Joseph G. Allen, “God’s λόγος in James and Early Judaism,” NovT 67 (2025), 368.
[I]t is difficult to read James 1:18 independently of its allusions to God’s creation of the world. James’s allusions to Genesis 1 in chapter 3 indicate that he is familiar with this portion of Scripture, and James has a penchant for grounding his ethical exhortation in the nature of the created order and humanity’s responsibility as creatures. It is not surprising, then, that James 1:18 uses creation language. There are several indications of this: (1) the use of the phrase “Father of Lights” to evoke God’s creation of the stars; (2) the use of the verb ἀποκυέω, which is used by Philo (Ebr. 30, ἀπεκύησε) and Poimandres 9 (ἀπεκύησε λόγῳ), with the latter using this term to describe God’s creative speech; (3) the use of the noun κτίσμα, which describes what has been created by God; (4) the use of the phrase “creation-face” (τὸ πρόσωπον τῆς γενέσεως) in 1:23, in what appears to be a reference back to these verses; and (5) the use of the instrumental dative, which configures the λόγος as a means of God’s creative action. The creational overtones in this chapter, then, are strong, and warrant reading the λόγος ἀληθείας as an allusion to God’s creation by his word.
The Amateur Exegete 
Hi Ben:
Did you see that the “Is that in the Bible?” website went offline yesterday?
I thought that it was kind of odd given that “A Bible Darkly” also stopped working a few weeks ago. (Wonder if WordPress might have taken down some sites that there weren’t posting frequently enough. Hope there’s nothing else going on.)
That’s two of my five favorite critical Bible studies sites (along with Amateur Exegete, Contradictions in the Bible, and Kirby’s site) off the web in a month….
-J Source
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I just now noticed what happened to Paul’s site. I’ll email him to see what’s going on.
Mark and I talked. He’s burned out it seems but saved a few of his posts from A Bible Darkly.
https://words.markedward.red/2026/02/deletion.html
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Thanks for the updates and sorry to hear about Mark’s website. (Wonder if someone might be willing to archive the full original with his permission.)
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Paul got back to me. It’s a WordPress issue. Hopefully it’s resolved soon.
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Ben, in your assessment, are there indications that Markan priority, as a widely accepted literary hypothesis, is sometimes transformed into a kind of hierarchy of historical reliability among the Gospels?
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That’s an interesting question. In my reading of recent scholarship, I don’t think that’s the case. But that could just be the kinds of scholars I read. I think the issue of reliability is fraught with difficulty and requires the sort of nuanced discussion that is not conducive to the sort of all-or-none approach that, say, apologists often use. For example, Paula Fredriksen thinks that John’s account is, in principle, more reliable than the Synoptics on the issue of how often Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Mark’s Gospel, for example, seems to take place during the final year or so of Jesus’s life, and he only goes up the one time. But surely that couldn’t be the truth. Surely he went up multiple times as John’s Gospel states. Does that mean John is more reliable than Mark? Maybe. I think it’s better to think that the reliability question is the wrong one to ask about these texts since these are literary creations, regardless of the sources that stand behind them.
I need to go back and see if there are any scholars who have used Markan Priority as a kind of doggy-door for reliability issues.
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