For the next two examples, James turns to plants. A fruit tree produces fruit according to its nature, and no tree can bear two different kinds of fruits. The idea is similar to Jesus’ teaching about the good tree producing good fruit (Matt 7.16), but the language is different.

The point is emphasized by repeating the address my brethren. Here again we may wish to render it inclusively as “my brothers and sisters” (New Revised Standard Version) or “my friends” (Revised English Bible). (See also comments at 1.2.)

Fig tree, olives, and grapevine are very common plants in the Middle East. The reference to these fruits does not keep to the precise point made in verses 10 and 11. To be fully logical, James would have to speak of a fruit tree bearing two kinds of fruit. However, it is not necessary for the analogy to be as precise in detail as this. The point James wants to make is clear enough: just as it is out of the question for one fruit tree to produce a different fruit against its nature, in the same way the presence of good and bad speech in one Christian person is inadmissible and self-contradictory. The verb yield may be rendered “produce” (Goodspeed, Barclay, Revised English Bible) or “bear” (Good News Translation, New International Version).

In translation we may break the sentence into two; for example, “Can a fig tree bear olives? Or can a grapevine bear figs?” Again these rhetorical questions, expecting a negative answer, may be rendered as negative statements, as Good News Translation has done. Another way to handle this is to add the answer “Of course not” at the end of the questions, as Translator’s New Testament has done. In cultures where “figs,” “olives,” and “grapes” do not exist and there are no words for these types of fruit, translators may use cultural equivalents; for example, “a mango tree cannot produce bananas; a breadfruit tree cannot produce custard apples.” The point here is that a tree produces only its own kind of fruit.

James closes this section by going back to the contrast of two different kinds of water. There are a couple of textual variants in the last sentence No more can salt water yield fresh. Some manuscripts add “so” or “similarly” before the negative in order to harmonize and to enhance the comparison. But this adverb is absent from important manuscripts and so represents a later attempt to smooth out the connection. A second problem is seen in the King James Version rendering “so can no fountain both yield salt water and fresh,” where the words “so,” “no fountain both,” and “and” represent a different Greek text than that translated by Revised Standard Version and Good News Translation. Obviously the word “fountain” is added after “salty” to avoid the strange and difficult notion that salty water can produce fresh. The most reliable text, adopted by Revised Standard Version and most modern translations, is perfectly intelligible though a bit awkward. The use of the word salt here, instead of “bitter” in verse 11, probably has no significance; it is simply a matter of stylistic variation. The salt water may be taken to be a salt water spring, thus the rendering “salty spring” (Good News Translation, Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch; similar also Goodspeed). The Contemporary English Version rendering provides a good alternative translation model: “Does fresh water come from a well full of salt water?” This translation seems to take account of the fact that in most places known by human beings springs normally don’t produce salt water.

Quoted with permission from Loh, I-Jin and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on The Letter from James. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1997. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .