Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Reasons for Thinking that Jude Is Pseudepigraphic, that is A Forgery by Bart D. Ehrman, read by John Paul Middlesworth.
[00:00:10] I concluded my previous post by indicating that a number of Christian readers, leaders in the ancient world, considered Jude not to be authentic, that is that it was a forgery written in the name of Jesus, brother by someone else.
[00:00:24] Here I continued the discussion, again taken from my study, Forgery and Counter Forgery, Oxford University Press, 2013.
[00:00:33] Modern times have seen a healthy split among scholars who see the book as authentically written by the brother of Jesus and of James, and those who consider it forged.
[00:00:42] Numerous factors give the poem to the latter group. For one thing, the book gives every indication of being produced relatively late in the first century, after the age of the apostles.
[00:00:53] The apostles themselves are referred to as living in the past and as predicting the last time when the author is now living, differentiated from the time of the apostles themselves.
[00:01:07] Moreover, the author speaks of the faith as the content of the body of knowledge that makes up the Christian religion, a usage found in the Pastorals but not in earlier Christian writings such as those of Paul.
[00:01:20] Despite occasional scholarly claims to the contrary, that this faith was delivered once and all to the saints assumes an event that transpired in the now distant past.
[00:01:34] More important for our purpose here, there are highly convincing reasons for thinking that whoever wrote this letter, it was not Jude, the Aramaic speaking peasant from Nazareth. Here again, as with the Book of James, we need to deal with the problem of language.
[00:01:49] This author, too, is not just writing literate he writes very good Greek, not the sort of skill one can acquire simply by spending time on the mission field without years of serious literary training.
[00:02:01] As R. Baucombe points out, the book employs wide and effectively used vocabulary.
[00:02:08] Some of its terminology is rather specialized other words are relatively rare.
[00:02:14] The author has command of good Greek idiom.
[00:02:18] According to Balcombe, his sentence construction is handled with considerable rhetorical effect.
[00:02:25] Balcombe goes on to speak of the author's almost poetic economy of words, scriptural allusions, catchword connections, and the use of climax in the fullest study of Jude's style. J. Darrell Charles speaks of the author's elevated use of rhetorical invention, composition, and style, and mentions in particular his use of parallelism, antithesis, figures of speech, repetition ornamentation, vivid symbolism, word and sound play.
[00:02:59] In addition, it should be pointed out that the author is not only flawlessly fluent in Greek composition, but he also knows the Hebrew Bible, evidently in Hebrew.
[00:03:08] Moreover, he knows the book of one Enoch, arguably in Aramaic.
[00:03:13] As a result, we have here an author who is not merely literate, able to read apparently effortlessly in three languages, but fully writing literate in one of them, a second language for him. If he were a native of rural Palestine, how could this be true of Jesus brother, an Aramaic speaking peasant from a small hamlet of Galilee who no doubt like his father, was a common laborer?
[00:03:38] As I've repeatedly stated, becoming reading literate in just one language took years and considerable resources.
[00:03:45] Becoming writing literate at the level required to compose a book took yet more years, and that was in one's native tongue. To become writing literate in a second language required intensive training. Where would Jude have found the time or resources to manage this training?
[00:04:01] It is true that his brother Jesus may have been extraordinary among his townspeople for learning to read Hebrew, but that is a far cry from being able to compose a book in Hebrew, let alone in Greek.
[00:04:13] And everything suggests that Jesus was the outstanding exception in the family.
[00:04:18] Anyone who suggests that a person like the historical Jude could have learned Greek compositions simply by traveling the world as a missionary has not taken seriously the scholarship on ancient literacy and on the educational systems of antiquity.
[00:04:33] As a side note, I might mention that we have some record about Jude's family from later times, which gives us no indication that it came from the upper classes that could afford the time and money for education.
[00:04:44] Hegesippus tells the story of Jude's grandsons brought before the emperor Domitian when he learned that they were from the line of David and so possibly instigators of a kind of messianic uprising against the state.
[00:04:57] These men convinced Domitian that they were poor farmers who could barely eke out in existence, working full time on the land, showing him their calloused hands as proof. And so he set them free.
[00:05:08] See Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3, 1920.
[00:05:13] There can be little doubt that the report is apocryphal. It defies belief that the Roman Emperor himself would cross examine Jewish peasants from Palestine, let alone that he would do so out of fear that their insurgency might cripple his empire. But the story does show how Jude's family was remembered in the early church, not as aristocratic elites with wealth and leisure to receive the refined benefits of higher education.
[00:05:37] Just the contrary, they continue to be known as lower class peasants who engaged in full time manual labor simply to survive.
[00:05:45] Nothing suggests that their progenitor Jude was any different.
[00:05:50] In short, the book of Jude appears to have been written relatively late, in the first century, after the age of the Apostles, by a highly educated Greek speaking and writing Christian who was able to negotiate the complexities of both the Hebrew Bible and surviving Aramaic literature.
[00:06:08] Whoever this elite, well trained figure was, he was not the Aramaic speaking peasant of Nazareth, the brother of Jesus and James.
[00:06:17] But why was it forged?
[00:06:19] I'll deal with that in the posts to come.
[00:06:23] The post concludes with nine footnotes.
