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The total prohibition of oaths (Matt 5:34-37) come from the historical Jesus. The criterion of discontinuity argues that there is no parallel to Jesus' total prohibition of oaths in the Jewish Scriptures, the intertestamental literature prior to 70 C.E., or the NT. The Jewish Scriptures take oaths for granted and imposes them in a few cases. Apart from Jas 5:12, the NT knows of no prohibition; Paul uses oaths with abandon. The criterion of multiple attestation argues that Jas 5:12 represents an independent tradition of the prohibition; Jas 5:12 is parallel to Matt 5:34-37 in both content and structure; James has other examples of Jesus' sayings woven into his epistle without attribution; and Jas 5:12 is at odds with James' treatment of the Law in the rest of his epistle. Hence Jas 5:12 qualifies as an independent witness to an isolated stream of oral tradition preserving Jesus' prohibition. This is Part 2 of a two-part essay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an examination of a Biblical oath formula found in twelve occurrences in the Old Testament. An overview of the translation, contexts, and minor variations of the sentence structure is given, along with the assertion of the author that such discrepancies are deliberate examples of the modification of the formula for a specific literary goal, rather than random examples of stylistic variation.