First notice how weird φονεύετε is in verse 2, and how much less weird φθονεῖτε would have been, as Erasmus correctly points out. [I must have read that φονεύετε about ten times before realizing that it must be φθονεῖτε. I Googled and found that I had only discovered an old chestnut.]
φθόνος is comparatively rare in the NT/Septuagint, but much more common in Philo and Josephus, whose language strikes me as much closer to James.
James is not accusing them of being actual adulterers. He's accusing them of being spiritual adulterers because of their devotion to worldly pleasures. This is obvious. If you miss it, you take a juvenile parody of the sense and go off in juvenile directions.
πρὸς φθόνον adverbial might be less explicit than a straight adverbial. Maybe "approaching jealousy" or "like jealousy", because he does not want to attribute the negative characteristic to God. But the old Testament descriptions (Ezekiel, Isaiah) of God's relationship and jealousy over his unfaithful or whorish wife, picturing Israel, are clearly in mind.
Michael's "bullshitting" isn't really defensible. You'd want to be able to point to a pattern of unlikely unsourcable quotations to make that claim, and it's just not there in James or the NT in general, even in the letters making unlikely authorship claims.
Statistics: Posted by jeidsath — Fri Jul 12, 2024 5:18 am