The Book of Jude, like the Pauline and Deutero-Pauline Books, is an epistle, a letter written by an early leader in the church. But unlike the rest of the New Testament letters we have read, this letter has no connection to the Apostle Paul, written neither by him nor by one of his followers. There are several such books in the Bible, among them the Letters of John and Peter, but since these letters must be read as a unit, none of them will be included in our study of the “littlest books” of the Bible. Jude, being one single chapter (like Philemon), is the final step on our journey.
The Book of Jude, short as it is, brings up a great many questions. It is in many ways a mystery, and stands out as unique among the scriptures. Thus this little book will require a relatively long introduction. I apologize for the length, but Jude brings up many unique and interesting issues that require extensive background knowledge.
The first question we must deal with is the authorship of the Book. The name Jude is short for Judas, which was a common name in 1st century Judaism, and could refer to any number of Jesus early followers. Tradition has it that this is the Judas who is listed as ‘not Iscariot’ in John or as ‘the son of James’ in Luke. The letter itself indicates that the writer may have been one of Jesus’ own brothers. But in truth, there were probably a great many early Jesus-followers who had this name. The name “Jude” is used by the author, probably to avoid confusion with Judas Iscariot. It must have been hard to share the name of the betrayer in the early Church.
Alongside the mysterious authorship of the book is the setting. Some books in our series have been relatively easy to date. Others, like Obadiah, were more difficult. The difficulty comes when the Book refers to no specific historical event, or refers to an event that could correspond to any number of dates. Obadiah spoke of conflict with Edom, but there were many times when Israel and Edom were in conflict, and that book could’ve reflected any of those times. Further, Obadiah doesn’t use any words that weren't commonly used throughout a vast period of history. Remember we dated Titus in part because of certain words Titus uses that didn’t come into common use until a certain date. Jude, unlike Titus, and like Obadiah, has no particular word usage that helps us indicate a particular date. Nor are there specific events mentioned that give us a clue. Scholars are all over the place as to when the book was written.
Some argue for a later dating, as late as 160 AD, due to the concern with a particular heresy known as Gnosticism (more on this later). But scholars argue about when Gnosticism begins as a movement. This writer, for one, argues for a much earlier beginning to Gnosticism than some scholars, and sides with those scholars that argue for an earlier date for the writing, as early as 80 or late as 100 AD. But it must be remembered that the possible date for the writing could be anywhere within an 80 year period, between 80-160 AD.
Additional to the mysterious authorship and date, there are many things that set Jude apart from other writings. For one, Jude appeals to books that are not included in the Biblical Canons, either Catholic or Protestant. Originally, the Jews did not have official canon. Their were certain books that no Jew would reject as having spiritual authority, namely the Five Books of Moses, called the Pentateuch. But besides these books, the rest of the scriptural corpus was amorphous, with different communities accepting or rejecting certain books, and different books having different ‘weight’ for different communities. For instance, in the Essene Community, which preserved the books now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, had multiple copies of Isaiah, and it seems that the Isaiah books held greater weight than other books of scripture. This ‘weighing’ of scripture is problematic for most Christians today, who want to see all of the Bible as equally the Word of God. But this is a relatively recent attitude. In ancient times, not all books of what we call ‘The Bible’ were considered equal.
And indeed there were books some communities used that others did not. In the Greek Translation of what we call the Old Testament, for instance, there were several books included that are not found in any Hebrew Translations. It is unclear whether these additional books come from Hebrew sources that are now lost to us, or whether they were originally written in Greek. But what is clear is that among Greek-speaking Jews, they were well known and often accepted as inspired scripture.
When the Jews officially split from Christians around 90 AD, they did so by canonizing certain scriptures as official for Judaism, thereby leaving out scriptures that Christians often used to support their claim that Jesus was the Messiah. Only the Hebrew version of the pre-Christian scriptures was considered official, and any scriptures that did not have proven Hebrew foundations were considered false.
But among Christians, the nature of scripture remained amorphous until the Church started to seek it’s own official Canon in the Fourth Century. Surprisingly, many of the books that the Jews had rejected to try to undercut Christians, were given at best a questionable status among Christians. After the reformation, Protestants defined themselves in part by official and final rejection of the authority of these books, which they now called the Apocrypha (which literally means ‘of questionable authenticity). Their rejection of the books had to do with the fact that many of the Catholic doctrines they found distasteful (like the idea of Purgatory) was found within them. Catholics responded in the Council of Trent in 1546 by officially canonizing the books, labeling them ‘Deutero-Canonical’ or ‘A Second Canon’. Eastern Orthodox also consider them authoritative. Their place in the Anglican Communion, is ill-defined, and they remain for Anglicans in much the same place they were before the actions of the Protestants and Catholics. It is left up to each believing Episcopalian how much weight they give these books, though most Anglican Bibles include them.
The process of deciding which books were officially ‘scripture’ and which were not was, for Christians, partly a political process. But generally, Christians chose to make official books that were widely used by the semi-autonomous Christian communities and collectives that had grown up around the world. The questionable place of some books was probably due in part to their use among a significant number of churches, but their lack of use in most churches.
This issue of Canonization and of the status of individual books is important here because Jude quotes from and relies heavily upon books that are rejected by almost all Christians as being canonical, historically speaking. The scriptures quoted include the Book of Enoch and the Book of the Assumption of Moses, both books that were very important to a very small number of Jewish communities in the first century, and less important to an even smaller number of Christian communities after that. Only Ethiopian Christians today include 1 & 2 Enoch in their Bibles. It is interesting then that these Old Testament Scriptures, rejected by Christian and Jewish community alike today, are actually quoted in this Canonical New Testament letter.
So should the Book of Enoch be included in the Old Testament? There can be no doubt that the Book had a big influence on the 1st Century Jewish worldview that informed Jesus and His followers, but it had relatively little impact on the early Church itself. How one approaches scriptures like Enoch and The Assumption of Moses is a very personal matter, involving a great detail of reflection not possible here. But it is important to know something about the process of Canonization and about books of questionable authority when reading the Book of Jude, since they play a central role for the author.
Because of the connection with the Book of Enoch (considered one of the most important Apocalyptic Texts of ancient times), Jude is heavily influenced by what is known as an Apocalyptic Worldview. As we saw in the prophetic books almost ad nauseum, in the most ancient times most Jews believed that all circumstances were tied to behavior: do good and good things happen, do bad and bad things happen. The various exiles of the Jews were interpreted as God’s punishment upon and undeserving people.
Over time, writings grew up like Job and Ecclesiastes that questioned this neat little picture. And when the Greeks took over Judea and started their terrible progroms against the Jews, different views on how God interacted with the world started to develop. What became dominant in the Jewish mind is what is known as “The Apocalyptic Worldview”. Whereas before the prophets had envisioned a world almost completely dominated by the Will of God, Apocalyptic thinkers focused on a supernatural war going on between God and forces aligned against Him. This view predominates in those additions to Daniel made during the Maccabean revolt, and in the Books of Enoch and The Ascension of Moses.
The Apocalyptic thinkers envisioned a world in which there were some kinds of dark powers...ancient beasts, fallen angels, or some other agents...that stood between Heaven and Earth, and kept God’s will from being completely made manifest in His Creation. These forces would become incarnated from time to time in Earthy rulers...for instance in the Book of Daniel, the King of Greece Antiochus Epiphanes was thought to be a monstrous beast made incarnate. These rulers would oppress God’s people, and this was in part the cause of the great evils of the world. This made simple sense of the situation in which the Jews found themselves. They were being oppressed by the Greeks not because they were idolaters or because they had followed other gods, but rather because they refused to follow other gods and stayed loyal to Yahweh alone. Since it was this loyalty that was the explicit reason for their oppression, the old prophetic answer of ‘you get what you deserve’ didn’t work any more. The Apocalyptic writers claimed a revelation from God that made more sense of the facts on the ground.
It was believed that God could, from time to time, send agents to help work ‘behind enemy lines’ to fight against the dark powers and their human followers. The Apocalyptic writers themselves often clamed to have been brought up to Heaven to see ‘behind the veil of the sense’ (‘apocalypse’ literally means ‘to see behind the veil’) and given a message to help people understand the evils of the world, and to fight against them. It was also believed that God would send angels to occasionally fight off the powers when they directly threatened mankind. The Book of Tobit, as well as Daniel 10, are full of this kind of imagery.
The point is that God was thought to no longer work directly with the people of the world. Rather, God had to work through agents, who could circumvent the dark powers and do the work God used to do Himself. But all Apocalyptic writers looked forward to a glorious day when God would finally overthrow the powers (usually via a particular and final messianic agent), and usher in God’s Kingdom on Earth, when Heaven and Earth would be finally one.
This worldview was the one Jesus was born into and it dominated the thoughts, hopes, understanding, and expectations of First Century Jews. The world was thought to be a physical manifestation of a spiritual struggle, a struggle both cosmic and terrible, which caused great collateral damage here on Earth. Both Jesus and Paul were Apocalyptic thinkers. After Jesus died, the general sense was that the final battle with the dark powers (now usually thought of as simply satan), had been won, and that the world would be progressively moving to a final shift, when God’s Kingdom would be instituted. The expectation was that a steady and progressive move towards that Kingdom would be the directional roadmap for the rest of history. But then the Temple was destroyed, an event most Christians thought was a sign of the final coming of God and Christ, yet nothing else really happened. And then again, Rome started to persecute the Christians, and Jews began to split from Jesus followers. All of this threw the dominant, optimistic Christian view into doubt.
So some Christians started to re-emphasize the Apocalyptic Nature of the world. They spoke more and more about angels and demons and about the spiritual warfare that Christians would be involved in until Christ’s second coming. Jude is firmly in this category. It is fitting that Jude immediately precedes Revelation, as both are born of roughly the same historical impulse: to make sense of a world that is increasingly dangerous for Christians using the imagery of spiritual warfare.
In that sense Jude is an important preamble to The Book of Revelation, setting up a vision of the way Jude thinkers like him believe the world to work, a vision that will play a central role in John’s Revelation.
But for all the things that set Jude apart from the Pauline letters, the one thing that ties them together is the focus on detractors. All of the letters we’ve read so far, with the exception of Philemon, have had a special concern with those people who stand against the important leaders who authored the epistles. Jude, too, is centrally concerned with this issue. However, whereas the main enemies of Paul and his followers were the Judaizers, who sought a stricter implementation of Jewish law among believers, Jude is struggling against a group that would be, by the second century, the greatest threat to Christian unity and survival: the Gnostics.
Gnostics were heavily influenced by Greek Philosophy, more so even than mainstream Christianity. They adopted the view of Plato that there was a strict separation and difference between the material and the spiritual, between body and soul. For them, the physical was an evil or corrupt form of existence, and spirit was a pure and good form. The goal of life, then, was to escape the physical and enter the spiritual through ascetic practices and intellectual development. Gnostics generally rejected the Old Testament altogether, believing that the physical world had been created by this part of God that had gone haywire, this kind of Cosmic Cancerous Demon named Demiurge. This being had stolen from God parts of himself, and these trapped pieces of the divine were the human souls, now trapped in this prison called the physical, or Creation. This demon had tricked the world into believe it to be god, and so the entire Old Testament is actually written, from the Gnostic point of view, by the devil.
Salvation came through the teachings of Jesus. Jesus, from the Gnostic point of view, was not really Yahweh incarnated in physical flesh, rather Jesus was the One True God who APPEARED as a physical human being. Jesus came to teach people how to live in such a way that they could escape their physical prison and return to the One True God from whom they had been stolen. All of life was about transcending the evil physical and reaching the transcendent spiritual. It was, then, not Jesus death and resurrection (which were mere illusion), but his teachings, imparted to only a select few disciples, that made salvation possible. People actualized that possible salvation by living out those teachings. This roughly speaking was Gnosticism.
Gnosticism was attractive, especially to those Christians who came from the Greek population, for a number of reasons. First of all, it was based on Greek Platonic Philosophy, and was compatible with Greek religion. Gnostics didn’t think physical behavior mattered much, and so they were not forced to choose between worship of Caesar and worship of Jesus. Most Gnostics thought it completely fine to give lip service to Roman Worship services, while following the way of Jesus. Second of all, Gnosticism didn’t look for a second coming that never materialized. The belief was that Jesus’ first life was the bringing together of God and man, and all that was left was for people to institute His teachings. There was no resurrection of the dead, for material existence was thought to be evil and only the spiritual Heaven was the goal. As people came to know the secret knowledge or gnosis that Jesus had taught some of His followers, the trapped divine spirits would return to their source, until the devil was robbed of his private play prison. Thus there was no challenge to the Gnostic view when the End did not take place in a timely manner.
But as attractive as Gnosticism was (and indeed still is today to many), it was completely incompatible with the original teachings of Jesus or Paul. For the central Jewish conviction, alive throughout the scriptures, is that life in this world is essentially good. The First Chapter of Genesis establishes for all time that God saw all He created and judged it, ‘good’. The idea of resurrection of the dead is an outgrowth of this conviction. The Gnostic desire to escape from life itself as a prison is not in line with the Jewish heritage of the Christian faith.
Further, the Gnostics ultimately put salvation in the hands of the individual, and only a select few individuals at that. Only those who had access to the line of thinkers that went back to the ‘specially chosen’ of Jesus were said to have access to the freedom and salvation that Jesus brought. And that salvation takes place through our own power, for it is the individual person who CHOOSES whether they will accept and live out the gnosis of Jesus. This is an aristocratic and self-important view of salvation completely at odds with the spirit of repentance that lies at the heart of Jesus message. The Pauline emphasis on Grace alone is the only way to preserve that Spirit and to ensure that salvation is truly available to all.
We must pause here a moment for there is a vitally important point that must be made. Gnosticism and Judaic Christianity are two extreme ends of a spectrum. The picture of Gnosticism laid out above is a picture of one extreme on that spectrum. Almost all Christianity exemplified some Gnostic and some Jewish influences. Any given Christian community or individual might fall somewhere on that spectrum. On the one side you had Jewish Christians who thought of Jesus as messiah but not God, and basically thought that all the Jewish law should remain intact. On the other side you had Gnostics who thought of Jesus as God but not man, and sought a purely spiritual release from an evil physical universe. Almost all Christian writings fit somewhere near or on the middle of that spectrum, with each emphasizing one side or the other to some degree. It is interesting that most of Paul’s writings defend the middle against the extreme of Judaizing, whereas Jude defends the same middle against extreme Gnosticism. But understanding the Gnostics as a part of a very subtle spectrum, rather than as some absolute separate group, is important. The same is true in terms of our understanding of Judaizers.
The Book of Jude, then, is the tirade of an early Christian leader against Gnosticism. It paints Gnostics as incarnations of the Dark Powers, in much the same way that Daniel pictured King Antiochus the same way. Jude’s argument has two prongs to it: on the one it is a polemic against those who are challenging the Jewish heritage of Christianity, but embedded in that polemic is an argument meant to weaken the position of the Gnostics themselves. For Jude offers an alternative explanation for why life continues to be difficult: it is not because creation is inherently evil, nor because the resurrection is false, but because the very dark powers that are incarnated in the Gnostics are holding the world hostage, and we must suffer a little longer until the victory of Christ is made complete over His enemies.
And in the end, that is what Jude is all about: the spiritual forces in the world that threaten us and lead us astray, and our need to stay hopeful that those forces will be overcome by even greater forces of good, of which Jesus Christ is the supreme Incarnation.
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