Jude the Letter

Extracts from Bart Ehrman’s Posts.

1. The Letter of Jude in a Nutshell – September 25, 2025
   • Bart’s fifty-word summary — The letter of Jude warns its unnamed readers of ungodly teachers who promote lawless living and who, along with their followers, will suffer the severe condemnation of God on the day of judgment, just like other apostates discussed in Scripture, both humans and angels, who turned to lives of disobedience.
   • In sum, even, even though this one of the shortest books of the New Testament, it is packed with fascinating features.  One other involves its author.  He claims to be “Jude, the brother of James” (v. 1).  Is he indirectly claiming to be Jesus’s brother Jude?  (See Mark 6:3)  If so, was he actually Jesus’s brother?
2. Jude, The Denigration of Angels, and the Followers of Paul
   • In my previous post [Bart] tried to show that the pseudonymous author of the book of Jude appears to be attacking an understanding of the Christian faith endorsed by members of Paul’s churches sometime after his death – that is, he is not attacking Paul head-on, but the views that had developed after Paul’s day to an extreme he would have himself strongly objected to.  I summed up this view with this paragraph.  The alleged opponents of Jude argue that:
     • Antinomian activities (actively sinful lives) demonstrate the full grace of God, which alone brings salvation – see how GRACIOUS God is?  He’ll save you by faith even if you are an immoral Cretan!
   • Or at least the author of Jude portrays his opponents as making that argument.  Whether they did so or not is anyone’s guess; but it does give one pause that Paul himself was falsely accused of something similar already decades earlier (as he indicates in Romans 3:8).
   • Just as the opponents do not merely insist that charis/”grace” apart from good works brings salvation (as in Ephesians), but go much farther (allegedly) in promoting an actual antinomian (lawless) lifestyle, so too the opponents do not merely discourage the worship of angels (as in the DeuteroPaulines), but they (allegedly) actively denigrate them. 
   • When then was he writing?  Apparently, after the Deutero-pauline letters (or at least later than the views found in those letters had been formulated), so presumably at the end of the first century or the beginning of the second.
3. Book of Jude: Who Wrote it? When? And Why? (part 1). Includes Extracts from his textbook.
   • J. Daryl Charles has noted the inordinately large number of verbal parallels between [James and Jude] 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.”^[2]  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.” (= “a second James”)^[3]
   • Eusebius indicates that like the book of James, it was thought by some to be forged although it was publicly read in many churches and thus, possibly, canonical:
4. Jude as Pseudepigraphic (i.e., forged)
   • More important for our purpose here, there are highly convincing reasons for thinking that whoever wrote this letter, it was not Jude, the Aramaic-speaking peasant from Nazareth.^[3]  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.^[4]  As R. Bauckham points out, the book employs  “wide and effectively used vocabulary”; some of its terminology is “rather specialized” (here I give some examples in Greek) other words are relatively rare (more examples).  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.”^[5]  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.”^[6]
   • 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.^[7]  Moreover, he knows the book of 1 Enoch, arguably in Aramaic.^[8]  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?^[9]

From Bart’s post titled “1 and 2 Peter and Jude “At a Glance” here.

Jude At a Glance

1. The author of the book of Jude appears to claim that he was Jesus’s (and James’s) own brother, but there are very good reasons for thinking he was not.
2. The book harshly warns against false teachers (whose views, again, are not set forth) who had infiltrated the Christian community and wreaked havoc in their midst, among other things urging immoral practices.
3. The author warns these false teachers that they need to repent or they will face the severe wrath of God.