James 4:5

4:5 Or do you think the scripture means nothing when it says, ¹  “The spirit that God ²  caused ³  to live within us has an envious yearning”? ⁴ 

James 3:3

3:3 And if we put bits into the mouths of horses to get them to obey us, then we guide their entire bodies. ⁵ 

James 5:17

5:17 Elijah was a human being ⁶  like us, and he prayed earnestly ⁷  that it would not rain and there was no rain on the land for three years and six months!

[4:5]  ¹ tn Grk “vainly says.”

[4:5]  ² tn Grk “he”; the referent (God) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

[4:5]  ³ tc The Byzantine text and a few other mss (P 33 Ï) have the intransitive κατῴκησεν (katwkhsen) here, which turns τὸ πνεῦμα (to pneuma) into the subject of the verb: “The spirit which lives within us.” But the more reliable and older witnesses (Ì⁷⁴ א B Ψ 049 1241 1739 al) have the causative verb, κατῴκισεν (katwkisen), which implies a different subject and τὸ πνεῦμα as the object: “The spirit that he causes to live within us.” Both because of the absence of an explicit subject and the relative scarcity of the causative κατοικίζω (katoikizw, “cause to dwell”) compared to the intransitive κατοικέω (katoikew, “live, dwell”) in biblical Greek (κατοικίζω does not occur in the NT at all, and occurs one twelfth as frequently as κατοικέω in the LXX), it is easy to see why scribes would replace κατῴκισεν with κατῴκησεν. Thus, on internal and external grounds, κατῴκισεν is the preferred reading.

[4:5]  ⁴ tn Interpreters debate the referent of the word “spirit” in this verse: (1) The translation takes “spirit” to be the lustful capacity within people that produces a divided mind (1:8, 14) and inward conflicts regarding God (4:1-4). God has allowed it to be in man since the fall, and he provides his grace (v. 6) and the new birth through the gospel message (1:18-25) to counteract its evil effects. (2) On the other hand the word “spirit” may be taken positively as the Holy Spirit and the sense would be, “God yearns jealously for the Spirit he caused to live within us.” But the word for “envious” or “jealous” is generally negative in biblical usage and the context before and after seems to favor the negative interpretation.

[3:3]  ⁵ tn Grk “their entire body.”

[5:17]  ⁹ tn Although it is certainly true that Elijah was a “man,” here ἄνθρωπος (anqrwpo") has been translated as “human being” because the emphasis in context is not on Elijah’s masculine gender, but on the common humanity he shared with the author and the readers.

[5:17]  ¹⁰ tn Grk “he prayed with prayer” (using a Hebrew idiom to show intensity).