Thesis Christ: Wealth and Wisdom in the New Testament with Chloé Fling

Your riches are rotten and your clothes are moth-eaten.” Overheard at Reed? In a sense, yes, although this biting takedown comes from the Biblical Epistle of James and makes up the title of Chloé Fling’s thesis. As a Religion/Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies (GLAM) major, Fling examines the incongruities of the Epistle of James in the New Testament to argue that an intentional subversion of convention is presented in order to criticize wealth.

As Fling discovered in Religion 345: The New Testament, not much has been said about the Epistle of James in academic literature. Undeterred, the lack of sources inspired Fling to make her own foray into the subject as the topic of her thesis.

Fling related some of the difficulties of working on a more obscure topic, saying “It was just a lot of me going to my advisor every week and being like, ‘Okay, I read fifteen more random texts from antiquity. [The Epistle of James] doesn’t match any of those,’” she remarked. 

However, embarking on a less traveled path proved fruitful. “Within the first month of starting, I had read everything out there and could form opinions, and then started to do work,” said Fling, describing the freedom of conducting a majority of original scholarship in her thesis.

The Epistle of James has proved problematic for many of its earlier scholars because its form and content do not square easily with other epistles in the New Testament, in terms of its unclear author and stringent moral messages. As Fling argues, these issues can be resolved by considering the Epistle of James as a Jewish wisdom text, which is a common genre in ancient Mediterranean writing. In the history of scholarship on the Epistle of James, Fling is only the second person to theorize that it could have been a wisdom text. 

At the same time, her attempt to make sense of the genre is complicated by idiosyncratic messaging within the epistle. The Epistle of James attacks wealth, whereas typical wisdom literature would praise the virtues of the rich. For Fling, these contradictions represent an intentional effort to explain and establish the limits of existing principles of wisdom at the time of the epistle’s creation.

Fling spoke highly of her experience embarking on original scholarship in an understudied topic. “That was really satisfying because no one had ever done work like that on James,” she reflected. Looking ahead, Fling plans to keep her options open as she considers various opportunities before her eventual plan of going to grad school.