James turns from the wisdom-from-above of 3:13-18 to the community that is not living by it, and he does so with a diatribe question: Πόθεν πόλεμοι καὶ πόθεν μάχαι ἐν ὑμῖν; The paragraph break at 4:1 is real but not clean — 3:16 has already named ἀκαταστασία καὶ πᾶν φαῦλον πρᾶγμα, and 4:1 supplies the aetiology.

Three features carry the verse.

First, the military vocabulary, which is dense and sustained: πόλεμοι, μάχαι, στρατευομένων here, then μάχεσθε καὶ πολεμεῖτε in v. 2 — five war-words in two verses, in reverse order across the pair. Per §8 the metaphor is live and stays live in English; the standard modern flattening to ‘quarrels and conflicts’ discards a register James chose deliberately.

Second, the question-and-answer form. πόθεν asks for a source and ἐντεῦθεν supplies one; the second question is introduced by οὐκ, which presupposes assent. This is diatribe, not information-gathering: James extracts an admission the hearers already possess.

Third, the location of the cause. The answer is not ‘from your opponents’ or ‘from the rich’ (whom he has just indicted at 2:6-7) but ἐκ τῶν ἡδονῶν ὑμῶν — from something internal to the addressees and already at war before any fight breaks out. The participle στρατευομένων makes the pleasures the standing army; the visible fights are its operations.

What the verse leaves open is the referent of μέλεσιν (limbs of individual bodies, or members of the congregation) and, correspondingly, whether the campaign is waged inside a person or across the assembly. The Greek does not decide, and neither does the rendering.

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

The two nouns are not synonyms. πόλεμος names the sustained state of hostility — a war, a campaign, the condition of being at war — while μάχη names the engagement, the quarrel, the episode. BDAG keeps them apart, and the pairing is standard in Greek from the classical historians onward, where πόλεμος is the war and μάχη the battle within it.

James writes both, and then in v. 2 reverses them as verbs: μάχεσθε καὶ πολεμεῖτε. The chiasmus binds the two verses, and it is invisible if one English word serves all four Greek words.

The near-universal modern rendering ‘quarrels and conflicts’ (or ‘fights and quarrels’) flattens two registers into one and, worse, drains the escalation. James has already used the milder factional vocabulary — ἐριθεία and ἀκαταστασία at 3:14-16 — and has now switched to war-words. Per §6 a hard word is not shaded toward comfort.

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)

πόθεν is an interrogative of origin: it asks for a source, and it is properly answered by ἐκ or by the local adverb ἐντεῦθεν. James supplies both. The structure is therefore tight:

• πόθεν … πόθεν …? — where from?
• οὐκ ἐντεῦθεν — from here
• ἐκ τῶν ἡδονῶν ὑμῶν — that is, out of your pleasures

Two consequences follow for rendering.

First, πόθεν is not ‘why’. Rendering ‘Why are there wars among you?’ converts a question of provenance into one of cause, and it pre-empts the ἐκ that answers it. English has ‘where … from’ available and should use it.

Second, the doubled πόθεν must both be rendered. One πόθεν could easily have governed both subjects; James wrote two. This is the same Koine reinforcement the corpus already preserves at πάλιν ἄνωθεν (Gal 4:9) and ἔτι μᾶλλον καὶ μᾶλλον (Phil 1:9), and the direction of ancient activity confirms it was felt as awkward — the Latin tradition (unde bella et lites in vobis) does not reproduce the second.

The ἐκ phrase stands in apposition to ἐντεῦθεν, unpacking what the adverb points at. Marking the seam with a dash or colon rather than a bare comma keeps this visible; a comma alone reads as two coordinate answers rather than one answer and its explanation.

The second clause is verbless: οὐκ ἐντεῦθεν, ἐκ τῶν ἡδονῶν … The copula must be supplied in English and is bracketed in the literal tier per standing policy on verbless clauses.

More consequentially, οὐκ presupposes the answer ‘yes’ (BDF §427; contrast μή, which presupposes ‘no’). James uses οὐ-questions repeatedly (2:4, 5, 6, 7; 4:1) and μή-questions where he wants denial (2:14; 3:11-12), and the switch is deliberate. English has no particle equivalent, so the expectation is carried by phrasing — ‘Is it not …?’ — and must be retained as a question. Converting to a declarative (‘They come from your pleasures’) supplies the concession the diatribe is designed to extract from the hearer.

The question mark itself is editorial. The earliest majuscules are unpunctuated, so the interrogative reading of both clauses rests on the grammar (πόθεν; οὐκ + implied copula), not on manuscript evidence, and should be reported as such.

ἡδονή names the gratification enjoyed, not the appetite that seeks it. The appetite-word is ἐπιθυμία, which James uses independently at 1:14-15 and sets beside ἡδονή in this very paragraph (ἐπιθυμεῖτε, v. 2; ἐν ταῖς ἡδοναῖς ὑμῶν, v. 3). Rendering ἡδονή as ‘desires’ or ‘passions’ substitutes the other word and hides that James has two in play.

All five NT occurrences (Luke 8:14; Titus 3:3; 2 Pet 2:13; Jas 4:1, 3) are pejorative in context, and Hellenistic Jewish moral literature — 4 Maccabees above all — treats ἡδονή as the standing antagonist of reason and of the law. But the charge comes from the context, not from the lexeme: Greek could speak of ἡδονή without censure, and no negative gloss may be built into the word itself.

The plural is instantial per standing corpus policy on pluralized abstract nouns: discrete gratifications, not an abstract disposition.

‘Lusts’ is excluded — modern English has narrowed it irrecoverably to sexual appetite, and nothing in James 4 restricts the field that way. ‘Cravings’ is already assigned to negatively-qualified ἐπιθυμία and cannot be borrowed here. The Vulgate’s concupiscentiis is reception, not evidence (§11).

στρατεύομαι is middle-only and means to serve as a soldier, to be on campaign. In the NT it is literal at Luke 3:14 and 1 Cor 9:7, figurative of apostolic warfare at 2 Cor 10:3 and 1 Tim 1:18, and figurative of appetites at 1 Pet 2:11 (αἵτινες στρατεύονται κατὰ τῆς ψυχῆς) and here. Paul’s cognate compound ἀντιστρατευόμενον at Rom 7:23 sits in the same field, and the verbal overlap with Jas 4:1 — a campaign waged ἐν τοῖς μέλεσίν μου — is close enough to be worth recording, though it establishes no dependence in either direction.

Two features must survive in English.

The campaign, not the state. στρατεύομαι is not ‘be at war’ — that would duplicate πόλεμος, which stands three words earlier. The verb names sustained operations conducted by soldiers in the field. ‘Be on campaign’ carries this; ‘battle’ and ‘fight’ duplicate μάχη/μάχομαι; ‘rage’ imports fury and discards the army altogether.

The unexpressed object. 1 Pet 2:11 supplies κατὰ τῆς ψυχῆς; James supplies nothing. The pleasures are on campaign in the members, and against whom is not said. Supplying a target — ‘war against your soul’, ‘war within you’ — fills a blank the text leaves open, and at Jas 4:1 the blank matters, because whether the pleasures are fighting the person, each other, or the neighbor is precisely what the ambiguous μέλεσιν leaves undecided.

The second article makes the participle an attributive modifier of ἡδονῶν, not an attendant circumstance: τῶν ἡδονῶν ὑμῶν τῶν στρατευομένων — ‘your pleasures, the ones that campaign’. The construction is the same repeated-article attributive already fixed at Phil 4:17 and Jas 1:9, and it should be rendered with an English relative clause so the defining force stays visible.

The alternative — a prenominal adjective (‘your warring pleasures’) — loses both the verbal aspect and the attributive construction. The present tense is durative: this is not what the pleasures do when provoked but what they are permanently doing.

The possessive ὑμῶν stands between noun and article, and a second ὑμῶν closes the verse. Two second-person possessives inside eight words, on top of the ἐν ὑμῖν of the first clause, is insistent, and the insistence is the point: the source of the trouble is repeatedly located in the addressees.

μέλος is the anatomical term for a bodily limb or part. Its NT distribution runs in two directions: the limbs of an individual body (Jas 3:5-6, the tongue as a μέλος; Rom 6:13, 19; 7:23; Matt 5:29-30) and the constituents of a corporate body (Rom 12:4-5; 1 Cor 12:12-27; Eph 4:25).

Both are live here, and the choice determines what kind of war James is describing.

English ‘members’ carries the same doubleness and is retained for that reason. ‘Your bodies’ adopts the first reading; ‘among you’ adopts the second and additionally deletes the noun. Both are excluded from the reading text.

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

In the Greek order, ἐν ὑμῖν follows μάχαι and is separated from πόλεμοι by the intervening καὶ πόθεν. Whether it governs both subjects or only the nearer one is not formally decidable.

If it governs both, James is asking about wars and fights within the community, and the war-language is unambiguously figurative of congregational strife. If it governs only μάχαι, πόλεμοι stands unqualified and the question opens wider than the assembly before narrowing.

The English rendering preserves the Greek slot — ‘Where do wars come from, and where do fights among you come from?’ — which reproduces the same ambiguity, since English ‘among you’ in that position is also readable as governing the pair. Relocating the phrase to the head of the sentence (‘What causes wars and fights among you?’) closes the question by fiat, and additionally converts πόθεν to ‘what causes’.

The verse is stable. Two items are worth recording.

The second πόθεν. A minority of witnesses and some of the versional tradition do not reproduce it, and the Latin (unde bella et lites in vobis) has one. Omission is the easier reading — the repetition looks pleonastic to a copyist or translator — and the doubled form is to be retained. The direction of the smoothing confirms that the repetition was felt.

Word order in the ἡδονῶν phrase. The witnesses are essentially unanimous; the minuscule variation that exists concerns the position of ὑμῶν and carries no exegetical weight.

The punctuation — two question marks, and the comma or dash before ἐκ τῶν ἡδονῶν — is editorial in every printed edition, since the earliest majuscules are unpunctuated. The interrogative reading rests on πόθεν and on interrogative οὐκ, which is secure grammatical ground; the placement of the internal break is judgment.

The Greek commentators take the war-language as describing something real and internal before it is social. Œcumenius and the catena material on James connect ἡδοναί with the passions that make peace within a person impossible, and read the outward μάχαι as the overflow of that condition — which is the individual construal of μέλεσιν.

Bede, whose commentary on James is the fullest early Latin treatment, works from the Vulgate’s concupiscentiis and reads the verse as diagnosing desire for temporal goods as the root of communal discord; his exposition moves easily between the person and the church without troubling to separate them.

What the patristic reading does not do is soften the vocabulary. The Latin bella et lites and the Greek commentators’ willingness to speak of an internal πόλεμος both keep the war-frame in place. The modern reduction to ‘quarrels’ is later, and it belongs to reception rather than to the exegetical tradition (§11).

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

3:13-18 has set two wisdoms against each other and closed with the fruit of righteousness sown in peace. 4:1 opens with the exact opposite condition, and the connection is thematic rather than syntactic — there is no connective, which per standing policy is not repaired in English.

The διαλογισμοί structure of 4:1-3 is a chain of source-questions and answers: wars come from pleasures (v. 1); you do not have because you do not ask (v. 2); you ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, so as to spend on your pleasures (v. 3). ἡδοναί frames the unit, appearing at both ends. What begins as a diagnosis of communal violence ends as a diagnosis of failed prayer, and the same noun is the hinge.

The indictment then escalates to μοιχαλίδες in v. 4 — the prophetic marriage-lawsuit — and the whole movement resolves at v. 6 in the Prov 3:34 LXX citation and the imperatives of vv. 7-10. The verse under examination is the first stroke of that indictment, and its rhetorical weight depends on the war-words landing at full strength.

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