A key question is the possible
and probable referent of δεσποτης.
The title is not among the conventional divine names, but was sometimes used by
Greek writers, including Jewish and early Christian authors, to refer to God
(in the NT, see Luke 2:29; Acts 4:24; Rev 6:10).67 The question is whether it
could refer to Jesus. As I argue here, the parallel passage in 2 Peter 2:1 is
the earliest witness to the text of Jude 4, and it reads και τον αγορασαντα αυτου δεσποτην αρνουμενοι. Significantly, the text
of 2 Peter attests the shorter reading and interprets δεσποτης as a reference to Jesus. Further,
the verb αρνεομαι occurs in a
similar sense over twenty times in the NT, and then it almost always refers to
a denying of Christ; only once to a denying of God the Father (1 John 2:22).
Finally, δεσποτης (“Master”) is correlative to δουλος (“slave”), and the author calls himself the slave of Jesus
Christ in the salutation (v. 1). In conclusion δεσποτης in this passage probably refers to
Jesus Christ.
Wachtel goes even further; he
interprets even the Majority Text as referring to one person, Jesus Christ,
appealing to other NT passages and to Pseudo-Oecumenius’ commentary, where the
Byzantine text is expounded along these lines. Thus, he argues that θεον was not added to avoid
ambiguity, but in order to enhance the Christological standing of Jesus. I do
not doubt that Jesus Christ is referred to as God in several places in the NT,
although I note that in practically all of the examples to which Wachtel refers,
there is ambiguity in terms of punctuation and textual variation.’° Evidently,
the Majority Text was interpreted in this way by Pseudo-Oecumenius and several
other authors, but one can hardly deny that the reference of the sole divine
title δεσποτης was not
perceived as ambiguous in much the same way as κυριος which scribes at times preferred to specify as either Jesus
or God (cf. v. 9 below). In fact, the presence of the adjective μονον increases the ambiguity, in light of
its occurrence in v. 25, μονω θεω σωτηρι ημων δια ‘Ιησου Χριστου του κυριου ημων.
In some witnesses,
the ambiguity is removed by the omission of the conjunction, so that the title
is unequivocally attributed to Jesus: GK (𝔓78 38 L:T K:B). Other witnesses replace the less common δεσποτην with θεον (378 2147 2652 L593), possibly because of
a gloss in the exemplar, or because of omission due to homoioteleuton if the
exemplar followed the Majority Text. The text of 𝔓72 has a different and awkward word order and adds the pronoun ημων. The scribe is known to have made many
additions where he repeats portions of his text, often a single word, and he
has also made a number of transpositions, some of which involve a leap followed
by a correction where the omitted words are inserted out of order (cf. v. 14,
21, 25).73 In this case, the scribe was interrupted when copying μονον as νομον which he then removed. His eye then probably skipped to ημων, he realized the mistake and copied the
omitted words in the wrong order, including ημων a second time. Thus, the accepted
reading has the best manuscript support, whereas most of the rejected readings
represent various attempts to make the text less ambiguous. (Tommy Wasserman, The
Epistle of Jude: Its Text and Transmission [Coniectanae Biblica New
Testament Series 43; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2006], 252-54)
