Chapter 3 THE AUDIENCE OF JAMES AND THE SAYINGS OF JESUS Dale C. Allison, Jr. Perhaps most scholars, when examining the use of the Jesus tradition in James, have concerned themselves chieÀy with the issue of extent: How many substantive parallels are there, that is, how many sayings attributed to Jesus did the author of our book know or at least use? Many have also often shown keen interest in the source(s) of those sayings. Did James know Matthew? Did he know Q? Did he himself hear Jesus and so simply call upon his personal recollection? Such questions are both inevitable and interesting. But there is an important, associated matter that has received much less attention. Seemingly only a few have stopped to ponder whether the passages showing likely debt to the Jesus tradition were intended to function as allusions. Did our author hope or take for granted that his readers would recognize the source of his materials and so appreciate his revisions? Or did he not care one way or the other? To borrow is one thing; to want to be seen borrowing is another. James certainly never bothered to signal clearly that this or that line takes up or rewrites this or that saying of Jesus. Can we ¿nd a satisfying explanation for this fact? One of my aims in the present study is to offer some observations about this last question. Before doing that, however, I should like to consider several closely related topics. 1. Rewriting Scripture John Kloppenborg has, in two recent articles, contributed much to our subject. 1 The central burden of his work is that James, in accord with the 1. John S. Kloppenborg, ‘The Reception of the Jesus Tradition in James’, in The Catholic Epistles and the Tradition (ed. J. Schlosser; BETL, 176; Leuven: Leuven University Press and Peeters, 2004), pp.93–141; ‘The Emulation of the Jesus Tradition in the Letter of James’, in Reading James with New Eyes: Methodological