James has just asked what use it is if someone claims faith and has no works (v. 14). Verse 15 opens the illustration that answers the question: a protasis describing two believers in acute destitution, whose completion arrives only in v. 16 with a pious dismissal and a withheld gift.

Four features carry the weight:

1. ἀδελφὸς ἢ ἀδελφή — the destitute are named as kin, and this is the one place in the letter where James spells out the feminine. The masculine plurals elsewhere in the letter are read through this verse, not around it.
2. γυμνοί — not necessarily wholly unclothed; in Greek and Hebrew idiom the word covers being without the outer garment, i.e. exposed and unprotected. But the word is harsh and the rendering must not sand it smooth.
3. ὑπάρχωσιν — James chose the heavier verb of settled existence over the plain copula. This is not a bad afternoon; it is how these people live.
4. τῆς ἐφημέρου τροφῆς — a NT hapax. The lack is not of savings or comfort but of today’s food, in an economy where the day-laborer ate what he earned that day.

The cumulative effect is that the case is not marginal or hypothetical. James builds the worst plausible case out of the nearest possible people, and then in v. 16 has a member of the congregation bless them and walk off.

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

ἐάν with the present subjunctive is a third-class condition: the protasis is presented as a live possibility, not asserted (first class) and not contrary to fact. The corpus policy is fixed: do not render ‘when’ (asserts the event) or ‘though’ (concedes it).

The protasis is long and multi-verb, running through v. 16 (ὑπάρχωσιν … εἴπῃ … μὴ δῶτε) before the apodosis arrives as the bare question τί ὄφελος; English must not close the sentence at the end of v. 15. The verse division here cuts a single grammatical unit, and the reading text should end with a comma or dash rather than a full stop.

Within the protasis, ὑπάρχωσιν is present (durative — an ongoing condition) while εἴπῃ and δῶτε in v. 16 are aorist (single acts). The aspectual contrast is exegetically live: a standing destitution met by one dismissive speech.

The pairing is the single most important datum in the verse for the letter as a whole. James uses the vocative ἀδελφοί (μου) some fifteen times; here, and only here, he writes the feminine out. That is decisive evidence that the masculine plural throughout the letter is the ordinary Greek inclusive form and not a restriction of address to men (§3). The corpus policy — render the masculine plural as written and footnote the mixed referent — rests on exactly this kind of internal marker.

The disjunctive ἤ is not weakening the case (‘either sort of person, it hardly matters’). It individuates: whichever one of them turns up in this state, the obligation is the same. Rendering ‘a brother or sister’ without the second article is idiomatic English and does not lose anything the Greek asserts.

On the kinship term itself: ἀδελφός here is fictive-kinship language within the assembly, not blood relation, and the corpus retains ‘brother’ rather than ‘fellow believer’ so the household register that James is exploiting stays audible. The whole force of vv. 15-16 depends on the destitute being insiders — the person addressed in v. 16 is failing a family member, not a stranger.

γυμνός ranges in Greek from wholly unclothed (Mark 14:52; John 21:7) to wearing only the undergarment, without the outer cloak — the sense at Isa 58:7 LXX (γυμνὸν ἐὰν ἴδῃς, περίβαλε) and behind Matt 25:36 (γυμνὸς καὶ περιεβάλετέ με). The Isaiah text is almost certainly in James’s ear: it is the classic prophetic indictment pairing clothing the naked with feeding the hungry, in a passage attacking fasting divorced from justice.

The Hebrew ‘ārôm behaves the same way (1 Sam 19:24; Job 22:6; Isa 20:2), which is why the LXX field is stable.

Masculine plural γυμνοί after two singular subjects of different grammatical gender is regular constructio ad sensum: Greek defaults to the masculine for a mixed pair (BDF §135). This carries no implication that the sister is somehow secondary; English simply has no equivalent and renders with a plural predicate.

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 corpus fixes ὑπάρχω as ‘exist / be (inherently)’, marking an ongoing state or intrinsic being, stronger than the simple copula (already settled at Phil 2:6 and 3:20). James had ὦσιν available and did not use it.

The force here is that the destitution is a standing condition rather than a momentary embarrassment. Some lexicographers judge that ὑπάρχω has weakened toward εἰμί in Koine and carries no extra freight; the papyri do show the verb in colorless contexts. But James uses it twice with evident weight (2:15; 4:14 of the vapor that is human life), and Luke-Acts uses it consistently of settled circumstances or possessions. The corpus retains the distinction and marks it in the literal tier (‘should be [inherently]’), leaving the reading text simply ‘is.’

Present aspect is durative and must be visible in the study tier.

The corpus already fixes λείπω in the middle/passive with a genitive as ‘lack / be lacking (in)’, and requires one English root across the three James occurrences: 1:4 (ἐν μηδενὶ λειπόμενοι), 1:5 (εἴ τις λείπεται σοφίας), and here.

The repetition is not incidental. At 1:4 the mature believer is left lacking in nothing; at 1:5 the one left lacking wisdom is told to ask God, who gives without reserve. Here the brother or sister is left lacking the day’s food — and the person addressed in v. 16 gives nothing. The catchword binds James’s account of God’s unstinting giving to a congregation’s withholding, and if the English varies the verb the connection disappears.

The passive shape matters: the subject is the one left short, not one who has failed to acquire. Do not render ‘they need food,’ which converts a deficiency into a want. Do not render ‘destitute of’ except in declared liturgical register.

The genitive τῆς ἐφημέρου τροφῆς is the ordinary genitive of the thing wanting after this verb.

ἐφήμερος (ἐπί + ἡμέρα) is a NT hapax and rare in the LXX. Its ordinary Greek range is ‘lasting a day, short-lived’ and ‘for the day, daily.’ Here the second governs, fixed by the noun it modifies and by the economics: the reference is not food that spoils quickly but the day’s ration.

The realia matter (§9). In a first-century economy of day-labor, the wage was reckoned and paid daily precisely because the laborer had no reserve — hence the Torah requirement to pay the hired man before sundown, ‘for he is poor and sets his heart on it’ (Deut 24:14-15; Lev 19:13). To lack ἡ ἐφήμερος τροφή is not to be poor in general but to have nothing to eat today. That is what makes v. 16’s ‘be warmed and be fed’ obscene rather than merely useless.

The adjective is two-termination (masculine and feminine identical), which accounts for the form ἐφημέρου standing with the feminine τροφῆς. This is morphology, not a textual problem.

τροφή is the plain word for nourishment or food, distinct from ἄρτος (bread) and βρῶμα (an item of food). Retain ‘food’; ‘sustenance’ is available in higher register.

Proposed — pending reviewPeter H. Davids, The Epistle of James: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982)

γυμνοὶ ὑπάρχωσιν καὶ λειπόμενοι admits two constructions, and the printed editions do not settle it because Greek supplies no marker.

The verse is textually stable in the critical tradition; NA28 prints without a variation unit here.

Minor items worth recording rather than adopting:

• Some witnesses read ὦσιν for ὑπάρχωσιν, substituting the plain copula. This is the easier reading and the direction of scribal simplification is obvious; the harder ὑπάρχωσιν stands.
• The word order ἐν ῥυπαρᾷ ἐσθῆτι at v. 2 shows James varying adjective placement freely, which bears on the transposition variants elsewhere in the paragraph but not here.
• Later witnesses occasionally add a possessive or connective to smooth the long protasis. The unadorned text is preferred throughout.

The verse division itself is a medieval editorial act, not manuscript evidence, and it cuts a single conditional sentence in two. Any English that treats v. 15 as a complete sentence has been shaped by the versification rather than by the Greek.

Vulgate: si autem frater aut soror nudi sint et indigeant victu cotidiano — ‘if a brother or sister be naked and lack daily sustenance.’ Two observations. First, Jerome keeps nudi, refusing to soften the adjective; the English tradition’s ‘poorly clothed’ has no support in the Latin. Second, he converts the participle into a finite verb (indigeant), resolving the syntactic question discussed above.

Victu cotidiano renders τῆς ἐφημέρου τροφῆς well: cotidianus is the same word Jerome uses at Matt 6:11 for ἐπιούσιος in the Lord’s Prayer, and the two texts sit in the same conceptual world of the day’s provision.

Peshitta likewise keeps the nakedness concrete and supplies a finite verb for the participle, following the same instinct as the Latin. The consistency of the versions in resolving the participle is evidence about translators’ habits, not about the Greek.

Proposed — pending reviewBiblia Sacra Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. Robert Weber and Roger Gryson, 5th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007)

The two deprivations James names — clothing and food — are the fixed prophetic pair for the duties owed to the destitute:

• Isa 58:7 LXX: διάθρυπτε πεινῶντι τὸν ἄρτον σου … γυμνὸν ἐὰν ἴδῃς, περίβαλε (break your bread to the hungry … if you see one naked, clothe him). The context is fasting that God rejects because it is divorced from justice — precisely James’s structure of religious performance without corresponding action.
• Ezek 18:7, 16: the righteous man gives his bread to the hungry and covers the naked with a garment.
• Job 22:6; 31:19-20: Eliphaz’s accusation and Job’s defense both turn on the same pair.
• Tob 1:17; 4:16: the pair as the substance of almsgiving in Second Temple piety.

The Synoptic form is Matt 25:35-36, where hungry/thirsty/naked/stranger/sick/imprisoned is the criterion of judgment. James is not quoting; he is working inside a settled Jewish idiom in which these two lacks stand for destitution as such.

The force for James’s argument: the works he has in view are not religious observances but the concrete relief the prophets demanded. That is what makes v. 16’s benediction a parody — it supplies the words of the prophetic concern with none of its substance.

The Greek and Latin commentators on James read vv. 15-16 as an a fortiori against verbal religion.

Ps.-Oecumenius and the catena tradition on James take the illustration as showing that faith without works is like a blessing without bread: the form of the thing is present and the substance absent. The comparison is not incidental to James’s argument but constitutive of it — the useless word to the naked is the useless faith.

Bede, in his commentary on the Catholic Epistles, presses the kinship term: the destitute are called brother and sister precisely so that the failure cannot be excused as a limit on obligation. He also notes the pairing with Isa 58, reading James as the apostolic form of the prophet’s charge.

Augustine, in the broader debate over faith and works, uses this passage to argue that the fides James denies to be saving is not the faith Paul commends but a professed assent that produces nothing. That is reception rather than lexical evidence (§11), but it shows that the concrete illustration was recognized early as the interpretive key to the paragraph — the argument is settled by a scene, not by a definition.

Proposed — pending reviewBede the Venerable, Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles, trans. David Hurst, Cistercian Studies 82 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1985)

• ‘is stripped bare’ for γυμνοὶ ὑπάρχωσιν in the reading text: keeps the harshness of the adjective while acknowledging in a note that the idiom covers being without the outer garment. Plain ‘naked’ is retained in the literal tier.
• ‘left lacking’ for λειπόμενοι, mandatory for the concordance with 1:4 and 1:5.
• ‘the day’s food’ for τῆς ἐφημέρου τροφῆς, keeping the interval specified by the adjective and avoiding both ‘daily bread’ (imports ἄρτος and the Lord’s Prayer) and ‘food for the day’ where flow permits the tighter phrase.
• Terminal comma or dash, never a full stop: the sentence does not end here.
• The masculine plural predicate is rendered with an English plural and the constructio ad sensum recorded, not compensated for.