Overview of Epistle of Jude

Jude the Brother of James

An initial question to be addressed concerns the book’s authorial claim. There are a number of persons named Jude/Judas in the New Testament : Judas Iscariot (Mark 3:19 and parallels; twenty-two occurrences altogether), Judas the son of James (the apostle, Luke 6:16), who may also be Judas “not Iscariot” of John 14:22, Judas the Galilean in Acts 5:37, Judas who owns a house in Acts 9:11, Judas who is called Barsabbas in Acts 15:22. There are solid reasons for thinking that the author of this letter is claiming to be one specific and arguably the best-known Jude of the early church, the brother of Jesus mentioned in Mark 6:3 (along with James, Joses, and Simon). The author identifies himself as the “brother of James” in v. 1, and Mark 6:3 provides us with the only James-Jude brother relationship in the New Testament. Moreover, one would normally identify oneself in relationship to one’s father, not one’s brother. The brother in this case must be an unusually well-known person to serve as an identity marker for the author—in this case, a well-known Christian. By far the best known James of the early church, of course, was James the brother of Jesus, head of the church in Jerusalem. The author of this short text, therefore, is almost certainly claiming to be a brother of both James and Jesus (cf. Mark 6:3; Matt. 13:55).

In a moment we will see why the author may have wanted to identify himself in relation to James rather than Jesus. Some scholars have objected that Jude was too obscure a name for an author to choose as a pseudonym. The objection has more rhetorical than substantive force, however. On one hand, how many “nonobscure” figures were there to choose from in the early church?

The objection seems to assume that everyone writing pseudepigraphically would choose the names Peter or Paul. On the other hand, and more pressing still, how could Jude be thought of as obscure (leaving Hardy out of the equation)? He was widely known as extraordinarily well connected: his one brother was “the” leader of the earliest Christian community; his other brother was the Savior of the World. Not bad credentials for an early Christian author. More than that, as J. Frey and others have shown, the author is claiming not just to be a brother of James (and thus a brother of Jesus) but also to be closely connected to the letter written by this brother, the New Testament book of James. The connection to this earlier letter is suggested already by the author’s use of the same identifying formula, . Moreover, J. Daryl Charles has noted the inordinately large number of verbal parallels between the two books: 93 cases of verbal agreement out of 227 different words used, 27 of these terms occurring two or more times in both letters: “Astonishingly, each of the twenty-five verses of Jude averages approximately four words found in the epistle of James—an extraordinary rate of verbal correspondence.” His conclusion: “Aside from Jude–2 Peter and Colossians-Ephesians comparisons, the verbal correspondence in James and Jude, considering the brevity of the latter, is unmatched anywhere else in the New Testament.” 30 The writer of the letter of Jude, then, is claiming a derived authority; as Vögtle has put it, Jude’s reference to his literary predecessor gives him a status as “einen zweiten Jakobus.”

Jude as a Forgery

Modern times have seen a healthy split among scholars who see the book as authentically written by the brother of Jesus and of James, and those who consider it forged. 32 Numerous factors give the palm to the latter group. For one thing, the book gives every indication of being produced relatively late in the first century, after the “age of the apostles.”

Here again, as with the book of James, we need to deal with the problem of language. This author too is not just writing literate; he writes very good Greek, not the sort of skill one can acquire simply by spending time on the mission field without years of serious literary training. 35 As R. Bauckham points out, the book employs “wide and effectively used vocabulary”; some of its terminology is “rather specialized” other words are relatively rare The author has “command of good Greek idiom,” his “sentence construction is handled with considerable rhetorical effect.” Bauckham goes on to speak of the author’s “almost poetic economy of words, scriptural allusions, catchword connections, and the use of climax.” 36 In the fullest study of Jude’s style, J. Daryl Charles speaks of the author’s “elevated use … of rhetorical invention, composition, and style,” and mentions, in particular, his use of “parallelism, antithesis, figures of speech, repetition, ornamentation, vivid symbolism, word- and sound-play.”

In addition, it should be pointed out that the author is not only flawlessly fluent in Greek composition, but he also knows the Hebrew Bible, evidently in Hebrew. 38 Moreover, he knows the book of 1 Enoch, arguably in Aramaic. 39 As a result, we have here an author who is not merely literate—able to read, apparently effortlessly—in three languages, but fully writing-literate in one of them (a second language for him, if he were a native of rural Palestine). How could this be true of Jesus’ brother, an Aramaic-speaking peasant from a small hamlet of Galilee, who no doubt like his father was a common laborer?

1. Record on Jude’s family:
2. As a side note, I might mention that we have some record about Jude’s family from later times, which gives us no indication that it came from the upper classes that could afford the time and money for education. Hegesippus tells the story of Jude’s grandsons brought before the emperor Domitian, when he learned they were from the line of David and so, possibly, instigators of a kind of messianic uprising against the state. These men convinced Domitian that they were poor farmers who could barely eke out an existence working full-time on the land, showing him their calloused hands as proof. And so he set them free (Eusebius H.E. 3.19–20). There can be little doubt that the report is apocryphal. It defies belief that the Roman emperor himself would cross-examine Jewish peasants from Palestine, let alone that he would do so out of fear that their insurgency might cripple his empire. But the story does show how Jude’s family was remembered in the early church: not as aristocratic elites with wealth and leisure to receive the refined benefits of higher education. Just the contrary, they continued to be known as lower-class peasants who engaged in full-time manual labor simply to survive. Nothing suggests that their progenitor, Jude, was any different. In short, the book of Jude appears to have been written relatively late in the first century, after the age of the apostles, by a highly educated Greek-speaking (and -writing) Christian who was able to negotiate the complexities of both the Hebrew Bible and surviving Aramaic literature. Whoever this elite, well-trained figure was, he was not the Aramaic-speaking peasant of Nazareth, the brother of Jesus and James.

Nature of the Polemic

It is impossible to say whether any such opponents really existed. But they certainly existed in the imagination of the author, whose attacks appear to be directed against Pauline Christians. It is this opposition to Paul—at least as conceived in the mind of the author—that explains, then, the choice of the pseudonym “Jude.” P. Davids is off-base to argue that an author wanting to choose a false name would not have chosen an “obscure” figure such as Jude, as we saw out the outset. Indeed, this author chose to polemicize against the Pauline tradition in a way that makes patent sense. By choosing the name Jude he has established his credentials as one closely related to James of Jerusalem, and he, in fact, stands in clear lines of continuity with the letter allegedly written by his more famous brother. His grounds of attack are different, but the target is the same: Paulinists whose radical views had led to the rejection of all authority, angelic and moral.

Kummel presents the reasons that almost all scholars suspect Jude to be a pseudepigraph (forgery) (Introduction to the New Testament, pp. 428):

The author was presumably a Jewish Christian, since he knews such Jewish-apocalyptic writings as the Ascension of Moses (9) and the Enoch Apocalypse (14), and the Jewish legends (9, 11). But the author “speaks of the apostles like a pupil from a time long afterward” (17). Not only does he assume a concept of “a faith once for all delivered to the saints” (3), but against the statements of the false teachers of the End-tim, he adduces in similar manner Jewish and early Christian predictions (14 f, 17). All this points to a late phase of primitive Christianity, and the cultivated Greek language as well as the citations from a Greek translation of the Enoch Apocalypse do not well suit a Galilean. The supposition repeatedly presented that Jude really does come from a brother of the Lord is accordingly extremely improbable, and Jude must be considered a pseudonymous writing. That is all the more fitting if Jude 1 contains a reference to a pseudonymous James (see 27.4).

Norman Perrin writes the following on why Jude is a forgery (The New Testament: An Introduction, p. 260):

The letter is pseudonymous, as is all the literature of emergent catholicism in the New Testament. The most interesting features of this letter are the characteristics of emergent Catholicism it exhibits. The letter speaks of “the faith once for all delivered to the saints”; faith is the acceptance of authoritative tradition, and the writer denounces the heretics and admonishes the faithful on the authority of that tradition. There is also evidence of a developing Christian liturgy. In verses 20-21, “pray in the Holy Spirit; keep yourselves in the love of God; wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ” testifies to the liturgical development of a trinitarian formula. The closing benediction is a magnificent piece of liturgical language, so different in style and tone from the remainder of the letter that the writer has probably taken it from the liturgy of his church.

The terminus a quo and terminus ad quem for this epistle are established by Jude’s dependence on James and II Peter’s dependence on Jude, respectively. It ought to be dated to the beginning of the second century.