James 4:11

Μὴ καταλαλεῖτε ἀλλήλων, ἀδελφοί, etc.: this speaking against one another must be taken together with the judging of one another; it is a question of deciding who is and who is not observing the Torah; some of the brethren were evidently arrogating to themselves the right of settling what did and what did not constitute obedience to the Torah, and those who, according to the idea of the former, were not keeping the Torah, were denounced and spoken against. Difficulties of this kind were bound to be constantly arising in a community of Jewish-Christians; if unnumbered differences of opinion with regard to legal observances was characteristic, as we know it to have been, of Rabbinism, it was the most natural thing in the world for Jewish-Christians to differ upon the extent to which they held the Torah to be binding. The writer of the Epistle is finding fault on two counts; firstly, the fact of the brethren speaking against one another at all, and secondly, their presuming to decide what was and what was not Torah -observance. καταλαλεῖ νόμου καὶ κρίνει νόμον : the reason why speaking against and judging a brother is equivalent to doing the same to the Law is because the Law has been misinterpreted and misapplied; the Law had, in fact, been maligned; it had been made out to be something that it was not. It is not a general principle, therefore, which is being laid down here, viz.: that speaking against a brother or judging a brother is always necessarily speaking against and judging the Law; these things are breaches of the Law, but not necessarily for that reason denunciation of it; the point here, as already remarked, is a maligning of the Law by making it out to be something that it was not. It is not a general principle, but a specific case, which is referred to here. εἰ δὲ νόμον κρίνεις, οὐκ εἶ ποιητὴς … κριτής : here again it is a specific case which is referred to; as a general principle the statement would be contrary to fact, for it is possible to give a judgment upon the Law, in the sense of criticising it, or even to denounce it, and yet obey it; the Rabbis were constantly discussing and giving their judgments on points of the Law, and were nevertheless earnest observers of its precepts. When a man misinterpreted the Law, and then acted upon that misinterpretation, and denounced others who did not do likewise, then he was truly not a doer of the Law, but a judge, and a very bad one too.