Who Wrote the Book of Jude? (3 of 4)

Twenty-five verses, written by a man who did not believe his own brother during the ministry, quoting a book that never made it into anybody’s Bible.

Jude is short and strange and it repays attention out of all proportion to its length.

How Does Jude Identify Himself?

As a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James.

That opening line does a great deal of work in nine words. He does not call himself an apostle. He does not claim to be Jesus’s brother, though he almost certainly was. He identifies himself through James.

Which James? The one who needed no further identification, the leader of the Jerusalem church, the brother of Jesus. In a letter written to Christians in the first century, an unqualified James in a position of authority means that one.

So Jude is presenting himself as part of Jesus’s family, and doing it obliquely, through a relative rather than directly.

Is Jude the Apostle Thaddaeus?

Almost certainly not, and the confusion is common enough to be worth stopping on.

Mark and Matthew list an apostle called Thaddaeus. Luke and Acts list the same man as Judas son of James. Two names, one apostle, and John introduces him with the parenthesis that has outlived him: Judas, not Iscariot.

Notice the difference. That apostle is Judas son of James, which makes James his father. The letter’s author is Judas brother of James, which makes them siblings.

Parentage and sibling relationship are different claims, and the letter states the one that places its author in Jesus’s family rather than among the Twelve.

The conflation is easy to see how it happens. Two men named Judas who are not Iscariot, both attached to a James, within a few pages of each other. It is still a conflation.

Why Would Jesus’s Brother Not Call Himself That?

That is the most interesting thing in the opening line.

He had the credential. Naming it would have settled the letter’s authority in three words. He does not use it.

The background makes it sharper. John 7:5 records that Jesus’s own brothers did not believe in him during the ministry. Something changed after the resurrection, since Acts 1:14 has the brothers gathered with the disciples and Paul records a resurrection appearance to James specifically.

A man who spent the ministry not believing, and who came to faith afterward, might well decline to trade on a family relationship he had spent years failing to recognise. That reading is inference, but it fits both the silence and what we know happened.

Why Does Jude Quote the Book of Enoch?

Because he expected his readers to know it, and that tells you something about the world he was writing in.

Verses 14 and 15 attribute a prophecy to Enoch, the seventh from Adam, about the Lord coming with his holy ones to execute judgment. That prophecy is found in 1 Enoch, a Jewish work from the centuries before Christ that is not in the Hebrew canon or in most Christian ones.

Jude also appears to draw on a tradition about the archangel Michael disputing with the devil over the body of Moses, which is not in the Old Testament and is generally connected to another work outside the canon.

This is not a slip. He is writing to people for whom that literature was familiar and usable, and he treats it as making a point they will accept. Which Enoch he is quoting, and why none of that literature made the canon, is worked through in Which Book of Enoch?

What it does not establish is that Jude regarded 1 Enoch as Scripture. Paul quotes Greek poets without canonising them. Citing a source as saying something true is not the same as ranking it.

But it does establish the shape of the world. Second Temple Jewish literature was live material for the first Christians, and reading the New Testament as though it emerged from the Old Testament alone leaves out the room the writers were standing in. Reversing Hermon follows that thread from the Watchers material into the mission of Jesus.

Why Was Jude Disputed in the Early Church?

Partly because of the Enoch quotation, and partly because it is short and hard to trace.

Jude appears among the disputed books rather than the acknowledged ones in the earliest surviving discussion of the collection. Later writers note directly that some rejected it because of the appeal to Enoch.

It survived the disputes and it was received, but the process is worth knowing. A short letter by a marginal figure, quoting a work outside the canon, took time to settle. The canon did not arrive whole.

What Is the Relationship Between Jude and 2 Peter?

They overlap heavily, and the overlap is not accidental.

A substantial portion of Jude appears in reworked form in the second chapter of 2 Peter, covering the same examples of judgment and the same denunciation of false teachers.

The three possibilities are that Jude used 2 Peter, that 2 Peter used Jude, or that both drew on a common source. The majority view is that 2 Peter used Jude, partly on the grounds that the Enoch material is handled more cautiously in 2 Peter, which looks like a later writer smoothing an earlier one.

That is a judgment about direction, not a settled fact. What is not in doubt is that the two documents stand in a literary relationship, and any account of either has to reckon with the other.

Part of a series on the New Testament writers who were not among the Twelve.

Footnotes2

1. The distinction between Judas son of James and Judas brother of James is one line of Greek, and it separates an apostle from a member of Jesus's family. Getting it wrong assigns a canonical letter to a man who almost certainly did not write it and removes it from a man whose story is considerably more interesting.
2. Jude's use of Second Temple material is worth more attention than the letter usually receives. It is direct evidence that the earliest Christian writers were formed by a literature broader than the Hebrew canon, and that they could reach for it without apology in a letter meant to correct error.

Sources

1 Enoch 1:9. The passage quoted at Jude 14-15. Widely available in translation.

Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History 3.25. Places Jude among the disputed books in the earliest surviving systematic discussion of the collection. Free in full at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Where the sourcing stops: the reading of Jude's refusal to claim family relationship as connected to his earlier unbelief is my own inference, offered as a fit rather than a demonstration. The majority position on the direction of dependence between Jude and 2 Peter is described here rather than argued.