As I just said, the short aphorism echoes Jesus’ own teaching and draws the implicit contrast between invoking God’s name as a guarantee of one’s truthfulness over against simple truthful speech. When James says, “Do not swear,” it is not coarse or vulgar speech that he prohibits, but he is prohibiting invoking God’s name to guarantee the reliability of what a person says. When we’re telling somebody something and they don’t believe us, and then we might say, “No,