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during the 30s and 40s or during the 80s and 90s of the first century. The epistle may show us a local version from a very early period of time (the first two decades after Jesus' death) or a version for a group of people much later in the century who either were not in contact with some other versions or had no interest in participating in other versions they knew about. While this Messianite version is highly limited, it has openings in it that would allow early Christians at any time to move from this version to other more elaborate versions within early Christianity. The suffering of Job leaves the door open for discourse about the death and resurrection of Jesus, the prophetic coming of the Lord invites apocalyptic discourse under circumstances that welcome it, the language against the rich could be a bridge into opposition discourse, and the wisdom discourse could create a context for cosmic Jesus discourse. In other words, participants in this version could be convinced to join a much more elaborate version. It does not seem remarkable, then, that this Messianite version of the venture of faith was included in the canon of the New Testament alongside much more elaborate versions. 4. Conclusion The primary goal of this essay has been to replace the model of trajectories, so dominant in the study of early Christianity, with a model of making Christian culture. The trajectories model (Robinson and Koester 1971), it turns out, presupposes the existence of orthodoxy at the beginning of Christian culture, then imposes a developmental process on the data whereby orthodoxy in multiple forms programmatically and persistently wards off heresy until orthodoxy becomes a dominant culture toward the end of the second century. The data both in the New Testament and outside it during the first two centuries shows us that this perception of the process of the making of early Christianity is not accurate. More recently developed insights into the ways in which humans create culture (Shore 1996) equip us to see that followers of Jesus in various places at various times throughout the first two centuries renamed Jewish practices as Christian practices, subtly or not so subtly changed the rules, and introduced new phrases and nuances to communicate their new understandings of who they were and what they were doing. The goal of this essay has been to exhibit the process of making Christian culture in the epistle of James. Most of the language in the epistle is characteristic of traditional Jewish discourse during the Hellenistic period. Death and resurrection discourse never appears in it. Thus, it does not contain the kerygma many interpreters inaccurately consider to be the center of the beliefs of every Christian group throughout the first century. The epistle exhibits one of the many ways in which Christians during the first century renamed certain Jewish practices, modified both Jewish practices and beliefs by using different language, and introduced new rules designed to nurture their own particular groups in various places throughout the Mediterranean world. Our analysis reveals that Abraham's venture of faith provides the underlying guidelines for the approach to Christian life presented by the epistle of James. Abraham's call by God to go forth on a journey away from his home is signalled in the opening address to "the twelve tribes in the disperson" (1.1). The major topic of the discourse is the trials that test the faith of individuals as they live in the midst of the world. The epistle explicitly cites Abraham as the exemplar of the person of faith who fulfilled the attributes of a "friend of God" in the midst of the most severe kind of testing (2.21-24). As the epistle proceeds, it modifies phrases and terminology in traditional Jewish discourse of the period, creating one of the many Messianite dialects of speech that emerged during the first and second century (Robbins 1996c). As the epistle comes to an end, it introduces a completely new rule for the |