If you’ve read “The New Testament Dissection” you know that the New Testament is made up of 27 writings most of which are letters.  In the days in which the New Testament was written letters usually started out with a greeting identifying the author and then who the letter was to.  Kind of like the label on a Christmas or birthday present , “From” and “To”.  The greeting of this short letter identifies the writer as “Jude the brother of James”.  It says that the letter is to people who are called, loved, and kept.  The word called is related to the word “church” which means “called out of”  the church is called by God from among all the people of the world (1 John 2:2) to be his people and to live dedicated lives (1 Peter 1:15-16).  According to the greeting the recipients were loved by God and kept special either by or for Jesus (or both).

There has been a lot of debate by scholars as to who Jude was.  In the Bible peoples names sometimes have different forms.  We do this in English when we call William “Bill” or Robert “Bob” or Christopher “Chris”.  Some times the alternate name is an abbreviation and sometimes it is a variation.  I recently ran across this same type of situation in Spanish where boys named Jesus are often called “Chewie”, although I think this last example is more of a nickname, perhaps as a way of showing respect for the name of Jesus the Messiah (or Christ in Greek).  In “What’s in a Name” we talk about how names are used and changed in the Bible, you might want to check out that page sometime.  In the Greek text of Jude (Greek is the language that most of the New Testament was originally written in) the authors name is Judas.  Jude is evidently an abbreviation of that name used by translators.  Jude identifies himself as the Jude, or Judas, who was the brother of James.  Some ancient copies of the book of Jude have “Jesus” instead of James as the brother of Jude.  In Matthew 13:55 and Mark 6:3 we see that Jesus had four brothers and some sisters.  His brothers were James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas.  Although the people listening to Jesus who identified his family saw these four men as Jesus’ brothers we know that they were only half-brothers.  They would have identified his parents as Joseph and Mary (John 6:42) but we know that he was created in Mary by God without a human father (although some people knew that Mary was pregnant before she married Joseph and claimed that Jesus’ father was a mystery man (John 8:41).  So the alternate name in some copies would not be incorrect.    The James in the list in Matthew (or Mark) is the same James as the author of the book of James who describes himself in language very similar to what Jude says (James 1:1).  Both describe themselves as servant of Jesus.  James was very well know in the early church and so Jude uses his brother’s name as a way of identifying which Jude (or Judas) he was.  There were other Judas’s, like Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus original followers, the one who betrayed him.

Since James is listed first in both lists of brothers of Jesus That would normally show he was the oldest (or second oldest counting Jesus).  The list in Mark and the list in Matthew have Judas and Simeon switched so we cannot know for sure if the lists are in some sort of birth order.  In any case it seems very unlikely that a brother of Jesus would live much later than 80 AD.  So we should consider that the upper limit of when the letter might have been written.  There are several parts of the book of 2 Peter which are very very similar to much of the book of Jude.  To Bible experts it looks like one copied or quoted the other.  Evidently the language and grammar in Jude is very smooth while the language and grammar in 2 Peter is kind of rough.  This leads some scholars to think that 2 Peter was written first and Jude copied him and “fixed” his writing.  On the other hand it would be very easy to “quote” someone and put your own style into it.  The purpose of the similar sections is different in the two books making it even more likely that the actual words could be changed.  Peter always was a guy in a hurry so it seems likely that his writing could be messier (Take it from someone who is in a hurry a lot of times and whose writing is often a mess).  2 Peter was written about 66 AD.  If he copied from Jude than Jude would have been written earlier than that.  Also some experts believe that Jude must have been written first because there would be no point in copying most of his book from 2 Peter.  As I said, though, they had different reasons for the things they said so that is probably not a good reason to say Jude wrote first.  (Don’t you wish they had copyright dates or even just date dates on their writings).  Some time in the 60’s AD seems like a safe starting point for us to think about James.

The date only really matters in helping us figure out what was going on (or not going on) when Jude wrote the book (actually the letter).  The letter is about some trouble makers in the church.  Some scholars read the letter and think the trouble maker were following a set of ideas called Gnosticism.  Those same scholars though, usually try to date to book after 100 AD because Gnosticism seems to really be an idea from the 100’s AD.  The problems that Jude deals with do not seem to fit a full blown form of Gnosticism.  It is really hard to say when certain ideas or beliefs started up.  Right now many ads for Pepsi cola have the slogan “Live for Now” on them.  If you heard someone say that you might say, ‘Oh that idea is from 2012 it was a Pepsi slogan.”  Other slogans in the recent past were “Just do It” by Nike, “You only go around once in life, go for the Gusto” by Michelob beer, or “Have it your way.” By Burger King.  This last one shows the point because in the 1960’s a singer by the name of Frank Sinatra released an album titled “My Way” wth a song of the same name.  So if someone was ordering food at a restaurant and said to the waiter, “Look I don’t like Blah Blah Blah, I want it my way.”  Is the person quoting the Burger King idea or Frank Sinatra or are they copying the Israelites from the time of the Judges (Ha!  You’ll have to read the “Intro to Judges” for that one).

So while it is important to understand as much as we can about the background of a particular book we need to be careful not to go too far and make it something it is not.  Jude was written by the brother of James and Jesus.  It had to be written sometime in his lifetime.  All we really know about the situation is what he tells us.  Let’s see what that is.