Third and last of the three questions that make up James’s cross-examination of the assembly (vv. 5-7), and the sharpest. Verse 5 asked whether God has not chosen the destitute; v. 6a states the assembly’s contrary verdict; vv. 6b-7 then ask, twice, what the favored class actually does. The escalation is deliberate: they drag you into court (v. 6), and — worse — the name pronounced over you is the very name their mouths abuse.

Three things carry the verse. αὐτοί is expressed a second time, so the pronoun is doing contrastive work: they, the ones you seated well. βλασφημοῦσιν in Greek is simply abusive speech, and whether the object makes it blasphemy in the narrow English sense is the exegetical question. And τὸ ἐπικληθὲν ἐφʼ ὑμᾶς is not general Greek but a fixed Septuagintal formula: the name called over a thing marks ownership, and it is used in the LXX of the temple, of Israel, and of conquered cities. James’s addressees have had a name laid on them the way a name is laid on property — and the people they honor are the people who revile it.

The verse is also the pivot of the argument. It shifts the offense from social discourtesy to something touching the divine name, which is what licenses the legal vocabulary (νόμος, παραβάτης) from v. 8 onward.

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

James asks three questions with οὐ in nine verses’ space (vv. 5, 6b, 7). Interrogative οὐ presupposes an affirmative answer; the rhetorical form is not inquiry but the demand that the hearer say aloud what he already knows.

The printed question mark is editorial — the earliest majuscules are unpunctuated — but here the reading is not seriously in doubt, since οὐκ heading a clause after two parallel οὐχ-questions cannot be a flat negation without producing nonsense.

Note the structure across vv. 6b-7: two questions, both with expressed αὐτοί, both present indicative, joined by nothing but juxtaposition after καί in v. 6. The asyndeton between v. 6 and v. 7 is preserved: no connective is supplied in English.

Greek verb endings already carry person, so an expressed nominative pronoun is marked. Here it is the second occurrence in two verses (καὶ αὐτοὶ ἕλκουσιν, v. 6; οὐκ αὐτοὶ βλασφημοῦσιν, v. 7), and the repetition is the rhetoric: the same party, named three times, is the party being honored at the door.

The force is contrastive-identifying rather than reflexive-intensive: not ‘they on their own’ but ‘they, these very people.’ English carries it either by fronting (‘Is it not they who…’) or by ‘they themselves.’ What is excluded is absorbing the pronoun into the verb (‘Do they not blaspheme’), which loses the pointing gesture that the whole paragraph turns on.

The antecedent is οἱ πλούσιοι of v. 6, not the singular ἀνὴρ χρυσοδακτύλιος of v. 2 — James has generalized from the illustration to a class.

βλασφημοῦσιν is one Greek verb for abusive speech directed at anyone. The corpus policy is fixed: render ‘slander’ where the object is human, ‘blaspheme’ where the object is God, and flag where the object leaves the question open.

Here the object is τὸ καλὸν ὄνομα — not God directly, but the name. That is the difficulty. The narrowing of English ‘blaspheme’ to speech against God is a later development; in Koine the word covers reviling a person (Titus 3:2), a reputation (Rom 3:8), or the divine name (Rev 13:6). LXX Lev 24:11-16 uses the cognate field for cursing the Name, and Isa 52:5 LXX (διʼ ὑμᾶς διὰ παντὸς τὸ ὄνομά μου βλασφημεῖται ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν) supplies the closest formal parallel: the divine name blasphemed among the nations. Paul cites that verse at Rom 2:24, and 1 Tim 6:1 and Titus 2:5 use the same construction of the name and the word being reviled through Christian conduct.

The present tense is durative: an ongoing pattern of abuse, not a remembered incident. The verse does not say the rich blaspheme because of the assembly’s favoritism (contrast Rom 2:24, where the causal διʼ ὑμᾶς is explicit); it simply records what they do.

Proposed — pending reviewHenry George Liddell, Robert Scott, and Henry Stuart Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. with revised supplement (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996)

ὄνομα is retained as the concrete noun per corpus policy: in biblical idiom the name already carries identity and authority, and glossing to ‘title,’ ‘reputation,’ or ‘authority’ removes data.

καλόν stands in first attributive position (article–adjective–noun), the tighter and more usual construction. The corpus gloss for καλός is ‘good,’ and the anti-variation rule applies within James, who uses καλῶς at 2:3, 2:8, and 2:19 — one English root across all of them. ‘Noble,’ ‘honorable,’ and ‘worthy’ each upgrade the register; ‘excellent’ imports ἀρετή.

What the name is James does not say. He does not write τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ κυρίου or τὸ ὄνομα Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, though both were available to him and he uses κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ at 2:1. The reticence is preserved: no qualifier is supplied in the reading text.

This is not ordinary Greek. ἐπικαλέω in the aorist passive with ἐπί + accusative renders the Hebrew idiom נִקְרָא שֵׁם … עַל — ‘the name of X was called over Y’ — and in the LXX it is a possession formula. It is used of the temple (3 Kgdms 8:43; Jer 7:10-11, 14, 30: ὁ οἶκος οὗ ἐπικέκληται τὸ ὄνομά μου ἐπʼ αὐτῷ), of Israel (Deut 28:10: ὅτι τὸ ὄνομα κυρίου ἐπικέκληταί σοι; Isa 43:7; Jer 14:9; Dan 9:19), of a conquered city (2 Kgdms 12:28), and of a woman taking a husband’s name (Isa 4:1). Amos 9:12 LXX — ἐφʼ οὓς ἐπικέκληται τὸ ὄνομά μου ἐπʼ αὐτούς — is quoted at Acts 15:17 in James’s own mouth, which is a datum worth recording even if nothing hangs on the identification of the author.

The formula asserts ownership. To have a name called over you is to be marked as belonging to the one whose name it is. That is why the verse can move from a seating arrangement to an offense of the first order: the assembly’s dishonored poor are the very people over whom the name has been pronounced.

The second τό makes the participle attributive and defining — ‘the name, the one invoked over you,’ not ‘the good name, having been invoked.’ The literal tier keeps the doubled article visible.

The participle is a divine passive: the agent is unexpressed and is not supplied. ‘The name God gave you’ and ‘the name you bear’ both add what the Greek withholds — the first by naming the agent, the second by making the addressees the subject.

ἐπί + accusative here is directional, the name coming down onto its bearers, matching the LXX ἐπʼ αὐτούς and the blessing-idiom already fixed at Gal 6:16. ‘By which you are called’ (Vulgate quo vocati estis) reverses the direction and turns an act of naming into a mode of address.

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

When was the name invoked over them? Three occasions are proposed and the Greek does not choose.

Nothing in the wording adjudicates, and the readings are not mutually exclusive. The rendering keeps the bare passive.

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

The Greek commentators take the name as Christ’s and the offense as blasphemy proper. The catena tradition on James (represented in Cramer’s collection, with material attributed to Cyril and to Didymus) connects the verse to Isa 52:5 and Rom 2:24 and reads the abuse as directed at Christ through those who bear his name — the emissary logic of Matt 10:40 and Acts 9:4 running in reverse.

Bede, in his commentary on the Catholic Epistles, presses the invocation-formula toward baptism explicitly and draws the pastoral inference James leaves implicit: the community honors those who dishonor its own Lord.

What is common to the ancient readers is that none of them softens βλασφημοῦσιν to mere social contempt. The Vulgate’s blasphemant fixed that reading in the West. Whether the object is the divine name or the community’s name-bearing status was not a question they distinguished — which is itself evidence that the two were not felt as separable.

Proposed — pending reviewBede the Venerable, Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles, trans. David Hurst, Cistercian Studies 82 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1985) · J. A. Cramer, ed., Catenae Graecorum Patrum in Novum Testamentum, vol. 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1844)

NA28 prints the verse without variation of substance and without a marked apparatus entry; the Greek tradition is stable.

Minor and inconsequential: the elision ἐφʼ before the rough breathing of ὑμᾶς is orthographic, and some minuscules write ἐπί unelided. A few late witnesses read ἐπικαλεσθέν or normalize the participle’s position. Neither affects sense.

The only editorial decision of weight is the question mark, which rests on discourse analysis rather than manuscript evidence — the earliest majuscules are unpunctuated. Given the two preceding οὐχ-questions and the interrogative οὐκ, the reading is secure.

Vulgate: nonne ipsi blasphemant bonum nomen quod invocatum est super vos? The Latin is close, and invocatum est super vos preserves the LXX directional formula exactly — better than most English versions, which follow the Wycliffite/Tyndale line into ‘by the which ye are called.’ Bonum for καλόν is the plain equivalent and does not upgrade the register.

Peshitta renders with the Syriac cognate of the same Semitic idiom (‘the good name that is called over you’), which is unsurprising: the construction is native to Syriac, and the version recovers the underlying שֵׁם … עַל without effort. The Syriac verb for the reviling is the ordinary word for blaspheming or defaming, carrying the same latitude as the Greek.

The divergence to note is the English tradition’s ‘by which you are called,’ which construes ἐπί + acc as designating an appellation rather than an act of naming-over. That reading is grammatically strained and dissolves the possession-formula; it is recorded as reception, not adopted.