Sermon Tone Analysis

Summary

The letter of Jude is one of the shortest books in the Bible.

Its content, however, is dense, offering a variety of fascinating topics for study.

In this episode we embark on a series book study of the epistle of Jude.

Introduction

This is going to be our standard introductory episode.

For those who may not have listened to book studies before, we’re not going to do verse-by-verse.

It’s not a commentary, but in a letter this short it might seem like it in places.

We’ll get close to that, but we’re not writing out a commentary.

It’s just sort of going through the book and whatever I find interesting or think the audience might find interesting, we’ll camp on those things.

So as we typically do in these introductory episodes, we’ll hit first some introductory issues, which is going to be for the most part this episode, but we’ll get as far as the first three verses today and then just resume as we keep going through the book.

Again, it’s not long, but there’s a lot of stuff in it to talk about.

So with that in mind, the first general thing that we should observe that might actually come in handy later (and I’ll give you a heads up as to when that might be).

Structurally, Jude is a typical first-century letter.

There are lots of noncanonical examples of ancient letters that have been recovered from Jude’s time period and the time period of the New Testament.

It has a three-part structure.

There’s an opening greeting and, of course, we get that in the first couple verses.

Then there’s the main body of the content, and in Jude’s case that is verses 3-23.

Then there’s a closing salutation or benediction—the last 2 verses, verses 24 and 25.

So Jude conforms rather nicely to what you would think of as a typical letter between the person writing it and a specific audience, as you get hundreds and hundreds of examples from the ancient world.

And again, I think that might come in handy a little bit later when we talk about something specific, but I’ll give everybody a heads-up when we get to that point.

Author

As far as the author goes, the name Jude, believe it or not (this is kind of a trivia question)...

The name itself occurs 45 times in the New Testament.

There are lots of Judes or Judas’.

It’s the same name in the Greek.

And I’m going to quote here from Herb Bateman.

He has a very lengthy commentary on the book of Jude in Lexham Press’ Evangelical Exegetical Commentary Series.

It’s real nice and I recommend it.

Herb writes this.

He says:

The New Testament refers to many men who bore the name Jude.

In Greek, it’s Ioudas.

There is the patriarch Judah, son of Jacob and Leah…

The Old Testament figure that gets mentioned in the New Testament, obviously, like in Matthew 1.

…as well as Judah, son of Simeon and father of Joseph.

Luke 3:30 mentioned the genealogies of Jesus, so those are some of the more obvious ones.

Herb continues:

Obviously, neither of these two Old Testament figures wrote the letter.

There is also the revolutionary Judas the Galilean (Acts 5:37), and the infamous disciple of Jesus, Judas of Iscariot.

And he’s mentioned, of course, a lot.

These two seem unlikely candidates because both died prior to Jesus’ crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension.

There is Jude son of James and disciple of Jesus (Luke 6:16, John 14:22, and Acts 1:3) and Jude the brother of James (Jude 1:1) [the letter that we’re discussing], who was also the half-brother of Jesus.

So Jude, the brother of James, in Jude 1:1 is… Again, Herb takes it and I’m going to take it as the half-brother of Jesus.

We will get to why in a moment.

So again, we notice that Jesus has brothers and sisters, and this Jude figure is one of them.

Herb writes:

Finally, there is Judas of Damascus, with whom Saul of Tarsus resided after his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:11), and Judas also called Barsabbas, the Jerusalemite prophet (Acts 15:22, 27, 32).

Of these latter four options, three have been suggested as possible candidates for authorship: Judas son of James, Judas Barsabbas, and Judas, the blood brother of James.

And again, the half-brother of Jesus.

So let’s talk a little bit about those three.

Judas the son of James… It used to be (prior to the 19th century anyway) that this Jude was considered the author of the book.

So if you have a really old commentary, maybe in public domain, they might take this position.

And this is based on the assumption that this disciple’s description (referred to as Ioudas Iakobou in Luke 6:16 and Acts 1:13)… It’s based on the assumption that this phrase literally should be translated “Judas, brother of James,” even though it never says that.

Ioudas Iakobou literally is “Judas of James,” but some people back in the day believe that it should be translated, “Judas, brother of James” on analogy to Jude 1.

In other words, they used Jude 1 to interpret Luke 6:16 and Acts 1:13.

But if you go to Jude verse 1, it actually has a different wording.

It’s Ioudas adelphos de Iokobou—Judas brother of James.

So the two are not worded the same way, but again, back in the day, the assumption was that the Ioudas Iakobou, “Judas of James” literally, should be interpreted as the brother of James because of Jude 1.

And again, scholars nowadays are saying well, that’s kind of an odd way to look at things because, again, the wording is not the same.

So we have two different contexts here and two different things that are said.

So the propensity now is to keep them separate.

Ioudas Iakobou in Luke 6:16 and Acts 1:13 should be translated simply as Jude, son of James, Jude who comes from James, or Jude of James.

So Jude, son of James is how we should be thinking in Luke 6:16 and Acts 1:13 of that disciple.

And it’s not the same as the figure in Jude 1. Again, really what drives this bus (other than the difference in wording) is that there is nothing in the gospels or Acts that connects Jude (Ioudas) and Jacob (Iakobou) as brothers, or anything but father and son.

There is nothing that connects them as brothers.

So we shouldn’t assume that this disciple back in Luke 6:16 and Acts 1:13 is the brother just because Jude has that other wording.

Jude 1 is talking about somebody different.

The second option, Judas Barsabbas… It had some support in less recent years, but basically there is no positive external support for this identification.

There were no Early Church Fathers or Patristic Fathers, for instance, that thought that Judas Barsabbas was a good authorial candidate, unlike option number 3, which is Judas, the blood brother of James (and, by extension, the half-brother of Jesus).

This is where the majority of scholars are today, and you can read about this Jude outside Jude 1 in Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55.

So let me just read Mark 6:3.

3 Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and

Judas [there’s the Jude] and Simon?

And are not his sisters here with us?”

Again, they took offense at him.

So you have the mention of this literal blood brother of James who, by extension, would be the half-brother of Jesus.

Now I’m going to quote Herb Bateman again in his commentary.

He says:

This third view has overwhelming commentator support.

To begin with, Jude, the brother of James, provides a straightforward testimony whereby he identifies himself both as the author of the letter, as well as the brother of James (Jude 1).

Furthermore, as Bauckham states, “The preservation of all four names of the brothers of Jesus in Matthew and Mark indicates that all four brothers were wellknown figures in the Early Church.”

Finally, there are several church fathers who explicitly name Jude the brother of James as the author of the letter.

I’ll just end the Bateman quote there, but the four church fathers that he brings up in his discussion (and, again, he has a pretty lengthy discussion of this) are Clement of Alexandria (and his dates are, just call it 150 AD into the 250s), Origen (another church father, 185 to 254 AD), Jerome (347 to 419 AD), and Tertullian (back in 155 to 220 AD).

So you have three church fathers that are living in the second century (in the 100s) who assign the book to this Jude, the blood brother of James (and then the half-brother of Jesus), and we’re going to go with that.

There’s no reason to think that that is aberrant or not tenable.

Provenance and date

Provenance and date… Can you really discern a provenance (the occasion of the letter) based on verses 1 and 2? We might as well read verses 1 and 2 as we jump in here.

The letter says:

That’s the opening and then he launches right into the letter where he says in verse 3:

So right there we learn that the author had one letter in mind, but then circumstances dictate that he is going to be essentially writing a letter about false teachers.

But that’s about all we know for sure.

So how could we assume… How can we really get a secure provenance from that?

And the answer is, we can’t.

The assumption, based on the identity of the author, is that he lived in Judea.

Okay, that’s probably a reasonable assumption if, of course, we’ve identified the author correctly.

Bateman, again, observes this:

After the death and resurrection of Jesus, the siblings of Jesus appear to be with Jesus’ disciples before Pentecost (Acts 1:14), and at least one brother, James, saw the resurrected Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:7).

Without dispute, James was a prominent leader in Jerusalem until his murder in AD 62 (Acts 15:13, Galatians 2:12, Josephus, Antiquities 20, lines 200-204).

Again, it’s a pretty straightforward comment to make.