You have condemned, you have killed the righteous man: James now makes his final charge against the rich, which serves as a transition to the next subject matter. The charge here reaches the high point of the list in the words condemned and killed. The verb “to condemn” is a judicial term. In this context it suggests that the rich abuse the legal system for their own gain. They not only accumulate wealth for themselves through illegal means, but they also exploit the poor to the point of condemning them by perverting the legal processes. Condemned may also be expressed as “declared to be guilty.” However, it is more likely that the rich took poor people into court to be condemned by a judge. The rich did not do the condemning themselves. So we may translate “You have caused innocent people to be declared guilty,” or in the case of languages that do not use the passive, we may express this as “You had a judge [or, chief] declare them guilty” or “… say, ‘You are guilty.’ ”

What does James mean when he says you have killed the righteous man? Some do not see any possibility of actual killing and so have interpreted this as a symbolic killing of the poor, referring to the failure of the rich in sharing their possessions and to fraudulently robbing the poor of their wages. In Ecclesiasticus 34.22 (a deuterocanonical book) we find a definition of such conduct: “To rob your neighbor of his livelihood is to kill him, and he who defrauds a worker of his wages sheds blood” (REB). Others, however, interpret the saying as a “judicial murder,” understood from the previous verb “to condemn”; that is, by perverting the law, the rich condemn the helpless poor to death. It can also happen that the courts deprive the poor of their livelihood by confiscating their farms or other means of support. Still others feel that James may not have in mind any actual crime in the Christian community that he is addressing. Rather he is echoing the theme of the merciless oppression of the defenseless poor by the rich, and highlighting the extent to which the rich are willing to go in exploiting the poor.

Who is the righteous man (“innocent people” [Good News Translation], “innocent men” [Phillips, New International Version], “innocent one” [Revised English Bible], “the just” [King James Version], “the upright” [Goodspeed, New Jerusalem Bible])? In Greek this is in the singular, and possibly because of this some earlier commentators see it as a reference to a particular righteous person, for example, Jesus or even James. But these suggestions seem out of place in the present context. It is best to take it as a general term referring to innocent or good people. Wealthy people using their power unjustly to oppress the powerless poor and the innocent is a recurring theme denounced by the prophets in the Old Testament (Amos 5.7-12; 8.4; Isa 3.14-15) Further, the idea that the powerful can go as far as to bring about the death of the poor and the righteous is often found in the wisdom literature (Pro 1.10-19; Psa 37.14-15, 32); an especially close parallel to the saying here is found in Wisdom 2.10-20 (deuterocanonical).

Taking the righteous man as a general term, we can render it inclusively as “innocent people,” as Good News Translation and Contemporary English Version have done. On the other hand, if we think that it is best to take it as a collective singular, referring to the kind of person killed in a representative capacity, and if this will be natural in a particular language, we can render it as “the innocent one” (so Revised English Bible) or “the righteous one” (New Revised Standard Version).

He does not resist you: this final clause in James’ charges is problematic. The problem is in deciding whether it is a question or a statement. Most of the recent translations render it as a statement. However, some consider the statement as an anticlimax and therefore have rendered it as a rhetorical question, “Does he not resist you?” with the expected answer to it “Yes, he does resist you.” In this case we still have to identify who “he” is, since the subject is not given in Greek. There are two possibilities:
(1) The first possibility is to take “he” as “the innocent one” who is exploited by the rich. This is apparently the option favored by Goodspeed when he renders the clause as “Will he make no resistance?” In this case what James would be conveying here is “Yes, he will resist you,” with the sense that this will be in the future, that is, on the Day of Judgment. If we wish to take the “righteous man” in the general sense as “innocent people” (in the plural), we can replace “he” with “they.”
(2) The second possibility is to take “he” as God. In this case the rhetorical question can be rendered as “Will God not resist you?” as in the Good News Translation alternative rendering. The answer to the question would be “Yes, God will resist you!”

Of the two possibilities, the second one seems better, as it fits better with the tone of charges and warnings.

The rendering of the last clause as a rhetorical question, while making sense, encounters some difficulty in that the present tense of the verb has to be taken as referring to the future, or even rendered as a future (so both Goodspeed and the Good News Translation alternative rendering). However, had James wanted to refer to the future, he could have altered the tenses accordingly, as he has done in 5.3. It is probably best therefore to render the final clause as a statement and take “he” as referring back to “the righteous one.” The righteous man is unable to resist because he is helpless and defenseless; “he cannot offer resistance to you” (Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch). This last statement need not be seen as an anticlimax. In fact it is quite powerful in several ways. The change to the present tense makes the fact of nonresistance more vivid. The fact that the statement does not have a connective to link it with the previous statement makes the fact of nonresistance more deliberate. In fact it is probably best to make it a separate and complete sentence (Reicke). Finally, a simple statement of defenselessness and powerlessness serves to put the abuse of power by the rich in sharper focus.

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 .