Verse 9 is the second half of a two-limbed sentence begun at v. 8. James has just granted, with a concessive μέντοι, that anyone carrying out the royal law — Lev 19:18, love of neighbor — is doing well. Now the other limb: but if you show partiality. The two clauses are built on the same frame (εἰ + present indicative + a verdict clause), so the reader is meant to hear a matched pair: one course does well, the other works sin.

Three things carry the weight.

First, the verb προσωπολημπτεῖτε is a Christian coinage on a Hebrew idiom (nāśāʾ pānîm, ‘lift the face’), the semitism that runs through the LXX prohibitions of judicial favoritism. James picks up the noun he used at 2:1 and turns it into a verb, so the charge is not a disposition but a practice underway.

Second, ἁμαρτίαν ἐργάζεσθε is a deliberately artisan-shaped phrase: not ‘you sin’ but ‘you work sin,’ with sin as the product turned out. This is the same verb James used at 1:20 of anger that fails to work God’s righteousness, and it is the very verb that dominates 2:14-26 (ἔργα, sixteen times in the chapter). The partial congregation is producing something — the wrong thing.

Third, the closing participial clause moves the scene into a courtroom. ἐλεγχόμενοι is forensic conviction, not private rebuke; ὑπὸ τοῦ νόμου makes the law the agent that secures the verdict; παραβάται is the sentence handed down. The rhetorical shift is severe: those who were seated as judges in vv. 2-4 (κριταί) are now in the dock themselves. That reversal is the point of the verse, and it sets up vv. 10-11, where a single infraction is shown to implicate the whole.

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

First-class condition, present indicative in the protasis. Per standing policy the protasis is assumed real for the sake of argument but the conditional form is preserved: ‘if,’ never ‘since.’ The conditional leaves the hearer to close the gap, and James has just built the same gap at v. 8.

The δέ here is genuinely adversative — it answers μέντοι in v. 8, which is itself the strongest concessive marker in the sentence. The pairing (‘if on the one hand you carry out … but if on the other you show partiality’) is a μέν … δέ correlation in all but form, and both members must be marked in English per §10. Rendering δέ ‘and’ would collapse the antithesis on which the whole paragraph turns.

Note the structural symmetry with v. 8, which the English should preserve:

Both apodoses are verb-plus-object; the second reverses the first term for term. ‘You do well’ / ‘you work sin’ keeps the parallel audible in English.

NT hapax verb (only here), and effectively a Christian-Jewish coinage: the whole προσωπολημπτ- family (noun προσωπολημψία, Rom 2:11; Eph 6:9; Col 3:25; Jas 2:1; agent-noun προσωπολήμπτης, Acts 10:34) is absent from pagan Greek and from the LXX proper, though the underlying idiom is everywhere in the LXX: πρόσωπον λαμβάνειν, calquing Hebrew נָשָׂא פָּנִים, ‘lift the face.’

The idiom is originally neutral — lifting the face of a suppliant who has bowed, hence granting his request (Gen 32:21 LXX; Mal 1:8-9). In legal contexts it becomes the standard term for the judge who decides by who is before him rather than by the case: Lev 19:15 (οὐ λήμψῃ πρόσωπον πτωχοῦ οὐδὲ θαυμάσεις πρόσωπον δυνάστου), Deut 10:17, Deut 16:19, Ps 81:2 LXX, Prov 18:5, Sir 4:22, 35:12-13. This is the field James is standing in, which matters: Lev 19:15 is nine verses before the Lev 19:18 he has just quoted. The royal law and the prohibition of partiality come from the same paragraph of Torah, and James is not making an inference so much as reading one chapter straight through.

Rendering: the corpus has no prior entry, and the traditional ‘respect of persons’ is now opaque in modern English (‘respect’ has drifted entirely to esteem). ‘Show partiality’ is the least lossy option: it names the practice, keeps the judicial register, and does not moralize. ‘Discriminate’ is excluded — it retrojects a modern civil-rights category (§9) and narrows a term that in James covers deference to wealth, not exclusion by class as such. ‘Play favorites’ collapses the register to the colloquial.

The morpheme πρόσωπον cannot be reproduced in English without paraphrase, so the literal tier carries ‘receive-the-face’ in brackets, keeping the Semitism visible.

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

ἐργάζομαι is the plain productive verb — to work something, turn something out — and the corpus already fixes it as ‘work (transitive)’, kept distinct from κοπιάω (‘labor to exhaustion’), ἐνεργέω (‘work effectively / produce’), and κατεργάζομαι (‘work out / bring to completion’). James had ποιέω available; he uses it in the previous clause (καλῶς ποιεῖτε). The switch is the point: doing well, over against manufacturing sin.

The collocation is not James’s invention. ἐργάζεσθαι ἁμαρτίαν / ἀνομίαν is LXX idiom (Ps 5:6; 6:9 [= Matt 7:23 ἐργαζόμενοι τὴν ἀνομίαν]; Hos 6:8), the negative counterpart of ἐργάζεσθαι δικαιοσύνην (Ps 14:2 LXX; Acts 10:35; Heb 11:33), and James himself used the positive form nine verses earlier: ὀργὴ ἀνδρὸς δικαιοσύνην θεοῦ οὐκ ἐργάζεται (1:20). Two verbs of production, one negated and one asserted, both with an abstract noun as product. The English must keep the object as a direct object — work sin — rather than intransitivizing to ‘you are sinning’, which erases both the construction and the concordance link.

ἁμαρτίαν is anarthrous, singular, and fronted before its verb. Fronting is topicalizing and should be preserved in English word order where possible; the anarthrous singular is qualitative — sin as such, not a countable act or a definite offense. Do not render ‘you are committing a sin’ (individuates) or ‘you commit sins’ (pluralizes).

ὑπό + genitive after a passive is personal agency, kept lexically distinct from ἀπό (source), διά (means), and ἐν (sphere) per standing corpus policy. The law is thereby personified as the agent that secures the conviction — the same move the tradition makes with ἡ γραφή as a speaking subject (Gal 3:8; 4:30; and Jas 2:23 in this chapter). Render ‘by,’ never ‘through’ or ‘according to.’

The article deserves notice. In v. 8 James wrote νόμον … βασιλικόν — anarthrous, qualitative, law as a regime. Here he writes τοῦ νόμου, articular and anaphoric: the law just cited, i.e. the Torah paragraph from which Lev 19:18 came. The corpus policy on anarthrous νόμος (‘law’, qualitative, article withheld) is therefore not triggered here; the article is present in Greek and must be rendered.

This is worth insisting on because the Pauline anarthrous νόμος of Gal 3-5 has trained English readers to hear ‘law’ in a polemical register. James’s νόμος is not that. It is νόμος βασιλικός (v. 8) and νόμος ἐλευθερίας (1:25; 2:12) — a standard that both convicts and liberates. Per §9, the Pauline sense may not be imported into a paraenetic context that does not carry it, and the rendering must not signal a contrast the author does not make.

ὡς here is characterizing, not comparative: it names the category under which the persons fall, exactly as at 1 Pet 4:11, 15-16 (ὡς φονεύς … ὡς Χριστιανός), where the corpus has already fixed the policy. ‘As if’ and ‘like’ are excluded — they convert a categorization into a simile and would make James say the partial are treated as though they were transgressors, when the point is that they are.

παραβάται is nominative plural, agreeing with the implied subject of ἐλεγχόμενοι (and so with the second-plural verb). It is a predicate nominative attached to the participle, not to a separate clause; English supplies nothing.

A note on person and number: the whole verse addresses ὑμεῖς in the plural (προσωπολημπτεῖτε, ἐργάζεσθε), and the masculine plural is Greek’s default for a mixed assembly — which James 2:15 (ἀδελφὸς ἢ ἀδελφή) shows this congregation to be. Per §3 the form is rendered as written and the referent noted rather than neutralized.

Agent-noun of παραβαίνω (παρά + βαίνω, ‘step across’), so etymologically one who oversteps a boundary. NT occurrences: Rom 2:25, 27; Gal 2:18; Jas 2:9, 11 — five in all, and James supplies two of them, using the noun again two verses later (γέγονας παραβάτης νόμου, v. 11).

The cognate abstract παράβασις (Rom 2:23; 4:15; 5:14; 1 Tim 2:14; Heb 2:2; 9:15) requires a law to overstep — Rom 4:15 makes that explicit (οὗ δὲ οὐκ ἔστιν νόμος, οὐδὲ παράβασις). So the noun is not a general term for wrongdoing; it names a specific relation to a specific standard, which is why James pairs it with ὑπὸ τοῦ νόμου and then illustrates it in v. 11 from the Decalogue.

Rendering: ‘transgressor’ is retained, since English ‘transgress’ still carries the boundary-crossing sense (Latin trans + gradior, an exact calque of παρα-βαίνω, which is why the Vulgate’s transgressores is a good guide here). Excluded:

• ‘lawbreaker’ — accurate in substance but drops the step-across image (§8) and duplicates the νόμος already named in the same clause.
• ‘sinner’ — that is ἁμαρτωλός, already fixed in the corpus, and it would erase James’s shift of vocabulary within a single verse (ἁμαρτία → παραβάτης).
• ‘offender’ — too weak and too modern-institutional.

The noun must stay distinguishable from ἁμαρτία in the same verse and from ἁμαρτωλός and ἄνομος elsewhere: James moves from the product (sin) to the status (transgressor), and one English word for both would flatten the movement.

Proposed — pending reviewJohannes P. Louw and Eugene A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 2nd ed. (New York: United Bible Societies, 1989)

The paragraph’s rhetorical architecture is worth seeing whole, because v. 9 is its pivot.

In vv. 2-3 the congregation seats the rich man καλῶς — well, comfortably — and tells the poor man to stand or sit under the footstool. In v. 4 they have become κριταὶ διαλογισμῶν πονηρῶν, judges dispensing corrupt verdicts. In v. 8 the word καλῶς returns, this time as the verdict on those who keep the royal law: you do well. And in v. 9 the judges of v. 4 are themselves convicted by the law as transgressors.

That is a courtroom in three moves: the assembly acts as tribunal, the assembly is arraigned, the assembly is sentenced. It is the same structure the LXX judicial texts assume when they warn judges against πρόσωπον λαμβάνειν — because YHWH is the judge who does not (Deut 10:17; 2 Chr 19:7).

Which is why the next two verses follow as they do. If partiality makes one a παραβάτης, and if a παραβάτης is liable for the whole (v. 10), and if the same lawgiver stands behind ‘do not commit adultery’ and ‘do not murder’ (v. 11), then the seating arrangement in the assembly is not a matter of etiquette. It is Torah violation, and the tribunal that arranged it will be tried under the νόμος ἐλευθερίας (v. 12) by a criterion of ἔλεος (v. 13).

The Greek commentators read the verse as a straightforward extension of the Levitical judicial prohibitions rather than as a general condemnation of social preference.

Chrysostom, in the catena fragments on James, presses the point that James does not argue from principle but from the text: the command to love the neighbor and the prohibition of face-receiving belong to one legislation, so a congregation that keeps one and breaks the other has not divided the law — it has broken it. The emphasis is on ὑπὸ τοῦ νόμου as the standing criterion, which supports the causal reading of the participle.

Bede, in his Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles, ties v. 9 forward to v. 10 and reads the participial clause resultatively: the partial are shown up by the law, and their conviction is what makes their single fault a liability for the whole. He also notes what the modern reader is likely to miss — that James’s target is the assembly acting corporately, in a setting the text calls a συναγωγή (v. 2).

What is absent from the patristic discussion is any attempt to soften παραβάτης. The Fathers take the verdict as delivered.

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

NA28 prints the verse without significant variation, and it carries no entry in Metzger’s Textual Commentary. Two orthographic points are worth recording, neither semantic:

προσωπολημπτεῖτε. The spelling with intrusive μ before the labial (‑λημπτ‑) is the Koine form and stands in the earliest witnesses; the Byzantine tradition and the Atticizing correctors give ‑λημπτ‑ / ‑ληπτ‑ variously. Same phenomenon as λήμψεται for λήψεται (already noted in the corpus at Jas 1:7, 12). Phonetic only; record, do not render differently.

Punctuation. The commas after προσωπολημπτεῖτε and ἐργάζεσθε are editorial. The earliest majuscules are unpunctuated, so the decision to set the participial clause off as a separate rhythmic unit — rather than binding it tightly to ἐργάζεσθε — is a modern judgment about discourse structure, not manuscript evidence. This matters slightly for the participle’s classification (see above): tighter punctuation nudges toward attendant circumstance, looser toward a causal or resultative clause. The reading text uses an em dash, which is deliberately non-committal.

The stability of the verse is itself a small datum. Where scribes were uncomfortable they smoothed — as they did with ἴστε/ὥστε at Jas 1:19 and with ἑαυτοῦ for αὐτοῦ at 1:26. Here they left the hard verdict alone.