Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

simply, Paul views such “works” as irrelevant to salvation,
     while James views them as a requirement for belief in Jesus as Christ. To prove his
     point,James offers a telling example, one that demonstrates he was specifically refuting
     Paul in his epistle. “Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered
     up his son Isaac upon the altar?” James says, alluding to the story of Abraham’s near
     sacrifice of Isaac at the behest of the Lord (Genesis 22:9–14). “You see how faith
     went hand-in-hand with [Abraham’s] works, how it was through his works that his faith
     was made complete? Thus what the scripture says was fulfilled: ‘Abraham believed God,
     and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,’ and he was called the friend of God”
     (James 2:23).
    What makes this example so telling is that it is the same one Paul often uses in his
     letters when making the exact opposite argument. “What then are we to say about Abraham,
     our father according to the flesh?” Paul writes. “For if Abraham was justified by
     works, he has something to boast about, though not before God. Rather, what does the
     scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness’ ”
     (Romans 4:1–3; see also Galatians 3:6–9).
    James may not have been able to read any of Paul’s letters but he was obviously familiar
     with Paul’s teachings about Jesus. The last years of his life were spent dispatching
     his own missionaries to Paul’s congregations in order to correct what he viewed as
     Paul’s mistakes. The sermon that became his epistle was just another attempt by James
     to curb Paul’s influence. Judging by Paul’s own epistles, James’s efforts were successful,
     as many among Paul’s congregations seem to have turned their backs on him in favor
     of the teachers from Jerusalem.
    The anger and bitterness that Paul feels toward these “false apostles [and] deceitful
     workers,” these “servants of Satan” sent to infiltrate his congregations by a man
     he angrily dismisses as one of the “supposedly acknowledged leaders” of the church—a
     man he claims “contributed nothing” to him—seeps like poison through the pages of
     his later epistles (2 Corinthians 11:13; Galatians 2:6). Yet Paul’s attempts to convince
     his congregations not to abandonhim would ultimately prove futile. There was never any doubt about where the loyalty
     of the community would lie in a dispute between a former Pharisee and the flesh and
     blood of the living Christ. No matter how Hellenistic the Diaspora Jews may have become,
     their allegiance to the leaders of the mother assembly did not waver. James, Peter,
     John—these were the pillars of the church. They were the principal characters in all
     the stories people told about Jesus. They were the men who walked and talked with
     Jesus. They were among the first to see him rise from the dead; they would be the
     first to witness him return with the clouds of heaven. The authority James and the
     apostles maintained over the community during their lifetimes was unbreakable. Not
     even Paul could escape it, as he discovered in 57 C.E ., when he was forced by James to publicly repent of his beliefs by taking part in
     that strict purification ritual in the Temple of Jerusalem.
    As with his account of the Apostolic Council some years earlier, Luke’s rendering
     of this final meeting between James and Paul in the book of Acts tries to brush aside
     any hint of conflict or animosity by presenting Paul as silently acquiescing to the
     Temple rite demanded of him. But not even Luke can hide the tension that so obviously
     exists in this scene. In Luke’s account, before James sends Paul to the Temple to
     prove to the Jerusalem assembly that he “observes and guards the law,” he first draws
     a sharp distinction between “the things that God had done among the gentiles in [Paul’s]
     ministry,” and the “many thousands of believers … among the Jews [who] are all
zealous for the law
” (Acts 21:20). James then gives Paul “four men who are under a vow” and instructs
     him to “go through the rite of purification with them, and pay for the shaving of
     their heads” (Acts 21:24).
    What Luke is describing in this passage is called a “Nazirite vow” (Numbers 6:2).
     Nazirites were strict devotees of the Law of Moses who pledged to abstain from wine
     and refused to shave their hair or come near a corpse