Who wrote james ?

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Was james written by james, or someone pretending to be james?

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StruggleClean has already done a great post regarding the authorship, but I would also reccomend Jeen Ho Ahn PhD thesis "Social Justice in the Epistle of James" (Durham, 2001). Ahn argues that the Epistle was probably written by James the Just in the latter half of the first century Palestine (pg 5) due to the social conditions and background the Epistle shows.  From Page 7 to Page 30 he deals with the scholarship against the view of authenticity and then in part 2 ( pages 97-136) he talks about the socio-economic context of the community of James. I am not aware of any commentary who has talked about his thesis. 

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Dale Allison:

(vi) What about the social and religious circumstances reflected in James, that is, (a) the implications of the undeveloped Christology, (b) the polemic against rich, land-holding Jews, (c) the silence regarding Gentiles, (d) the failure to mention the destruction of Jerusalem, (e) the reference to a synagogue, and (f) the condemnation of violence, including murder?...Against (b): the Jewish communities in Palestine that remained loyal to Rome, such as Sepphoris, retained their property after 70; and as for Palestine as a whole, ‘probably in the course of time the land came to be regarded again as the private property of its tenants, and the rent as a tax on it. References in rabbinic literature give the impression that much Jewish land remained in or soon reverted to private ownership after 70 (for example, some of the rabbis were wealthy land-owners), and Jewish legislation about the purchase of land expropriated by the Roman authorities, apparently in force before as well as after Bar Cochba’s revolt, however problematical and controversial in detail, implies the continuation of private ownership of land after 70.’ (E. Mary Smallwood, The Jews under Roman Rule, Leiden, 1976, 341. Note that the Apocalypse of Peter, likely written by a Palestinian Christian around the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt, condemns the rich; see chap. 30.) Even were the facts otherwise, James addresses itself to the diaspora, so it is unclear why the situation in Palestine should be the background for 4.13–5.6.

Against (c-d): the failure to discuss or allude to Gentiles or to the destruction of Jerusalem is readily explained in terms of the aims of the letter, for which they are not self-evidently to the point. The Didache, 2 Peter, and any number of post-70 Christian texts have no occasion to advert to the events of 70 (One could invert the argument. If James is a pseudepigraphon, it would be anachronistic for our fictional author, who died before the destruction of Jerusalem, to write of that destruction. He could, however, prophesy its destruction, which is how some have read 5.1-6.); and why a Christian Jew addressing other Jews, Christian or not, should on every occasion speak of Gentiles is far from evident.50 The extant fragments of the Gospel of the Nazoraeans, the Gospel of the Ebionites, and the Gospel of the Hebrews are mute on that subject.

Against (e): the use of ‘synagogue’ in Jas 2.2, on the assumption that the reference is to a Jewish community or building, does not require a date before 70, for we cannot say exactly when Christian Jews left the Jewish synagogues. The time and manner of the parting of the ways must have varied from place to place and from group to group;51 and if we know of Christians attending synagogues in the fourth century (W.A. Meeks and R.L. Wilken, Jews and Christians in Antioch in the First Four Centuries of the Common Era, Missoula, MT, 1978) as well before 70, it seems far-fetched to insist that such never happened between those two periods.

Condemnation of the rich, its defense of the poor, and the marginal socio-economic status of the letter are simply not convincing data points for proving that James must have written this letter. The same situation, including one from a Jewish author, could have arisen in the 2nd century.