JUDE: The Unbiblical Epistle

 

According to Tom Bissel – journalist, Bible scholar, and video-game writer (who knew that combo was a profession?)—the epistle of Jude is “the most neglected book of the New Testament.”  The letter weighs in at only 25 verses and it does seem to have suffered some scholarly and pulpit neglect.  It’s even stirred up a bit of hostility over the centuries; more than one esteemed church father has considered it an unworthy addition to the Bible's canon.

An “unbiblical epistle,” if you will.

I’ve got a soft spot for underdogs, so of course this book of the Bible catches my eye for a little blog spotlighting.  I usually focus on single verses or even single words, but this month I’ll take a bite of a whole book.

 

IMPORTANT NOTE

If you’re a little vague on the contents of Jude’s letter, it’ll be far more useful for you to pop out of this blog and read the Scripture yourself, because the words of the Bible are infinitely more edifying for you than mere blogs about them.  Wander back here in five minutes, since it takes less than that (seriously) to get through the entire letter.  Better still, you can sit back and have it read aloud to you without leaving your chair.  Just click here to hear all of Jude in the New King James Version.

 

JUDE THE OBSCURE

The first challenge of reading Jude’s epistle is to figure out who Jude is.  If we immediately think it’s one of Jesus’ apostles, we need to slow down.  The epistle doesn’t say that.  The writer never calls himself an apostle, and in verse 17 he writes of the apostles as if they’re someone other than himself and perhaps even long gone at the time he’s writing:

But you, beloved, remember the words that were spoken before by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ ….

          It’s true that Jesus had two among the Twelve with the name Jude/Judas, one the Iscariot and the other sometimes tagged “not the Iscariot.”  In Greek, Luke calls this Judas “of James” in both his gospel and in Acts, a term which can mean “son of” or “brother of” James.  If you glance at Acts 1:13 in the KJV versus the NKJV, you’ll see that this linguistic problem is far from settled, although most current versions have favored “son of.”

          Whether an English manuscript translates the name as Jude or Judas, the Greek has the same name for each apostle.  The name of the epistle itself is usually rendered “Jude” in English-language Bibles for the purpose of making it clear they’re not penned by the Iscariot.  But as I said above, they are also unlikely to have been written by the apostle Jude (called “Thaddeus” in Mark and Matthew’s gospels).  The writer does say his name is Jude (a name in old Palestina that was as common as John and Mark), but claims no apostolic title and writes about apostles as past luminaries.

 

DID I JUST LOSE A COUPLE READERS?

          Please allow me a quick aside.

          I have a hunch I may have just annoyed a few readers by saying that Jude probably wasn’t the apostle Judas Thaddeus.  Many Bible-believing churches teach it as a given that the apostle Jude and the epistle-writer Jude are the same person, even though Scripture makes no such direct claim.  Still, having assumed for years, even decades, that a Jude is a Jude is a Jude, they may have felt jarred by my explanation, then presumed me misguided, and then clicked away.

          That’s cool.  I mean it.  No one’s salvation rests on agreement over the authorship of Jude.  I do, however, always feel concerned when traditions of men are elevated in our minds to a level of Biblical truth.  Consider: There’s a manmade tradition that Paul wrote the letter to the Hebrews, although that’s unlikely and the letter makes no such assertion.  There’s a manmade tradition that the first five books of Scripture are “the Books of Moses,” meaning he must have written them – also unlikely, especially the parts about Moses’ death and reflections that “in those days, there were not yet any kings over Israel.”  Many assume, even insist, that John of Patmos who authored the Revelation was the same John as John the gospel writer, a claim I debunked at length in a talk (linked here) that I gave at Second Life’s House of Prayer last decade.  John could very well be the apostle with the most manmade concoctions surrounding his life story, a winding tale that was mostly pieced together two hundred years after Jesus lived.  Human traditions.

          Thanks for granting me that aside.

 

THE LITTLE EPISTLE THAT COULD

The earliest church Fathers accepted the epistle of Jude without hesitation, but doubt started setting in after the first and second generations of believers.  Eusebius, one of the early leaders, entered Jude into his list of “disputed writings,” without rejecting it outright.  Origen of Alexandria, another church Father, also spoke of growing doubts about Jude’s place in Scripture.  He said that he himself did not doubt its canonicity, but that many others did.  He was just mentioning it.  For a friend, I guess.

Still, Jude’s epistle held in there and competed its way into the semi-finals, safe for over a thousand years.  Why do I say “semi-finals”?  Mostly because the Bible had one more obstacle to overcome: The Martin Luther hurdle.

Martin Luther tossed plenty of Deuterocanonical books from the Bible, and he had serious concerns about several New Testament favorites like Hebrews, James, the Revelation, and, of course, Jude.  I guess I can understand some of Luther’s reasoning when it comes to Jude.  Let’s chat with him about it.

 

LUTHER: This writer Jude couldn’t be the same person as the apostle Jude!  He speaks of apostles as if they’re someone else, people in their past!

ME: I've already said that, but, very true, he does, right there in verses 17 and 18.

LUTHER: The apostle Jude went to Persia after Christ's ascension, not to Greek-speaking lands, and the epistle’s Greek is too good for a Hebrew!

ME: Again, true, that’s some accomplished Greek that Jude’s got there.  Although let’s not forget that the stories about where apostles went after the close of Scripture is pretty much post-Biblical folklore from later centuries.

LUTHER: He quotes non-scriptural books as if they were scriptural!

ME: I know!  Stories from the “Book of the Watchers” and the “Assumption of Moses.”  So cool!  Jude quotes Gnostic texts and turns them into Bible text!

LUTHER: Not cool, I say!  And the epistle reads like it’s ripped off from 2 Peter.

ME: Actually, Bible scholars say it’s probably the other way around – the writer of 2 Peter found Jude good enough to edit and co-opt.

LUTHER: Why are you contradicting me, girl?!

ME: Chill, dude.  You’re not really here.  I’m just writing a blog post.

 

As time passed, all the New Testament books Luther doubted made it past his editing attempts – even the Revelation, which he really disliked.  (“I see no Christ in it” is one of his more famous statements about the Revelation.)

Still, Jude faced – and faces -- ongoing challenges.  Why does Jude quote non-biblical texts as if they were Scripture – the story from the gnostic text "Assumption of Moses” with Michael arguing with Satan for Moses’ body, and the extended quotation from the Book of the Watchers, an apocalyptic text from the Book of Enoch written in the intertestamental period?  Should we be as suspicious of Jude as Luther was?

 

JUDE WHO?

Okay, so, the apostle Jude probably wasn’t the author.  I’ll stick with “probably” because I like to stay open to discovering I’m wrong.  If I am, I’ll probably blame Luther.

Let’s consider other candidates.  We have a few to pick from, since “Judas” was a popular name at that time.  Parents doing the naming were Jews descended from of the tribe of Judah, after all.

Our main hint: We have the way Jude introduces himself in the epistle – Adelphos Iakobou, brother of James.  Of course, this is the second thing Jude says about himself.  First, he calls himself a Iesou Christou doulos, a Jesus Christ servant.  This little trio of identifiers – Judas, a Jesus servant, the James brother – is very cozy.  And there might be good reason for that.  Judas, James, and Jesus might all have been family.

Mark the evangelist lists the names of Jesus’ brothers when the people of Nazareth wonder about Jesus’ claims to importance: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Judas, and Simon?”  (Jesus’ sisters are mentioned, too, but not named.  Go figure.)

Our epistle-writing Jude calls himself the brother of James, which is a real claim to fame in the early church.  James was certainly Jesus’ brother, and he was the recognized leader of Jerusalem’s new Jesus movement.  Is this the same James as the one mentioned in Jude 1?  If so, that would make Jude a brother of Jesus, too.

Yes, I know.  I just lost even more readers, the Catholic ones, by mentioning Jesus had brothers by Mary.  I’ll press on, though.

Why wouldn’t Jude call himself “brother of Jesus” in his introduction to the epistle if he was, in fact, family?  Wasn’t being Jesus' brother even more impressive than being a brother of James?  Some Protestant commentators think the omission may be humility on Jude’s part, a reflection of his new relationship with the human who’d been his brother Jesus.  Sure, Jude had to mention James to give his epistle street cred.  But when it came to his relationship to Jesus, he was doulos, a servant, a slave.

The few Catholic commentaries I was able to consider while preparing this blog took a different direction.  Several of them declared that the apostle, the half-brother of Jesus, and writer of the epistle were all the same Jude.  However, this seems unlikely.  The Gospels say that Jesus’ brothers didn’t believe during His time on Earth (John 7:1-5), only coming to the faith later.  That a single Jude could be both an apostle and an unbelieving brother, simultaneously, is pretty doubtful.  If the evangelists went to the trouble to refer to Judas parenthetically as (not Iscariot), it seems they’d also mention “his brothers did not believe in Him (except for Judas [not Iscariot]).”

Conservative protestant commentators also throw a few curveballs at the identity of Jude.  As I mentioned earlier, Luke 6:16 refers to our Jude the apostle as Ioudan Iakobou, which early Bible translators translated “Judas the brother of James” to harmonize it with the epistle writer.  But those two words simply mean, “Judas of James.”  Most translations render that as “Judas the son of James,” as I mentioned.

Still, those conservative Protestant exegetes continue to insist it must mean brother, and that the Jude of the epistle was, as Catholics say, the Apostle.  Like Luther, they see no reason for the epistle to be in the Bible if it isn’t the words of an Apostle like John and Matthew and late-comer Paul.

Here’s my pushback, though: “Must be written by an apostle” is an odd demand to put on a New Testament book.  True, the ancients started that idea in order to justify allowing some epistles into the canon.  However, what Luther, the church Fathers, and modern conservative exegetes all seem to miss – you’re getting my opinion here now, but I think it’s a good one – is that being an Apostle is a silly criterion for getting your writings into the Bible.

Mark wasn’t an apostle, and he gets his own Gospel slot.

Luke wasn’t an apostle, and, frankly, his Acts plus his gospel equal 28% of all the words in the New Testament, more than any other New Testament author.

You don’t have to be “conservative” or “liberal” in your hermeneutics to allow non-apostle writers a place in the Bible.  You just have to be logical.  Look at what you’ve already allowed in.  All the Judes don’t have to be the same Jude, and this Jude isn't required to be that Jude.  We can have a Jude multitude.  The Jewish home of ancient Palestina certainly did.

Confusing yet?  There’s more.

I regret to mention that lists of the 12 apostles don’t always agree from one gospel to the next.

Mark appears to call Jude by the name “Thaddeus.”  Some ancient manuscripts have Matthew calling him that, too, while other variations of Matthew call him Lebbaeus.  Some other ancient Scripture manuscripts unhelpfully dub him Judas the Zealot.  Others add the name Jude onto the apostle Thomas's name, because of course we needed more.

I think you see the point:

No one definitively knows who our epistle-writing Jude was or wasn’t.  Too many centuries, too many names, too many of us, myself included, approaching the question with motivated reasoning and cognitive bias.  We will probably never know if all the New Testament Judes are two, three, or many people.  However, we have a single page of writing from one of these Judes (or perhaps a different one altogether), so we do get to know a couple things that will pop out as we read the twenty-five verses of this tiny epistle:

Number One: Jude REALLY loves reading nonbiblical writings, especially crazy tales tied to angels and demons; and

Number Two: He is really ticked off.  I mean, really.

 

WAIT, DID WE EVEN GET PAST VERSE ONE?

          We just did a whole lot of thinking, and we didn’t even get to the second verse of the epistle!  I’ll be honest: I knew that I wouldn’t get past the first seven Greek words of this letter.  I’m saving that for next month, where I’ll dive into just how angry Jude is at those corrupting the church of God from the inside.

          If you’ve read my blog post from last month, you may recall I discussed how a Christian's freedom to judge only includes judging themselves and, with the right heart, their brothers and sisters within the church.  No judging outsiders, just insiders.

          Jude goes all out on the freedom to judge those inside the church.  His fury matches that of any Old Testament prophet as he unleashes his condemnation against

·        those who despise authority;

·        those mounting insurrections;
·        those using churches just to pocket profits;
·        those spouting fake news;
·        those who are lewd or murderous; and most important

·        those just pretending to be Christian.

 

Intrigued?  Then I’ll get to work on it right away so that you’ll have next month’s post: DAT JUDE’S GOT ‘TUDE.

 

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx / YoYo Rez / Iesou Christou doula