Interestingly, our earliest known manuscript/s of both Jude and 2 Peter is one manuscript, P72, from the late third or fourth century.
M David Litwa recently did a short video presentation about E.Jude on his Patreon. I gleaned or outright quote:
"The Greek of this epistle is very refined: very urbane. Full of all sorts of new words called hapux legomena/legomenon [I can't work out whether he said the singular or the plural]. That is, words never used elsewhere in the New Testament. Words characteristic of classical Greek and of a native speaker; not of a Galilean son of a carpenter [ie. a brother of Jesus] who had to learn Greek outside of the home, on the streets.
"This author lifts the veil on his pseudonymity1 when he looks back to a previous age in which there were apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ among whom he apparently does not include himself." Later Litwa says, "this is a second century epistle written by someone who is pretending to be a Jew from the first century."
Litwa dates E.Jude between 120 to 150 CE
He says "this is full-blown heresiology even though [the author] doesn't use the term ‘haraesis’.
"This author is writing a heresiological text and he sounds most like those earliest heresiologists, namely Justin, Hegesippus and Irenaeus."
1 This author is writing under a pseudonym: most likely to gain authority for his own brief epistle to address the situation of his time, while claiming the authority of the past.
On Jude's opponents: modern scholarly sentiment is that we can say pretty much nothing about them, because the accusations and the criticisms and the vitriol are all very, very stereotyped in general. But Litwa notes that, on occasion, the criticisms become very specific and the author drops hints of who he is really talking about.
At one point he calls them ‘reefs in your love feasts’ or 'your agape meals.' This is quite an insult: reefs here referring to hidden reefs that boats would knock up against unknowingly, ripping apart their hull and sinking the ship.
Now, if you look at the reception history. Clement of Alexandria, when you read his commentary on Jude, thought that Jude was referring to Carpocratian Christians (some of whom belong to Clement's own group). He says this also in the Stromata book three [where] he also reveals that the Carpocratians participated in love feasts [without explicitly calling them love feasts]
The second specific thing that Jude says against his opponents is that they are the animates. Paul classified people into animate and spiritual in 1 Corinthians 2:13 to 16. And Valentinians openly made a distinction between animate and spiritual people: the spiritual people were the enlightened ones, namely members of one's group :the animates were other Christians, basically, in simplified form.
Litwa notes that the Valentinians had a trifold class namely the fleshly, spiritual and the animate but he thinks that Isma Dunderberg "makes a good argument that basically the classification is binary in that it ends up that there's just more or less two groups of people: the saved and those who aren't."
Jude was turning the tables and saying that the Valentinians are animate, and that, although they claim to be spiritual, they in fact do not have spirit.
Jude also refers to his opponents following in the way or path, the hodos, of Cain. [Along] with Cain, he attacks other archetypal enemies grouped together: Sodomites in verse 7, and then both Korah and Cain in verse 11.
The only other co-location/collocation(?) of these specific enemies comes in the heresiological reports of Irenaeus against Pharisees where he argues against Christians who lauded Cain and, in addition to Cain, Korah and the sodomites (and Irenaeus) throws in Esau as well.
Litwa notes that these three enemy groups, Valentinians, Cainites, Carpocratians, were all Egyptian Christians.
And he notes that three Alexandrians, namely Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Didymus of Alexandria, all 'understood' Jude's citation of the argument of Michael the angel with the devil, over the body of Moses, came from the Assumption of Moses.
Furthermore, Jude 14-15 quotes 1 Enoch 1.9 as scripture:
Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about these men: "See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones to judge everyone, and to convict all the ungodly of all the ungodly acts they have done in the ungodly way, and of all the harsh words ungodly sinners have spoken against him".
Hardly any other Christians or Christian texts cite 1 Enoch as scripture: Barnabas 4:3 and 16:5,6; and early Origen in First Principles 1.3 ie. when he was in Egypt (Tertullian, when he cites 1 Enoch, makes an apology: ‘you may not be familiar with this, but it is scripture.')
There was open skepticism about Jude’s authority in canonicity in the fourth century by Eusebius and Jerome. And, it wasn't canonized in the paschita, the Syriac version of the canon or NT.
Litwa notes
- A recent commentary translated from the German by Jorg Frey:
- ‘The Letter of Jude and the Second Letter of Peter’, 2018
- An essay on Jude and heresiology by Frederik Wisse:
- ‘The Epistle of Jude in the History of Heresiology,’ in Essays on the Nag Hammadi Texts, ed. Martin Krause (1972); 133-43
- An article by Isma Dunderberg,
- ‘Valentinian Theories on Classes,’ in a book called Zugange zur Gnosis, pp. 113-28
Garry W. Trompf (2010) 'The Epistle of Jude, Irenaeus, and the Gospel of Judas' Biblica Vol. 91, No. 4: pp. 555-82
Abstract
A detailed case that the New Testament Epistle of Jude was written against the socalled Cainite sectaries, who were in possession of a Gospel of Judas as Irenaeus attests, is presented ... Because the names Judas and Jude were the same, the good name of Iouda, especially as being that of a relative to Jesus, needed clearing; and subversive teachings—making Cain, Judas and other Biblical figures worthy opponents of the (Old Testament) god—had to be combatted. Since a Gospel of Judas has come to light, within the newly published Tchacos Codex, one is challenged to decide whether this was the gospel appealed to by the Cainites, and, if it was, to begin to grasp how they read a text which did not readily match their interests.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/42615949?s ... b_contents
Full Paper available on Academia.edu here - https://www.academia.edu/30903088/The_E ... l_of_Judas
