Luke Timothy Johnson on Martin Luther on James and Paul

[James] throws things together so chaotically that it seems to me he must have been some good, pious man who took a few sayings from the disciples of the apostles and thus tossed them off onto the paper. James is a right strawy epistle.--Martin Luther

But these observations still miss the mark, for they allow the presumption to stand that James and Paul were addressing the same topic. They were not. In Paul, the contrast between faith and works was one between the faith in and of Jesus, as a soteriological principle, and the observations of the commandments of Torah, with its promise of life. The contrast in James is one that was common among Hellenistic moral philosophers between speech and action.... James decries a merely verbal profession of faith that fails to be lived out in appropriate behavior.--Luke Timothy Johnson
___
Quoted in Ben Witherington III, The Indelible Image: The Theological and Ethical Thought World of the New Testament, Volume One, p. 277.