<p>4:16<em> But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil</em>- We have previously commented on how their blatant rejoicing in their sin was due to their reasoning that it was impossible that they could sin- hence &quot;all such&hellip; <em>is</em> evil&quot;. Similarly the Judaist element at Corinth rejoiced in the fact that there was a division in the ecclesia between the Paul and Apollos factions (1 Cor. 4:6,7), and that they retained in fellowship a brother who had brazenly committed incest for all to see (1 Cor. 5:6); this all shows the same mentality, of openly rejoicing in the freedom that they believed they had from all moral and spiritual constraints. &quot;Rejoice&quot; really means to glory or boast, which means that it had to be done to someone else. To boast that they did not need to say &quot;If the Lord will&quot; about their plans would not have made many eyes turn in the world generally; therefore it is more likely that they were boasting to the poor brethren whom they had spiritually condemned, saying that the superior revelation which they had received enabled them to have freedom from that kind of spiritual requirement which the poor brethren needed to obey.</p><p>&quot;Boastings&quot; occurs only three times elsewhere, and each time it is in the context of false Judaist reasoning. Rom. 1:30 describes how Israel in the wilderness, and also the last day Jewish ecclesias, were &quot;boasters&quot;. If this means spiritually boastful, then it implies that the rejected generation in the wilderness thought up ways to spiritually justify themselves; hence Rom. 1:30 goes on to describe &quot;inventors of evil things&quot;, i.e. the alternative tabernacle system of worship that they created and carried with them, based around their idols (Acts 7:43,44). 2 Tim. 3:2 describes the boastful infiltrators of the ecclesias in the last days (2 Tim.3:6), who had once known the Truth (2 Tim. 3:5 cp. Rom. 2:20; 2 Tim. 1:13) but through their claims to superior knowledge and revelation ( 2 Tim. 3:7) and giving way to their corrupted natural mind (2 Tim. 3:8) were &quot;reprobate concerning the faith&quot;. This very well describes the Judaist brethren to whom James was writing.</p><p>&quot;Boasting&quot; also occurs in 1 Jn. 2:16 translated &quot;pride&quot;: &quot;All that is in the world (the Jewish world- so the phrase normally means in John's writings), the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the pride (boasting) of life, is not of the Father (as the Judaists were claiming?), but is of the world. And the world passes away&quot; (in AD70). We have suggested that this boasting of life was a spiritual boasting by the Jews that they were blessed with superior wisdom and justification with God. 1 Jn. 2:16 is looking back to Eve's sin in Eden (Gen. 3:6)- she saw that the fruit of the tree of knowledge was good for food (the lust of the flesh), pleasant to the eyes (lust of the eyes) and to be desired to make one wise (pride of life). The Jews' desire for worldly wisdom was like Eve in Eden. Her motivation for taking the fruit would therefore have been that of spiritual pride, the desire to boast to her husband that she was now under no restrictions at all and had a wisdom equal to that of God. Exactly the same was true of the first century Judaizers.</p>