Introduction

Jude, Brother of James

The letter names its author simply as “Jude, servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James,” and the Church has received him as one of the Lord’s brethren, close kin to James who led the church at Jerusalem. It is one of the briefest letters in the New Testament, a single urgent paragraph’s worth of warning against teachers who had crept into the community, turning “the grace of our God into licentiousness” and denying, in effect if not in open word, the authority of Christ. Theophylact’s exposition is correspondingly compact, but he does not rush past the letter’s two most distinctive and demanding features: its use, twice over, of material drawn from outside the books that Jews and Christians alike counted as Scripture.

Contending for the Faith

Jude’s warning follows a pattern later echoed, almost verse for verse, in Second Peter: a roll call of God’s past judgments—the angels who did not keep their proper place, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, the generation that perished for its unbelief in the wilderness—held up as proof that grace does not exempt the wicked from consequence. Theophylact follows Jude’s charge against the false teachers closely: they are “dreamers” who defile the flesh, “murmurers” who complain of their lot, flatterers of the powerful for the sake of gain, men who have gone “in the way of Cain,” rushed after “the error of Balaam for hire,” and perished “in the gainsaying of Korah.” His comments identify these teachers with the licentious sects the early Church knew well, drawing at one point on Epiphanius of Salamis’s Panarion to make plain exactly what shameful practice Jude’s carefully guarded language was describing.

Quoting Beyond Scripture

Twice Jude reaches for an example the Old Testament itself does not record. He tells how the archangel Michael, disputing with the devil over the body of Moses, did not presume to bring against him a reviling judgment but said only, “The Lord rebuke you”—an episode preserved not in the Pentateuch but in a Jewish work outside the canon, the Assumption of Moses, which survives now only in fragments and citations like this one. And a few verses later he quotes Enoch, “the seventh from Adam,” foretelling the Lord’s coming in judgment “with His holy myriads”—a prophecy from the book that circulated under Enoch’s name, likewise outside the Hebrew canon. Theophylact treats both citations as simply true and useful: he explains the Michael story as a lesson that no one, however wronged, has license to hurl abuse even at the devil, and he reads the Enoch prophecy as a straightforward warning of judgment to come, without pausing to justify Jude’s use of writings that the Church did not receive as Scripture in their own right. On his reading, an apostle citing a source outside the canon is no more remarkable than a preacher today quoting a true saying from a book he would not otherwise commend: the citation stands or falls on its own content, not on the status of the book it is drawn from, and Jude’s readers plainly knew and accepted both stories already.

A Short Letter’s Long Reach

Jude closes with one of the most quoted doxologies in the New Testament—praise to “Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to set you blameless before the presence of His glory with great joy”—and Theophylact lets that note of confidence stand as the letter’s true close, after so much warning. A brief letter, easily read in a few minutes, it earns its place in Theophylact’s commentary series not for its length but for the two unusual citations that ask a reader to think carefully about how Scripture uses truth wherever truth is found, and for a final doxology that has outlived every controversy the letter was written to address.