Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Jude the Denigration of Angels and the Followers of Paul, Written by Bart Ehrman, read by Ken Teutsch in my previous post, I tried to show that the pseudonymous author of the Book of Jude appears to be attacking an understanding of the Christian faith endorsed by members of Paul's churches sometime after his death.
[00:00:24] That is, he is not attacking Paul head on, but the views that had developed after Paul's day to an extreme he would have himself objected to.
[00:00:33] I summed up this view with this paragraph.
[00:00:37] The alleged opponents of Jude argue that antinomian activities actively sinful lives demonstrate the full grace of God, which alone brings salvation.
[00:00:48] See how gracious God is. He'll save you by faith, even if you are an immoral cretin.
[00:00:56] Or at least the author of Jude portrays his opponents as making that argument. Whether they did so or not is anyone's guess, but it does give one pause that Paul himself was falsely accused of something similar already decades earlier, as he indicates in Romans 3. 8 In any event, this charge against what appears to be a post Pauline position can help explain why the author claims to be Jude, the brother of James.
[00:01:24] As other scholars have noted, by claiming to be Jude, Jesus brother, this author is uniting with the Epistle of James, his other famous brother, in opposing a view of grace that renders the moral life of the Christian immaterial.
[00:01:40] But there is even more in Jude to suggest that the opponents are being constructed as representing a form of Pauline Christianity.
[00:01:49] One of the specific charges leveled against them is that they denigrate and revile angels.
[00:01:55] According to verse 8, the opponents not only defile the flesh, they also reject authority and revile glorious ones. In verse 10, again, they are said to revile what they do not understand.
[00:02:11] They are unlike the Archangel Michael, who did not dare to revile the devil, verse 9.
[00:02:17] Moreover, the one explicit quotation of the short epistle is of First Enoch in verses 14 and 15, a passage that also relates to angels, as does the allusion to the Book of the watchers from 1 Enoch. In verse 6.
[00:02:33] I'll discuss 1st Enoch, the book of the Watchers, and this quotation of it in later posts. For now it's enough to know that First Enoch is a Jewish apocryphal text not not part of the Hebrew Bible that was widely popular. And here Jude appears to quote it as Scripture.
[00:02:51] Where in the Christian tradition are angels devalued?
[00:02:55] As other scholars have pointed out, we have already seen a movement in this direction, possibly in one of the most famous passages in the undisputed Paul letters the Love chapter of 1 Corinthians 13. Who would have thought, where the phenomenon of glossolalia already places believers on the same level as angels and Paul indicates, there is something greater than that.
[00:03:23] Moreover, for Paul, rulers, powers, and authorities are considered inferior forces subject to Christ in the end, and believers are said to be the future judges of angels. First Corinthians 6:3 In Galatians, Paul devalues the law precisely because it was given through angels. Galatians 3:19 the depotenticizing did I make that word up? It means depriving angels of their power of angels is carried out yet further in the deutero Pauline epistles. Angelic powers are part of the creation overcome by Christ.
[00:04:04] Colossians 1:16 10 Ephesians 1:21. They are stripped through Christ's triumph over the powers, and for that reason they are decidedly not to be worshipped.
[00:04:21] It appears, however, that the argument made by the anonymous author of Jude appears to be directed at Pauline Christians who have taken their views, whether actually or or simply in the author's fertile imagination, yet a step farther than that evidenced in the deutero Pauline epistles of Ephesians and Colossians. Just as the opponents do not merely insist that charis apart from good works bring salvation, as in Ephesians, but go much farther, allegedly in promoting an actual antinomian lifestyle, so too the opponents do not merely discourage the worship of angels as in the deutero Paulines, but they allegedly actively denigrate them. Thus, even though the opponents do not take a position attested in any of the canonical Pauline writings, they stand in a clear Pauline trajectory.
[00:05:14] It is impossible to say whether any such opponents really existed, but they certainly existed in the imagination of the author whose attacks appear to be directed against Pauline Christians.
[00:05:24] It is this opposition to Paul, at least as conceived in the mind of the author, that explains, then, the choice of the pseudonyms Jude.
[00:05:33] Some scholars have argued that an author wanting to choose a false name would not have chosen an obscure figure such as Jude, but that's completely off base. On the contrary, this author chose to polemicize against the Pauline tradition in a way that makes patent sense. By choosing the name Jude, he has established his credentials as one closely related to James of Jerusalem, and he in fact stands in clear lines of continuity or with the letter allegedly written by his more famous brother.
[00:06:03] His grounds of attack against Paul are different, but the target is the same Paulinists whose radical views had led to the rejection of all authority, angelic and moral.
[00:06:16] When then, was he writing?
[00:06:18] Apparently after the Deutero Pauline letters, or at least later than the views found in those letters, had been formulated.
[00:06:25] So presumably at the end of the first century or the beginning of the second.
