Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Twenty Five Verses, Fighting a Fire

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Twenty Five Verses, Fighting a Fire

Jude is a single, urgent chapter, written, the author says, because he had meant to write about the faith the community shared in general but felt compelled instead to address an immediate threat: certain people had "stealthily entered" the community, perverting God's grace into an excuse for immorality and denying Christ.

The letter answers with a rapid sequence of Old Testament and Jewish tradition examples of judgment on the disobedient, the wilderness generation destroyed after the exodus, angels who abandoned their proper place now kept in chains, Sodom and Gomorrah, drawing a line from ancient rebellion to the present false teachers.

Unusually for a New Testament book, Jude directly quotes non-biblical Jewish literature as authoritative: it cites the Book of Enoch by name, quoting its prophecy of the Lord coming "with ten thousands of his holy ones" to execute judgment, and it alludes to a dispute between the archangel Michael and the devil over the body of Moses, a story known from a separate work called the Assumption of Moses that does not survive complete. The letter closes with one of the New Testament's most quoted doxologies, "to him who is able to keep you from falling... be glory, majesty, power and authority," widely used in Christian worship independent of the letter's original polemical context.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.