Theopedia

Epistle of Jude

“…contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.”

— Jude 3 (ESV)

Overview

The Epistle of Jude is a one-chapter, twenty-five-verse letter near the end of the New Testament, among the General (or “Catholic”) Epistles addressed to the church at large rather than to a single congregation.1 At only 602 words in Greek, it is one of the shortest books in the New Testament.1 Jude wrote to urge believers to “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3) against false teachers who had “crept in unnoticed” among them (Jude 4).

Author and Date

The author identifies himself as “a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James” (Jude 1). This James is the James who led the Jerusalem church and wrote the epistle bearing his name (Acts 15:13; Gal. 1:19), which makes Jude, like James, a half-brother of Jesus rather than one of the Twelve.2 Conservative scholarship has generally accepted this identification, though some critical scholars have argued the letter is pseudonymous and dates from the turn of the second century.1 Richard Bauckham has argued for a date in the AD 50s; others place it as late as the 80s, depending on how it relates to 2 Peter.1 Either way, the letter’s brevity, not any real deficiency in early testimony, accounts for its comparatively thin attestation among the earliest patristic writers.1

Historical and Literary Context

Jude wrote a brief, urgent letter of warning rather than the “general letter about our common salvation” he had originally intended (Jude 3). He found it necessary to write instead because false teachers, “ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (Jude 4), had already gained a foothold among his readers. The abundant use of Jewish history and tradition throughout the letter suggests the original readers were Jewish Christians.2

Jude’s second chapter closely parallels 2 Peter’s second chapter, sharing much of the same material, imagery, and order of argument.2 Elijah Porter Barrows judged Jude the earlier of the two, “not separated from it by a great number of years.”2 Modern scholarship continues to debate the direction of dependence between the two letters.1

Structure

  • A call to contend for the faith (1-4): greeting, Jude’s change of plan, and the occasion for writing.
  • Examples of divine judgment on the ungodly (5-16): the wilderness generation destroyed for unbelief after the exodus (Jude 5), the angels who “did not stay within their own position of authority” and are kept “in eternal chains” for judgment (Jude 6), and Sodom and Gomorrah, given up “to a punishment of eternal fire” as an example (Jude 7).
  • A call to persevere and the closing doxology (17-25): an exhortation to build up the faith, wait for Christ’s mercy, and show mercy to others, ending in a doxology to the God “who is able to keep you from stumbling” (Jude 24).

Major Themes

Contending for the faith once for all delivered to the saints. Thomas Watson appealed to Jude 3 directly when urging believers to defend Scripture against its enemies: “The Castle of Scripture is beset with Enemies, Hereticks fight against it, we must therefore … contend for the Faith once delivered to the Saints.”3 The “faith” Jude has in view is a fixed body of apostolic teaching handed down once, not a private revelation each generation reconsiders.

Judgment on the ungodly, drawn from Old Testament and intertestamental example. Jude marshals a series of precedents. John Gill read Jude 4’s description of false teachers “who were before of old ordained to this condemnation” as evidence that divine judgment on apostasy is no afterthought but part of God’s own preordination of the ungodly to condemnation for their sin.4 The judgment on the angels “who did not stay within their own position of authority” (Jude 6) rests on the same original uprightness of all angels, fallen and unfallen alike, that Genesis 1:31 and 2 Peter 2:4 also assume.5

The closing doxology. Jude ends by directing his readers’ confidence away from their own strength toward God’s: “Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy” (Jude 24). Gill took this confidence in Christ’s keeping power as itself evidence against the final and total apostasy of any true believer, since Jude could not consistently warn against apostasy while doubting the saints’ preservation.6

Canonicity

Jude’s place in the canon was questioned in the early church, chiefly because the letter quotes non-canonical material. Verses 14-15 draw on the Jewish apocalyptic work 1 Enoch, and verse 9 alludes to a tradition about a dispute between the archangel Michael and the devil over the body of Moses, found in the lost work known as the Assumption of Moses.2 Jerome recorded that Jude’s use of Enoch was the reason some in the early church hesitated over the letter.1 Eusebius accordingly classed Jude among the “disputed” books in his own survey of New Testament reception.2

Despite that hesitation, Michael Kruger notes that Jude’s reception was “remarkably positive”: it appears in the earliest surviving canonical list, the Muratorian Canon; Tertullian affirmed it as apostolic Scripture; Clement of Alexandria cited it and wrote a commentary on it; Origen received it as fully canonical; and Eusebius, despite noting the disagreement, still placed it among the books “used publicly with the rest in most churches.”1

Citing 1 Enoch does not require treating that book as Scripture, any more than Paul’s citation of pagan poets (Acts 17:28; Titus 1:12) or his reference to the unrecorded names “Jannes and Jambres” (2 Tim. 3:8) commits him to the sources those references come from.2 Barrows argued that Jude may simply have drawn on a tradition also present in 1 Enoch, independently of the book itself, and that in any case citing a true statement preserved in a noncanonical source does not endorse that source as a whole.2 The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession includes Jude among the canonical books of the New Testament and, in the same chapter, excludes the Apocrypha and by extension other noncanonical writings from that number.7

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 8, “Problem Books and Canonical Boundaries.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  2. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 501-502. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  3. Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity: Consisting of Above One Hundred and Seventy-Six Sermons on the Lesser Catechism (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1692), 19. ↩

  4. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book II, chap. 3. ↩

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 10, “Creator of Heaven and Earth.” ↩

  6. Gill, book VI, chap. 15. ↩

  7. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 2. ↩