A Faith Worth Fighting For - Part One Series

Open up your Bibles to Jude. When is the last time you heard that? Jude is the next to the last book of the New Testament, right before Revelation. It doesn’t rank up there on the list of most popular books in the Bible. Not many quotes from Jude are on your refrigerator or being cross stitched for wedding gifts.

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It’s not very popular for a few reasons.

(1) It’s a short book, only 25 verses. By word count it’s the 5th shortest book of the Bible.

(2) It’ deals with a difficult subject, false teachers. Jude has some pretty severe words and, especially in our day, we tend to avoid any hint of judgmentalism.

(3) Jude’s use of non-biblical books. He quotes from a book called 1 Enoch and references another non-biblical work called the Assumption of Moses. It’s hard to know sometimes what to make of those references.

(4) Jude, the author is not well known. All the other books of the Bible are written by more well know leaders in the church. Matthew, Mar, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, James (who knows who wrote Hebrews?) But Jude – who is this guy?

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Let’s tackle that question first.

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Authorship

Jude was a common name in NT times. It’s a variation of Judas (I guess no one could stomach naming a book Judas!). There are at least five Jude’s/Judases in the New Testament. One we can eliminate immediately.

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(1) Judas Iscariot – he killed himself after he betrayed Jesus.

(2) There’s Judas the Galilean who is mentioned in Acts 5:37. Most eliminate him as he is mentioned just in passing as a former Jewish revolutionary.

(3) There’s a Judas Barsabbas in Acts 15, but he never seems to rise to a suitable level of prominence and is not mentioned as brother of James.

(4) There’s another one of the 12 apostles, Judas, the son of James (Luke 6:16, Acts 1:13). But the Jude of this letter refers to himself as the brother of James, not the son of James.

(5) That leaves one candidate – Jude (or Judas) the half-brother of Jesus who is the brother of James.

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Matthew 13:55 (NIV) — 55 “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother’s name Mary, and aren’t his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas?” (cf. Mark 6:3)

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Why does he reference himself to James? James, another common name in NT times, is in all likelihood the brother of Jesus who at first didn’t believe (John 7:5) but later became a leader in the Jerusalem church as we see in Acts 15, 22; Galatians 2, and 1 Corinthians 15:7 (one of the witnesses to the resurrection). Jude likely became a believer after the resurrection since Acts 1:14 says the Lord’s brothers were part of the prayer meetings prior to Pentecost. We learn from 1 Cor 9:5 that the Lord’s brothers were itinerant missionaries, and Jude probably was included here. But why doesn’t he call himself the brother of Jesus? He likely refrains from calling himself the brother of Jesus out of humility and a desire to avoid the appearance of claiming special authority based on his biological rather than spiritual relationship to Jesus. So, this Jude, who likely became a leading figure of the church as well, the brother of James and the half-brother of Jesus.

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Who are the original recipients?

Jude does not specify the audience like Paul does in his letters. He seems to have a church in mind, or a network of churches, but perhaps this was for a wider audience than Paul’s letters. There are no personal greeting. No people he gives thanks to. This is why Jude is classified as a general, or catholic, epistle among the NT documents. It would make sense that these churches were at least partially composed of Jewish people who would be somewhat familiar with 1 Enoch and The Assumption of Moses.

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When was it written?

One way to date this book is to note its relationship to 2 Peter. A lot of the material in Jude is also included in 2 Peter (much has been written about hat that we will not get into). The current consensus is that Jude was written first and Peter made use of Jude. If that’s the case, Peter (according to Christina tradition) died a martyr’s death at the hand of Nero Caesar who died in AD 68. That would mean that 2 Peter was written on later than AD 68 and Jude was written some time before that. So, pretty early on in the history of the church.

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What is a bit unsettling about that is the fact that false teaching has taken root in the church no more than 35 years after the resurrection! Within a generation the core beliefs of the church are being challenged. That reminded me of a sobering quote by John Wesley: