Epistle of Jude

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A letter twenty-five verses long opens by telling the reader exactly who is speaking and on whose authority. The writer names himself a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James — one sentence, and almost every later argument about the Epistle of Jude runs back to it. He claims no apostolic office and no name of his own weight; he stands as a slave of his Lord and as the kin of another man, James, well enough known to need no further identifying. In the early churches there was only one James who could be left so bare — James the Just, the brother of Jesus and head of the Jerusalem community. To be that James’s brother was to be a brother of Jesus as well, one of the kinsmen the Gospels name; and so the smallest of New Testament books presents itself, by implication, as the work of a member of the Lord’s own family. Whether the implication is the author’s own claim or a later writer’s borrowed cloak is the question the letter sets going and never closes.

The occasion is stated and then abandoned. Jude had meant to write to his readers about the salvation they held in common; instead he found he had to write urgently, exhorting them to contend for the faith once delivered to the holy ones. Something had intervened. Certain people, he says, have crept in unawares — slipped in among the faithful at table and assembly — turning the grace of God into license and denying the only Master and Lord. Who they were in the flesh, what they taught, where they gathered: none of this is given. The letter is a denunciation aimed at men the first readers could identify and the later reader cannot. What survives is the shape of the alarm, not its object.

A litany of the fallen

Against the intruders Jude does not reason; he recites. The body of the letter is a chain of exempla, instances of the once-favored who were judged and destroyed, each laid down as a pattern of the fate now waiting for the men who have crept in. The Lord saved a people out of Egypt and afterward destroyed those who did not believe. The angels who did not keep their proper domain but left their own dwelling he has held in eternal chains under darkness, reserved for the judgment of the great day. Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, having given themselves to unnatural lust, lie as an example, undergoing the punishment of eternal fire. Three judgments, drawn from the Old Testament and from the lore that had grown up around it, set in a sequence that is its own argument: the rescued can be unmade, the heavenly can be chained, the cities can burn.

A second triad follows, sharper and more personal. Woe to them, Jude cries, for they have gone the way of Cain, and rushed for profit into the error of Balaam, and perished in the rebellion of Korah. The three names carry the whole weight without explanation — the first murderer, the prophet who sold his oracles, the Levite who rose against Moses and was swallowed by the earth. The intruders are then heaped with images rather than charges: hidden reefs at the love-feasts, waterless clouds blown past by the wind, autumn trees without fruit and twice dead, wild waves of the sea foaming out their own shame, wandering stars for whom the gloom of darkness is kept forever. The method is rhetorical, not forensic. The letter does not prove that its targets are wicked; it surrounds them with the language of a judgment already certain, until the verdict feels like a description.

Enoch the seventh from Adam

What has fixed the most attention on this short letter is the company it keeps. Jude reaches twice past the bounds of what would become the canon and draws on writings the later church declined to receive, and he does so without a trace of apology. The clearer instance is a direct quotation. Enoch, named the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these very men — and there follows a saying that matches, almost word for word, the opening chapter of the Book of Enoch, the great Jewish apocalypse ascribed to the patriarch who, in Genesis, walked with God and was taken. In R. H. Charles’s translation of that apocalypse the verse reads: “And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones / To execute judgement upon all, / And to destroy all the ungodly: / And to convict all flesh / Of all the works of their ungodliness.” The words are not in Genesis; they are the seer’s. Jude treats them as prophecy in the full sense: the patriarch foretold the intruders’ doom. The very numbering — Enoch counted seventh in the line from Adam — is drawn from the Enochic literature itself, where the seventh place in the genealogy marks him as a figure of completion and revelation. To the author of Jude the book carried the authority of its named seer, and the boundary between it and the scriptures of Israel was not a boundary he felt.

The second borrowing is an allusion, and its source no longer survives whole. Where, Jude says, the archangel Michael, contending with the devil in dispute over the body of Moses, did not dare to bring a slanderous accusation against him but left the rebuking to the Lord — there the intruders, by contrast, blaspheme whatever they do not understand. The scene is in no canonical text. Early Christian writers attribute it to a lost Jewish work that circulated under the title of the Assumption, or Testament, of Moses, an apocryphon describing the patriarch’s death and the contest of angel and accuser over his corpse. The surviving fragments of that work break off before the episode, so Jude’s half-sentence is one of the few traces left of a story once told in full. The point Jude draws from it is a lesson in restraint: even the chief of the angels, facing the accuser himself, would not presume to a reviling judgment, while the men he condemns revile freely what is beyond them.

Taken together the two passages are among the clearest windows in the New Testament onto a moment before the canon hardened, when the writings of Second Temple Judaism — the apocalypses, the rewritten patriarchal testaments, the visionary expansions of Genesis — could be cited as the voice of prophecy alongside the Law and the Prophets. The author of Jude is not smuggling; he quotes openly, expecting his readers to know the books and grant them weight. The unease is entirely on the side of his later interpreters, who inherited a narrower shelf and had to account for a scripture that quoted non-scripture as true.

Tradition and the modern doubt

The traditional reading takes the opening words at face value. The writer is Jude, in Greek Judas, named in the Gospels among the brothers of Jesus alongside James, Joses, and Simon; the James he invokes is his more famous sibling, the leader of the Jerusalem church martyred in the sixties. On this account the letter is early, the work of a Palestinian Jewish Christian steeped in the Enochic and Mosaic apocrypha that flourished in his world, writing while the first generation was still alive to be remembered. The deep at-homeness with Second Temple literature, the absence of any developed church hierarchy, the purely Jewish frame of the argument: all of this has been read as the mark of an authentically early and authentically Palestinian hand.

Much modern scholarship hesitates. Several features cut the other way. The Greek is fluent and rhetorically polished, an unexpected register for a Galilean artisan’s brother. The author looks back on the apostles as a past company, recalling what the apostles of the Lord had foretold, as though their age were over and their warnings now coming true. The very thing the readers are urged to defend — the faith once for all delivered to the holy ones — presupposes a settled body of teaching, a deposit to be guarded rather than a gospel still being preached, which many take as the language of a later, more institutional moment. To these readers the letter is pseudonymous: written under the honored name of the Lord’s brother by someone of a later generation, a practice common in the ancient world and not necessarily felt as forgery, since to write in a revered figure’s name could be to claim his authority for what one believed he would have said. The dating follows the verdict, and the proposals range from the middle of the first century, if Jude himself wrote, to well into the second, if a later hand did. No external evidence settles the matter, and the internal evidence points both ways at once.

Two Peter and the contested canon

Jude’s afterlife is tangled with another short letter against false teachers, the Second Epistle of Peter. The second chapter of 2 Peter runs parallel to Jude through much of its length — the same fallen angels, the same Sodom, the same waterless and wandering imagery, the same rhetoric of judgment — so closely that one must depend on the other or both on a common source. The dominant view among scholars is that 2 Peter drew on Jude, expanding and smoothing its language and quietly dropping its quotations from the non-canonical books, as though a later writer found the apocryphal citations awkward where Jude had felt no awkwardness at all. The reverse direction has had its defenders, and the question is genuinely contested; what is not contested is the literary kinship of the two letters, which has made them companions in every discussion of the early canon.

That canon received Jude slowly and not without resistance. The late second-century list known as the Muratorian Canon already counts it among the accepted writings, and Tertullian cites it as scripture, going so far as to use its quotation of Enoch to argue for the standing of the Enochic book itself. Clement of Alexandria knew it and wrote on it. But the very features that make the letter interesting also made it suspect. Origen records that its authority was doubted by some. Jerome reports that many rejected it precisely because it quoted the apocryphal Enoch as prophecy — the same boldness that marks its character became the ground of the objection to it. The fourth-century church historian Eusebius, sorting the books into the acknowledged and the disputed, placed Jude among the antilegomena, the writings spoken against — recognized by many, contested by some, not yet beyond question. In time the contest closed in its favor, and by the late fourth century its place among the catholic epistles was secure.

Texts and scholarship

The Greek text is established in the standard critical editions of the New Testament; the citation in Jude 14–15 can be read against the apocalypse it quotes in R. H. Charles’s still-current translation of the Enochic literature, The Book of Enoch (1912), and within the broader corpus he gathered in The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913). The fullest modern treatment of the letter and its sources is Richard Bauckham’s Jude, 2 Peter (Word Biblical Commentary 50, 1983), with its detailed catalog of the parallels to the Testament of Moses and the Enochic citation; Bauckham developed the case for an early, Palestinian Jude in Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church (1990). The Enochic background, and the standing of 1 Enoch in the world Jude shared, are mapped in George Nickelsburg’s Hermeneia commentary, available in the one-volume 1 Enoch: The Hermeneia Translation (2012). For the early reception and the disputed canonical status, the relevant testimony is collected in Bruce Metzger’s The Canon of the New Testament (1987), which traces the path of the catholic epistles from contested to received.

The same scholarship places the letter within a thick context: the New Testament’s other contested catholic epistles, among them the Epistle of James; the warnings against false teachers folded into Colossians and the later Pauline correspondence; and, beyond the canon’s edge, the writings of the Apostolic Fathers and the non-canonical Epistle of Barnabas, which shared Jude’s world and in some early lists hovered near the boundary it only just crossed. Its eschatological frame — the coming of the Lord with his myriads of holy ones to judge, the chains of darkness kept for the angels until the great day — belongs to the wider current of early Christian eschatology that runs through Revelation and the apocalyptic strand of the Bible as a whole.

The letter itself answers the alarm it raised. After a final charge — to build themselves up, to keep themselves, to have mercy on the wavering and snatch others out of the fire — Jude turns from the men who have fallen to the one who does not let his own fall. The closing doxology lifts its eyes to him who is able to keep them from stumbling and to set them faultless before the presence of his glory with great joy, the only God their Savior, to whom belong glory and majesty, dominion and power. The whole letter has been a catalog of those who left their place and were unmade — the angels who abandoned their domain, the cities consumed, the wandering stars kept for the dark. The last word names the opposite power: a keeper who holds the faithful upright exactly where the intruders slipped, the brief and furious warning resolving into the single image of a hand that does not let go.

→ In the library: Charles — The Book of Enoch (1912) · Charles — Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the OT (1913)

→ Related: Revelation · Eschatology · Devil · Epistle To The Colossians · Second Epistle To Timothy · Second Epistle Of Peter · Book Of Enoch · Michael · New Testament · Canonization · Apostolic Fathers