Jude

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When Jesus preaches in his hometown synagogue, the locals are astounded. “Where did this man get all this? … Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon?” (Mark 6:3).

Readers of BR (and especially of its sister magazine Biblical Archaeology Review) have recently learned quite a bit about Jesus’ brother James, who assumed control of the Jerusalem church after Jesus died.¹ But what do we know about the other brothers—say, Judas, or Jude, as he is more commonly known?

Jude is named quite clearly as Jesus’ brother in Mark 6:3 and the parallel passage in Matthew 13:55, but he is listed third in the earlier Markan text and fourth in Matthew. This may mean that he was (or was not!) the next brother in line after James to be the head of Jesus’ family, these things being determined by age. If not, this might in turn explain why he did not succeed James as head of the Jerusalem church. (Rather, Eusebius mentions a cousin of Jesus following James in Jerusalem, well after the Romans devastated the city in 70 A.D. Apparently, closer family members were not present to take over when James was martyred in 62 A.D.)

Jude did not lead the church, but he did write an important letter. The epistle of Jude (the last letter in the New Testament 16canon) begins: “Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James.”

Some have questioned whether the Jude who wrote the letter is actually the brother of Jesus. (If he’s the brother of Jesus, they ask, then why doesn’t he say so?) But the reference to James is sufficient to prove this Jude’s identity beyond a reasonable doubt. As New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham has stressed, “The only man in the early church who could be called simply James without risk of ambiguity was James the Lord’s brother.”² And if Jude is the brother of James, he is the brother of Jesus, too.

Further, that Jude calls himself a “servant” of Jesus does not in any way count against his blood kinship with Jesus; it simply reflects his humility and his use of a common title that Christian leaders used in that era to establish or make a claim to authority in a church setting. James himself used the same title in the opening line of his letter, where he calls himself “a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ” (James 1:1; see also Philippians 1:1).

Jude apparently worked as an itinerant missionary. In 1 Corinthians 9:5, Paul writes, “Do we [Paul and his companion Barnabas] not have the right to be accompanied by a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?” We have no evidence that James was itinerant, which means that Paul was probably referring to Jude, Simon and Joses. Based on this passage, we may also conclude that Jude likely traveled with his wife. Since Paul does not suggest Jude was a missionary to Gentiles like himself, and since Corinthians appears to have been written to a Jewish Christian audience who knew of Jude, it seems very probable that Jude was, like Peter, a missionary to Jews. In support of this, the church father Julius Africanus tells us that the family of Jesus spread the gospel throughout Israel starting from Nazareth and its vicinity.³

All the other information we can garner about Jude the brother of Jesus must come from his brief letter.

As suggested above, there has been considerable debate over the authorship, authenticity and date of the Letter of Jude. I’m inclined to agree with scholars like Richard Bauckham and William Brosend, who tend to view this letter as genuine and date it as early as the early 50s A.D.

The only argument against this dating involves verse 17 of the letter, which admonishes readers to “remember the predictions of the apostles of our Lord.” Critics suggest this means the letter must date well after the apostles were active (and thus well after the days of Jude, Jesus’ brother). Further, they question whether Jude would really have talked about “the apostles” as a group that didn’t include himself. There are several problems with this conclusion, however.

First, as Brosend points out, nothing in this verse suggests that the apostles made these predictions in the distant past. To the contrary this letter is full of the eschatological fervor and anticipation of the return of Christ that characterized the apostolic era in general.⁴

Second, Jude’s refusal to classify himself as an apostle may simply reflect his belief that he was not one, perhaps because the risen Lord did not appear to him—an essential criterion for being an apostle of Christ.

In addition, Jude must be earlier than the Second Letter of Peter, which dates to the end of the first century, because Peter depends on Jude.

Others critics have quibbled about the Greek of Jude’s letter being too good for a Galilean carpenter, but, as Bauckham says, this complaint does not have much merit. Although Jude has a good Greek vocabulary, his skills with grammar and syntax are not as adept.⁵

If we accept that this letter was written by Jude, the brother of Jesus, probably sometime in the 50s A.D., what does it tell us about the author?

The Letter of Jude is very polemical and focuses its wrath on false teachers who have infiltrated the audience and are misleading and beguiling them into false belief and bad behavior. The letter seems to be, like the letters of James, an encyclical (a letter that circulates among several churches). Jude is a good rhetorician and can occasionally sound like his brother James in his use of colorful metaphors (“they are shepherds who feed only themselves, clouds without rain, autumn trees without fruit and uprooted-twice dead … wandering stars for whom blackest darkness has been reserved”). More often, however, he sounds like a prophet of woe (“Woe to them! For they go the way of Cain …”) not unlike Jesus in Matthew 23 (“Woe to you scribes and Pharisees …”).

Jude’s aim is to get his audience to disassociate from such false people, and to keep them out of house-church meetings, where they are “blemishes at [their] love feasts” and where they have the opportunity to share their erroneous teachings and ways in an intimate setting (vs. 12). Jude warns of coming judgment, and of coming eschatological salvation, to enforce his teachings.

Jude’s letter reflects the charged atmosphere of what can be called apocalyptic Jewish Christianity. He cites the extracanonical Testament of Moses, with its discussion of the struggle between the archangel Michael and the Devil over the body of Moses, and 1 Enoch in order to enforce his message about the coming of the Lord for judgment. Verses 4–19 include a highly skilled midrash on several Old Testament passages. His midrashic technique resembles those found in the Dead Sea Scroll commentaries, and it shares with the Qumran community the belief not only that the Old Testament is replete with prophecies about the end times, but that the author and audience are living in the age of the fulfillment of those prophecies.⁶ It is no surprise that his letter was placed next to the Book of Revelation in the canon.

Jude is also Trinitarian in his thinking, speaking of praying in the Spirit, keeping one’s self in God’s love, and waiting for the mercy of the Lord Jesus to bring the gift of eternal life. Nor is he shy about stressing a high Christology, speaking about Jesus being the believer’s only sovereign and Lord (vs. 4b).

Jude’s great worry is that the audience may defect to a false teaching, and so his famous doxology (the hymn of praise that makes up his closing lines) promises that if they will rely on God, God will keep them from falling away: “Now to him who is able to keep you from falling, … to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, power and authority, before all time and now and forever” (Jude 24–25). Jude was clearly a fiery preacher of salvation and judgment who did not feel a need to pull his punches, but rather fought fire with fire.

Jude’s letter is far more Christological, apocalyptic and eschatological than James’s. Jude is a prophet and a preacher and a pneumatic (spiritual) exegete of ancient texts. James is a sage; his teaching and preaching were considered a model by at least one early thinker—the author of 2 Peter, who recycled Jude’s ideas. (Only Paul’s work seems to be as obviously influential on other New Testament documents as Jude is on 2 Peter.)

If nothing else, the Letter of Jude makes evident that even in the earliest period of Christian history, there were a variety of views and teachings, but that there were also limits. The inner circle of the Christian community was responsible for enforcing and reinforcing these boundaries. Jude, Paul, the Beloved Disciple, James—all of the inner circle who wrote documents—make 50this clear, especially by trying to protect their followers from false teachers.

Jude is not as famous as his brother James. Nor did he have as great an impact on the early Christian movement. Yet, he remains a figure to be reckoned with, who shows once more just how thoroughly Jewish and thoroughly eschatological in orientation the leadership of that movement once was.⁷

When Jesus preaches in his hometown synagogue, the locals are astounded. “Where did this man get all this? … Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon?” (Mark 6:3). Readers of BR (and especially of its sister magazine Biblical Archaeology Review) have recently learned quite a bit about Jesus’ brother James, who assumed control of the Jerusalem church after Jesus died.1 But what do we know about the other brothers—say, Judas, or Jude, as he is more commonly known? Jude is named quite clearly as Jesus’ brother […]