Temptation as Self-Mastery Innovation in James

The Letter of James uses the concept of “temptation” in a way that innovates upon the discourse of Greek and Roman self-mastery to fit within a Jewish milieu. Such usage has no clear precedent before the first century CE. The language throughout the letter, though observably Jewish, presupposes a strong familiarity with self-mastery discourse common to Greek and Roman moral philosophy. But “temptation” itself (πειρασμός) is unattested in Greek before the LXX and missing from the philosophers’ vocabulary of self-mastery, and earlier Jewish literature does not make one’s own desire the agent of tempting. The application of this term within James is thus an innovation within both spheres of thought. This thesis surveys self-mastery as presented in Greek and Roman moral philosophy and then the New Testament. It then focuses on James, through a close reading of “desire” (ἐπιθυμία), “temptation” (πειρασμός), and its verbal form (πειράζω) across the Greek and Roman philosophers, the LXX, and the NT, and of how James uses them. It concludes that the Letter of James uses “desire” as the moral philosophers do, yet by making “one’s own desire” the agent of temptation, sets this desire within a theological framework in alignment with the LXX and the rest of the NT. This stands as an alternative to the influential yēṣer reading, which takes James’s “desire” as a Greek equivalent of the yēṣer, the “inclination” developed more formally in later rabbinic literature. This thesis instead incorporates Greek and Roman moral discourse into its interpretation and suggests a framework of fermentation to understand how ideas of Greek and Roman philosophers have irreversibly fused with those of the Septuagint within the Letter of James.