Don’t Let Pseudepigrapha Scare You
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Footnotes
Gnostic refers to the beliefs and practices of a variety of religious groups that relied on secret knowledge revealed only to a select few. Gnosis is the Greek word for this non-empirical insight.
See The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. by James M. Robinson and Marvin W. Meyer (San Francisco: Harper and Row; Leiden: Brill, 1977).
Earlier, in 1773, some manuscripts of Enoch were brought to Europe, but they were translated into English only in 1821 and into German only in 1833.
Surveying New Testament scholarship during the period 1926–1956, Professor Robert Grant observed that the only real advances were made by the critical scholars and historians, not by those scholars who were looking only for the message:“ The permanent achievements [of this period 1926–1956] were made by those whose goal was understanding rather than proclamation. They did not sell their birthright as critics and historians for what has been called a ‘pot of message’ ” (Robert Grant, “American New Testament Study, 1926–56,” Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 87, p. 50 [1968]).
In addition a selection of the major Pseudepigrapha was published in 1984, edited by H.F.D. Sparks, The Apocryphal Old Testament (Oxford University Press).
On the other hand, we should not overlook the fact that in the first century the Romans recognized the Great Sanhedrin (Sanhedrin Gedolah) as the ruling body of Jews in Jerusalem. But as Charlesworth points out “an establishment must be distinguished from a normative theological system.”
It is also true that “without any doubt, the cult in Jerusalem was dominant.” But this went “hand in glove with a rejection of the priestly ruling class—considered by some religious Jews to be illegitimate—and the deep and ancient traditions that the present Temple is but an imperfect model of the future earthly, heavenly, or eschatological (perhaps messianic) Temple … The cult not only proved to be a unifying force in Judaism, it also tended to spawn differences, as the struggles for control, as well as the corruption within the priesthood, produced opposition.”
Rebecca’s Children, Judaism and Christianity of the Roman World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). (See Bible Books)
Actually, in Greek it is in the aorist tense, signifying an event that was seen holistically as a past time. All the verbs used in Jude are in this aorist tense. The cumulative effect is to denote the end of a whole process.