The use of scripture in the Letter of Jude

Abstract

The place and role of the Bible in winning or reclaiming souls in the Christian church from the earliest era to the present has been central and inevitable. Jesus himself was influenced by the Aramaic and Hebrew catena that were preserved in Judaism; these were the scriptures he knew. After Jesus, the early believers continued to search the scrolls as the pre-existent text that pointed to the continuity in their reverence to Jesus and thereby re-discovering their identity and the fulfillment of the prophecies aforementioned in them. By the second century, many other Christian writings circulated and were highly considered as of equal importance as the Jewish scriptures. Even though this process of the Christian believer searching for meaning and understanding in the Bible has not changed till date, one thing that stands to be often overlooked in the twenty first century is the cultural and ideological milieu in which the early Christians understood the constituents of scripture. It is against this background that this paper examines Jude’s use of both canonical and non-canonical materials to reveal the library of scripture that existed in the early Christian communities. The method adopted in this paper is exegesis. It is mainly argued that Jude alluded to the Pseudepigrapha (1 Enoch and the Testament of Moses) as scripture in the same way he used the Old Testament.Thus, it suggests a period of writing in which the Old Testament Canon was still open. In pursuance of the above purpose, possible quotations or allusions to other material are analyzed. The discussions centre on two broad headings; The Old Testament and Pseudepigrapha, within which specific sub topics are treated.

Keywords: Jude, Pseudepigrapha, Scripture, Hermeneutics, Typology, OT in NT, Exegesis