Monday, September 18, 2023

Michael F. Bird on the Epistle of Jude and its High Christology

  

The Epistle of Jude.

 

The Epistle of Jude is a letter of exhortation to a Christian assembly somewhere in the Hellenistic east, written principally to warn against certain intruders who are characterized by debauchery, the interpretation of dreams, a denial of Jesus Christ and denunciation of angelic authorities (Jude 4-16). Whereas much of the polemic against the intruders trades in stereotypical tropes to describe their godlessness; nonetheless, the allegation of rejecting lords and blaspheming glorious ones in vv. 8, 10 has a degree of specificity that is not stereotypical. This explains why the latter includes an unusual focus on angels compared to other New Testament writings. The intruders disparage angelic beings perhaps on account of a Hellenistic skepticism towards the invisible, because of ecstatic visionary experiences of the heavens with no angels, to denigrate the angels who gave the Torah, because of a prejudicial view of heavenly powers compared to Christ, to curse angels as wicked beings (4Q280 I 1-7), or to invoke the manipulate angels through magical spells (PGM VII.795-85).

 

Jude retorts: (1) “Jesus” himself was the angel of the exodus, thus to disparage angels is to disparage the preexistent Jesus (Jude 5 alluding to Exod 23.20-23 and Num. 14.26-38). (2) Angels are part and parcel of cosmic reality and redemptive history, as evil entered the world with evil angels and evil will finally be defeated at the judgment of the wicked angels; thus the intruders have abandoned Jewish theodicy and a theocentric heavenly hierarchy (Jude 6 alluding to 1 En. 10.4-5, 11-15). (3 Those who denigrate angels will suffer the same fate as Sodom and Gomorrah, who tried to violate angels (Jude 7-8). (4) Even the archangel Michael did not slander the Devil, the epitome of rebellious angels, but left judgment to God (Jude 9 alluding to Zech. 3.2 and Assumption of Moses according to Clement of Alexandria, frag. 2 and Origen, Princ. 3.2.1). (5) These debauched dreamers and angel-deniers will ironically be judged when the Lord comes with his angels (Jude 14-15 quoting 1 En. 1.9). Jude urges respect for angelic mediators as, dare I say, “guardians of the galaxy,” the heavenly custodians of the cosmic order, and supernatural servants of the people of God. Jude, much like Justin, believes “This God we do venerate and worship, and also the Son who came from him and taught us these things, and the company of other good angels who follow him and are like him, and also the prophetic spirit” (1 Apol. 6.2)

 

The author notably mentions how “Jesus once saved for all a people from Egypt and afterwards destroyed those who did not believe” (Jude 5). Here we must observe that there are significant textual variants in Jude at this point, as the earliest papyrus containing Jude as “God’s Messiah” (Theos Christos) saved a people from Egypt (P72), the majority of manuscripts read “Lord” (kyrios; א and many minuscules), while two prominent majuscules read “Jesus” (Iēsous; B A), with a combination of Lord, Jesus, God, and Christ in other witnesses. The evidence is thin and disputed, yet recent critical editions of the Greek New Testament have all savored “Jesus” (Iēsous) as the more original reading (ECM, NA28, UBS5, SBLGNT, THGNT). If “Jesus” is original in v. 5, then Jude would be explicitly identifying Jesus with the “angel of the Lord” in Exod. 23.20-23 and be engaging in a typological argument similar to Paul’s remark about Christ as the rock that accompanied Israel in the wilderness (1 Cor 10.4). Of course, even if kyrios is original in v. 5, the description of Jesus as “master and lord” in v. 4 would permit a christological interpretation of kyrios in v. 5.

 

In this vein, Jarl E. Fossum believes that Jude, much like Justin some decades later, identified the pre-incarnate Jesus with the angel of the Lord, who, in Jewish tradition, was associated with the exodus, the punishment of the Israelites in the wilderness, the imprisonment of the fallen angels, and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as we find in Jude 5-7. Fossum concludes: “Jude 5 implies that the Son is modelled on an intermediary figure whose basic constituent with the Angel of the Lord.” (Michael F. Bird, Jesus Among the Gods: Early Christology in Greco-Roman World [Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2022], 207-8)