James has just anatomized a counterfeit: a σοφία that is ἐπίγειος, ψυχική, δαιμονιώδης (v. 15) and whose habitat is ζῆλος καὶ ἐριθεία (vv. 14, 16). Verse 17 is the answering portrait, and it is built as a catalogue — one copula (ἐστιν), then seven further predicates in asyndeton, closing on a pair of α-privatives.

Four things drive every decision below.

1. The list is asyndetic except once. The single καί binds ἐλέους to καρπῶν ἀγαθῶν into one item; everywhere else the members stand bare, which per the corpus asyndeton policy means no English ‘and’ may be supplied, including before the last member.
2. πρῶτον μέν … ἔπειτα is a frame, not a countdown. Whether πρῶτον ranks purity above the rest or merely opens an enumeration is contested, and the rendering must not settle it.
3. The catalogue answers v. 16 point for point. εἰρηνική against ἀκαταστασία, ἀδιάκριτος against the divided partiality of 2:4, μεστὴ ἐλέους against the ἀνέλεος κρίσις of 2:13, καρπῶν ἀγαθῶν against πᾶν φαῦλον πρᾶγμα.
4. Two of the eight terms are genuinely undecided — ἀδιάκριτος (undivided / impartial / unwavering) and, to a lesser degree, εὐπειθής (compliant / open to persuasion) — and the apparatus flags rather than resolves them.

The register is Hellenistic-Jewish virtue-catalogue, closest in the NT to Wis 7:22-23, where a list of epithets is likewise predicated of σοφία. That parallel is the single most useful control on the vocabulary here.

The corpus already fixes ἄνωθεν as ‘from above’ (spatial) or ‘from the beginning’ (temporal), with the note that both senses are ordinary first-century usage and John 3:3-7 shows the ambiguity can be load-bearing. Here the temporal sense is excluded by v. 15’s κατερχομένη (‘coming down’), which supplies the direction. So: spatial, and by settled biblical idiom a circumlocution for divine origin (cf. πᾶν δώρημα τέλειον ἄνωθέν ἐστιν καταβαῖνον, Jas 1:17).

The adverb stands in attributive position — between the article and its noun — which in Greek makes it function adjectivally (cf. ἡ ἄνω Ἰερουσαλήμ, Gal 4:26; τῇ νῦν Ἰερουσαλήμ, Gal 4:25, both already fixed in the glossary). Per that entry, the literal tier keeps the wooden ‘the from-above wisdom’ so the construction is visible, and smooth registers resolve to ‘the wisdom from above.’

Do not render ‘heavenly wisdom.’ That is ἐπουράνιος, a word James does not use, and it would flatten the directional force that v. 15’s descent-participle supplies.

δέ here is genuinely adversative — it turns from the σοφία just denied heavenly origin (v. 15) to the one that has it. Per §10 the particle is rendered, never dropped.

The μέν is more interesting. Its normal correlative δέ never arrives; instead the answering member is ἔπειτα. This is well-attested Koine (BDF on μέν answered by other particles or by nothing at all), and it means the μέν must still be marked in English rather than silently deleted. The literal tier carries ‘indeed’; smooth registers let the ‘first … then’ pairing do the work.

One structural consequence: because μέν … ἔπειτα binds only the first two members, the remaining six are grammatically parallel to εἰρηνική and are not further ranked. Any English rendering that numbers the list beyond the second item over-reads the syntax.

πρῶτον is the adverbial neuter accusative of πρῶτος and can mean either ‘first in rank, above all’ (cf. πρῶτον πάντων, 1 Tim 2:1) or ‘first in a series, to begin with’ (Rom 1:8; 1 Cor 11:18). ἔπειτα is straightforwardly sequential-enumerative (1 Cor 15:6, 7, 23, 46; Heb 7:2).

English ‘first … then’ is ambiguous in precisely the same way and is therefore retained. Excluded from the reading text: ‘above all’ (adopts the rank reading) and ‘in the first place’ (adopts the enumerative). The study tier’s ‘first of all’ leans slightly toward rank and is flagged as leaning.

The corpus already fixes the adverb ἁγνῶς at Phil 1:17 as ‘purely / with pure motive,’ with the note that it concerns sincerity of intention, not doctrinal soundness or ritual state. The adjective here must share that root and that domain.

But the domain is wider than motive alone. ἁγνός belongs to the ἅγιος family and carries a cultic residue: in the LXX and in Greek inscriptions it describes what is fit to approach the holy (2 Cor 11:2 of the virgin bride; 1 John 3:3 of Christ; 1 Tim 5:22 σεαυτὸν ἁγνὸν τήρει). What it names is unmixedness with respect to God — the quality that makes something admissible.

Keep it lexically distinct from three neighbours the corpus has already separated:

• καθαρός — ‘pure (cultically clean),’ fitness to approach (Jas 1:27)
• εἰλικρινής — ‘unmixed,’ absence of admixture (Phil 1:10)
• ἄμωμος — ‘without blemish,’ sacrificial (Phil 2:15)

‘Pure’ is the right English word and no alternative competes. Reject ‘chaste’ (narrows to the sexual, which is one application of ἁγνός and not its content) and ‘holy’ (that is ἅγιος, and would make James say something about consecration rather than about unmixedness).

NT only here and Heb 12:11 (καρπὸν εἰρηνικὸν … δικαιοσύνης, which is remarkably close to Jas 3:18’s καρπὸς … δικαιοσύνης ἐν εἰρήνῃ). The adjective is formed on εἰρήνη, already fixed in the corpus as ‘peace’ with the Hebraic breadth of שָׁלוֹם — positive wholeness and right ordering, not the Greek negative sense of hostilities ceasing.

That matters for the rendering. εἰρηνική is not ‘peaceful’ in the modern English sense of tranquil or undisturbed; it names a disposition that makes peace, and James says so explicitly one verse later with τοῖς ποιοῦσιν εἰρήνην. ‘Peaceable’ preserves the active-relational sense; ‘peaceful’ has drifted toward the descriptive and would make the wisdom sound placid rather than reconciling.

The placement is deliberate: εἰρηνική stands immediately against ἀκαταστασία (v. 16), already fixed in the corpus as ‘disorder’ from the α-privative on καθίστημι. The wisdom from above settles what the wisdom from below unsettles.

Already fixed in the corpus at Phil 4:5: ‘forbearance / forbearing’, with ‘gentleness, magnanimity’ as flagged alternates. That decision stands and is applied here without departure.

The entry’s grounds bear repeating because they are unusually well-documented. Aristotle (NE 5.10) defines τὸ ἐπιεικές as the correction of strict law where its letter would work injustice — the just man’s refusal to press a claim to its legal limit. Hellenistic and LXX usage extends this to the clemency of a superior who could exact more and does not (Ps 85:5 LXX; Wis 12:18; 2 Cor 10:1 of Christ’s πραΰτης καὶ ἐπιείκεια).

Why the alternatives are excluded from the reading text:

• ‘gentle’ — has drifted in modern English to mildness of manner, dropping the not-pressing-a-claim sense that is the word’s core. It is also spent on πραΰτης, which stands four verses earlier at Jas 3:13 (ἐν πραΰτητι σοφίας) and must stay distinguishable.
• ‘reasonable’ — intellectualizes a term about the exercise of rights.
• ‘considerate’ — modern social register.

In a letter whose second chapter concerns favoritism in court and whose fifth concerns wages withheld, a wisdom that will not press its full claim is not a vague amiability. It is a specific renunciation.

Proposed — pending reviewSophie Laws, A Commentary on the Epistle of James, Black's New Testament Commentaries, London: A. & C. Black, 1980.

NT hapax; absent from the LXX. Transparent compound εὖ + πείθομαι, and the corpus already fixes the middle/passive πείθομαι as ‘be persuaded by / obey’ — two ends of one line, with the note that the persuasion-root must stay audible because of the πέποιθα / πεποίθησις / πεισμονή cluster.

Greek usage runs the same spread. In Epictetus and the Stoic moralists εὐπειθής is the good soldier or son, obedient to command; in Philo and the rhetorical writers it is the mind readily open to reason. Josephus uses it of subjects who submit without compulsion.

The reading text takes ‘open to persuasion,’ which in English is hospitable to both and does not name a superior the Greek does not name. Excluded: ‘submissive’ (adopts the authority reading and, in modern English, imports a social hierarchy), ‘compliant’ (now carries a note of spinelessness), ‘docile’ (Latin docilis, ‘teachable,’ is a reasonable calque but has acquired a demeaning tone). Retain ‘willing to yield’ in liturgical register.

One guard: this adjective describes wisdom’s readiness to be reasoned with, not indifference to truth. James has just called lying against the truth a vice (3:14), so no rendering may suggest that this wisdom yields on anything asked of it.

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

μεστός takes a genitive of content and is a physical fullness-word — a net full of fish (John 21:11), a jar full of vinegar (John 19:29). James has used it nine verses earlier of the tongue: μεστὴ ἰοῦ θανατηφόρου, ‘full of death-dealing poison’ (3:8). The repetition is deliberate and must be visible in English: one container is full of venom, the other full of mercy.

ἔλεος is already fixed as ‘mercy,’ the LXX equivalent of חֶסֶד — enacted covenant loyalty, not sentiment or clemency toward the guilty — and kept distinct from χάρις, οἰκτιρμός, and χρηστότης. Its presence here answers ἀνέλεος ἡ κρίσις at Jas 2:13, and James has already shown at 2:15-16 what an unmerciful profession looks like.

καρπῶν ἀγαθῶν applies the standing καρπός entry: live agricultural metaphor, never abstracted to ‘results,’ ‘outcome,’ or ‘good effects.’ The plural is instantial — discrete yields, not an abstract fruitfulness — and must not be singularized, especially since James switches to the deliberate singular καρπὸς δικαιοσύνης in the very next verse.

The single καί in the whole catalogue stands here, binding mercy and fruits into one item. That is worth noting rather than smoothing: James does not treat merciful disposition and produced good as two entries on a list.

NT hapax, absent from the LXX, and the hardest word in the verse. It is the α-privative of the verbal adjective from διακρίνω, and the corpus has already had to make two decisions about that verb: ‘be divided’ at Jas 1:6 (where δίψυχος is James’s own gloss) and ‘make distinctions’ at Jas 2:4 (where two parties are actually sorted). All three of the resulting senses are live here.

The reading text takes ‘without dividedness,’ which is hospitable to the first and, at a stretch, the third, and does not exclude the second. ‘Impartial’ is the flagged alternate and appears in the liturgical register. What is excluded outright is ‘straightforward’ or ‘sincere’ — that is ἀνυπόκριτος, which stands immediately after, and using it here erases James’s distinction.

Whichever sense is adopted, the privative shape must survive in English. Do not substitute a positive term.

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.

α-privative on ὑποκριτής, the stage-actor — one who speaks from under a mask. Six NT occurrences, all in paraenetic or virtue contexts: ἀγάπη ἀνυπόκριτος (Rom 12:9; 2 Cor 6:6), πίστις ἀνυπόκριτος (1 Tim 1:5; 2 Tim 1:5), φιλαδελφία ἀνυπόκριτος (1 Pet 1:22), and here of σοφία.

The theatrical root is not fully spent in the first century — Greek writers still play on it — but the word had also settled into a general term for the unfeigned. ‘Unhypocritical’ is retained in the literal tier because it keeps the ὑποκρι- root visible in English (the English word derives from it directly); ‘without hypocrisy’ in the reading text; ‘unfeigned’ in the study tier where the mask-image is worth making audible.

Rejected: ‘sincere’ (has narrowed in modern English to honesty of speech, and the corpus has already excluded it as a rendering for εἰλικρινής on the same grounds) and ‘genuine’ (spent on γνήσιος, already fixed).

The pairing with ἀδιάκριτος is the closing rhetorical move of the catalogue: two α-privatives, assonant, both about the absence of a doubleness — internal division and outward mask. English cannot reproduce the sound-play, but keeping both privatives negative in shape (‘without … without …’) preserves the pattern.

The list is not a general anthology of virtues. Every member has a counterpart in what James has just described.

The practical consequence for translation: the English must not level the vocabulary. Where the corpus has already fixed a term used earlier in the letter (ἔλεος, καρπός, εἰρήνη), the same English word is mandatory here, or the answering structure becomes invisible to the reader.

Note also what the catalogue is not. It contains no cognitive term at all — no σύνεσις, no γνῶσις, no epistemic virtue. James’s σοφία is identified entirely by conduct and bearing, exactly as at 3:13 (δειξάτω ἐκ τῆς καλῆς ἀναστροφῆς τὰ ἔργα αὐτοῦ). This is the Proverbs conception of חָכְמָה, and the corpus σοφία entry already fixes it against speculative senses.

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

ἐστιν is written once, after ἁγνή, and elided across the remaining seven predicates. Per the standing policy on adjectival lists in asyndeton with an elided copula (fixed at Phil 4:8), English supplies the copula only where grammar demands and brackets it in the literal tier.

The list is asyndetic throughout, with the single exception of the καί binding ἐλέους to καρπῶν ἀγαθῶν. Two rules follow, both from the standing asyndeton entries:

1. No connective may be supplied between members — including before ἀνυπόκριτος. English editorial habit inserts ‘and’ before a final list item; doing so here reproduces the smoothing that scribes and versions perform, not the text. The Vulgate’s bonis consentiens sine iudicatione sine simulatione preserves the asyndeton; several later minuscules do not.
2. The one καί that is there must be rendered, and its function noted: it groups, and the grouping is data.

On punctuation: NA28 closes the verse with a high point (·), continuing into v. 18 rather than stopping. This is editorial judgment — the earliest majuscules are unpunctuated — and the reading text follows it with a dash rather than a full stop, so that the καρπὸς δὲ δικαιοσύνης of v. 18 is heard as picking up καρπῶν ἀγαθῶν here.

The verse is textually quiet; NA28 prints it without a variation unit and no major witness disturbs the catalogue’s substance. Two minor matters are worth recording, both of which show the direction in which scribes smooth rather than any real doubt about the text.

Order of the closing pair. A small number of later witnesses transpose ἀδιάκριτος and ἀνυπόκριτος. The transposition carries no exegetical weight, but the fact that it happened at all is evidence that the two α-privatives were felt as a unit and that their sequence struck copyists as arbitrary.

Insertion of connectives. The Byzantine tradition and several versions supply καί before one or more of the later members. This is the standard smoothing of asyndeton and is secondary on both external and internal grounds — the harder asyndetic reading is original, and the corpus policy is that reproducing the smoothing reproduces the transmission rather than the text.

Nothing here bears on the sense. The interpretive weight of the verse falls entirely on lexical decisions, not text-critical ones.

The nearest formal parallel in Greek-speaking Judaism is Wis 7:22-23, where σοφία is likewise the subject of a run of predicative adjectives, several of them compounds and privatives: νοερόν, ἅγιον, μονογενές, πολυμερές … ἀκώλυτον, ἀγαθοποιόν, φιλάνθρωπον, βέβαιον, ἀσφαλές, ἀμέριμνον, παντοδύναμον, πανεπίσκοπον. The formal resemblance is close enough to establish the genre: a virtue-catalogue predicated of personified Wisdom, running in asyndeton, favoring privatives.

The substantive difference is what matters. Wisdom of Solomon’s list is largely ontological and cosmological — what σοφία is in itself and in relation to God’s governance of the world. James’s list is entirely relational and behavioral: peaceable, forbearing, open to persuasion, merciful, undivided, unfeigned. Not one of his eight terms describes wisdom’s nature; all eight describe how it behaves among people.

That is a considered move, not an accident of register. It is the same move as 3:13 (show your wisdom by conduct) and the same move as 2:14-26 (show your faith by works). Whether James knew Wisdom of Solomon is not demonstrable and is not claimed here; what the parallel establishes is that his readers would have recognized the form, and would therefore have noticed the content.

One further LXX-shaped feature: the pairing of ἔλεος with produced good, and the fruit-imagery running from καρπῶν ἀγαθῶν into καρπὸς δικαιοσύνης (v. 18), belongs to the prophetic-sapiential field the corpus has already mapped at Prov 11:30 and Amos 6:12, both of which underlie the fixed phrase καρπὸς δικαιοσύνης.

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

The Fathers read the catalogue as a description of the community’s teachers, taking the whole of James 3 as a single unit governed by Μὴ πολλοὶ διδάσκαλοι γίνεσθε (3:1). That is a defensible reading of the chapter’s structure and worth registering, though it should not be built into the rendering.

On the individual terms, two observations recur in the Greek tradition and are useful checks on the modern English drift:

• εὐπειθής was consistently read as a virtue of the one who listens rather than of the one who submits — the teacher who can be corrected, over against the one described at 3:14. This supports the reading text’s ‘open to persuasion’ against ‘submissive.’
• ἁγνή as ‘first’ was almost universally taken as priority of rank, not of enumeration, with the remaining terms understood as flowing from it. Modern commentators are more cautious about pressing πρῶτον this way; the contested block above leaves the question open, and the patristic consensus is recorded as reception rather than as evidence (§11).

The Latin tradition’s sine iudicatione for ἀδιάκριτος pulls toward the ‘impartial / not making distinctions’ reading and is one of the earliest witnesses to it — but it is a translation decision, not lexical evidence, and cannot settle the question.

Proposed — pending reviewJ. B. Mayor, The Epistle of St. James, 3rd ed., London: Macmillan, 1913.