Verse 10 asserted the verdict: keep the whole law, stumble in one point, and you stand liable for all of it. Verse 11 supplies the reason (γάρ), and the reason is not arithmetical but personal. The unity of the law rests on the unity of the Lawgiver: ὁ … εἰπών … εἶπεν καί — the one who said the one thing said the other thing too. Two commands, one voice.

James then drives it into the second person with a deliberately extreme test case. If you keep the sexual commandment and break the homicide commandment, your record of compliance on the first buys nothing: γέγονας παραβάτης νόμου. The perfect tense is doing real work — not “you are behaving badly” but “you have crossed over into a settled status.”

Three decisions govern the rendering. First, νόμου is anarthrous and is kept so: “transgressor of law,” not “of the law.” The claim is categorical, about law as a regime, and supplying the article narrows it to a document. Second, the two present indicatives are durative and are rendered progressively, since a single lapse and a standing practice are not the same charge. Third, the adjunctive καί after εἶπεν means “also,” not “and” — it is the hinge of the whole argument, and dropping it leaves two commands merely listed rather than traced to one mouth.

The verse is a legal-argumentative unit inside a paraenetic section (§10), and its Decalogue citation is handled per the OT-citation policy: the wording is rendered as James wrote it, with the LXX substrate noted rather than restored.

Proposed — pending reviewRalph P. Martin, James, Word Biblical Commentary 48, Waco: Word Books, 1988

Article + aorist participle, substantivized: “the one who said.” James never names the speaker. He could have written ὁ θεός (as at 2:5, 19), or ὁ νόμος (as at 2:9), or ἡ γραφή (as at 2:8, 23). He wrote none of them.

The reticence is the argument. Naming God would make the point theological in a way the hearer could hold at arm’s length; naming the law would leave the law as an inventory of statutes. Designating the Lawgiver purely by the act of speaking — and then repeating the same lemma as a finite verb, εἶπεν — welds the two commandments together at their source. Chrysostom’s successors in the Greek catenae and Bede alike read the verse this way: unus est legislator, and James himself says so outright at 4:12 (εἷς ἐστιν ὁ νομοθέτης).

The repetition λέγω → λέγω (participle, then indicative) is not stylistic clumsiness. It is the same rhetorical device the corpus has already met at Phil 4:2 (παρακαλῶ … παρακαλῶ) and Phil 4:17 (ἐπιζητῶ … ἐπιζητῶ): the verb is repeated so that the contrast lands on the objects rather than on the action. Here the two objects are the two commandments, and the single repeated verb is what makes them one utterance. English must repeat the verb — “the one who said … said also” — even though “who gave both commands” would be smoother.

The Decalogue in LXX Exod 20:13-15 and Deut 5:17-18 uses the imperatival future with οὐ: οὐ μοιχεύσεις, οὐ φονεύσεις. James has μὴ μοιχεύσῃς, μὴ φονεύσῃς — prohibitive aorist subjunctive with μή. The sense is identical; the form is not.

This is not a slip. Prohibitive μή + aorist subjunctive is the ordinary Koine way of forbidding an act not yet begun, and it is how the Decalogue is quoted in a strand of the tradition (compare Mark 10:19 par., where witnesses fluctuate between μή + subjunctive and οὐ + future, and Rom 13:9, which retains the LXX futures). Either James is quoting from memory in idiomatic Koine, or he is drawing on a catechetical form of the Decalogue already circulating in the subjunctive.

Per the OT-citation policy, the Greek is rendered as it stands and the substrate is noted, not restored. Hence “Do not commit adultery” rather than “You shall not commit adultery” in the reading text — the imperatival-future rendering (“you shall”) is reserved for the places where the Greek actually has the future, as at Gal 5:14 (ἀγαπήσεις). The study and liturgical tiers retain “you shall” because English ears expect the Decalogue in that register, and the tier is declared.

Order. James gives adultery before murder. So does LXX Deut 5:17-18 in its dominant manuscript tradition (Vaticanus: οὐ μοιχεύσεις, οὐ φονεύσεις, οὐ κλέψεις), against the Hebrew order (murder, adultery, theft) followed by MT Exod 20. The same adultery-first sequence appears at Luke 18:20 and Rom 13:9. This is real evidence that James is working from a Greek Bible in the Deuteronomic tradition, and it should not be normalized to the Hebrew order in translation or in the note.

Proposed — pending reviewAlfred Rahlfs and Robert Hanhart, eds., Septuaginta, editio altera, Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2006

εἶπεν καί is not “and said.” The καί stands after the finite verb and before the second quotation, and it is adjunctive — “said also.” The corpus has already fixed this for καί before prepositional phrases (Phil 1:18), before demonstratives (Phil 3:15), before participles (Phil 3:18), and inside ἵνα clauses (1 Pet 4:13); the rule applies here.

Dropping it produces “the one who said X and said Y,” which is a list. Rendering it produces “the one who said X also said Y,” which is an identification. The whole force of v. 11 is the second, and it is the second that grounds v. 10’s πάντων ἔνοχος. A translation that loses the καί has lost the argument.

A first-class condition with the present indicative: εἰ δὲ οὐ μοιχεύεις φονεύεις δέ. Per standing policy the protasis is entertained as real for the sake of argument, and it is rendered “if,” not “since.” The conditional form leaves the hearer to fill the gap, and that gap is the rhetoric.

Two features of the negation matter.

οὐ, not μή. In a conditional protasis Greek normally takes οὐ with the indicative, so the negative is grammatically expected and carries no independent emphasis — the same discipline the corpus applies to μή with participles. But its presence does confirm the mood: this is a condition of fact, not a supposition contrary to fact.

The doubled δέ. The first δέ is transitional (“now”), the second correlative-adversative (“but”). Together they set the two clauses of the protasis against each other, and both must be rendered per §10. Note the position: the second δέ is postpositive and therefore stands after φονεύεις, which throws the weight of the clause onto the verb that arrives first in English. Keep “but you are murdering” as the second member so the English sequence matches.

The illustration is deliberately grotesque. James does not accuse anyone in his congregation of homicide (he does raise φονεύετε at 4:2, which some read literally, but that is a separate crux). The pairing is a reductio: choose the two commandments least likely to be broken by the same person, and the point stands with maximum clarity. Whether James also has in view the partiality of 2:1-9 as a species of the second-table breach is a live question, but the verse itself does not say so.

In the citation the verbs stand in the aorist subjunctive (a single act forbidden). In the application James switches to present indicatives: μοιχεύεις, φονεύεις. The switch is not accidental — he had aorists available and had just used them.

The present is durative. The charge is not “if you once committed adultery” but “if your practice is one thing and not the other.” Literal and study tiers therefore render progressively (“you are not committing adultery … you are murdering”); smooth registers may compress, but the note records the aspect. Rendering both as simple English presents (“if you do not commit adultery but do commit murder”) is acceptable but loses a distinction James wrote into the sentence.

φονεύω is unlawful killing specifically — the LXX verb of Exod 20:13 rendering רָצַח, and the standing word for homicide in Jewish Greek (Matt 5:21; Jas 4:2; 5:6). Render “murder,” not “kill”: the older English “Thou shalt not kill” (Vulgate non occides, which is genuinely broader in Latin) has misled generations into hearing a prohibition of all killing. That rendering is reception, not evidence (§11), and is confined to the liturgical tier.

μοιχεύω in first-century Jewish usage denotes intercourse violating a marriage, and is narrower than πορνεία (already fixed as “sexual immorality”). Keep the two lexically distinct.

Perfect active indicative of γίνομαι, second person singular: “you have become.” This picks up γέγονεν in v. 10 exactly — same lemma, same tense, third person there and second person here — and the two must be rendered with the same English words so the reader can see the argument close.

The corpus already fixes γίνομαι as “come to be / become,” preserving the contrast with ὑπάρχω and εἰμί, and fixes the perfect γέγονα as “I have become” (Gal 4:16). Three things follow.

First, the perfect is not a past. “You became a transgressor” severs the standing result, which is the whole point: the status is in force as James writes.

Second, the perfect is not a present. “You are a transgressor” erases the transition — that a line was crossed, that there was a before and an after.

Third, γίνομαι is not εἰμί. James is not describing what the person always was; he is describing what one act of breaking has made him. The Vulgate’s factus es holds this correctly; much modern English does not.

Agent-noun of παραβαίνω, “step across.” The image is a boundary overstepped, and it is not spent in the first century: the cognate noun παράβασις is what Paul distinguishes from ἁμαρτία at Rom 4:15 and 5:13-14 on precisely this ground — where there is no law there is no παράβασις, because there is no line to cross.

Five NT occurrences (Rom 2:25, 27; Gal 2:18; Jas 2:9, 11), all forensic. James has already used it at 2:9 (ἐλεγχόμενοι ὑπὸ τοῦ νόμου ὡς παραβάται), and the recurrence here closes the inclusio around vv. 9-11. One English word at both points is mandatory.

Render transgressor, which retains the crossing-image in its Latin morphology (trans + gradior). Excluded: “lawbreaker” (a compound that duplicates νόμου and destroys the genitive), “sinner” (that is ἁμαρτωλός, already fixed, and it is the wrong category — James’s whole point is that this is a legal status), “offender” (drops the boundary), “guilty of breaking the law” (dissolves the noun into a clause).

The distinction from παράπτωμα (“trespass / false step,” fixed at Gal 6:1) should be kept audible: a παράπτωμα is a stumble off the path, a παράβασις a deliberate step over a marked line.

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

παραβάτης νόμου — the genitive is anarthrous. Verse 10 had ὅλον τὸν νόμον, articular; v. 9 had ὑπὸ τοῦ νόμου, articular; v. 11 drops the article. The change is deliberate and is preserved in English: “a transgressor of law,” not “of the law.”

The corpus already fixes the anarthrous νόμος as qualitative — law as a regime or principle rather than a named document (ἐκ νόμου, ὑπὸ νόμον, ἐν νόμῳ, οὐκ ἔστιν νόμος). The rule applies here, and it is exegetically load-bearing. Articular τὸν νόμον in v. 10 names the Torah as a body; anarthrous νόμου in v. 11 says something categorical about what the man now is in relation to law as such. English must accept the slight stiffness rather than smooth it away.

This matters because the whole force of vv. 10-11 depends on refusing to let the law be a checklist of separable items. A man who has stepped over one line has not become a transgressor of that statute; he has become, simply, a transgressor of law.

γάρ is rendered, not dropped (§10; standing entry). It grounds v. 10’s verdict, and the grounding relation is the exegetically decisive feature of the verse: James justifies the unity of the law’s claim by the unity of the law’s speaker.

The structure is tight:

• v. 10: whole law kept, one point stumbled → liable for all (γέγονεν … ἔνοχος)
• v. 11a: reason — one speaker behind both commands (ὁ … εἰπών … εἶπεν καί)
• v. 11b: application in the second person (εἰ δὲ … γέγονας παραβάτης νόμου)
• v. 12: consequence — speak and act as those about to be judged

The two perfects (γέγονεν, γέγονας) bracket the unit, and v. 11’s shift from third person to second is the point where the argument stops describing and starts accusing. Preserve the shift; do not level the persons for smoothness.

Proposed — pending reviewRichard Bauckham, James: Wisdom of James, Disciple of Jesus the Sage, New Testament Readings, London: Routledge, 1999

NA28 prints the verse without brackets and the UBS committee assigned no rating, which reflects a substantially stable text. Three points are worth recording.

Order of the commands. A small number of witnesses transpose to put murder first, conforming the citation to the Hebrew order of Exod 20 and to the more familiar Decalogue sequence. The adultery-first order is both better attested and the harder reading (it matches LXX Deuteronomy, not the Hebrew or the common catechetical order), and is to be retained.

Mood of the prohibitions. Some witnesses read the imperatival futures οὐ μοιχεύσεις / οὐ φονεύσεις, assimilating James’s subjunctives to the LXX wording. This is a classic harmonization to a familiar source text and moves in exactly the direction scribes always move; the subjunctives are original.

The article with νόμου. A portion of the later tradition supplies τοῦ before νόμου, levelling the anarthrous genitive to the articular usage of vv. 9-10. Again, the direction of smoothing is diagnostic: scribes add the article, they do not remove it. Retain the anarthrous form.

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

The patristic reading is remarkably uniform and turns entirely on the identity of the speaker rather than on any theory of the law’s integrity as a system.

The Greek catena tradition takes ὁ εἰπών as God and draws the conclusion James draws four verses later: εἷς ἐστιν ὁ νομοθέτης (4:12). To despise one command is to despise the one who gave all of them; the offense is against a person, not against a statute.

Augustine treats Jas 2:10-11 at length in Epistula 167 (to Jerome), which is effectively a monograph on this passage. He is troubled by the Stoic-sounding parity of sins the verse seems to imply and resolves it by locating the unity of the law in love: whoever offends against love offends against the whole, because love is what the whole law is. He is careful to insist that this does not make all sins equal in gravity — a distinction the verse itself does not make, and which should be recorded as his reading rather than read out of James.

Bede, in his commentary on the Catholic Epistles, follows the same line: unus est enim legislator, and the authority slighted in one precept is the authority of all.

What none of them does is treat the verse as abolishing distinctions among sins. That is a later polemical use, and per §11 it may be named as reception but supplies no evidence for the rendering.

Proposed — pending reviewAugustine, Epistula 167 (Ad Hieronymum, de sententia Iacobi), CSEL 44, ed. A. Goldbacher, Vienna, 1904 · Bede the Venerable, Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles, trans. David Hurst, Cistercian Studies 82, Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1985