James turns from the quarrelling congregation (4:1-10) and the self-appointed judge (4:11-12) to a third figure: the traveling merchant. The verse is almost entirely other people’s words. James supplies only three words of his own — Ἄγε νῦν οἱ λέγοντες — and then hands the microphone to the speakers, quoting a plan of six months’ business in one breath.

Four features carry the weight:

1. Ἄγε νῦν is a frozen singular imperative doing the work of an attention-particle, addressed to a plural — the summons of the diatribe, and in James a summons that precedes indictment (repeated at 5:1).
2. οἱ λέγοντες is a present participle: not people who once said this, but people whose speech habitually runs this way.
3. τήνδε τὴν πόλιν is the only genuinely deictic use of ὅδε in the New Testament. A finger goes down on a place.
4. Four coordinated futures strung together with καί (polysyndeton) — go, spend, trade, gain — reproduce the rhythm of confident planning-speech.

And one absence: the sentence has no main clause. James opens with a vocative, quotes the boast, and then breaks off. The syntax stays unresolved through v. 14’s parenthetical rebuke and lands only at v. 15 (ἀντὶ τοῦ λέγειν ὑμᾶς). The suspension is the rhetoric — the reader is left holding an unfinished sentence exactly as the merchants are left holding an unfinished year.

Nothing in the verse is condemned yet. There is no charge of dishonesty, no accusation of greed, no hint that trade is wrong. What is missing from the plan — and the missing thing is the whole point — arrives only in v. 15.

Built onbdag · bdf

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

Ἄγε is the present active imperative of ἄγω, 2nd person singular, standing before a plural address (οἱ λέγοντες, and then the 1st plural verbs of the quotation). The mismatch is not an error: the form has frozen into an interjection, exactly as ἰδού and ἴδε have (already fixed in this corpus at Jas 3:4 and Gal 5:2 respectively).

The combination with νῦν is a set Hellenistic phrase of the debating and moralizing register. In the New Testament it occurs only here and at Jas 5:1 (Ἄγε νῦν οἱ πλούσιοι), which is decisive: James uses it twice, both times to open an address to a class, both times before an indictment. Whatever softness the particle may have in classical dialogue, in James it is the sound of someone being called forward.

Register options: “Come now” (default), “Come on now” (colloquial, risks flippancy), “Go to now” (the older English, opaque today — declared liturgical register only). Excluded: “Listen” (that is ἀκούσατε, Jas 2:5, which James had and did not use here) and “Now then” (converts a summons into a transitional connective).

Built onbdag · bdf

Nominative articular participle used for the vocative — regular Koine (BDF §147), and already fixed in this corpus as “you who [verb]” (Gal 4:21). The article marks a class rather than a passing condition: this is a type of person, identified by the way they talk.

The tense is doing real work. λέγοντες is present, hence durative: not “you who said this” but “you who keep saying this.” The indictment is not of a single rash sentence but of a settled habit of speech that has a shape — and the shape is what vv. 14-15 attack.

Note what James does not write. He does not write οἱ ἔμποροι (“the merchants”), nor οἱ πλούσιοι (which he saves for 5:1). The class is defined by its speech. This is consistent with the whole letter, where speech is treated as a domain of conduct in its own right (1:19, 26; 3:1-12; 4:11).

English requires a second-person rendering (“you who say”) because the participle is vocative; the literal tier keeps “the [ones] saying” with the article visible.

Built onbdf · bdag

ὅδε is the near demonstrative of classical Greek (“this here,” pointing), and it had largely died out in Koine, driven from the field by οὗτος. Its only other New Testament appearances are in the fossilized prophetic formula τάδε λέγει (Acts 21:11; Rev 2:1 and following) — which is not a live deictic use at all. Jas 4:13 is the sole place in the NT where ὅδε functions as a genuine pointing demonstrative.

That makes the word a deliberate choice, and the question is what it points at.

Both readings are defensible and they differ in effect: the first makes the boast vivid, the second makes it generic. English can hold much of the tension. “Such-and-such a city” leans indefinite while still implying that a name exists; “this city here” leans specific. Excluded: “a certain city” (adopts the indefinite reading and, worse, in modern English reads as vague where the Greek is pointed) and “that city” (τήνδε is the near demonstrative — “that” inverts the deixis).

The article is retained: ὅδε stands in predicate position outside the article-noun unit, the regular Greek arrangement for demonstratives (BDF §292), and carries no additional emphasis beyond the deixis itself.

Built onbdag · bdf

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)

ποιέω with a time-word in the accusative is standard Koine idiom for spending or passing that period: χρόνον οὐκ ὀλίγον ποιεῖν, “to spend no little time” (Acts 15:33); τρεῖς μῆνας ποιήσας, “having spent three months” (Acts 20:3); ἐνιαυτὸν ὅλον, Acts 11:26 in a comparable construction. Josephus and the LXX supply the same idiom (Eccl 6:12; Prov 13:23 LXX).

So the accusative ἐνιαυτόν is an accusative of extent of time, not a direct object, and the verb is not “make” in the productive sense. Per §8 this is a culturally transparent idiom, not a live metaphor: “spend a year” is the natural English equivalent and no note is needed in the reading text. The literal tier keeps “will do there a year” so the construction remains visible.

ἐνιαυτός is already fixed in this corpus as “year” (Gal 4:10), the year as a completed annual cycle. Retain the singular and the anarthrous, qualitative form: “a year,” a year’s stay, not “the year” and not “a whole year” (ὅλον is absent — the Byzantine tradition supplies it at Acts 11:26, not here).

Excluded: “stay a year” (drops the ποιέω idiom, and “stay” imports μένω), “carry on business for a year” (imports ἐμπορεύομαι from the next clause and collapses two verbs into one), and any rendering that treats ἐνιαυτόν as the object of a productive verb.

Built onbdag · bdf · muraoka-lxx

From ἐν + πορεύομαι — literally “travel in,” hence the word for the traveling trader, ἔμπορος (Matt 13:45; Rev 18:3, 11, 15, 23), and the trade itself, ἐμπορία (Matt 22:5) and ἐμπόριον (John 2:16). The verb occurs only twice in the NT: here, of the merchants’ plan, and at 2 Pet 2:3, where false teachers ἐμπορεύσονται their hearers — trade in people.

Crucially, the verb is not pejorative in itself. LXX usage is neutral (Gen 34:10, 21; 42:34; Prov 31:14, of the industrious wife). The 2 Pet 2:3 sense is supplied by the object, not the lexeme. James is not condemning commerce, and the rendering must not smuggle a verdict in.

• “Do business,” “trade,” “carry on trade” — all correct and neutral.
• Excluded: “make a profit” (that is κερδαίνω, the very next verb, and merging the two erases a step in the sequence); “traffic” (in modern English now criminal); “speculate” (imports risk-appetite the verb does not name); “peddle” (imports the pejorative of 2 Pet 2:3).

A small resonance worth naming but not rendering: the πορεύ- root of ἐμπορευσόμεθα picks up πορευσόμεθα at the head of the quotation. The plan begins with going and continues with going-in-order-to-trade. English cannot reproduce this without strain; it is recorded here rather than manufactured in the translation.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

Already fixed in this corpus (Phil 3:8): κερδαίνω → “gain,” cognate with κέρδος (“gain / profit”) and its opposite ζημία (“loss”), and required to share the English accounting root so that Philippians’ ledger metaphor stays traceable from 1:21 through 3:8.

Here the commercial sense is not metaphorical at all — this is the word in its home habitat, the trader’s balance. Two features:

It is absolute. No object is expressed. James does not say what or how much they will gain. The reticence matters: the plan’s terminus is simply more, unspecified and unbounded. Any supplied object (“make a profit on it,” “make money”) fills a blank the Greek leaves open. Bracket a supplement if one is needed in the literal tier; “make gain” and “turn a profit” both keep the object unstated in English.

It is the last word. The four futures run go → spend → trade → gain, and the sentence ends on the gain and then breaks off. The rhetorical placement is deliberate: the plan’s final term is profit, and the sentence dies there without a main verb. Preserve the clause-final position in English.

Excluded: “get rich” (imports πλουτέω and anticipates 5:1), “make money” (supplies the object), “profit” as a bare noun (converts a verb into a noun and loses the future).

Built onbdag · obrien-nigtc

Four future indicatives in the 1st person plural, joined by three καί: πορευσόμεθα … ποιήσομεν … ἐμπορευσόμεθα … κερδήσομεν.

This is polysyndeton — the connective repeated before every member where asyndeton or a single final καί was available. The corpus policy is already fixed (Gal 4:10): repeating the connective weights each item equally and produces accumulation, and English must repeat “and” before every member even where modern editorial style would prune it. Deleting a conjunction reproduces the smoothing, not the text.

The effect is the cadence of a business plan being recited: one confident clause hooked to the next, no subordination, no qualification, no conditional. Compare v. 15, which supplies exactly the subordination that is missing here (Ἐὰν ὁ κύριος θελήσῃ). The absence in v. 13 is what v. 15 is about.

The futures are genuine futures, not deliberative subjunctives, and must be rendered as futures in English. Several witnesses read the aorist subjunctive πορευσώμεθα (“let us go,” “are we to go?”), and part of the tradition adjusts the other verbs similarly — see the textual note. The indicative asserts; the subjunctive proposes. Rendering “let us go” imports the softer reading and dissolves the presumption James is quoting.

Built onbdf · na28

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

Two related variants, both in the direction of easing the sentence.

Σήμερον ἢ αὔριον (NA28, with the primary Alexandrian witnesses) against σήμερον καὶ αὔριον in a substantial part of the tradition, including the Byzantine text. The disjunction is the harder and better reading, and it is also the more pointed: “today or tomorrow” expresses casual indifference to which day — the plan is settled, the date is a detail. “Today and tomorrow” makes the two days a stretch of time and flattens the shrug.

πορευσόμεθα (future indicative) against πορευσώμεθα (aorist subjunctive), with the tradition further fluctuating between indicative and subjunctive in the other three verbs. In unaccented majuscules the two forms differ by a single letter, and the confusion of ο/ω is among the commonest in Greek manuscripts, so the variation may be partly orthographic. But its exegetical direction is consistent: the subjunctive converts assertion into proposal (“let us go,” or as a deliberative question, “shall we go?”), which softens the boast James is quoting.

On the general principle: variation in the direction of smoothing is evidence for the roughness being original (§4, §5 of the working rules). Both variants here smooth. Both are secondary.

Built onna28 · metzger-tc

The rhetorical shape is that of the Hellenistic diatribe: an imagined interlocutor is summoned, his own words are quoted back at him, and the quotation itself does the accusing. James has used the device already (2:18, ἀλλʼ ἐρεῖ τις; 3:13, τίς σοφός; 2:14-16, the hypothetical case) and will use it once more immediately (5:1). The summons + articular participle + quoted speech pattern here is the fullest instance in the letter.

The realia are first-century, not modern (§9). The men in view are not shopkeepers but traveling traders — the class that moved between the Hellenistic cities of the eastern Mediterranean, took lodging for a season, bought and sold, and moved on. The sailing season, the year’s residence, the specified destination all fit a well-documented pattern of commerce. Nothing in the text suggests these men are outsiders to the assembly: the vocative is direct, the letter’s other vocatives address the community, and 5:1 (οἱ πλούσιοι) is marked differently.

The sapiential background is dense and near at hand:

• Prov 27:1 LXX: μὴ καυχῶ τὰ εἰς τὴν αὔριον — do not boast about tomorrow. James supplies καυχᾶσθε at 4:16.
• Sir 11:18-19, the man who says “I have found rest” and does not know how long it will be until he leaves it.
• Luke 12:16-21, the rich fool, who has the same structure: a first-person plural plan for years, and no God in the sentence.

The Greek commentary tradition on James is thin, surviving largely in catena fragments, but its reading of this passage is consistent on one point: the target is presumption about the future, not commerce.

The Catena material attributed to Didymus and to Cyril’s circle takes Ἄγε νῦν as a call to reflection rather than a curse, and reads the string of futures as the sin of κατατολμᾶν τοῦ μέλλοντος — presuming upon what is to come. Bede, in the earliest full Latin commentary on the Catholic Epistles, makes the same distinction explicitly: the fault is not the journey or the trading but the omission of si Dominus voluerit — which is to read v. 13 through v. 15, exactly as the syntax requires.

This matters as a check on a modern drift. Where later ascetic and, differently, modern anti-commercial readings have found in the verse a condemnation of trade itself, the earliest interpreters found a condemnation of a sentence with God left out of it. That is what the Greek supports, and it is a useful reminder that the passage’s sting is available to a merchant who keeps trading.

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