James has told a story (vv. 2-3) and now turns on the hearers with a single question that gathers it up. Three things are happening at once.

A verdict is extracted, not announced. οὐ with the indicative frames the charge as something the assembly must concede rather than something the writer imposes. The aorists are ingressive: at the moment they seated the one man well and the other by the footstool, they became something.

A word is turned back on them. διεκρίθητε is the same verb James used at 1:6 of the man who is διακρινόμενος — divided, two-souled, unstable. Whether it means that here, or the sharper ‘you discriminated’, is the verse’s central crux and cannot be settled from the lexicon alone.

A court is convened, and it is the wrong court. κριταί answers διεκρίθητε on the κρι- root, and the courtroom vocabulary runs through the paragraph (κριτήρια, v. 6; νόμος, v. 8; κρίσις, v. 13). Those who sorted the two visitors by clothing have set themselves on a bench — and the reasonings they sit with are πονηρά.

What the verse does not do is name the sin abstractly. It reports what the seating already was.

The clause is unpunctuated in the earliest majuscules, so both the question mark and the placement of the sentence break are editorial. Two decisions are involved and they are separable.

Is it a question at all? NA28 punctuates as a question, and the οὐ is decisive: a negated indicative statement of fact would say ‘you were not divided’, which is nonsense after vv. 2-3. Read interrogatively, οὐ signals the expected answer ‘yes’ (BDF), the standard Greek device for extracting an admission. This is secure.

Where does the conditional end? The ἐάν protasis of v. 2 runs through three aorist subjunctives (εἰσέλθῃ … εἰσέλθῃ … ἐπιβλέψητε … εἴπητε). v. 4 shifts to aorist indicatives, which marks it as the apodosis. A minority construal makes v. 4 a further part of the protasis with the apodosis unexpressed, but the mood shift tells against it and no serious edition adopts it.

The καί joining the two verbs is plain coordination. Consecutive force (‘and so became’) is available and probably intended, but per §10 the force is carried by the sequence of clauses, not smuggled into the particle: render ‘and’.

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 crux of the verse. δια- + κρίνω, ‘judge in two directions’, and the form is aorist passive in morphology though middle in force — the standard Koine pattern for this verb.

Three senses are attested in the first century and each has a claim here:

1. ‘You were divided within yourselves’ — the sense the corpus has already fixed for the middle at Jas 1:6, where James’s own gloss is δίψυχος (1:8). This reads ἐν ἑαυτοῖς as reflexive and makes the charge one of internal incoherence: they hold the faith of the Lord of glory and simultaneously operate a seating chart. The word-link to 1:6 is the strongest internal argument.

2. ‘You made distinctions / discriminated’ — the plain active sense of διακρίνω (‘distinguish’, Acts 15:9; 1 Cor 4:7; 11:29) carried over into the passive-deponent form. This reads ἐν ἑαυτοῖς as reciprocal (‘among yourselves’) and makes the charge exactly what vv. 2-3 described: sorting people. It fits the immediate narrative better than anything else.

3. ‘You passed judgment’ — a forensic sense drawing on the following κριταί. Least well supported lexically for the middle, but the κρι- wordplay keeps it live.

What is excluded in every tier: ‘doubt’ (narrows to the epistemic, per the standing entry), ‘waver’ (drops the object), and ‘show partiality’ (that is προσωπολημπτέω, which James uses five verses later and which would erase his choice of a different verb).

Built onbdag · bdf

Proposed — pending reviewRalph P. Martin, James, Word Biblical Commentary 48 (Waco: Word, 1988) · Martin Dibelius, James, rev. Heinrich Greeven, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976)

Koine uses the plural reflexive freely for the reciprocal — a policy already fixed in this corpus at 1 Pet 4:8-10, where ἑαυτούς and ἀλλήλους alternate within three verses with no discernible difference. So ἐν ἑαυτοῖς is formally open:

• Reflexive, ‘within yourselves’ — the seat of the division is each person’s own divided self. Pairs with reading (1) of διεκρίθητε.
• Reciprocal, ‘among yourselves’ — the community has split into two classes by its own seating. Pairs with reading (2).

English ‘among yourselves’ is faintly hospitable to both (an individual can be divided among his own commitments), and it is what the reading text uses; the literal tier keeps ‘in yourselves’ so the reflexive form is visible. The parsing table records the form as reflexive so the reader can see that the reciprocal sense is a construal, not a lemma.

ἐγένεσθε is ingressive aorist of γίνομαι — already fixed in the corpus as ‘come to be / become’, preserving entry into a new state against the mere being of εἰμί. James had ἐστέ available. The point is that the seating did not reveal judges who were already there; it made them.

κριταί is the agent-noun of κρίνω and answers διεκρίθητε on the same root. The chapter builds a sustained forensic field: κριτήρια (‘law courts’, v. 6), the νόμος βασιλικός (v. 8), παραβάται (‘transgressors’, v. 9), κρίνεσθαι and κρίσις (vv. 12-13). The assembly that dragged nobody to court has convened one on its own floor — and v. 6 will point out that the rich are the ones doing the dragging.

James uses the noun again at 4:11-12 (κριτὴς τοῦ νόμου; εἷς ἐστιν ὁ νομοθέτης καὶ κριτής), where the objection to human judging is that there is already a Judge. Render ‘judges’ at every occurrence; ‘arbiters’ and ‘critics’ both drop the bench.

Built onbdag

A bare genitive after an agent-noun, and its function is genuinely open. Three construals, each yielding a different charge:

Descriptive / qualitative — ‘judges characterized by evil reasonings’, i.e. judges whose thinking is corrupt. This is the Semitizing genitive of quality already met in this corpus at σῶμα τῆς ταπεινώσεως (Phil 3:21) and ἀκροατὴς ἐπιλησμονῆς (Jas 1:25) — and the latter is James’s own construction, ten verses earlier, which is a real argument.

Objective — ‘judges who hand down evil verdicts’, the διαλογισμοί being the decisions rendered. Supported by διαλογισμός’s attested sense of a deliberated conclusion.

Genitive of the sphere judged — ‘judges of (i.e. adjudicating by) evil standards’.

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

The corpus has already fixed this noun at Phil 2:14: arguing / disputing, with the inward-reasoning sense flagged rather than resolved. The lemma spans internal deliberation (Luke 2:35; 5:22; 9:47; Rom 1:21 — always with a negative charge in the NT) and outward dispute (Phil 2:14; 1 Tim 2:8).

Here the inward pole governs. The context is not a quarrel but a seating decision reached by a calculation about clothing, and Luke’s usage of διαλογισμοὶ τῶν καρδιῶν (Luke 9:47; cf. Mark 7:21 διαλογισμοὶ οἱ κακοί) supplies the closest parallel. This is a declared deviation from the standing gloss: render ‘reasonings’ or ‘thoughts’ here rather than ‘arguing/disputing’, and flag the shift per §4.

‘Reasonings’ is preferred over a bare ‘thoughts’ in the literal tier because the λογ- root and the calculating sense should stay audible — what happened in vv. 2-3 was a computation. ‘Thoughts’ is retained in the reading text where English flow requires it. Avoid ‘motives’ (imports intention-vocabulary the noun lacks) and ‘opinions’ (too propositional).

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

Distinguish from κακός (already fixed as ‘evil / harmful’, covering badness and the causing of injury). πονηρός in Koine leans toward active malignancy — the eye that is πονηρός is grudging (Matt 20:15), ὁ πονηρός is the evil one, and πονηρά πράγματα are things that work harm rather than merely fall short.

The adjective is not decorative here. It is the verse’s verdict-word, and it is the last word of the sentence, in the emphatic slot. What the assembly did was not a lapse in etiquette; the reasoning behind it was malignant.

Render ‘evil’ and keep it distinct in English from κακός where both occur in one context. Avoid ‘wicked’ as base gloss (has drifted toward the theatrical in modern English) and ‘corrupt’ (imports institutional decay).

Built onbdag

NA28 prints οὐ διεκρίθητε ἐν ἑαυτοῖς with no bracketing, and the reading is well supported across the major uncials.

A number of later witnesses read καὶ οὐ διεκρίθητε with an added connective, and some read οὐχί for οὐ. Both are the ordinary direction of scribal smoothing — supplying a link to the preceding conditional and strengthening the interrogative particle — and neither affects the sense. The corpus policy on asyndeton (fixed at Phil 3:2; Gal 5:4) applies: where Greek supplies no connective, none is supplied in English, and witnesses that add one show what is to be avoided.

The punctuation is not a textual matter. The earliest majuscules are unpunctuated, so the question mark at the end of the verse and the sentence-break after v. 3 are editorial judgments and must be reported as such rather than as manuscript evidence. The judgment is secure on grammatical grounds (see ‘The shape of the question’), but the reader should know it is a judgment.

Built onna28 · metzger-tc

Patristic comment on James is thin before the fourth century, but the direction of the early Greek reading is legible from the versions and from the catena tradition.

The Vulgate has nonne iudicatis apud vosmetipsos et facti estis iudices cogitationum iniquarum — ‘do you not judge among yourselves’. Jerome’s iudicatis takes διεκρίθητε forensically rather than as internal division, and apud vosmetipsos takes ἐν ἑαυτοῖς reciprocally. It also produces a rather flat doubling with iudices in the next clause, which the Greek’s κρι- wordplay handles more elegantly. This is reception, not evidence (§11), but it shows the discrimination reading was live very early.

The patristic emphasis generally falls where James put it: on the seating as an enacted verdict. The Greek commentators keep the courtroom sense of κριταί in view and connect it forward to v. 6 (the rich dragging believers εἰς κριτήρια) and to 4:11-12 (one Lawgiver and Judge). The rhetorical force they consistently draw out is the one the aorists carry — that the congregation did not merely think badly, it constituted itself a tribunal.

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

James 2:1-13 is paraenesis in diatribe form: a scene sketched (vv. 2-3), a question flung at the hearers (v. 4), a vocative and a second question (v. 5), a chain of rhetorical questions (vv. 6-7). The genre demands that the questions stay questions in English (§10) — converting v. 4 into a declarative (‘you have discriminated and become judges’) would supply the concession James is extracting and dissolve the device.

The register is elevated but not liturgical: James writes cultivated Koine with real rhetorical shaping (note the fronted οὐ, the paired aorists, the clause-final πονηρῶν). The English should be brisk and pointed, not ornate.