Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

If you're doing our new testament plan, you've finished your fifth book today, and if you're doing the whole Bible, you've finished your 44th book.

This book has a lot going on, so we'll only have time to hit the major points. Let's get into it.

This book was written by the half-brother of Jesus which is incredible given that

his brothers used to mock him. But this book shows what an incredible change of

heart James went through because it opens with the author

calling himself a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, from mocking him to serving him.

But spoiler alert, this book isn't actually by James, huh?

It turns out King James of King James version fame

wanted to see his own name in the Bible,

so he had the translators mistranslate the author's name and somehow we just let him get away with it.

The real names of James and every other James in the Bible is Jacobus, which is something like

Jacobus in Hebrew and Jacob in English. So we'll call him Jacob because King James isn't the boss of us.

This letter is written to the church outside of Israel, and that's important. It's written to

believers. If we take it out of that context, it sounds like this book is

listing things we have to do in order to earn God's approval instead of them being things that

serve as markers of knowing him. Over the centuries, this book has caused quite a stir because it seems

to be advocating salvation by works which is contrary to everything else in scripture.

But if we remember the rules of Bible interpretation, the first of which is that

scripture is the lens we use for interpreting scripture, and if we remember the

author's original audience and context, then all those things help us understand

this book rightly. In chapter 1, Jacob addresses trials the early church

...