be true, the letter
Page 44