This is the promise attached to the procedure of v. 14, and almost every load-bearing word in it is contested.

The shape is simple: three futures in a row — σώσει, ἐγερεῖ, ἀφεθήσεται — with three different subjects. The prayer saves; the Lord raises; and it is forgiven him, the agent unexpressed. James builds the sentence so that human action, divine action, and divine action with the agent hidden stand in that order, and the last clause is hedged with a conditional (κἂν) that the first two are not.

Four decisions carry the verse.

First, εὐχή is not the word James used one verse earlier (προσευξάσθωσαν) or one verse later (εὔχεσθε in v. 16 is the cognate verb, but the noun here is unique in James). εὐχή elsewhere in the NT means a vow (Acts 18:18; 21:23). Whether that sense is live here is genuinely open.

Second, κάμνω is the third illness-word in three verses (ἀσθενεῖ v. 14, κάμνοντα here, and the ἰαθῆτε of v. 16), and its root sense is being worn out by labor or by suffering, not being medically sick. The variation of vocabulary is deliberate.

Third, σῴζω and ἐγείρω are both words that mean one thing in a sickroom and another in an eschatological context, and James — who has used σῴζω of the salvation of a ψυχή at 1:21 and will again at 5:20 — has chosen the two most ambiguous verbs available. The apparatus does not resolve this.

Fourth, the final clause. κἂν ἁμαρτίας ᾖ πεποιηκώς is a periphrastic perfect subjunctive — an unusually heavy construction for a simple ‘if he has sinned’ — and the conditional itself is the datum. James does not say the sick person has sinned. He says: and if it should turn out that he has. That reticence is theologically deliberate and must survive in English.

εὐχή occurs three times in the NT: Acts 18:18 and 21:23, both unambiguously of a vow, and here. The cognate verb εὔχομαι appears in v. 16 (εὔχεσθε ὑπὲρ ἀλλήλων) and elsewhere means simply ‘pray’ or ‘wish’ (Rom 9:3; 2 Cor 13:7, 9; 3 John 2).

In the LXX the noun overwhelmingly renders נֶדֶר, the vow — Num 6:2-21 (the Nazirite), Deut 12:11, Ps 21:26 LXX, Eccl 5:3-4. The prayer-sense is present (Prov 15:8, δεήσεις; Job 22:27 with εὔχομαι) but the vow-sense dominates.

The genitive τῆς πίστεως is equally open. Source (‘the prayer that comes from faith’), quality (‘the believing prayer’), and characterizing (‘the kind of prayer faith makes’) are all live. Per standing corpus policy on bare genitives — πίστις Χριστοῦ, καρπὸς δικαιοσύνης, ἐλπὶς δικαιοσύνης, νόμος ἐλευθερίας, στέφανος τῆς δόξης — English holds the bare genitive and the debate is recorded rather than resolved. ‘The prayer of faith’ is retained in the literal and liturgical tiers; ‘prayer offered in faith’ in the reading text leans toward quality without excluding source.

One exclusion is firm. The article is anaphoric, pointing back to the elders’ prayer of v. 14, not generic. Renderings that make the phrase a general principle about believing prayer (‘prayer made in faith will save the sick’) detach the promise from the procedure that generates it. James is not laying down a rule about faith-healing; he is telling a congregation what the elders’ prayer accomplishes.

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

κάμνω has only two secure NT occurrences (Heb 12:3, of growing weary in the soul, and here; Rev 2:3 is a variant). The root sense across Greek from Homer onward is to work oneself to exhaustion, hence to be worn out, and derivatively to be sick — the sick person being, in Greek idiom, one whom illness has worn down. οἱ κάμνοντες becomes a standard term for the sick in the medical writers, but the wearing-out is the etymological core and is not entirely spent.

James uses three distinct words for the condition in three verses:

| v. 14 | ἀσθενεῖ | is weak / is ill | | v. 15 | τὸν κάμνοντα | the one worn down | | v. 16 | ἰαθῆτε | be healed |

The corpus already fixes ἀσθενέω as ‘be weak’ with the physical sense flagged where forced by context (Phil 2:26-27). κάμνω must stay lexically distinct from it, since James deliberately varied. ‘The sick’ for both flattens the variation and hides that the second word describes the person’s state rather than the condition afflicting him.

Rejected renderings: ‘the sick person’ (levels into ἀσθενέω), ‘the sufferer’ (imports πάσχω), ‘the invalid’ (modern medical category, §9). ‘Worn down’ preserves the exhaustion-sense while leaving the illness-reading fully available.

The present participle is durative — a condition currently obtaining, not a past episode.

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Both verbs are ambiguous in exactly the same way, and James has stacked them.

σῴζω. The corpus policy fixes ‘salvation’ / ‘save’ as the base gloss with the wider range (rescue, deliverance, physical healing) footnoted rather than substituted. In the Synoptics σῴζω regularly means physical restoration (Mark 5:23, 28, 34; 6:56; 10:52 — ἡ πίστις σου σέσωκέν σε), which is the closest verbal parallel to this verse. But James himself uses σῴζω twice elsewhere, at 1:21 (σῶσαι τὰς ψυχὰς ὑμῶν) and 4:12 (ὁ δυνάμενος σῶσαι καὶ ἀπολέσαι), and at 5:20 (σώσει ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ἐκ θανάτου). All three are soteriological.

ἐγείρω. The verb of raising from a sickbed (Mark 1:31; 9:27; Acts 3:7) and the verb of resurrection (1 Cor 15:4, 15-16; Rom 4:24). Where a sick person is the object and a divine subject the agent, both are live.

The rendering keeps both verbs in their standard English glosses — ‘save’ and ‘raise up’ — precisely because English ‘save’ and ‘raise’ carry the same doubleness. ‘Make him well’ and ‘restore him to health’ adopt the first reading; ‘bring him to salvation’ adopts the second. Neither may stand in the reading text.

Note also the subject-shift: σώσει has ἡ εὐχή as its subject, ἐγερεῖ has ὁ κύριος. The instrument is named first, the agent second. Renderings that make the Lord the subject of both (‘the Lord will save and raise him’) delete a distinction the sentence is built on.

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

καὶ ἐγερεῖ αὐτὸν ὁ κύριος — verb, object, then subject last. The postponement is emphatic: the clause lands on the agent.

English word order cannot reproduce this, so the effect is carried by keeping ‘the Lord’ as the grammatical subject and not relocating the clause, and by noting the position here. Renderings that front the subject and merge the clauses (‘and the Lord will save and raise him’) destroy both the position and the subject-shift.

Per §1 and standing corpus policy, κύριος is rendered ‘Lord’ and never converted to YHWH. The referent here is contested between God and Christ — v. 14’s ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι τοῦ κυρίου and v. 7-8’s ἡ παρουσία τοῦ κυρίου pull toward Christ, while v. 11’s ὁ κύριος (πολύσπλαγχνος καὶ οἰκτίρμων, echoing Exod 34:6) pulls toward God, and v. 4’s Κυρίου Σαβαώθ is unambiguously the LXX divine title. James does not disambiguate and neither does the rendering.

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κἄν is crasis of καί + ἐάν. The καί is adjunctive-concessive: ‘and if in addition’, adding a further contingency rather than merely coordinating. It must be rendered — dropping it to a bare ‘if’ (as most English versions do) removes the additive force by which James attaches a supplementary provision to a promise already given.

The verb is ᾖ πεποιηκώς, a periphrastic perfect subjunctive: present subjunctive of εἰμί plus perfect active participle. Koine builds periphrastic perfects freely, but James had the simple perfect subjunctive available and did not use it. Two things follow.

First, the construction is stative and emphatic: it names not the act of sinning but the standing condition of one who has sinned. ‘If he has sinned’ is correct but flattens; the literal tier keeps ‘if he should be having committed sins’ so the construction is visible.

Second — and this is the load-bearing point — the whole clause is a third-class condition, presenting the case as a live possibility neither asserted nor denied. James does not say the sick man has sinned. He provides for the case.

ἁμαρτίας is anarthrous accusative plural — instantial per standing corpus policy on pluralized abstract nouns: particular acts committed, not a state of sinfulness. The singular reading in some witnesses is a levelling toward the abstract and is not followed.

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

ἀφεθήσεται αὐτῷ is the fixed Koine remission formula: third-singular passive of ἀφίημι with a dative of the person for whom release is granted, and with the thing remitted as the unexpressed subject or supplied from context (Matt 9:2, 5; 12:31-32; Mark 3:28; Luke 5:20, 23; 7:47-48; 1 John 2:12).

Two features must survive.

The passive is a divine passive. The agent is unexpressed. English must not supply one: ‘God will forgive him’ and ‘the Lord will forgive him’ both write in what James withheld — the more pointedly because he did name ὁ κύριος in the immediately preceding clause and then declined to name him again. Some witnesses add αὐτῷ ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ or similar; the direction of scribal clarification is exactly the direction to avoid.

The construction is impersonal. Greek says ‘it will be forgiven to him’, not ‘he will be forgiven’. The literal tier preserves this. Reading tiers may use the personal English passive, which is idiomatic, but the impersonal shape is recorded because it keeps the sins — not the man — as the thing released.

The root sense of ἀφίημι is to send away, let go, release; in LXX and NT usage of sin it renders the Hebrew remission-vocabulary (Lev 4:20, 26, 31; Ps 31:1 LXX). Retain ‘forgive’ as the base gloss; ‘pardon’ imports a juridical clemency-frame and ‘remit’ is opaque outside liturgical register.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

The verse is a chain of three future indicatives with a conditional attached to the last:

1. ἡ εὐχὴ τῆς πίστεως σώσει τὸν κάμνοντα — human instrument, named subject.
2. καὶ ἐγερεῖ αὐτὸν ὁ κύριος — divine agent, named subject, postponed.
3. κἂν … ἀφεθήσεται αὐτῷ — divine agent, unnamed, and the whole clause conditional.

The progression is deliberate. Each step withdraws further from direct assertion: the prayer will do this; the Lord will do that; and if this further case obtains, this too will happen, by an agent not named.

The futures are predictive, not gnomic. Per §6 they are rendered as plain futures with no modal hedging — ‘may save’, ‘will likely restore’, and ‘can bring healing’ all soften a hard promise, and hedging is precisely what the passage’s difficulty tempts a translator to do. Equally, the futures are not to be strengthened into guarantees with added adverbs.

ἐγερεῖ is the contracted Attic future of ἐγείρω (ἐγερῶ), standard in Koine, which has largely lost the sigmatic future of liquid stems. No semantic weight attaches.

The καί joining clauses 1 and 2 is coordinating, not consecutive. ‘And so the Lord will raise him’ over-specifies a logical relation the parataxis withholds — per standing corpus policy on paratactic καί (Jas 4:2-3), the flatness is the rhetoric.

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The text is stable in its main outlines. Three points are worth recording.

ἐγερεῖ. Universally attested. Some minuscules read the aorist ἐγείρῃ under the influence of the neighboring subjunctive; secondary and easily explained.

ἁμαρτίας. A minority tradition reads the singular ἁμαρτίαν, levelling the instantial plural toward an abstract condition. The plural is the harder and better-attested reading and is retained; the number is exegetically live (see the syntax section).

ᾖ πεποιηκώς. A few witnesses simplify the periphrasis to a simple perfect (πεποίηκεν) or aorist subjunctive (ποιήσῃ). Both are smoothings of an unusual construction and confirm that the periphrasis was felt as marked.

ἀφεθήσεται αὐτῷ. Some versional witnesses supply an agent (ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ, or the equivalent in Latin and Syriac renderings). This is clarification of a divine passive and shows the direction of smoothing to be avoided.

None of these affects the sense materially, and none is adopted. The apparatus of NA28 records the variation without discussion, which is a fair assessment of its weight.

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The early reception is instructive chiefly for what it did not assume.

Origen (Hom. in Lev. 2.4) lists the elders’ prayer and the confession of sins among the ways forgiveness is obtained, treating v. 15 and v. 16 as a single provision and reading the forgiveness clause as genuinely conditional.

Chrysostom, in the treatise on the priesthood (3.6), cites the verse for the authority of presbyters in the remission of sins — but note that he cites it for what the prayer accomplishes, not for a rite of anointing, and he does not treat the σώσει as guaranteed bodily recovery.

The Greek catena tradition and Bede (Comm. in Ep. Jac.) both take σώσει primarily of the body while allowing the soul-sense, and both read κἂν as a real conditional — Bede explicitly notes that James does not say the sick man has sinned.

Proposed — pending reviewBede the Venerable, Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles, trans. David Hurst, Cistercian Studies 82 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1985) · John Chrysostom, On the Priesthood (De sacerdotio), 3.6

Three restraints are built into the Greek and must not be lost in English.

The prayer is the named instrument, but the Lord is the named agent. James does not attribute the outcome to the faith of the sick man, to the oil, or to the elders as such. The subject-shift between σώσει and ἐγερεῖ places the efficacy where it belongs, and any rendering that merges the clauses obscures this.

The forgiveness clause is conditional. James provides for the possibility that sin is in the picture; he does not diagnose. The temptation — visible in the reception history and in some modern renderings — is to read a causal chain from sin to sickness. The Greek supplies no causal marker at all, and the third-class condition explicitly leaves the case open. Per §6, this must not be shaded toward either the harder reading (illness as punishment) or the more comfortable one (the connection quietly dropped).

The futures are unqualified. This is the harder half of the same discipline. James writes σώσει, not ‘may save’. Whatever σῴζω means here, it is promised, not hoped for. A translator uncomfortable with the pastoral consequences of an unqualified promise of healing has two honest options: argue that σῴζω is soteriological, or let the promise stand as written. Hedging the future is not among them.

The verse also sits inside a communal frame. The sick man summons the elders (v. 14); the congregation confesses to one another and prays for one another (v. 16). Nothing here is individual, and renderings that abstract the verse into a general principle about believing prayer detach it from the assembly that James addresses throughout.

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