please forgive james

You are invited to send your questions to the Vineyard Boise staff regarding the Please Forgive James series. We will update this page periodically throughout the series with answers:

Q: Who are Jannes and Jambres mentioned in 2 Timothy 3 in regards to Moses? I’ve never read or heard about them.
A: Excellent question. One thing we are pretty certain about is that neither of them is James.

Actually, I cross referenced the information on Wikipedia’s entry on Jannes and Jambres with several Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias, and it has it right and catches the essentials:

Jannes and Jambres, or sometimes Johanai and Mamre, or Iannes and Mambres, are names given to the magicians who contended with Moses and Aaron and were discomfited by the Hebrew leaders in the Hebrew Bible book of Exodus . These names were not given in the book of Exodus itself, but they appear in 2 Timothy 3:8 in the New Testament. Origen says that there was an apocryphal book called The Book of Jannes and Jambres, containing details of their exploits, and that St Paul ’s epistle was quoting from it. This book has not been rediscovered. They also appear in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, together with Moses, as famous magicians of antiquity; Pliny’s citation is also referred to in Apuleius. Numerius, a Pythagorean philosopher, calls them sacred Egyptian scribes. Jewish traditions in the Targums preserve other half-legendary lore about the pair. They are called the sons of Balaam, the unwitting prophet of Peor. It was also claimed that they converted to Judaism, and that they left Egypt at the Exodus; however, they perished on the way, either at the Red Sea or the destruction of the Golden Calf.

The fact that Paul uses these names from popular Jewish tradition is curious, to be sure. At the very least it shows that both were familiar with the “rest of the story” as told in their culture–a story very pertinent to the point Paul is making about the troublemakers Paul and Timothy were dealing with.