James has not only a new image here but also a new point of view (Hort).
He has, in verses 9-11, shown the inconsistency of two kinds of speech
from the same tongue. Now he goes deeper to the heart behind the
utterance. The comparison is here made between the heart and its
utterance (tongue). The grape and the fig are the commonest fruits in
Palestine. “Each tree is known by its own fruit” (Luke 6:44). Yes, and
Jesus had just said (6:43): “For there is no good tree that bringeth
forth corrupt fruit; nor again a corrupt tree that bringeth forth good
fruit.” It is not uncommon to find the point made somewhat as James has
it. So Epictetus (Diss. ii. 20) says: “How can a vine grow, not
vinewise, but olivewise, or an olive, on the other hand, not olivewise,
but vinewise?”[80] And Jesus says: “Either make the tree good, and its
fruit good; or make the tree corrupt, and its fruit corrupt” (Matt.
12:33). Once more hear Jesus: “Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs
of thistles?” (Matt. 7:16). It is the appeal to life.
It has been charged that James exaggerates the evil of the tongue, but
one who knows life as it is must agree with James. Sirach says, “Curse
the whisperer and the double-tongued, for such have destroyed many that
were at peace” (28:13). Plummer quotes also a clause from the Syriac
that is not in the Greek: “Also the third tongue, let it be cursed; for
it has laid low many corpses.” Sirach (28:14 f.) continues: “A third [or
backbiting] tongue hath unsettled many, and driven them from nation to
nation; and strong cities hath pulled down, and overthrown houses of
great men. A backbiting tongue hath cast out capable women, and deprived
them of their labors.” The “third tongue” injures three classes
(Plummer): the person who utters the slander, the one who listens, and
the one of whom the slander is told. It is a triple sin and only sin.
“Neither can salt water yield sweet,” James adds, and his conclusion
falls with the force of a trip hammer. The crisp wisdom of James about
the tongue makes one wonder afresh if his mother had not taught him some
of these aphorisms as a child.
IX
The True Wise Man
The connection between the paragraph about wisdom (3:13-18) and the
preceding discussion of the perils of the tongue is very close. James is
still thinking of the men who supposed that they had true faith but who
did not practice it; “men who supposed that they had a deeper wisdom and
a larger knowledge than their brethren, and who were continually
asserting their claim to be teachers” (Dale). But Hort considers the
passage on the tongue a “long digression,” a view hardly tenable. These
ambitious teachers had overlooked the havoc wrought by tongue (and pen).
James has given a needed warning about that phase of the subject and now
turns to the subject matter itself. The ambitious teacher will do all
the more harm if he is not merely a bungler of real wisdom but a
disseminator of false wisdom. Already the air was full of all sorts of
fads and fancies that appealed to the unthinking and the unwary. The
Essenes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Epicureans, the Stoics, the
Mithraists, the Gnostics, the Judaizers, the cult of emperor worship,
with more or less distinctness were clamoring for a hearing. There were
professional sophists who traveled over the country with patent
solutions of all problems. Some appealed to the nervous or the neurotic,
like Christian Science today; others to the ignorant, like Russellism or
Mormonism. Paul will later discuss both speech and wisdom “as good
things liable to grievous abuse” (Hort), in 1 Corinthians 1:5, 17; 2;
and 3.