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 – 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 strongly objected to.  I summed up this view with this paragraph.  The alleged opponents of Jude argue that:

Antinomian activities (actively sinful lives) demonstrate the full grace of God, which alone brings salvation – see how GRACIOUS God is?  He’ll save you by faith even if you are an immoral Cretan!

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.  As other scholars have noted, by claiming to be Jude (Jesus’s 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.

But there is even more in the Judes to suggest that the opponents are being constructed as representing a form of Pauline Christianity.  One of the specific charges leveled against them is that they denigrate and revile angels.  According to v. 8, the opponents not only “defile the flesh,” they also “reject authority” and “revile glorious ones.”  In v. 10 again they are said to “revile what they do not understand.” They are unlike the archangel Michael who did not dare to revile the Devil (v. 9). Moreover, the one explicit quotation of the short epistle is of 1 Enoch in vv. 14-15, a passage that also relates to angels, as does the allusion to the Book of the Watchers from 1 Enoch in v. 6.  (I’ll discuss 1 Enoch, the Book of the Watchers, and this quotation of it in later posts; for now it’s enough to know that 1 Enoch is a Jewish apocryphal text – not part of the Hebrew Bible – that was wisely popular.  And here Jude appears to quote it as “scripture”!)

Where in the Christian tradition are angels devalued?  As other scholars have pointed out, we already see 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 woulda thought?), where the phenomenon of glossolalia (speaking in tongues) already places believers on the same level as angels (1 Cor. 13:1) and Paul indicates there is something greater than that.  Moreover, for Paul, rulers, powers, and authorities are considered inferior forces, subject to Christ in the end (1 Cor. 15:24).  And believers are said to be the future judges of angels (1 Cor. 6:3).  In Galatians Paul devalues the Law precisely because it was given through angels (Gal. 3:19).

This 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 (Col. 1:16; 2:10; Eph. 1:21); they are stripped through Christ’s triumph over the powers (Co. 2:15), and for that reason they are decidedly not to be worshiped (Col. 2:18).

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 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/”grace” apart from good works brings salvation (as in Ephesians), but go much farther (allegedly) in promoting an actual antinomian (lawless) lifestyle, so too the opponents do not merely discourage the worship of angels (as in the DeuteroPaulines), 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.

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.

It is this opposition to Paul – at least as conceived in the mind of the author – that explains, then, the choice of the pseudonym “Jude.”  Some scholars have argued that 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 with the letter allegedly written by his more famous brother.  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.

When then was he writing?  Apparently after the Deutero-pauline letters (or at least later than the views found in those letters had been formulated), so presumably at the end of the first century or the beginning of the second.