Recognition of the parallels between Q material and the Epistle of James has developed in recent years, and has convincingly attested to James’ literary dependence upon Q. If James does constitute an independent witness to the Sayings Gospel, there indeed may be some merit to a limited deployment of the Jacobean epistle in studies of the Synoptic Problem. The present contribution considers the reconstruction of Q through comparison with several of its Jacobean parallels, surveying the extent to which James can be fruitfully deployed. While scholars should certainly exercise caution in using James to reconstruct Q, selective comparison may offer us some new insights, particularly in adjudicating discrepancies between Matthew and Luke. Although the Epistle’s utility is limited because of its lack of verbatim citation of Q, James may be particularly helpful in the contentious debate about the inclusion of the Lucan woes (Q/Luke 6.24–6) into Q and offers some force to the minority position that the woes constituted an original component of Q’s Beatitudes.

Investigation into the origins of the rare compound δίψυχος and cognate forms has been dominated by intertextual methodologies. With a sole focus upon issues of literary dependency, previous scholarship has attempted to trace the neologism to a specific text or author. Such an approach is misguided, given the inherent methodological difficulties of establishing the direction of borrowing between texts of uncertain dates, as well as the tenuous historical record for the attestation of the lexeme. Moving away from intertextuality, in this article it is suggested that recent advances in the study of lexical formation, including translational compounding and prototype lexical semantics, present themselves as a more productive avenue of enquiry.