Epistle of Jude

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The Epistle of Jude is one of the shortest books of the New Testament: a single chapter of twenty-five verses, written as a letter and given over almost entirely to attacking a group of teachers the author regards as a danger to the churches. It opens by naming its writer as “Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James” — a self-description that has shaped every later argument about who actually wrote it.

The letter’s occasion is plain even where its targets are not. The author had meant to write about “our common salvation,” but turned instead to a warning: certain people have slipped in among the faithful, men who “pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness” and deny the Lord. What follows is a chain of examples of the punished and the fallen — Israelites destroyed in the wilderness, the angels who left their proper place, Sodom and Gomorrah — each held up as a pattern of the judgment awaiting the intruders. The tone is unrelieved; the letter does not argue so much as denounce.

What has drawn the most attention is the letter’s use of sources outside what became the canon. Jude quotes, as a genuine prophecy, words attributed to “Enoch the seventh from Adam” — a passage found in the Book of Enoch, a Jewish work the later church did not receive as scripture. It also alludes to a quarrel between the archangel Michael and the devil over the body of Moses, a scene drawn from a now-lost apocryphal text. To the author these writings carried authority; the unembarrassed citation is one of the clearest windows in the New Testament onto a world in which the boundary of “scripture” was not yet fixed.

Tradition long held that the writer was Jude (Judas), one of the brothers of Jesus named in the Gospels, which would place the letter early. Much modern scholarship is doubtful: the polished Greek, the references to the apostles as a past generation, and the developed sense of a settled body of teaching to be “contended for” suggest to many a later hand writing under an honored name, a common practice of the period. The question remains open, and the letter’s date is argued anywhere from the mid-first century to well into the second.

Jude’s afterlife is bound up with the Second Epistle of Peter, which reproduces much of its argument and most of its examples — the direction of borrowing being itself a long-running scholarly puzzle. Its standing in the canon was contested for centuries, in part because of the disputed sources it quotes; the early church historian Eusebius listed it among the books “spoken against.” It was received in the end, and remains the New Testament’s briefest and most quotable warning against corruption from within, closing on a benediction that has long outlived the controversy that prompted it.

→ In the library: Charles — The Book of Enoch (1912)

→ Related: Revelation · Eschatology · Devil · Epistle To The Colossians · Second Epistle To Timothy