Category: Bible

Well, the Discovery Channel, seems to be waking up to the blunder it made in getting behind James Cameron’s titanic fiasco about Jesus’ family tomb.

EXCERPTS:

Discovery Channel’s controversial James Cameron-produced documentary "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" drew the largest audience for the network in more than a year on Sunday night, but the network has taken several recent steps to downplay the project.

Departing from normal procedures, the cable network didn’t tout its big
ratings win. The network also scheduled a last-minute special that
harshly criticized its own documentary, and has yanked a planned repeat
of "Tomb."

"This is not one where you necessarily beat the
drum, from a business perspective," said David Leavy, executive VP of
corporate communications at Discovery. "It’s not necessarily about
making money, or making ratings, or shouting from the highest office
building. Sometimes having some maturity and perspective is more
important than getting picked up in all the ratings highlights."

Although Mr. Leavy said the network stands by the documentary "100
percent," the company took several unusual steps in the wake of the
controversy that could be seen as distancing itself from the content.

Last
week, Discovery abruptly scheduled a panel debate to air after the
documentary, moderated by Discovery newsman Ted Koppel. Discovery’s
announcement of the panel emphasized that Mr. Koppel "has no connection
to the production of ‘The Lost Tomb of Jesus’" and that "the panel will
explore the filmmakers’ profound assertions and challenge their
assumptions and suggested conclusions."

When the panel discussion aired, guests criticized the documentary as "archaeo-porn" that played fast and loose with the facts.

The
day after the March 4 airing, Discovery yanked a planned repeat of
"Tomb" from its more hard-news-branded Discovery Times Channel.

When
the Nielsen ratings revealed that "Tomb" averaged 4.1 million viewers –
Discovery’s largest audience since September 2005 – the network
declined to put out a press release touting the numbers, as would be
standard practice for a highly successful premiere. The second-season
premiere of Discovery Channel’s "Future Weapons," for instance, earned
a media announcement for its audience of 2.5 million. A network
representative, however, insisted Discovery was not trying to bury
"Tomb."

The Discovery official issues a lot of spin trying to save face for the network, and they still haven’t done all they need to to distance themselves from this stinkburger, but the overall message is clear: They screwed up and they know it. Now they’re trying to avoid getting more egg on their collective face.

GET THE STORY.

OH, AND I WONDER IF THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH IT.

They just got a new CEO two months ago, and the Jesus tomb thing was certainly in motion before then. If his new broom is sweeping clean, some of the execs who signed off on Cameron’s nonsense may want not to be swept away along with it.

. . . MARK BRUMLEY IS HAVING WAY TOO MUCH FUN AT JAMES CAMERON’S EXPENSE.

Many people on the Internet are ably demolishing James Cameron’s opportunistic documentary regarding his ostensible discovery of Jesus’ tomb.

There’s so much material out there that it’s difficult to process it all (at least in the time I have available), but I said that I’d offer some thoughts of my own on the subject, and so I’ll do so. I’ll also provide links to work being done by others.

Let’s start with some principles that should be widely agreed upon, even by those who do not believe in the Resurrection.

1) Jesus was a Galilean.

2) Jesus’ family was poor (as illustrated by the kind of offering they gave at the Temple at Jesus’ birth).

3) Jesus was crucified by the Romans.

4) There were significant tensions between the early Christian community and the Jewish community (as illustrated by the executions of St. Stephen and St. James the Just and by St. Paul’s own admitted persecution of the Church).

5) Early Christians made a big deal out of the claimed Resurrection of Christ.

6) In a first century Jewish context, that would mean that his tomb was empty.

7) Early Christians also made a big deal about the claimed Ascension of Christ.

8) Early Christians made a big deal about the Church as the mystical/metaphorical Bride of Christ.

9) Nothing remotely like the story envisioned by James Cameron and his colleagues is recorded in early Christian or Jewish or pagan literature about the early Church.

If we accept these premises, how likely is it that Jesus had a wife and a son and was buried in a middle class tomb in Jerusalem with multiple other family members spanning several generations?

Not very.

Let’s watch the dominos fall:

The first domino to go over is the fact that Jesus was a Galilean. He was Jesus of Nazareth. His family’s home was in the north, in Galilee. Why would they have a family tomb in Jerusalem? An individual might be buried there if he happened to die there (as with Jesus being [temporarily] interred in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb or when James the Just was martyred in Jerusalem). That would be expected since they buried people the same day, and there wouldn’t be time to get a body down to Galilee. But the family’s tomb would be in Galilee, since that’s where most members of the family would die.So it’s implausible to begin with that Jesus’ family would have a tomb in Jerusalem.

Now the second domino falls: They were dirt poor. They just didn’t have money. The lower-class status of the family is attested to both inside and outside of Scripture (including later records about kinsmen who demonstrated that they had never been anything other than working men by displaying the callouses on their hands). So how could they afford a middle or upper-middle class tomb even if they had a tomb in Jerusalem?

In particular, why would they build an ornate one? See the picture at the top of this post? Notice the geometric designs above the door of the tomb? That’s ornamentation, and it takes money to have rock carving like that done. Again, this isn’t the kind of tomb poor people would have.

The ornamentation also calls attention to the tomb, causing dominos three through six to keel over. The early Christian community and its claims about a Resurrected Messiah were very annoying to the local non-Christian communities, both Jewish and Roman. To non-Christian Jews, the Christian message was a betrayal of the faith as they understood it. It was heresy. It was something to be stamped out.

To the Romans, and increasingly with time, the Christian community was also troublesome. Partly it was troublesome because it stirred up contention within the Jewish community (which itself was headache enough for the Romans at the time). Partly it was troublesome because it came to be perceived as a treasonous group that did not honor the state religion nor form part of the tolerated religion of Judaism. And if you buy the theories common in liberal critical circles that the authors of the New Testament tried to shift the blame for Jesus’ death from Roman leaders to Jewish leaders then there’s an extra reason for the Romans to be annoyed with the early Christian community. Even if you don’t (as I don’t) buy the idea of blame transferrence, put yourself in the position of a Roman governor and ask: "Do I really want a local cult worshipping as a god a man who we Romans put to death?" For the Romans too, there was motive to undermine Christian claims.

So when Christians are running around saying that Jesus’ tomb is empty and that he’s been raised from the dead and that this only proves that he’s the Son of God, if you’re a non-Christian Roman or Jew then you’re going to have a powerful incentive to say, "Wait a minute! Jesus’ tomb is RIGHT OVER THERE in what will become the Talpiyot neighborhood of Jerusalem! And look, his bones are right here in this ossuary conveniently labeled ‘Jesus son of Joseph’ in this conveniently-ornamented-and-thus-advertised tomb that the rest of his family is using!"

Matthew 28:11-15 is also noteworthy in this regard:

[S]ome of the guard [over Jesus’ tomb] went into the city and told the chief priests all that had taken place.And when they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel, they gave a sum of money to the soldiers and said, "Tell people, `His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ And if this comes to the governor’s ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble." So they took the money and did as they were directed; and this story has been spread among the Jews to this day.

To the ears of any sensitive reader, but especially to an apologist, the nature of this passage is immediately apparent: It’s counter-apologetics. Matthew is pre-emptively doing apologetics against a claim that was current among non-Christian Jews in his day. It doesn’t matter if you believe that Matthew was right, or even if you believe that Matthew was Matthew (rather than a "Matthean community"). What’s happening here is that the leading non-Christian explanation for the empty tomb is being debunked.

As an apologist for the Christian position–like Matthew–you don’t want to raise alternatives to the Christian explanation in the reader’s mind if you don’t have to. Thus you don’t raise the idea of Jesus’ disciples stealing his body unless you’ve got a real, live objection out there that you need to offer a counter-explanation for (i.e., the chief priests bribed the soldiers to say this). You don’t even want the reader’s mind moving in that direction if you can avoid it.

So the fact that Matthew (or the "Matthean community") takes the trouble to raise and then debunk the idea of the disciples stealing the body shows that this was the leading explanation  in the non-Christian Jewish community of why the tomb was empty. (And why Matthew–rather than Mark or Luke or John–deals with this, since Matthew’s gospel was most clearly written for a Jewish audience: This was the audience in which this explanation was common.)

But there would be no reason to concoct this explanation if Jesus’ bones were, in fact, lying in a clearly labelled ossuary in a publicly marked tomb that was in multigenerational use by members of his family in Jerusalem. If you’ve got the body then you don’t need to make up the story about his disciples stealing it.

Domino seven–the early Christian preaching of the Ascension–also tips over against James Cameron’s case. It provides the Christian explanation for where Jesus’ body is: It ain’t on earth! It’s up in heaven! He’s been exalted to the right hand of God in accord with his status as Messiah and Son of God. So if you’ve got that oh-so-conveniently-identifiable tomb right there in Jerusalem, why don’t you use this to dethrone the Ascension claim by pointing out (in excellent Latin if you’re a Roman) Habeas corpus!–"That you have the body!" Right there! In that ossuary!

And then there’s domino #8: The Church as the Bride of Christ. This image would never have arisen if there was a Mrs. Jesus living right there in Jerusalem. Look at what happened in other religions where the founder was married. Do we know about their wives? Well, let’s see . . . Moses was married to Tsipporah and then later to an Ethiopian woman. Muhammad was married to Khadijah and then later to Aisha and Sawda and Zaynab and . . . well, let’s just say that he was very enthusiastic about marrying women. Joseph Smith Jr. was married to Emma Hale and Lucinda Pendleton and Louisa Beaman and . . . uh . . . let’s just say he was enthusiastic about marrying women, too.

We know about these women because they were honored figures as wives of The Founder, and if Jesus had a wife then (a) we would know about it and (b) the whole Church-as-the-Bride-of-Christ metaphor would never have come into existence.

And then there’s the fruit of marriage: offspring.

Now, Dan Brown wants to sneak a forgotten daughter of Jesus by us, but we tend to know about even the daughters of religious founders. Muhammad’s daughter Fatima comes to mind.

It would be much harder to sneak a forgotten son by the eyes of history. For example, Moses had Gershom and Joseph Smith Jr. had Joseph Smith III.

It’s not just hard to sneak sons past because patriarchal cultures focus more on sons, it’s also because of this: In traditional societies, the son is looked on as the father’s natural successor.

The son may not end up as successor, but we still tend to know about sons because of their role as potential successors. If a son dies before he can assume office, it’s viewed as a great blow to the community because it destabilizes the leadership and triggers a struggle for succession. That struggle gets recorded. Or, if the son doesn’t die, a succession struggle may break out anyway, and it, too, gets recorded. Thus when Joseph Smith Jr. was killed after shooting at the people who had come to lynch him (no passive martyr he), there was a succession struggle in the early Mormon community after which Joseph Smith III ended up out of power (later forming the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now the Community of Christ) while Brigham Young ended up in charge of the main Mormon establishment.

And we know about this because succession struggles are the things history is made of and so they get recorded.

So if Jesus had a son named Judah (or anything else), we’d know about it. We know a lot about the politics of the early Church, and we’d certainly know about a succession fight involving the son of Jesus. We’d have all the arguments of the winning side about why their side was right and the son of Jesus was not his legitimate successor.

This is especially the case when you realize that Jesus’ surviving male family members were active in the leadership of the Church, like James the Just, who became bishop of Jerusalem. But it was his "brothers" who played these leadership roles, not his son.

Thus the ninth domino falls: The fact that nothing like Cameron’s version was recorded by anybody–including those hostile to the Church who would want to discredit it–underscores the utter implausibility of the whole idea.

Then there are the specific arguments brought forth by Cameron and his crew in favor of their hypothesis, but those have been ably rebutted by others.

SEE HERE.

AND HERE.

AND HERE.
(CHT to the reader who e-mailed the last!)

I’ve gotten numerous links from readers (CHTs all round!) about the Tomb of Jesus nonsense that is being peddled by James Cameron and The Discovery Channel.

I plan to have a response to this soon, but I just wanted to let y’all know it’s coming.

Till then . . .

A reader writes:

I’m on the RCIA team for my parish, and this past week, a gentleman asked me if I could find out something for him about the Our Father.  His mother says the line above as "in earth as it is in heaven" and he said she told him that’s how it used to be or that was how her translation of the Bible had it.  I asked him what denomination she was, and he said just a regular Protestant, non-denominational. 

I’ve tried checking out a few sites with different Bible translations and have not found any that say "in" earth.  Wondered if you had any historical information as to this question.   

This man is very very interested and knowledgeable about the Faith and is very much looking forward to the Easter Vigil and coming into the Church.  I suspect he may be getting a little grief from his family, and the poor man is aggravated by, as he puts it, "a one letter difference,"  so I told him I would try to find out for him.

Your friend may be right that his mother is getting this from her ordinary translation of the New Testament. Many groups of Protestants still use the King James Version of Scripture as their ordinary translation, and in this translation it does read "in earth as it is in heaven" (SOURCE). So that’s likely where this is coming from.

As to the reasonability of the "on"/"in" translation, this comes from the Greek of the text. In the Greek New Testament, there is a difference in the prepositions that are present in the two phrases. The "earth" phrase is introduced by the preposition epi, which would naturally be rendered by "on," "upon" or something like that, while the "heaven" phrase is introduced by the preposition en, which would naturally be rendered by "in." So there is a distinction in the Greek between the two phrases.

The image that is conveyed by the Greek prepositions seems to be one in which the person saying the prayer is located on earth, which is below the heaven where God’s will is performed perfectly. We’re thus asking that his will be done on earth (i.e., down here) the way it is up there (i.e., in heaven).

This seems to be what the Greek translator has in mind, informing the English language translation, though if we want to trace this all the way back to its rootes, we have to go into the Aramaic.

Here we find something different.

It’s always hard to translate prepositions from one language to another, because prepositions can mean a variety of things, and their meanings don’t perfectly overlap from one language to another. That’s a problem that happens with all words, but it particularly happens with prepositions.

If we look at common Aramaic versions of the Our Father (LIKE THIS ONE), we find that the preposition introducing both the "earth" phrase and the "heaven" phrase is b-, giving us bish-maya ("in/on heaven") and b’ar-ah ("in/on earth").

The distinction between the two thus likely wasn’t there in the original Aramaic of this prayer. Jesus probably said b-heaven  and b-earth, which could be translated "in heaven" or "on heaven" and "in earth" or "on earth." It was up to the translator to decide what was best.

The Greek translator decided that–in Greek–it sounded more natural to say "in (en) heaven" and "on (epi) earth," and many English translators looking at the Greek have decided similarly, leading to the standard English translation of the Lord’s Prayer. The translators of the King James Version seem to have decided differently, rendering the preposition as "in" in both cases.

But this is not an essential point. It’s a matter of translation (specifically, a matter of English translation that does not apply to other languages), and I suspect that your friend’s difficulties with his family may involve weightier matters in the end.

Still, let’s keep him–and them–in prayer.

A reader writes:

I have a very important question about God and right now my faith is at stake.  I doubt you will be able to provide a satisfying answer but please try your best.

In the Exodus and several other instances God ordered the Israelites to perform what I think we can all agree is genocide.  Samuel told Solomon to go forth and kill and kill every man, woman, child and beast.  Making no distinction between age, sex or whether or not they were innocent. 

These were real people living real lives.  They were not wicked evil doers in some cases, they were just in a land that was supposedly promised.  The people God ordered executed had been living there for generations and the Israelites came and murdered them for their land. 

I now know two men who will be dead soon from cancer.  A girl that was in my kindergarten class was hit and killed by a bus in first grade.  I have experienced death first hand and will soon do so again.  Nobody deserves to die and what God did was a despicable, disgusting and unjustifiable crime. 

God said every man, woman, and child.  Put yourself in the shoes of the murdered.   Maybe you have a son/daughter, perhaps a nephew or a co-worker has a child.  Imagine any child that you regularly come in contact with and then imagine some terrorist coming in and killing him/her.  "They say, oh our God ordered it.  You see, even though you own this land it really belongs to us because our God told us it was ours so we have to kill you."  You don’t believe in their God but that doesn’t matter to them.  You are just in their way and you happened to worship a different God, therefore you deserve to die.

How could a God that supposedly loves us perform genocide on us at the same time?

I am sorry to hear that your faith is currently being challenged, and will certainly pray for you. I encourage my readers to do likewise.

It is understandable that, if anything were to challenge your faith, this kind of thing would. Not only are the passages in the Old Testament difficult to understand, but the reality of suffering and death in our lives is the hardest thing for many people to endure. I have had to endure it myself, and I sympathize entirely with your situation.

Let me do what I can to see about answering your questions. I hope you’ll bear with me as I lay some principles that will become relevant later in the discussion. I want to give you as thorough an answer as I can.

First, regarding the commands to exterminate particular populations, these are, indeed, horriffic from a modern-day point of view. Such commands are incompatible with the Christian age, and anyone today who would claim to have received such commands–such as the terrorists you mention–is wrong. God does not work that way today.

The question is whether he ever worked that way, and the answer to this question must be either yes or no. We will look at both possibilities.

Continue reading “Hard Sayings Of The Old Testament”

A reader writes:

I was hoping you could discuss St. Paul’s teaching on the spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12-14.  In particular, I’m wondering about the emphasis St. Paul places on prophecy.  He tells the Corinthians to be especially eager for prophesying, indicating its superiority over the gift of tongues.  In chapter 14 verse 31, he says that all can prophesy, though they should do it one at a time.  He warns against pride (Ch 14 v 36) and disorder (v 40).

Now I am wondering what he means by prophesying in this case; are we to assume that all the men (women are excluded in verse 34-35) are receiving messages from the Lord, to be spoken to the community, one at a time? 

No. When Paul says you can all prophecy, he’s restricted his universe of discourse to those people who are able to prophecy. He’s giving an assurance that those who have the prophetic gift will all be able to just it, but they must do so in an orderly manner. He is not saying that all have the prophetic gift, as is clear from his rhetorical question in 1 Corinthians 12:29, which in context has the implied answer "No, not all are prophets." This is also implied by the fact that he encourages the Corinthians to desire this gift.

Also, women are not excluded from prophesying. They are excluded from teaching in church, but they can prohesy, as illustrated by his reference a few chapters earlier in 1 Corinthians 11:5 to women praying or prophesying with their heads covered.

And why is it that women are to stay silent? 

They didn’t have to be absolutely silent. They could pray or prophesy in Church. They couldn’t then teach or interrogate teachers (hence the reference to them asking their husbands at home if they want to know something). The reason for this had to do to a considerable extent with the culture of the early Christian community and was to a considerable extent of disciplinary rather than doctrinal force. It does, however, have a doctrinal nucleus that is reflected in the fact that the Magisterium is capable of being composed only by men (who have been ordained to the episcopacy). Today women can teach in religious settings (though they cannot give the homily) but they cannot teach magisterially.

I have gone to charismatic prayer meetings in the past, where indeed some people had messages from the Lord.  However, I always had doubts as to whether they were genuine prophecies or not.  How do you tell?

In general terms, if the messages contain predictions that come true then this is a sign that they are genuine; if they contain statements of a theological nature that are false then it is a sign that they are not genuine. In general, the same kinds of criteria that apply to discerning private revelations would apply here.

The spiritual gifts, in particular the gift of tongues and the gift of prophecy, were obviously of some importance at least from within the context of the Corinthian community at the time St. Paul was writing, since he devotes a good chunk of his first letter to the Corinthians to them.  In the Church today, they don’t really seem that important, except from within the charismatic movement.  I’ve often wondered why that is.  Any thoughts?

The development of Christian history revealed that the miraculous spiritual gifts began to appear more rarely than they appeared in the first century. This is consistent with the history of the Old Testament, in which prophecies seemed more common in some periods than in others. While God has never completely stopped giving private revelation, it seems that the initial intensity with which it was given at the beginning of Church history was something to help the early Church get off the ground. Afterwards, as the Church became firmly established, the granting of miraculous gifts and private revelations became less common, though it has never completely ceased.

In the second half of the 20th century, the Catholic Charismatic movement developed, and many more reports of this type of activity began to be made. The Church thus far has not attempted to make a systematic determination of how many of these reports are genuine, and it is likely to do so given the overwhelming number of them. Instead, it has allowed Catholics (in general) to make their own assessments of how common these phenomena are at present. I would characterize the Church’s attitude in this matter as cautious but open, which incidentally reflects St. Paul’s instructions:

Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophesying, but test everything; hold fast what is good (1 Thess. 5:19-21).

A reader writes:

My husband and I were trying to figure out what happened to the gifts the Magi gave to Jesus. Was the gold kept as well as the other gifts. Also why did the wise men just leave and not stay to continue to worship Jesus. The Shepherds also knew Jesus was the Messiah. Why didn’t they stay and honor him and become his first apostles.

Unfortunately, the answers to these questions are unknown due to our disturbing lack of time machines, but we can speculate. So here goes:

1) Presumably the gold was initially kept by the Holy Family but then was later spent (perhaps during their sojourn in Egypt). The frankincense and myrrh could have also been sold, or they may have been burned, since they were used for incense.

2) It’s not clear that the Magi understood fully what Jesus was (i.e., that he was God). The worship they paid him might not be the worship of the divine but the "worship" (reverence) due to a king or other figures in authority (which is why the British sometimes refer to high officials as "Your Worship"–not implying that the officials are God but that they are to be reverenced because of their office; the word "worship" has become exclusively used to refer to divine worship only recently). The Magi thus may have understood there visit simply as a visit to an important king, who wouldn’t even take his throne for years. Hence, they went home.

3) Same thing with the shepherds. Even understanding that Jesus is the Messiah, they wouldn’t have known that he was God or that he would have disciples. They would likely have thought of him as the future king who would kick the Romans out of Israel–but that wouldn’t happen for years, and so they, too, went home.

Those are my thoughts, any way. Shy of getting a time machine, I don’t know how to check them out. If you happen to run across a Delorean with a flux capacitor accessory installed, though, let me know.

A reader writs:

I’m having trouble finding your several day posting on Creation/evolution that you did awhile back.  Is there any way you could send me the link?

If it’s the one I think you mean (it having taken several posts to play out), it wasn’t on creation and evolution per se, but on the interpretation of Genesis 1.

That was a post I was particularly pleased with, and yours is not the only request I’ve had for a link to it. Newer readers also may not have seen it, so I’ll just go ahead and link it here.

IT’S THIS ONE.

A reader writes:

What’s your opinion of the translation that one often sees in James 2:14: 

Can such faith save him? (NIV)

Can that faith save him? (NAS)

as apposed to the KJV and NKJV:

Can faith save him?

To
me, this one translation choice seems to be make a big difference in
how one reads James in light of the Sola Fide debates.  But I’d be
interested in your thoughts on it from an "original language" viewpoint
and if it’s really as critical as it seems to me.

The Greek of the passage allows either translation. In the Greek original there is a definite article (the Greek equivalent of "the") in front of the word for faith in this passage. The thing about the definite article in Greek is that it’s a little tricky. It doesn’t fully correspond to the English word "the" in its meaning and usage.

If I may put it this way, the Greeks were kind of definite article happy. They slapped it in front of all kinds of nouns where we just wouldn’t. For example, if you’re reading along in the Greek New Testament you’ll run into statements that "the Jesus" or "the Paul" did or said things. (In other words, they’ll put the definite article in front of a proper name.) They also put it in front of a lot of other words where we wouldn’t use it, and in these cases it doesn’t convey the same force as the English "the."

In other cases, though, they used it with more force than "the" has. In these situations, it has the force of a pronoun, like "that."

There are thus three ways the translator may need to handle the definite article:

1) Leave it untranslated because it doesn’t correspond to English usage/doesn’t have as much force as "the"

2) Translate it as "the"

3) Translate it with a pronoun or similarly more forceful term, like "that"

Pretty much everybody agrees that option #2 is not the correct one in James 2:14. A reference to "the faith" would be most naturally understood as a reference to "the Christian faith," and it does not seem plausible that James wants to say that the Christian faith does not save people.

Translations thus divide between following option #1 (like the KJV and NKJV) and option #3 (like the NIV and NAS).

If you are coming from an interpretive school that tries to solve the James/Paul issue by saying that James is talking about a different kind of different and inferior faith than Paul is (e.g., "dead faith") then that would push you toward option #3. I think that there are problems with that approach, and I’ve written about that elsewhere.

The passage is more naturally handled with option #1, as the King James and New King James translators (who were firmly Protestant) did. The passage naturally reads like one in which the definite article has less force rather than more, and if you aren’t being motivated by a variant of the "dead faith" solution to the James/Paul problem, I don’t see why you’d want to go with option #3.

Thus Protestant author Bob Wilkins (who founded a ministry in support of the doctrine of sola fides) writes:

The Greek merely has the definite article. The noun faith occurs 11 times in vv 14-26. Of the 11 uses, 8 times James uses the definite article. Yet clearly in none of the other 7 places does it make any sense to translate the noun and article as that faith or such faith. For example, v 17, if handled the same way as some translate v 14b, would read, "Thus also that faith by itself, if it does not dead." Is there some kind of faith, then, that is not dead when devoid of works? Hardly. James’s point is that faith without works is dead. Not some special kind of faith [SOURCE].