James turns from the individual under trial (ch. 1) to the assembly at worship, and he opens the new argument with the hardest sentence in the letter to construe. Four things are at stake in one line.

One. Is it a command (‘do not hold’) or an accusation cast as a question (‘you are not holding … are you?’)? The Greek form ἔχετε is identical for imperative and indicative, and Greek manuscripts carry no punctuation, so the question mark printed in NA28 is an editorial judgment.

Two. προσωπολημψία is a Semitic calque — literally ‘face-receiving’ — and it is plural here. James is not naming a vice of character but a set of concrete acts, which vv. 2-4 then stage in detail.

Three. τὴν πίστιν τοῦ κυρίου is a bare genitive of exactly the type disputed in Paul (πίστις Χριστοῦ). Here the objective/content reading is easier, since the article and the following illustration point to the community’s confession; but the genitive is left as a genitive.

Four. τῆς δόξης, tacked on at the end after a full string of genitives, is the recognized crux. It may qualify κυρίου (‘the Lord of glory’), or Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, or πίστιν, or stand as a Semitic genitive of quality (‘our glorious Lord’), or — on a minority reading — be in apposition to the whole name, making δόξα a title of Christ. The rendering keeps a possessive-genitive phrase and flags the rest.

The force of the whole: a community that assigns seating by clothing is doing so in the name of a Lord whose glory is precisely what no one in the room can see. Faith in that Lord and face-receiving cannot occupy the same room.

The address recurs eleven times in James and marks the seams of the argument; per the standing policy it is rendered identically at every occurrence and never varied for style. The possessive μου is retained without exception — it is what places the writer inside the family he is about to indict.

The masculine plural stands as written (§3). That the referent is mixed is settled internally by ἀδελφή at 2:15: James marked the feminine when he chose to, so the plural here is the ordinary Greek inclusive form and not evidence of an all-male assembly.

Unlike 1:16 and 1:19, the vocative here is not intensified with ἀγαπητοί — that comes four verses later, at 2:5, where James pivots from indictment to appeal. The bare form opens the charge; the intensified form opens the argument.

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ἔχετε is morphologically ambiguous: present active imperative 2pl and present active indicative 2pl are identical. Since the earliest majuscules are unpunctuated, the choice is entirely a matter of discourse analysis, and NA28’s question mark is editorial judgment, not manuscript evidence.

The rendering adopts the interrogative in reading tiers, on the strength of NA28’s punctuation and the surrounding question-chain, and retains the imperative in the study and liturgical tiers. Either way the pragmatic force is the same: the practice is being forbidden. What differs is whether James forbids it directly or forces the hearers to condemn it themselves — and the second is exactly the move he makes at 2:4.

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Proposed — pending reviewMartin Dibelius, James: A Commentary on the Epistle of James, rev. Heinrich Greeven, Hermeneia. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976.

A biblical coinage, absent from pagan Greek: πρόσωπον (face) + λαμβάνω (receive), calqued on the Hebrew idiom nāśāʾ pānîm, ‘lift up the face’ — the gesture of a judge who raises a suppliant’s bowed face and so shows him favor. The LXX renders the Hebrew literally (πρόσωπον λαμβάνειν, Lev 19:15; Deut 10:17; Ps 81:2 LXX; Mal 2:9), and the compound noun and its cognates emerge in early Christian Greek: προσωπολημψία (Rom 2:11; Eph 6:9; Col 3:25; Jas 2:1), προσωπολήμπτης (Acts 10:34), προσωπολημπτέω (Jas 2:9, and nowhere else).

Two features must survive in English.

The forensic domain. The idiom is courtroom vocabulary. Lev 19:15 forbids it to the judge, and the LXX texts denying it of God (Deut 10:17; 2 Chr 19:7) assert his judicial impartiality. That is why vv. 4 and 6 turn to κριταί and κριτήρια: James is charging the assembly with running a corrupt court.

The plural. προσωπολημψίαις is dative plural — instantial, naming discrete acts, not an abstract disposition. Per the standing policy on pluralized abstract nouns, English must individuate: ‘acts of favoritism,’ not ‘partiality.’ Some witnesses read the singular προσωπολημψίᾳ, which is a levelling toward the commoner abstract and is secondary; the plural is what vv. 2-3 then itemize.

Rendering: ‘acts of favoritism’ in reading tiers; the calque ‘face-receiving’ is retained in the literal tier so the Semitic idiom and the link to πρόσωπον stay visible. Excluded: ‘snobbery’ and ‘class distinction’ (modern sociological categories, §9), ‘prejudice’ (relocates the fault into attitude), and a bare ‘partiality’ (drops the plural and the face).

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Proposed — pending reviewDale C. Allison Jr., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle of James, International Critical Commentary. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013.

ἐν + dative here is manner or attendant circumstance: the condition under which the faith is held. It is not a spherical ‘in the sphere of’ nor instrumental ‘by means of.’

Two renderings are inadequate. ‘Do not hold the faith and show favoritism’ dissolves the preposition into a second verb, and loses James’s claim that the two are one act, not two. ‘Do not let your faith be based on favoritism’ makes προσωπολημψία the ground of the faith, which is nonsense in context — the ground is the Lord.

English ‘with’ carries manner without over-specifying, and is retained. The literal tier keeps ‘in,’ so that the reader can see the Greek preposition and weigh the manner/sphere question.

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The construction is the bare genitive that generates the pistis Christou debate in Paul (Rom 3:22; Gal 2:16; Phil 3:9). Here the objective/content reading is considerably easier than in Paul:

• the noun is articular — ἡ πίστις, the faith, anaphoric to a shared confession rather than to an individual’s act of believing;
• ἔχω + πίστιν is Koine idiom for holding a position or profession (cf. Jas 2:14, 18; Mark 11:22);
• the illustration in vv. 2-3 concerns behavior within a confessing community, not Christ’s own faithfulness.

Per standing policy the genitive is left as a genitive: ‘the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Do not render ‘faith in our Lord Jesus Christ’ in the main text without flagging, and do not render ‘the Christian faith,’ which imports a later creedal designation (§9).

Note also that this is one of only two places where James names Jesus Christ (the other is 1:1) — a fact worth recording, not explaining away. Where he does name him, it is to make the name incompatible with a seating chart.

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The recognized crux. After τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ — a complete and formulaic title — James appends a further feminine genitive, τῆς δόξης, with no connective. Greek word order permits several attachments and the sentence is genuinely overloaded.

Rendering. The reading text takes (a), set off by dashes so the appositional structure is visible without asserting that δόξα is a title: ‘— the Lord of glory —’. The literal tier keeps the bare sequence with a bracketed supplied head noun so the reader can see that the attachment is a decision. Excluded from the main text: ‘our glorious Lord Jesus Christ,’ which adopts (b) and destroys the genitive; and ‘Jesus Christ, who is the Glory,’ which adopts (d).

Why it matters here. On every reading, δόξα is the honor no one in the room can see. The assembly is grading visible splendor (ἐσθὴς λαμπρά, v. 2 — a shining garment) while confessing a Lord whose splendor is invisible. The juxtaposition is the argument, and any rendering that buries δόξα in an adjective weakens it.

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Proposed — pending reviewPeter H. Davids, The Epistle of James: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982. · J. B. Mayor, The Epistle of St. James: The Greek Text with Introduction, Notes and Comments, 3rd ed. London: Macmillan, 1913.

The verse is textually stable in substance; the variation is minor and instructive about the direction of scribal smoothing.

• προσωπολημψίαις (plural) is read by the principal witnesses. A singular προσωπολημψίᾳ appears in part of the tradition — a levelling toward the commoner abstract singular, and against the itemization of vv. 2-3. The plural is original.
• Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ is occasionally omitted or transposed in scattered witnesses; the omission relieves precisely the syntactic overload that τῆς δόξης creates, which is a classic mark of secondary simplification. Retain.
• The Koine spelling προσωπολημψίαις with intrusive μ before the labial is original; Atticizing προσωποληψίαις in the later tradition is orthographic normalization and carries no exegetical weight.

No variant touches the two real cruces — the mood of ἔχετε and the attachment of τῆς δόξης — because neither is a matter of the letters written. Both are decisions readers must make, and the manuscripts leave them open.

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The idiom behind προσωπολημψία is Hebrew and the theology behind it is Torah’s.

• Lev 19:15 — ‘you shall not lift up the face of the poor nor honor the face of the great’ (LXX: οὐ λήμψῃ πρόσωπον πτωχοῦ οὐδὲ θαυμάσεις πρόσωπον δυνάστου). This is the nearest source, and note that it forbids partiality in both directions — a point James’s own argument in vv. 5-6 has to negotiate carefully.
• Deut 10:17 — ‘God … who does not lift up the face and takes no bribe’ (LXX: ὅστις οὐ θαυμάζει πρόσωπον οὐδὲ οὐ μὴ λάβῃ δῶρον). Impartiality is a divine attribute, which is why acting otherwise is not merely unkind but a misrepresentation of the God confessed.
• Mal 2:9 — the priests are humiliated ‘because you did not keep my ways and lifted up faces in the law.’ Face-receiving in the administration of the law: the exact charge.

James writes εἴπητε and ἐπιβλέψητε in vv. 2-3 for the court of the assembly; he is applying a judicial statute to a worship gathering. The move is not a metaphor for him — v. 4’s κριταί and v. 6’s κριτήρια show he regards the assembly as an actual venue of judgment.

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Proposed — pending reviewLuke Timothy Johnson, The Letter of James, Anchor Bible 37A. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

The Greek and Latin commentators broadly take the verse as a prohibition rather than a question, and read τῆς δόξης with κυρίου.

The Latin tradition renders nolite in personarum acceptione habere fidem Domini nostri Iesu Christi gloriae — imperative, and with gloriae left standing as a genitive at the end, reproducing the Greek difficulty rather than solving it. That reticence is worth noting: Jerome did not convert it to an adjective, and neither should we.

The patristic emphasis falls consistently on the incongruity: honor assigned by garment inside a congregation confessing a Lord whose glory is not on display. That reading of the verse’s force is independent of how the syntax is resolved, and it is why the rendering keeps δόξα as a noun in the emphatic final position where James put it.

On the imperative/interrogative question, patristic testimony is real evidence for how the sentence was heard, but it is not decisive: the earliest manuscripts these readers used were unpunctuated too, and a commentator who paraphrases with an imperative may simply be rendering the pragmatic force of a rhetorical question.

The paragraph is paraenesis with a diatribe edge — direct address, a staged hypothetical (ἐὰν γάρ, v. 2), and a chain of questions expecting agreement. The register is cultivated: James’s vocabulary here includes the coinage χρυσοδακτύλιος (v. 2, ‘gold-ringed’) and the hapax προσωπολημπτέω (v. 9), and this verse piles four genitives in a row.

Two consequences for translation. First, the connectives and the interrogative structure are load-bearing (§10) and must survive: the questions of vv. 4-7 are the argument’s engine. Second, the syntactic overload of v. 1 is not a defect to be tidied. English must feel the weight of the accumulated title, because the accumulation is what makes the seating chart absurd.