The Epistle of Jude — The Letter That Quoted Lost Books

Part of the series: The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet

The Epistle of Jude is twenty-five verses long, and in two of them it does something no other book of the New Testament dares to do: it quotes, by name and as prophecy, a work that is in almost no one’s Bible.⁠¹ The book is 1 Enoch, a sprawling Jewish apocalypse that the Church never received as Scripture. Jude introduces a line from it the way a preacher introduces Isaiah—“Enoch…prophesied”—and a few verses earlier he had already reached for a second non-canonical source, the lost Assumption of Moses, to supply a scene found nowhere in the Old Testament.⁠²

That is the puzzle at the center of this little letter. The feature that makes Jude strange is also the feature that nearly kept it out of the canon, and the story of how the Church kept it anyway turns out to be one of the more revealing episodes in the formation of the New Testament. Jude is, by the measure of pages, almost the smallest book in the Bible. By the measure of what it can teach about how Scripture came to be Scripture, it is one of the largest.

This post reads Jude the way the rest of this series has read the disputed books: the text first, closely; then the question of who wrote it; then the apocryphal sources that made it a problem; then the long road from suspicion to definition; and finally what the Church actually gained by keeping a letter so many of the Fathers were prepared to lose.

A letter that quotes what is not in the Bible

Begin with the thing everyone notices. Near the end of his warning against a group of false teachers, Jude writes:

Enoch, of the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied also about them when he said, “Behold, the Lord has come with his countless holy ones to execute judgment on all and to convict everyone for all the godless deeds that they committed and for all the harsh words godless sinners have uttered against him.”⁠³

The quotation is not an allusion or a paraphrase. It is a near-verbatim citation of the opening oracle of 1 Enoch, which in R. H. Charles’s standard translation reads:

And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones / To execute judgement upon all, / And to destroy all the ungodly: / And to convict all flesh / Of all the works of their ungodliness which they have ungodly committed, / And of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.⁠⁴

The two texts line up clause by clause. Jude is quoting 1 Enoch 1:9, and he frames it with the most authoritative verb in a Jewish writer’s vocabulary—prophesied—applied to a figure, Enoch, who in the apocalypse speaks as a seer of the last judgment.⁠⁵ The New American Bible’s own footnote concedes the point without flinching: the verse is “cited from the apocryphal Book of Enoch 1:9.”⁠⁶

That is the more famous of Jude’s two borrowings. The other is quieter but, to the ancient mind, no less startling. In verse 9 Jude writes:

Yet the archangel Michael, when he argued with the devil in a dispute over the body of Moses, did not venture to pronounce a reviling judgment upon him but said, “May the Lord rebuke you!”⁠⁷

There is no quarrel between Michael and the devil over Moses’s corpse anywhere in the Old Testament. Deuteronomy says only that Moses died in Moab and that the Lord buried him in an unmarked grave.⁠⁸ The scene Jude reports comes from another lost Jewish work, the Assumption of Moses (sometimes called the Testament of Moses), the closing section of which does not survive—but three ancient Christian writers, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Didymus the Blind, name that book as Jude’s source.⁠⁹

So in a letter of twenty-five verses, Jude twice reaches outside the canon for his material, once openly and once by allusion. A modern reader may find this merely interesting. An ancient reader found it dangerous—because if an inspired apostle quotes Enoch as prophecy, does that not make Enoch prophecy? The question is not naive, and it is the hinge on which Jude’s whole reception turned. We will come back to it. First, the man.

Who was Jude?

The letter opens with a self-introduction of almost defiant modesty: “Jude, a slave of Jesus Christ and brother of James.”⁠¹⁰ Every word of that line has been argued over.

Start with the name. “Jude” is simply the English convention for Ioudas, Judas—the same name as the betrayer, which is precisely why English Bibles spell this man’s name differently, to spare him the association.⁠¹¹ He is not Judas Iscariot, and the letter takes pains to mark the distance: this Judas is a servant of the Lord he names four times in two verses.

Then the crucial phrase: “brother of James.” In the early Church there was exactly one James who could be identified by that name alone, with no further qualifier—James “the brother of the Lord,” head of the church in Jerusalem, author of the Epistle of James.⁠¹² To be the brother of that James is to be one of the men the Gospels list among the brothers of Jesus: “Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon?”⁠¹³ Origen, reading the same line in the third century, drew exactly this conclusion: the author is “Jude…the brother of James,” one of the kinsmen of the Lord.⁠¹⁴

A Catholic reader will want a word here about what “brother” means, since the Church holds the perpetual virginity of Mary. The ancient answer—already worked out by Origen in the passage just cited and standard in Catholic tradition—is that these are not sons of Mary but kinsmen, whether step-brothers (sons of Joseph by an earlier marriage) or cousins. The Greek adelphos, like the Hebrew and Aramaic it often translates, covers a range of family relations wider than the modern English “brother.”⁠¹⁵ The point for our purposes is narrower: whatever the exact relation, the author presents himself as the brother of James the Just, and thus as a member of the family of Jesus.

That raises a further question, and here the traditional and the critical readings part company. Among the Twelve, Luke lists an apostle he calls “Judas of James”—in Greek simply Ioudas Iakōbou, “Judas, [son or brother] of James.”⁠¹⁶ Matthew and Mark seem to name the same apostle “Thaddeus.”⁠¹⁷ Catholic tradition has long tended to fold these figures together: the apostle Jude Thaddeus, the brother of James, and the author of the epistle are taken to be one man, and that identification stands behind the popular devotion to Saint Jude Thaddaeus, patron of hopeless causes.⁠¹⁸

Most modern scholars, including many Catholic ones, are more cautious, and the reason lies in the letter itself. Jude never calls himself an apostle. Worse for the identification, in verse 17 he tells his readers to “remember the words spoken beforehand by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ”—speaking of the apostles as a group he stands outside of, and whose preaching now belongs to the past.⁠¹⁹ A defender of the traditional view can answer that an apostle might decline to claim the title out of humility, exactly as he claims kinship with James rather than with Jesus.⁠²⁰ The honest verdict is that the New Testament gives us a man named Judas who was a brother of James and of the Lord, who wrote as a servant rather than an apostle, and whose precise place in the apostolic college cannot be settled from the evidence we have. For the life of the man behind the name—the missions, the legends, the patronage—the companion to this essay is the post on Saint Jude Thaddaeus; here the subject is the letter.

One vivid detail survives that fits the family portrait. Eusebius, drawing on the second-century historian Hegesippus, reports that under the emperor Domitian the grandsons of Jude, “who is said to have been the Lord’s brother according to the flesh,” were still alive—poor farmers, hauled before the authorities as descendants of David, who showed their callused hands and were released as harmless.⁠²¹ Richard Bauckham built an influential reconstruction on such fragments: the brothers of the Lord, the desposynoi (“those belonging to the Master”), formed a network of traveling Jewish-Christian missionaries, and Jude is best understood as one of them.⁠²²

Did Jude write Jude?

Authorship and date are, as always with the disputed letters, joined at the hip. If the brother of the Lord wrote the letter, it belongs to the first Christian generation, sometime between roughly AD 50 and the destruction of Jerusalem in 70. If a later writer composed it in Jude’s name—a practice attested in the ancient world—it slides toward the end of the first century or the beginning of the second.⁠²³ The arguments cut both ways, and a fair reader should feel their force on each side.

Bauckham is the most forceful modern defender of authenticity, and his case is cumulative rather than decisive. The letter, he argues, is saturated in Palestinian Jewish texture—its debt to apocalyptic literature, its haggadic handling of the Old Testament, its method of exegesis—all of which suits a Jewish-Christian author of the first generation rather than a later, more Hellenized hand. The bare self-identification as “brother of James” makes best sense if James needs no introduction, which points to the lifetime of the brothers of the Lord.⁠²⁴

The case for pseudonymity rests on three observations. The first is the letter’s appeal, in verse 3, to “the faith that was once for all handed down to the holy ones”—language that strikes some scholars as describing a fixed, settled body of orthodox teaching, the sort of thing that takes a generation or two to harden.⁠²⁵ The second is verse 17’s backward glance at the apostles, which seems to place the author after their generation. The third is the Greek itself: Jude is written in capable, even rhetorically polished Koine, dense with rare words, which some judge unlikely from an unschooled Galilean.⁠²⁶

None of these is conclusive, and the third in particular cuts both ways: the same command of Greek and of Jewish apocalyptic that one scholar reads as too sophisticated for a brother of Jesus, another reads as exactly the equipment of a bilingual missionary who spent his life among Greek-speaking Jews. The Church has never defined the question. The Pontifical Biblical Commission weighed the authorship of several New Testament books in the early twentieth century, but never the Epistle of Jude; Catholic exegetes today divide, as their Protestant colleagues do, and the matter remains genuinely open.⁠²⁷ What is not in dispute is that the letter is early enough, and Jewish enough, to be a precious witness to the world of the first Christians.

The letter itself

For all the controversy around its edges, Jude is a tightly built piece of writing, and its architecture rewards attention. After a salutation (vv. 1–2), the author states his occasion with unusual candor: he had meant to write a warm letter about “our common salvation,” but an emergency forced his hand. Certain men have “crept in” among the faithful—“godless persons, who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness and who deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ”—and so instead he must write to urge his readers “to contend for the faith that was once for all handed down to the holy ones” (vv. 3–4).⁠²⁸

The body of the letter (vv. 5–16) is a sustained denunciation of these intruders, and it is built almost entirely out of examples—a string of Old Testament and Jewish-apocalyptic precedents, each one a case of presumption met by judgment. What is striking is the patterning. Jude thinks in threes. He names three classic instances of divine punishment: the unbelieving generation that God saved from Egypt and then destroyed in the wilderness; the angels who “did not keep to their own domain” and are now held “in eternal chains, in gloom”; and Sodom and Gomorrah, made “an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire” (vv. 5–7).⁠²⁹ He gives three more in a single breath—the intruders have “followed the way of Cain, abandoned themselves to Balaam’s error for the sake of gain, and perished in the rebellion of Korah” (v. 11).⁠³⁰ In between he piles up images of barrenness and disorder: “waterless clouds blown about by winds, fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead and uprooted…wild waves of the sea…wandering stars for whom the gloom of darkness has been reserved forever” (vv. 12–13).⁠³¹

The method here is worth naming, because it is the same method the Dead Sea community used and the rabbis would refine: Jude cites an event or a text and then applies it, point for point, to his own moment—“these are…,” “these people….” Scholars call it midrashic, or pesher-style, exegesis, a reading of ancient judgments as prophecies of the present.⁠³² The whole middle of the letter is, in effect, a compact commentary in which the false teachers are the fulfillment of every cautionary tale in Israel’s memory.

Two of those tales, as we have seen, come from outside the Old Testament—the dispute over Moses’s body (v. 9) and the prophecy of Enoch (vv. 14–15). The denunciation ends with the grumblers of verse 16, and then the letter turns, in its final movement, from warning to upbuilding.

The closing exhortation (vv. 17–23) is the pastoral heart of Jude, and it is gentler than the storm that precedes it. Remember what the apostles foretold, the author says; and then: “build yourselves up in your most holy faith; pray in the holy Spirit. Keep yourselves in the love of God and wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ.”⁠³³ It is a small Trinitarian rule of life—faith, the Spirit, the love of God, the mercy of the Lord Jesus—followed by a graded counsel of mercy toward those endangered by the false teachers: “On those who waver, have mercy; save others by snatching them out of the fire; on others have mercy with fear.”⁠³⁴ Rescue, but with care; love, but without naivety.

And then the doxology, to which we will return, which lifts the whole letter at the last into praise.

Jude and the Book of Enoch

Now to the problem that will not go away. Jude quotes 1 Enoch as prophecy. Does that make 1 Enoch Scripture?

The Catholic answer is no, and the reason is worth stating carefully, because it touches the whole doctrine of biblical inspiration. The Church does not teach that everything an inspired author quotes is itself inspired. It teaches that the inspired author writes under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, so that what he asserts—the point he makes, the truth he affirms—is asserted by the Holy Spirit. The Second Vatican Council put it precisely in Dei Verbum: “everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit,” and so the Scriptures teach “without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation.”⁠³⁵ Inspiration covers the saving truth the author affirms, not the canonical status of the sources he uses to affirm it.

There is a ready analogy, and it is not Jude’s alone. Paul quotes the pagan poet Aratus on the Areopagus—“for we too are his offspring”—and cites Epimenides to the Cretans and Menander to the Corinthians.⁠³⁶ No one imagines that Paul thereby canonized Greek verse. He found a true sentence in a non-inspired author and pressed it into the service of a true argument. Jude does the same with a Jewish apocalypse: he finds in 1 Enoch a vivid oracle of the coming judgment, judges it true, and deploys it against men who deny that any judgment is coming. The inspired affirmation is Jude’s—the Lord is coming to judge the ungodly—and the Spirit stands behind that, not behind the entire library of Second Temple apocalyptic.⁠³⁷

Here, however, is the detail most readers do not know, and it is worth pausing on. There is one ancient Christian tradition in which 1 Enoch is not apocrypha at all but Scripture: the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, together with its Eritrean sister, receives 1 Enoch into its Old Testament canon—the largest scriptural canon in traditional Christianity, running to eighty-one books.⁠³⁸ The fact is more than a curiosity. 1 Enoch survives in its complete form only in Geʿez, the classical language of Ethiopia; the Greek and Aramaic copies are fragments. When R. H. Charles produced the standard English translation, he worked from the Ethiopic, because the Ethiopian Church had preserved whole what everyone else had let fall.⁠³⁹ The very book Jude quotes still sits inside one living Church’s Bible.

The ancient Christians who first wrestled with Jude saw the stakes clearly, and they did not all draw the same conclusion. Tertullian, around the turn of the third century, ran the argument forward rather than backward: since the Apostle Jude bears witness to Enoch, Enoch ought to be received—“Enoch possesses a testimony in the Apostle Jude.”⁠⁴⁰ Most of the Church declined that inference, kept the apostle, and let the apocalypse go. But the discomfort lingered, and it became the chief reason Jude itself fell under suspicion—which is the next part of the story.

The long road to the canon

Jude’s path into the New Testament is a study in how the early Church actually discerned its Scriptures: slowly, by use, with real disagreement, and never by a single decree until very late.

The earliest evidence is encouraging for the letter. The Muratorian Fragment—the oldest known list of New Testament books, usually dated to around 170—includes Jude without apology: “the epistle of Jude and two of the above-mentioned…John are counted…in the catholic [Church].”⁠⁴¹ Around the same time Clement of Alexandria thought the letter important enough to comment on, and Eusebius reports that Clement gave “abridged accounts” of the disputed Scriptures, “I refer to Jude and the other Catholic epistles.”⁠⁴² Origen, in the next generation, quoted Jude warmly: “Jude, who wrote a letter of few lines, it is true, but filled with the healthful words of heavenly grace.”⁠⁴³

But Origen also knew the letter was doubted by some, and the doubt grew. The cause, as Jerome states with admirable bluntness, was precisely the Enoch problem:

Jude the brother of James left a short epistle which is reckoned among the seven catholic epistles, and because in it he quotes from the apocryphal Book of Enoch it is rejected by many. Nevertheless by age and use it has gained authority and is reckoned among the Holy Scriptures.⁠⁴⁴

That sentence is the whole drama in miniature. The letter was “rejected by many”—not because anyone doubted its orthodoxy, but because its use of an apocryphal book embarrassed readers who feared that to keep Jude was to smuggle Enoch in with it. And yet it survived, Jerome says, “by age and use”—by the sheer fact that the churches had been reading it in worship for generations. Not everyone who knew the objection conceded it: Didymus the Blind, the great Alexandrian teacher of the fourth century, wrote a commentary on the catholic epistles that answered the charge directly and defended Jude’s place.⁠⁴⁵

Eusebius, writing his great history around 325, recorded the verdict of his age with a historian’s precision. He sorted the New Testament writings into the acknowledged, the disputed, and the spurious, and he placed Jude among the second group, the antilegomena—the “spoken against”:

Among the disputed writings, which are nevertheless recognized by many, are extant the so-called epistle of James and that of Jude, also the second epistle of Peter, and those that are called the second and third of John.⁠⁴⁶

“Disputed, yet recognized by many”: that is Jude’s exact status for most of the first three centuries. The disagreement was regional as much as doctrinal. In the Syriac-speaking churches the resistance was firmest of all—the Peshitta, the standard Syriac New Testament, simply left Jude out, along with 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Revelation, and the letter entered Syriac use only with the later Philoxenian and Harklean revisions of the sixth and seventh centuries.⁠⁴⁷

The tide turned in the fourth century, as it did for the other disputed books. In 367 Athanasius of Alexandria, in his thirty-ninth Festal Letter, listed for the first time the exact twenty-seven books of the New Testament we now receive—Jude among the seven catholic epistles, named without hesitation.⁠⁴⁸ The North African councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) ratified the same list for the Latin West.⁠⁴⁹ A millennium later, when the question was reopened in a different key, the Council of Florence reaffirmed the canon in its 1442 Bull of Union with the Copts, and the Council of Trent, in the Fourth Session of 8 April 1546, defined it with the full weight of the Church’s authority. Trent’s decree names “one of Jude the apostle” in its list of the sacred books and adds the anathema: “if any one receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said books entire with all their parts…let him be anathema.”⁠⁵⁰

The letter that had been “rejected by many” for quoting a book outside the Bible was now, irrevocably, a book inside it. The Catechism of the Catholic Church lists it among the twenty-seven, and states the principle that had carried it there: “It was by the apostolic Tradition that the Church discerned which writings are to be included in the list of the sacred books.”⁠⁵¹

What the Church received from Jude

It would be easy to treat Jude as a curiosity—a footnote on canon formation, valuable mainly for the questions it raises. That would be a mistake. The letter earned its place not only by age and use but by its contents, and two of its lines have done more theological work than their brevity would suggest.

The first is verse 3. When Jude urges his readers “to contend for the faith that was once for all handed down to the holy ones,” he gives the New Testament one of its clearest statements that the faith is something received and transmitted, not invented and reinvented. The Greek terms carry the weight: the faith was delivered once for all—completely, not by installments—and handed down, with the verb (paradidōmi) that gives us the noun “tradition.”⁠⁵² Catholic theology reads this as a charter text for the deposit of faith: there is an objective body of apostolic teaching, given whole at the beginning, which each generation guards rather than improves.⁠⁵³

And here the letter’s strange career closes into an irony almost too neat to be invented. The book that nearly fell from the canon for quoting a non-canonical apocalypse is also the book the Second Vatican Council reached for when it wanted to teach how the canon itself is known. Dei Verbum, expounding the role of Tradition, cites Jude by name—the faithful are to “fight in defense of the faith handed on once and for all (see Jude 1:3)”—and in the very next breath draws the conclusion: “Through the same tradition the Church’s full canon of the sacred books is known.”⁠⁵⁴ The Church discerned that Jude belonged in the Bible by the same living Tradition that Jude itself commands its readers to defend. The letter that the apostolic Tradition rescued is the letter that points back to that Tradition as the ground of the canon. One could hardly ask for a tidier vindication of how the New Testament came to be.

The second line is the doxology, and it has outlived every controversy about the letter’s edges:

To the one who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you unblemished and exultant, in the presence of his glory, to the only God, our savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord be glory, majesty, power, and authority from ages past, now, and for ages to come. Amen.⁠⁵⁵

It is among the fullest and most exalted benedictions in the New Testament, and in its more familiar older idiom—“Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling”—it has been spoken over countless congregations at the close of worship for centuries.⁠⁵⁶ Most Christians who have heard those words have no idea they come from the most-doubted short letter in the canon.

In the Roman Rite, fittingly, that is nearly the only part of Jude the faithful ever hear at Mass. The letter has no Sunday reading at all, and it appears in the weekday Lectionary exactly once—verses 17 and 20b through 25, on the Saturday of the Eighth Week in Ordinary Time, and then only in the years when that week is reached.⁠⁵⁷ The Church, in her public reading, proclaims Jude’s exhortation and his doxology while quietly passing over the verses that quote Enoch and the Assumption of Moses. It is a small liturgical echo of the ancient compromise: keep the apostle, and let the apocalypse stay in the background.

What we know and what remains open

It is worth ending where honesty requires, with the ledger of the settled and the unsettled.

What is settled is the letter’s place: Jude is canonical Scripture, defined as such by the Church, read in her liturgy, and received without qualification as the inspired word of God. Settled, too, is the broad shape of its message—a fierce defense of the apostolic faith against teachers who turned grace into license, framed in the imagery of judgment and closed in praise. And settled, by a strong scholarly consensus, is its priority to 2 Peter: the substantial overlap between the two letters is best explained by 2 Peter’s having drawn on Jude, not the reverse—which makes Jude, despite its brevity, a source for another book of the New Testament.⁠⁵⁸

What remains open is the human story behind the text. Whether the brother of the Lord wrote the letter himself or whether a later disciple wrote in his name; whether that brother is also the apostle of Luke’s list; precisely who the false teachers were and what they taught; how early or late to date it—these questions the evidence does not finally answer, and a careful reader will hold them with an open hand. The Church has bound none of them.

That mixture of certainty and reserve is, in the end, the right posture toward Jude. The letter itself models it. Confident about the faith once delivered and the judgment surely coming, it is content to leave a good deal of its own machinery—its sources, its quarrels, its half-named opponents—in shadow. It quotes a lost apocalypse and an unrecorded legend, it nearly lost its own place for doing so, and it survived because the Church kept reading it until the question answered itself. For a book of twenty-five verses, that is a remarkable amount of history to carry. It is also a remarkably clear window onto the slow, deliberate, Spirit-guided process by which the Church came to know which books were hers.

Key scholarly works on Jude

The standard modern commentary is Richard J. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, Word Biblical Commentary 50 (Waco: Word Books, 1983), which both defends authenticity and works out the letter’s exegetical method in detail; Bauckham’s Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990) develops the family-of-Jesus reconstruction. Among Catholic treatments, Daniel J. Harrington’s commentary on Jude in Donald Senior and Daniel J. Harrington, 1 Peter, Jude and 2 Peter, Sacra Pagina 15 (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2003), and the chapter on Jude in Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1997), are the most useful starting points. Jerome H. Neyrey, 2 Peter, Jude, Anchor Bible 37C (New York: Doubleday, 1993); J. N. D. Kelly, A Commentary on the Epistles of Peter and of Jude (London: A. & C. Black, 1969); Peter H. Davids, The Letters of 2 Peter and Jude, Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006); and Gene L. Green, Jude and 2 Peter, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), round out the field across the critical and evangelical traditions.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who wrote the Epistle of Jude?

The letter identifies its author as “Jude, a slave of Jesus Christ and brother of James” (Jude 1). The most natural reading makes him a brother of the Lord—one of the men named in Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55—and thus the brother of James the Just of Jerusalem. He does not call himself an apostle. Whether he is also the apostle “Judas of James” (Luke 6:16) is disputed: Catholic tradition has often identified them, while many modern scholars distinguish the author of the letter from the apostle, partly because Jude 17 seems to speak of the apostles as a group distinct from himself. Whether the brother of the Lord wrote the letter personally or a later disciple wrote in his name is debated; the Church has not defined the question.

Why does the Epistle of Jude quote the Book of Enoch?

In verses 14–15 Jude quotes 1 Enoch 1:9 as a prophecy of the coming judgment, and in verse 9 he draws on the lost Assumption of Moses. He uses these Jewish works the way Paul uses pagan poets (Acts 17:28; Titus 1:12)—as true statements pressed into a true argument. On Catholic teaching, biblical inspiration guarantees the truth the sacred author affirms, not the canonical status of the sources he quotes (Dei Verbum 11). So Jude’s citation does not make 1 Enoch Scripture for the Catholic Church. The one exception in world Christianity is the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo tradition, which does receive 1 Enoch into its Old Testament canon.

Is the Jude of the epistle the same as the apostle Saint Jude (Thaddeus)?

Catholic tradition has generally treated the apostle Jude Thaddeus, the brother of James, and the author of the epistle as one man, and the popular devotion to Saint Jude as patron of hopeless causes rests on that identification. Many modern scholars are more cautious, because the letter never claims apostleship and seems to set its author apart from the apostles (Jude 17). The New Testament evidence does not settle the question. For the apostle as a person—his missions, legends, and patronage—see the separate account of Saint Jude Thaddaeus.

Why was the Epistle of Jude doubted in the early Church?

The chief reason was its use of apocryphal books. As Jerome reports, Jude “is rejected by many” because it quotes the Book of Enoch; readers feared that keeping Jude meant endorsing Enoch. Eusebius accordingly classed Jude among the antilegomena, the disputed books, and the Syriac churches left it out of the Peshitta for centuries. Yet, in Jerome’s words, “by age and use it has gained authority,” and it was affirmed at Athanasius’s canon of 367, the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397), and finally defined at the Council of Trent (1546).

Did Jude or 2 Peter come first?

The scholarly consensus is that Jude came first and that 2 Peter drew upon it. A substantial majority of Jude’s twenty-five verses are paralleled in 2 Peter, especially in 2 Peter 2:1–3:3, and the direction of dependence is judged to run from Jude to 2 Peter—in part because 2 Peter appears to soften or omit Jude’s references to 1 Enoch and the Assumption of Moses. A minority of scholars argue the reverse or posit a common source, but Jude’s priority is the majority position.

Footnotes

1. 1. Jude consists of 25 verses in a single chapter; only 2 John (13 verses), 3 John (14 or 15 verses, depending on versification; 15 in the NABRE), and Philemon (25 verses) are comparably short. On the formal quotation of 1 Enoch, see notes 3–6 below.

2. 2. The Letter of Jude, in The New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE), with the introductory note identifying the letter's reliance on apocryphal sources; bible.usccb.org/bible/jude/1. On the Assumption of Moses behind v. 9, see note 9.

3. 3. Jude 14–15 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org/bible/jude/1.

4. 4. 1 Enoch 1:9, in R. H. Charles, trans., The Book of Enoch, in The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913); text at ccel.org. The oracle itself echoes Deuteronomy 33:2.

5. 5. “Enoch, of the seventh generation from Adam” (Jude 14) is itself an Enochic phrase: 1 Enoch 60:8 and elsewhere reckon Enoch as the seventh patriarch from Adam (Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch; cf. Genesis 5).

6. 6. NABRE note on Jude 14–15: “Cited from the apocryphal Book of Enoch 1:9” (bible.usccb.org/bible/jude/1).

7. 7. Jude 9 (NABRE).

8. 8. Deuteronomy 34:5–6: Moses died in the land of Moab, “and he was buried in the valley…but no one knows the place of his burial to this day” (NABRE). The Greek of Deuteronomy 34:6 could be read “they buried him” or “he buried him,” an ambiguity the later legend filled in; cf. the NABRE note on Jude 9.

9. 9. The NABRE note on Jude 9 identifies the source as “the apocryphal Assumption of Moses.” The patristic attribution to that work is preserved in the catenae citing Clement of Alexandria, Origen (who reports the episode in On First Principles 3.2.1), and Didymus the Blind. The closing portion of the Assumption (Testament) of Moses does not survive in the extant Latin palimpsest.

10. 10. Jude 1 (NABRE).

11. 11. The Greek Ioudas is rendered “Judas” for Iscariot and Judas Maccabeus but conventionally “Jude” for this author, to distinguish him from the betrayer; the underlying name is identical.

12. 12. On James “the brother of the Lord” as the James who needs no further identification, see Galatians 1:19; 2:9, 12; Acts 12:17; 15:13; 21:18; and 1 Corinthians 15:7. Cf. the [Epistle of James](/epistle-of-james/).

13. 13. Mark 6:3 (NABRE); cf. Matthew 13:55, which lists the brothers as “James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas.”

14. 14. Origen, Commentary on Matthew 10.17, in Ante-Nicene Fathers (ANF) 9, trans. John Patrick; ccel.org.

15. 15. In the same passage (Comm. Matt. 10.17) Origen records the view, “basing it on a tradition in the Gospel according to Peter…or ‘The Book of James,’” that the brethren were sons of Joseph by a former wife, “wishing to preserve the honour of Mary in virginity to the end.” On the Catholic doctrine, see Catechism of the Catholic Church 499–500.

16. 16. Luke 6:16; Acts 1:13, “Judas of James” (Greek Ioudas Iakōbou), translated “Judas son of James” in the NABRE and NRSV. The bare genitive is grammatically ambiguous and was read by some ancients as “brother of James.”

17. 17. Matthew 10:3; Mark 3:18, “Thaddeus” (with the variant “Lebbaeus” in part of the manuscript tradition), where Luke has “Judas of James.”

18. 18. See the companion essay, [Saint Jude Thaddaeus: The Apostle of Hopeless Causes](/saint-jude-thaddaeus/), on the apostle's identity, mission traditions, and patronage.

19. 19. Jude 17 (NABRE): “But you, beloved, remember the words spoken beforehand by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Cf. Felix Just, S.J., “The Letter of Jude,” catholic-resources.org, who judges the author “probably not” the apostle on this ground.

20. 20. The reticence about apostleship parallels James 1:1, where the brother of the Lord likewise calls himself merely “a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

21. 21. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.19–20, citing Hegesippus, in NPNF, 2nd ser., 1, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert; newadvent.org (3.20 narrates the grandsons of Jude “said to have been the Lord's brother according to the flesh”).

22. 22. Richard Bauckham, Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990); cf. his summary in “The Relatives of Jesus,” Themelios 21.2 (1996): 18–21.

23. 23. For the range, see the NABRE introduction to Jude and the survey in Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, WBC 50 (Waco: Word Books, 1983). An authentic letter falls c. AD 50–65; a pseudonymous one c. AD 80–110.

24. 24. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, argues that the letter's Jewishness, its debt to Palestinian Jewish literature and haggadic tradition, and its apocalyptic exegetical method are consistent with authorship by Jude the brother of Jesus.

25. 25. Jude 3 (NABRE). The phrase is read by some as a mark of “early catholicism”—a fixed, post-apostolic body of orthodoxy; see, e.g., the discussion in Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, who resists the inference.

26. 26. On Jude's Greek and its concentration of rare words (hapax legomena), see Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter; the same evidence is read in opposite directions by defenders and critics of authenticity.

27. 27. In a series of responses between 1905 and 1915 the Pontifical Biblical Commission defended the traditional authorship and dating of several New Testament books—among them the Synoptic Gospels (1911–1912), the Pastoral Epistles as Paul's (1913), and Hebrews as Pauline in substance (1914)—but it issued no ruling on the authorship of Jude or the other catholic epistles. Later magisterial teaching has not bound the question. The Church defines Jude's canonicity and inspiration, not its human authorship.

28. 28. Jude 3–4 (NABRE).

29. 29. Jude 5–7 (NABRE); cf. Numbers 14 (the wilderness generation), Genesis 6:1–4 with 1 Enoch (the fallen angels), and Genesis 19 (Sodom and Gomorrah).

30. 30. Jude 11 (NABRE); cf. Genesis 4 (Cain), Numbers 22–24 and 31:16 (Balaam), and Numbers 16 (Korah).

31. 31. Jude 12–13 (NABRE). The “love feasts” (agapai) are the communal meals associated with the early Eucharist; cf. the NABRE note and 1 Corinthians 11:18–34.

32. 32. On the pesher/midrashic structure of Jude 5–19, see Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, who analyzes the body of the letter as a series of exegetical comments applying cited texts to the opponents.

33. 33. Jude 20–21 (NABRE).

34. 34. Jude 22–23 (NABRE). The manuscript tradition varies between a two-group and a three-group reading; the imagery of “snatching…out of the fire” draws on Zechariah 3:2–3 (NABRE note).

35. 35. Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum 11; vatican.va. Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church 105–108 on inspiration and inerrancy.

36. 36. Acts 17:28 (Aratus, Phaenomena 5; also Epimenides); Titus 1:12 (Epimenides); 1 Corinthians 15:33 (Menander, Thais).

37. 37. The principle is stated at Dei Verbum 11–12: inspiration concerns “that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation,” read with attention to the author's intention and literary form.

38. 38. On the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon and its inclusion of 1 Enoch (and Jubilees), see the overview in “Orthodox Tewahedo biblical canon,” with the standard discussion in R. W. Cowley, “The Biblical Canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church Today,” Ostkirchliche Studien 23 (1974): 318–323. The “broader” Ethiopian canon is often reckoned at 81 books.

39. 39. 1 Enoch survives complete only in the Geʿez (Ethiopic) version; Greek and Aramaic witnesses (the latter from Qumran) are fragmentary. Charles's 1913 translation was made from the Ethiopic; see note 4.

40. 40. Tertullian, On the Apparel of Women (De cultu feminarum) 1.3, in ANF 4, trans. S. Thelwall: “To these considerations is added the fact that Enoch possesses a testimony in the Apostle Jude”; tertullian.org.

41. 41. The Muratorian Fragment, line 68, in Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), Appendix IV, 305–307; text at bible-researcher.com. The fragment is usually dated c. 170–200, though a minority of scholars argue for a fourth-century date.

42. 42. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.14.1 (NPNF, 2nd ser., 1): Clement, in the Hypotyposes, gave “abridged accounts of all canonical Scripture, not omitting the disputed books,—I refer to Jude and the other Catholic epistles”; newadvent.org.

43. 43. Origen, Commentary on Matthew 10.17 (ANF 9); see note 14. Origen quotes Jude approvingly elsewhere as well, while also acknowledging that some doubted it.

44. 44. Jerome, On Illustrious Men (De viris illustribus) 4, in NPNF, 2nd ser., 3, trans. Ernest Cushing Richardson; newadvent.org. Composed c. 392–393.

45. 45. Didymus the Blind (c. 313–398) wrote a commentary on the catholic epistles, surviving in a Latin translation, that defended Jude against the objection drawn from its use of apocrypha; see “Epistle of St. Jude,” Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), newadvent.org.

46. 46. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25.3 (NPNF, 2nd ser., 1); newadvent.org. Cf. 2.23.25, where Eusebius notes that James and Jude are “disputed…not many of the ancients have mentioned” them, “nevertheless we know that these also…have been read publicly in very many churches.”

47. 47. The original Peshitta New Testament contained 22 books, omitting 2 Peter, 2–3 John, Jude, and Revelation; these entered Syriac use with the Philoxenian version (507/508) and the Harklean revision (616). See Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), on the Syriac versions.

48. 48. Athanasius of Alexandria, Festal Letter 39 (AD 367), the earliest surviving list of exactly the 27 New Testament books, which names “of Jude one” among the seven catholic epistles; text at bible-researcher.com.

49. 49. Council of Hippo (393), canon 36, and Council of Carthage (397), canon 47, both list “one [epistle] of Jude” among the canonical Scriptures; see the African canons at bible-researcher.com.

50. 50. Council of Trent, Session IV (8 April 1546), Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures, trans. James Waterworth; bible-researcher.com. Denzinger–Hünermann 1502–1503. The Council of Florence had affirmed the same canon in its Bull of Union with the Copts, Cantate Domino (4 February 1442).

51. 51. Catechism of the Catholic Church 120, which lists “the Letters of James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2 and 3 John, and Jude” among the 27 books of the New Testament; vatican.va.

52. 52. The participle in Jude 3, paradotheisē, is from paradidōmi, “to hand on, deliver”—the verb of tradition; the adverb hapax means “once for all.”

53. 53. On the deposit of faith handed on once and for all, see Catechism of the Catholic Church 84–86, and the discussion of Scripture and Tradition as “one sacred deposit” in Dei Verbum 10.

54. 54. Dei Verbum 8, citing Jude 1:3 (“to fight in defense of the faith handed on once and for all”) and adding, “Through the same tradition the Church's full canon of the sacred books is known”; vatican.va.

55. 55. Jude 24–25 (NABRE). The NABRE note calls it a “liturgical statement” that returns to the themes of the letter's opening.

56. 56. The older idiom (“keep you from falling”) follows the King James and Revised Standard renderings of Jude 24; the NABRE has “keep you from stumbling.”

57. 57. In the Roman Lectionary, Jude 17, 20b–25 is the First Reading for Saturday of the Eighth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II (Lectionary no. 352). Jude has no Sunday reading in the Roman Rite.

58. 58. On the literary relationship and the consensus for Jude's priority, see Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, and the treatment in [2 Peter—The Most Contested Letter in the Canon](/second-peter/). The principal overlap is Jude 4–18 with 2 Peter 2:1–3:3.