The decade of the 60s was a volatile and indeed violent one for residents of Judea under the rule of one bad procurator after another. Jewish blood began to boil long before it began to be spilled in large quantities. In order to set the demise of James in its proper perspective, we need to consider first the context in which he was martyred. The picture is a dark and foreboding one, as Jerusalem spiraled down in a death dance into conflagration and destruction.
THE DEMISE OF A JEWISH WORLD
Roman rulers during the empire seem to have regarded Judea as a minor and yet troublesome province. It was hardly seen as a plum appointment for ambitious patrician Roman soldiers and politicians wishing to climb the ladder of success. It is fair to say that Rome generally tended to send very much less than their best potential procurators to govern this region in the 50s and 60s. We must back up a bit and consider first the last procurator who ruled for any extended time in Judea. His name was Felix and served under Claudius and then Nero as procurator of Judea from A.D. 52 until either 58 or 59. It might have been thought that he would govern in a clement manner since he was married to a Jewish princess named Druscilla in A.D. 54, but since observant Jews saw this as a violation of Jewish marital customs, it seems not to have helped much. Felix also had the problem of dealing with the fact that north of him in the Holy Land was Herod Agrippa II, who kept being given more and more land by Nero.
It is then not a surprise that Felix was somewhat paranoid, and Josephus’s account of his reign reads like tales from the reign of the Marquis de Sade—a true reign of terror. Felix was always executing one zealot or another and seems to have made it his personal mission to root out Jewish messianic troublemakers such as Eleazar the revolutionary. This only produced more violence among the Jews, leading to the rise of the so-called sicarii or “dagger-men,” who went around executing Jews who were collaborating with Rome, such as Jonathan the high priest. It was also during Felix’s reign that the messianic pretender called the Egyptian rallied a group of Jewish followers and promised to bring down the walls of Jerusalem with a shout from the Mount of Olives. Felix sent out troops against this group, and the Egyptian escaped, which explains how Felix may have thought that Paul, when he was taken prisoner in the Temple precincts in Jerusalem, might have been this Egyptian.
The important thing to notice about all of this is that the Jewish Temple hierarchy was very concerned about maintaining the Temple and their roles in it, and once messianic figures or Jewish revolutionaries started executing Temple priests, they would certainly be opposed to any sort of messianic movements, including the Jesus movement, that might arouse the suspicions of Rome and might lead to their own loss of political power. No doubt, they kept a watchful eye on James and his fellow Jewish Christians in Jerusalem, seeing them as potential troublemakers who would endanger their fragile collaborative arrangement with the procurator.
Suffice it to say that in the time period of A.D. 52 to 68 or so, there must have been increasing pressure on the church in Jerusalem to appear truly Jewish and truly loyal to the Temple and its hierarchy. This is in part what must have been driving a request like we find in Acts 21:21–24 where Paul is asked to take part in a purification ceremony in the Temple with other Jewish Christians, and indeed to pay for the cost of these others doing so. It is fair to say that when Paul marched into Jerusalem with Gentiles and the “collection” in A.D. 58, he could hardly have picked a much worse or more xenophobic time to come in the 50s. Jews, Jewish Christians, and especially Pharisaic Jewish Christians would have become more concerned about the direction of the Jesus movement, not less, at the time when this event transpired. This is the backdrop not only to what happened in regard to Paul in A.D. 58–60 while he was under house arrest, but also what was to happen to James in A.D. 62.
The next procurator, Festus, arrived in A.D. 60 with Judea on the verge of falling into pure chaos. Bandits and zealots plagued the land; bad blood existed between Herod Agrippa II and the Temple hierarchy. Festus was a capable man, and he was able to prevent all-out war from breaking out, but Judea was nonetheless a seething cauldron waiting to bubble over. Festus could not have known he was facing a very divided Jewish leadership when he went to deal with them in regard to the matter of Paul, and in any case he was off the scene rather quickly, for he died in office, preventing a natural transition to the next procurator (Albinus). There was an interregnum, a gap between the rule of one procurator and the next, and so the high priest Ananus decided to seize the moment to strike at the heart of the Jewish Christian community. Josephus provides a remarkably frank and direct report of what transpired in A.D. 62 that is critical of the Jewish Temple hierarchy.
THE REPORT OF JOSEPHUS ON JAMES’S MARTYRDOM
It will be well at this juncture to allow Josephus to speak for himself in a rather full way, not least because he provides us with the only early account of James’s martyrdom, for the New Testament is silent on the matter.
The younger Ananus, who as we have said, had been appointed to the high priesthood, was rash in his temper and unusually daring. He followed the school of the Sadducees, who are indeed more savage than any of the other Jews, as I have already explained, when they sit in judgment. Possessed of such a character, Ananus thought that he had a favorable opportunity because Festus was dead and Albinus was still on the way. And so he convened the judges of the Sanhedrin and brought before them a man named James, the brother of Jesus, who was called the Christ, and certain others. He accused them of having transgressed the Law and delivered them up to be stoned. Those of the inhabitants of the city who were considered to be the most fair-minded and who were strict in observance of the Law were offended at this. They therefore secretly sent to King Agrippa urging him, for Ananus had not even been correct in his first step [of convening the Sanhedrin without Albinus’s permission], to order him to desist from any further such actions. Certain of them even went to meet Albinus who was on his way from Alexandria, and informed him that Ananus had no authority to convene the Sanhedrin without his consent. Convinced by these words, Albinus angrily wrote to Ananus threatening to take vengeance upon him. King Agrippa, because of Ananus’ action, deposed him from the high priesthood which he held for three months.251
This account has struck the vast majority of scholars as frank and unlikely to reflect later Christian padding or editing.252 Josephus, it is true, is a tendentious writer, and it is fair to say that here his concern is not with James per se, whom he mentions only in passing, but with chronicling how the Jewish and Roman leadership acted. But it is often what one says in passing, which is less likely to reflect the ax one is grinding, that is most historically revealing.253 This being so, we need to consider it carefully.
First of all, James is called by Josephus the brother of Jesus, just as is the case in the New Testament and also on the ossuary. The term used here is adelphos, not the Greek word for cousin, and this independent testimony to the relationship of James to Jesus is both early and important. Josephus is prepared to call Jesus the so-called (legoumenou) Christ, but is not prepared to call James the so-called brother of Jesus.254 It is important then to say that it was not just early Christian writers who called James the brother of Jesus. At least one early Jewish writer did so as well.
Second, the attestation that James was a Torah-true, faithfully observant Jew is stressed. Indeed it is apparently the basis of the complaint of injustice to Albinus, and it seems clear that Josephus definitely agrees an injustice was done to James. It was the strict Jews who complained about the injustice done to James, presumably because they recognized him to be a good and faithful Jew, perhaps in spite of his messianic beliefs about his brother. Indeed the action against James was seen to be such an injustice that it led to Ananus being deposed.
Stoning was indeed a possible punishment for lawbreaking in the form of blasphemy, false teaching, or being a troubler and seducer of the Jewish faithful, and this is the punishment Josephus says James underwent.255 This is indeed more believable in this volatile and very Jewish setting than the later Christian accounts that have him pushed from the pinnacle of the Temple and then struck thereafter as well.256 In short, James, like his brother, suffered a travesty of justice at the hands of an unscrupulous high priest who was critiqued not only by Josephus, but also by other fair-minded Law-observant Jews of Jerusalem. There is nothing in this account that reflects later anti-Semitic or pro-Christian sentiments, and it deserves to be given its proper weight.
This account makes it clear that James had respect not only within his own Jewish Christian constituency but also among other Jews in Jerusalem, including very strict ones. This could hardly have been the case if James himself had not been a pious and observant Jew himself. It is then all the more remarkable that James was able to take a middle way between Judaizing Pharisaic Christians on the one hand and the Pauline line on the other, in order to try and forge a workable model of Christian community that could include both Gentiles without circumcision and Jewish Christians, even strictly observant ones. James was not only James the Just, faithful to the Law. He was James the Mediator, whose broader perspective on the true essence of the Law and of faith and grace shines through.
THE BURIAL OF JAMES
As we now can say with some assurance with the discovery of the James ossuary, James was buried in Jerusalem and buried in a thoroughly Jewish manner, appropriate and indeed distinctive to the period of Jewish history between the rule of Herod the Great and the fall of the Temple in A.D. 70. Notice that James was not carried back to Nazareth and buried there. No, his fellow Jewish Christians in Jerusalem were his primary family and community at the time he died, and they in all likelihood provided for his burial.
It involved a two-stage process in which the body was laid out and allowed to decay. Early Jews did not practice mummification, unlike Egyptians. Once the flesh had disappeared from the bones, then the bones would be taken and carefully put in an ossuary, which did not entail laying the skeleton out to its full length, but in fact taking apart the skeleton so it would fit within a rather narrow and often short container.257 Early Jews who believed in resurrection had no difficulty believing God could reassemble the person and put new flesh on the bones and new breath in the body, especially in light of passages like Ezekiel 37:1–14. Respect for the dead and a belief in the resurrection of the righteous did not require burying them in a condition that mimicked what they looked like in this life.258
In fact it is plausible that Jews used the form of reburial involving ossuaries precisely because they believed in an afterlife, and the most prominent belief on that matter was the belief in a bodily resurrection. Is it an accident that the growth in this practice in Judaism parallels the rise of Pharisaism, the Pharisees being the most ardent advocates of bodily resurrection amongst early Jews? I think not, and early Jewish Christians very much followed in the footsteps of the Pharisees in regard to this matter. Their savior had been raised from the dead. They looked forward to a like destiny.
The ossuary itself is interesting in various respects. First of all, we do know that it was found in an area near or in the old city of David where there were Jewish tombs. In other words, James was not likely buried in a graveyard specifically for Christians. He was buried with his fellow Jews, and not likely in a family plot either. If James had been buried in a family cave where there were other ossuaries already in place, it is likely that, as with the case of Caiaphas’s ossuary, the inscription would have been placed on the end of the box so his ossuary could be distinguished from other such ossuaries, which would have been placed lengthwise in the cave. Instead we have an inscription on the side of the bone box, and not one hastily scrawled on it for mere identification purposes. To the contrary, James’s ossuary has what can only be called an honorific inscription, and an odd one at that, for it mentions not only the name of his father but also of his brother.259 The Jewish Christians who buried James wanted to honor him in burial, and we may suspect that they expected some would come and visit the burial spot and see the inscription written on the side of the box. The association with his brother is indeed the most honorific part of the inscription, and it is what not only sets off the inscription from other grave inscriptions in early Judaism,260 it also is the singular means by which this James could be clearly identified by those who visited the tomb. This James had been known by Jews and Jewish Christians alike as “the brother of Jesus,” the most notable and in some minds notorious first-century Jew by that name. James’s glory was in part a reflected glory, and he himself was perfectly comfortable with being known as a servant of Jesus. He was not one who sought honorific titles for himself, unlike various rulers and religious figures of his day. James was buried properly according to Jewish custom, and it is only by a providential accident that his ossuary has now been found. It of course needs further testing, especially in view of the discrediting of the Israeli Antiquities Authority report, but this must await the resolution of the trial of Oded Golan. I see nothing, however, at this juncture to cause me to change my earlier conclusion that the James ossuary is what it purports to be—the burial box of James.
THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH
What happened after James died? According to church tradition, he was replaced not by Jude or another brother of Jesus but by a relative of Jesus named Symeon, son of Clopas, as head of the Jerusalem church.261 Symeon is actually called a cousin of the Lord whom all deemed appropriate to be the next bishop. This indicates that the connection with Jesus’s family continued to be important to the Jerusalem church.262 It is Eusebius who also tells us that at the outset of the Jewish War, Jewish Christians in Jerusalem were warned by a prophecy to flee, and they did so to Pella. This would mean that Jewish Christians would not have remained in Jerusalem for many more years after James’s death. Somewhere in the mid-60s, or at least by 67–68, they would have fled due to the deteriorating situation in Jerusalem (food shortages and in-fighting between Jews, among other things). One reason to trust this tradition is that Pella is an odd choice of destination if one is making up a story about a location for early Christians to seek out. Damascus and Antioch would more likely have been chosen since they have clear and early connections with accounts in Acts about a Christian presence.
While it is not true to say that early Jewish Christianity died out because of the fall of Jerusalem and its Temple, it is true to say that it lost its central focus, for it was a Law-observant form of Christianity, and this included worship in the Temple. Thus in quick succession, first losing James, then losing a crucial part of the social context and religious focus in which it had been born and grew, this form of the Jesus movement experienced a drastic turn of events. But did Jewish Christianity return to Jerusalem after the Jewish War and before the Bar Kokhba Revolt in the early second century? Apparently some Jewish Christians did return, for Eusebius tells us that Symeon was not martyred until the time of the Emperor Trajan (in the early second century).
James had successfully established one form of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem, and it clung to its identity and location even despite severe trauma and difficulties involving not one but two Jewish wars (including the Bar Kokhba Revolt).263 But it was definitely a weakened form of Christianity, and it was also dispersed, indeed to judge by the letters of James, Peter, and Hebrews it was dispersed all over the empire, including even in Galilee.
The death and burial of James is not recorded in the New Testament. This is in part because the only history book in the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles, only takes us up to A.D. 60, and James died after that point in time. We must then rely on Josephus’s account and to a lesser extent the later Christian accounts of the event. What we have seen so far in this chapter is that it is perfectly believable in the volatile and often violent situation which existed in Jerusalem in the 60s that James could have been martyred by Sadducean Jewish Temple officials. After all, the same priestly family seems to have been involved in some way, though indirectly, in the demise of James’s brother Jesus.
The account of Josephus is a credible account, especially because the matter is simply used by Josephus as an illustration of the abuse of power by a high priest. Josephus only refers to James in passing, and there is no reason to doubt he is correct in saying that James’s martyrdom was seen as an abuse of power and an injustice by some fair-minded Jews who protested to the incoming procurator. What Josephus’s account does not tell us is how and where James was buried. We must turn to the early Christian accounts and the evidence from the finding of the ossuary for clues on this matter. What Josephus’s account does suggest is that James was an observant Jew, and other such Jews took umbrage when he was unfairly executed.
Since stoning was a punishment reserved for certain particular crimes, it appears likely that James was accused of being either a blasphemer or a false teacher leading astray the faithful. In a detailed study Bauckham concludes: “Our attempt to explain Josephus’ account of the death of James has therefore left us with two plausible possibilities: that he was executed as a blasphemer or as a maddiah [one who leads astray the faithful] (of course it is possible that he was convicted of both crimes). Both possibilities have the advantage of coherence with the policies of the Temple authorities towards Jesus and the Jerusalem church at an earlier stage in its history.”264 This is assuming that the action of the high priest was not merely one of pure maliciousness. Though Josephus portrays the priest in question as impetuous, this is simply his stock way of referring to young authority figures whom he thinks poorly of. It is more likely, since Josephus says the Sanhedrin was assembled, that a judicial verdict was passed on James, just as there was probably one passed on Jesus.
It is telling that this blow to the early Jewish Christian community did not immediately cause it to flee. Rather they must have stayed in the city long enough to allow the flesh to desiccate and to practice reburial on the bones of James. This means that the reburial likely would have transpired in A.D. 63 or 64.265 This also means that the now-famous ossuary inscription would have been written on the eve of the real outbreak of the Jewish War. Jewish Christians were not abandoning their city at this juncture. Rather, they were carefully and quietly honoring their dead leader and continuing the community in the tradition he had taught them, which involved the practicing of Jewish customs and the speaking of the language only Semites used in the region—Aramaic.266 Some final reflections on James are in order.
At the epicenter of early Jewish Christianity stands James—fixed like a rock in Jerusalem, no traveling evangelist he. If the measure of a man is seen in those he influenced, then James is clearly a giant. The intertextual echoes in 1 John and 1 Peter suggest that the two other major figures responsible for early Jewish Christians in the Greco-Roman world, Peter and the Beloved Disciple, were deeply indebted to the teaching and orientation of James toward these fledgling communities being birthed from Jerusalem to Rome. It is James whom we find steering the ship of Jewish Christianity in the remarkable homily called “the Letter of James.” And what do we learn of the man from this remarkable polemical salvo?
We learn at least the following things. James did not have a problem assuming authority over those he had not personally converted or discipled. His sense of authority in relationship to the Jewish Christians in the Diaspora is clear in “James” the document, yet it is also clear since this homily is an act of persuasion, a piece of deliberative rhetoric meant to change the audience’s mind and behavior, meant to help them renounce “friendship with the world” and do a better job of embracing “friendship with God.” At the heart of the homily is the attempt to remove the inequities that existed in these congregations between rich and poor, haves and have-nots. But equally clearly, James believes that that sort of social program requires a higher vision, the embracing of a more heavenly countercultural wisdom, to be enacted even in part. He will dispense some of this wisdom in this homily and hope it becomes implanted in the hearts of at least many in the audience. He pleads for a living faith that works, that does good deeds of piety and charity. He insists on impartiality and generosity of spirit toward all, even the lowest of the low. Like Jesus he insists on the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount, not as an ideal, but as something that by grace becomes the Magna Carta of freedom and possibilities for a truly Christian community. Like Paul he believes salvation is by grace through faith, but that this does not settle the matter of how Christians should behave thereafter. Faith that is not perfected in godly works is no living faith at all, and for both James and Paul, in differing ways, Abraham is the benchmark of both faith and obedience.
James is wary of the cult of personality, prefers to call himself only the servant of Jesus, and warns strongly against too many desiring to become teachers in the community. Few could have matched his knowledge of the scriptures, the teaching of Jesus, and early Jewish wisdom literature (for example, Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon) in any case, and even fewer had his aptitude for and skill with rhetoric. He was the orator par excellence. It is a shame he has been viewed as a mere appeaser or compromiser in early Christianity, or even worse someone who opposed the bold missionary work of Paul with the Gentiles and his message of salvation by grace through faith. James was neither of these persons, but he was a skillful diplomat, as Acts 15 shows, working out a necessary compromise. And to judge from both Acts and James the homily, he was no hard-line Judaizer either, though he probably believed all Jewish Christians should continue to keep the Mosaic covenant, especially in the Jerusalem community, though he says nary a word in his homily about circumcision, Sabbath-keeping, or food laws. Were these really not the subject of some discussion in Jewish Christian churches in the Diaspora? It is hard to tell, but neither 1 John nor 1 Peter suggests they were either, and Paul’s fulminations in Galatians and elsewhere pertain almost entirely to Gentile Christians and others who are part of his congregations. There is so much more we could say about James, but one more remark must suffice. He is the one person who held together the teachings of Jesus and early Judaism and the Jewish Christian churches with one hand, and at the same time extended the right hand of fellowship to Paul and his mission of salvation by faith. For this he deserves our eternal praise and admiration.
But we must now turn to another of Jesus’s brothers of which we know a bit: Jude. We have already seen a piece of evidence that reflects the fact that he did not become the head of the Jerusalem church after James. What is his story, and what should we make of his letter and contribution to early Christianity?
A JUDAS WHO DID NOT BETRAY JESUS
The brother of Jesus we know as Jude was in fact named Judas. He is mentioned quite clearly as Jesus’s brother in Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55—third in Mark’s listing of brothers and fourth in Matthew’s. His position in these listings may mean that he was not the next brother in line after James to be the head of Jesus’s family (these things being determined by age), which may in turn explain why he did not succeed James as head of the Jerusalem church. Jude is also referred to by name in Eusebius’s Historia Ecclesiastica, following the account of Hegesippus from the third century.
The fact that Jude’s letter begins with the identification “brother of James” establishes the connection with the holy family beyond reasonable doubt. The fact that Jude also calls himself a servant of Jesus, as does James in James 1:1, does not count against his blood kinship with Jesus as some have argued; it simply reflects his humility and his use of a common title adopted by Christian leaders in that era to establish authority in a church setting. As Bauckham stresses, the connection of this Judas and this document to the holy family is secure because “the only man in the whole early church who could be called simply James [as in Jude’s claim to be brother of James] without risk of ambiguity was James the Lord’s brother.”267
Bearing in mind that we have no evidence that James was itinerant—indeed, as we have seen, he sent and received messengers rather than traveling himself—Paul’s reference in 1 Corinthians 9:5 to brothers of the Lord being accompanied by believing wives suggests that Jesus’s brother Jude was an itinerant Jewish Christian missionary who was married and traveled with his wife. Since Paul does not suggest that Jude was a missionary to Gentiles like himself, and since Jude’s letter likely addresses a Jewish Christian audience, it is very likely that, like Peter, he was a missionary to Jews. Jude refers to others (but not himself) as “apostles” in verse 17, thereby distinguishing himself from those followers of Jesus who were evangelizing non-Jews.
As for what we know of Jude from noncanonical sources, Julius Africanus tells us in the late second century that the family of Jesus spread the gospel throughout Israel starting from Nazareth and its vicinity. This likely confirms that apart from James, the family of Jesus was based in Galilee after Easter, which is perhaps another reason Jude did not succeed James as leader of the Jerusalem church.
Now let’s see what information we can garner about Jude the brother of Jesus from a closer look at his brief letter.
HEY JUDE, DON’T MAKE IT BAD: A LETTER COMBATING FALSE TEACHERS
There has been considerable debate over the authorship and authenticity of the letter of Jude, and accordingly debate over its proper dating as well. Those like Bauckham and William Brosend, who are inclined to see this letter as genuine, date the letter early, perhaps as early as the early 50s. The one thing thought to count against this sort of dating is the aforementioned verse 17, with its reminder about the “predictions of the apostles of our Lord.” Those inclined to see this letter as a pseudepigraph—a letter written by someone else who adopted the name and authority of Jude—see that verse as a clue that the document was written in the postapostolic era. There are several problems with this conclusion.
For one thing, it might just as well reflect the fact that while Jude sees himself as a servant of the Lord Jesus, he does not see himself as an apostle, perhaps because Jesus did not appear to him personally. (Seeing the risen Lord was an essential criterion for being an apostle of Jesus Christ, as opposed to being an apostle/agent/missionary commissioned by a church.) While 1 Corinthians 9:5 shows that Paul knows that the brothers of Jesus are Christians by the time he writes this letter, he does not call them apostles there, and he mentions only an appearance to James amongst the brothers at 1 Corinthians 15:7. Remember that John 7:3–5 makes clear that the brothers did not believe in Jesus during his ministry, while Acts 1:14 tells us only that the brothers came to the Pentecost meeting in the upper room convinced of Jesus’s resurrection. Second, as Brosend points out, there is nothing in the construction of verse 17 that suggests that the apostles made these predictions in the distant past. To the contrary, this letter is full of the eschatological fervor and anticipation of the return of Christ that characterized the apostolic era in general.268
Another thing that supports an early dating of the letter of Jude is the fact that it has to have been written prior to 2 Peter: the vast majority of scholars now recognize that 2 Peter 2:1–18 and 3:1–3 are dependent on Jude verses 4–13 and 16–18.269 That means this document must have circulated in Jewish Christian circles in the first century prior to the writing of 2 Peter near the end of that century.
As for the authorship of Jude, some people have quibbled about the Greek of this letter being too good for a Galilean carpenter, but as Bauckham argues, this complaint does not have much merit. For one thing, this letter reflects that the author knows the Aramaic edition of the book of 1 Enoch and of the Testament of Moses; furthermore, his use of the Old Testament does not suggest he is following the Greek Old Testament in general. Here is someone who apparently knows Hebrew, Aramaic, and some Greek. His skill in Greek should not be exaggerated, however. He has a good Greek vocabulary, but his skills with grammar and syntax are not honed. One could say he has an oral skill with Greek, as his rhetoric is powerful at points, but his written Greek is far from textbook Greek.270 The view that best explains the evidence we have, both as to authorship and as to dating, is that the letter of Jude was written by a brother of Jesus, probably sometime in the 50s.
So what can this brief, twenty-five verse letter tell us about the author? It seems to be, like the letters of James, an encyclical, though it may have been written to a particular congregation. Very polemical, it focuses its wrath on false teachers who have infiltrated the letter’s audience and are misleading and beguiling others into false belief and bad behavior. While Jude is a good rhetorician and can occasionally sound like his brother James in his use of sapiential speech and colorful metaphors (referring, for example, to shepherds who feed only themselves, clouds without rain, autumn trees without fruit, wandering stars for whom blackest darkness has been reserved), he more often sounds like an offerer of prophetic woe oracles, not unlike what we find on the lips of Jesus in Matthew 23. In many ways this letter reads like the epistles of John in their polemics against schismatics and false teaching. The function of Jude’s harsh language is to get the audience to disassociate from false teachers, and in particular to recognize that they shouldn’t be let into the church meetings, where they are “blemishes at your love feasts” and are given an opportunity to share their erroneous teachings and ways in an intimate setting. Jude warns of both coming judgment, like that on Sodom, and coming eschatological salvation to enforce his ethical teaching here. However, he does not want to discourage mere doubters with his rhetoric; rather, they are to be encouraged.
Especially interesting is Jude’s use of extracanonical documents. He uses material from the Testament of Moses that speaks about the struggle between the archangel Michael and the devil over the body of Moses, apparently choosing that text because the false teachers Jude is condemning slander celestial beings; and he appeals to 1 Enoch to reinforce his message about the coming of the Lord for judgment. Jude 4–19 can be said to be a skilled midrash on various Old Testament texts. The writer’s midrashic technique resembles that found in the Qumran commentaries, and he shares the Qumran community’s perspective not only that the Old Testament is replete with prophecies about the end-times, but that the author and audience are living in the age of the fulfillment of those prophecies.271 This document, then, reflects the charged atmosphere of what can be called apocalyptic Jewish Christianity. It is therefore appropriate that this document was placed next to the book of Revelation in the canon.
Jude is Trinitarian in his thinking, speaking of praying in the Spirit, keeping oneself in God’s love, and waiting for the mercy of the Lord Jesus to bring the gift of eternal life (clearly seen as in the future). Nor is he shy about stressing a high Christology, speaking about Jesus being the believer’s only sovereign and Lord. His great worry is that the audience may fall away or defect to a false teaching, and so his famous concluding doxology promises that if they will rely on God, he can keep them from falling away. Jude is a fiery preacher of salvation and judgment who does not feel a need to pull his punches, but rather fights fire with fire to, by all means, rescue some. It could be that he intended this document as an honor-and-shame discourse—in other words, one meant to shame the audience into avoiding or even expelling the false teachers, and thereby honoring Christ and God and thus avoiding the dangers of apostasy.272 The use of the purity language helps reinforce the rhetorical aims of the discourse.
There is much we can learn about Jude from what he says in this discourse. His letter is far more Christological than that of James to the Jewish Christians, and it is far more apocalyptic and eschatological than James’s. Jude is more of a prophet and preacher and spirit-inspired exegete of ancient texts, while James is more of a sage. We can assume that Jude was seen by at least some in the early church as a paradigm of good teaching and preaching, for his work gets recycled in 2 Peter. Only Paul’s work seems to be as obviously influential in other New Testament documents as Jude is on 2 Peter. This may be as much because of who wrote this short document as because of what is said. Jude is clearly no mere clone or copycat of either of his older brothers; rather, he carves out his own niche and serves the cause of Christ in his own way, with a strong sense of eschatological urgency. His work deserves far more attention than it usually gets, and it speaks volumes about the prophetic, eschatological, and highly Jewish character of the discourse in the Jewish Christian communities in and around the Holy Land. Jude deserves to be seen as a strong voice within the inner circle of Jesus.
But there are also a few things to be learned from what Jude does not say. Despite all his use of purity language, he does not argue about kosher food laws, or Sabbath-keeping, or circumcision, but rather about general ethical, spiritual, eschatological, and Christological concerns. This says a lot about where his focus was. One cannot characterize him as amongst the Judaizers or Pharisaic Jewish Christians we hear about in Galatians 2 or Acts 15, despite his use of esoteric Jewish materials and midrashic exegesis. In fact, no Judaizers or Pharisaic Christians are ever heard from directly in the New Testament, only indirectly. This makes clear that in the end that rigidly Pharisaic branch of early Jewish Christianity was not seen to represent even the Jewish Christians, as characterized by James and Jude; the inner circle of earliest Christianity did not include such hard-line figures any more than it included Gnostics or libertines. The differences between James, Jude, Peter, Paul, Mary, the Beloved Disciple, Joanna, and Mary Magdalene, while real, should not be exaggerated.
Clearly this letter of Jude, with its polemical tone, makes evident that even in the earliest period of church history there were a variety of Christian views and teachings that were seen as beyond the pale ethically, spiritually, theologically, and Christologically by the inner circle. All of the inner circle who wrote documents make this clear, some (for example, Jude, Paul, and the Beloved Disciple) offering more polemics than others against false teachers. There were boundaries to the Christian community, and they regularly were enforced and reinforced by the inner circle. Interestingly, the boundaries were insisted on even by those who could be called charismatics. Jude, for example, urges praying in the Spirit, and Paul stresses prophesying even when writing to a pneumatic church situation in Corinth; but this charismatic focus was not seen in any way as a cause to be less demanding at the ethical or Christological level of discourse. The equating of charismatic and libertine or charismatic and theologically broad-minded is a false one if we are talking about the inner circle of earliest Christianity.
WHAT WE’VE LEARNED AND WHAT THAT KNOWLEDGE TELLS US ABOUT JESUS
In the 60s the early Christian movement was to lose three of the inner circle—Peter, Paul, and James—leaving something of a leadership vacuum in both Jerusalem and Rome. In addition to this upheaval, Jerusalem itself was to receive a stunning blow in A.D. 70 with the destruction of the Temple, a blow from which it would not truly recover for the rest of the New Testament era. The center of the Christian movement would of necessity have to be located elsewhere. That era in Jerusalem was a volatile vortex into which early Jews and early Jewish Christians were both dragged, changing both forms of Judaism irrevocably.
It is telling that neither early Judaism nor early Christianity tried to go back to a Temple-centered religion focused on a theology of holy space and holy land, at least not after the brutal suppression of the Jewish Bar Kokhba Revolt in the early second century. It is a strange truth that the Jesus movement and the Pharisaic movement, both of which survived the two Jewish revolts, became supercessionist in character—that is, believing that the former form of their religion should be left behind for something better—a Word-centered religion in the case of Judaism, and a Jesus-and Word-centered religion in the case of Christianity.
History, it has been said, is most often written by the winners, but sometimes winning or losing is just a matter of location, of being in the right or wrong place at a certain time. This was certainly true of the more Torah-true form of Christianity that James nurtured in Jerusalem. While this form of Christianity was by no means snuffed out by the destruction of Jerusalem, it was forced out into backwaters like Pella and even Galilee. In my view we bear witness to something of the aftermath and residue of the Jerusalem crisis in the Gospel of Matthew, a gospel likely written in the 70s or 80s for Jewish Christians in Galilee (or, less likely, in Syrian Antioch). That gospel, like documents such as the Didache, reflect the tenacious attempt to preserve a more Jewish form of discipleship to Jesus—a form that was to continue on into the early Middle Ages, until anti-Semitism in the church forced it underground and largely exterminated it.
But it is perfectly clear that during the New Testament era both the more Jamesian and the more Pauline forms of early Christianity were alive and well. Both forms—the form which thought Jewish Christians ought to be Torah-true, and the form which thought adherence to the Torah was optional—were alive and well. The mediating figures, as we have seen in Acts 15, were Peter and James, who were closer to Paul and endorsed his ministry in a way the hard-line Judaizers did not. James was worried about a garbled Paul, or a Paul misinterpreted, just as Jude was worried about teachers who seemed libertine and the Beloved Disciple was concerned about the denial of incarnational Christology by the schismatics.
None of the inner circle would have argued with the view that faith without works is dead, and none of them would have been happy with an inadequately low Christology. Jesus was the risen Lord for all of them, and the sovereign mediator between God and humankind; they viewed the human race as lost without Christ. All of them manifested one or another form of what can be called early Jewish Christianity—even Paul, as we shall see in the next chapter.
But let us remember that there was already a strong sense of Christological orthodoxy and ethical orthopraxy in these communities. We have seen plenty of evidence that there were both Christological and ethical boundaries to the communities of Jesus which led to polemics against false teachers of various sorts, ranging from Judaizers to libertines to those with too low a Christology. These boundaries were defined and refined and further clarified in the period when the New Testament documents were written—that is, between A.D. 49 and the end of the century. What we have no hint of in the New Testament is polemics against later aberrations like Gnosticism or Marcionism; nor does any New Testament document—or, for that matter, any other first-century Christian document, such as the Didache or 1 Clement—suggest that there was a Gnostic or Marcionite stream of Christian tradition already extant in the first century. Likewise, we do not have any hard evidence of a purely low Christological stream of Christianity in that era, if by evidence we mean whole communities of this orientation. False teachers do not a stream of Christianity make.
All of the inner circle of Jesus were Jews advocating what they took to be a Christological reformulation of Jewish monotheism with the premise that the Old Testament was God’s good revelation for God’s people, including his Christian ones—something the author of the Gospel of Thomas and later Gnostic documents obviously struggled with. Jesus was confessed, worshipped, and proclaimed as the risen Lord in all of the communities addressed in the New Testament era that we know of. This is why false teachers were immediately singled out and castigated in those communities, and this is why they left.
It is simply historically false to suggest that the intellectual boundaries of Christianity were not defined until well after the New Testament era. The evidence that they already existed in the New Testament era is compelling. However, as offshoots and aberrations from the earlier and more apostolic faith arose in the second through fourth centuries, the church was forced to more clearly define Christological orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Then indeed the boundaries were more rigidly and firmly put in place. But this is not because before the fourth century what existed was a “free-range” Christianity that would have considered Gnosticism (or, for that matter, an inadequate Christology or polytheism or libertinism) a legitimate variant on a Christian theme. It is because the specific problems raised by such later deviations had not yet formed, or had not yet fully formed, in the New Testament era.
Let’s conclude this chapter by asking what we learn about Jesus by looking through Jude’s eyes. The message of Jude suggests that he knew of his brother’s strong apocalyptic rhetoric and compelling eschatological message. A non-eschatological Jesus doesn’t work any better than a non-Jewish one! The nascent Trinitarian language in Jude makes perfectly clear that Jude did not see such language as incongruous with either the message of Jesus or Jesus the man himself. Indeed Jude, like the other members of the inner circle of Jesus, believed firmly that he lived in the eschatological age of false teachers and false teaching, a time when proto-orthodoxy was at a premium and needed to be maintained. He also believed fervently that Jesus would return, bringing in his hands eternal life. This is something a Jew could believe only of a divine figure. In this light, it is noteworthy that Jude talks about figures like Enoch but does not equate Jesus with them. Rather, he calls the latter the Lord Jesus Christ and tells us that the earliest apostles were apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ. This concept of Jesus did not arise in the late first century; it arose in the earliest circle of Jesus’s followers in response to encountering the risen Jesus and in response to what they remembered of his claims and his teachings. For them, the historical Jesus and the risen Jesus who was the risen Lord were one and the same person, a man they worshipped, prayed to, and served—even in the case of Jesus’s own brothers, who had known him since childhood!
This speaks volumes about the historical Jesus, however uncomfortable it may make those who like the notion that high Christological views of Jesus were royal robes only later placed on this man. A late take on high Christology is historically false. As I once heard the great German New Testament scholar Martin Hengel say, the earliest Christologies were some of the highest ones, seeing Jesus as both human and divine. This is because those who knew him best and earliest knew that this was a fair representation of how he presented himself, what he taught and did, and what the implications of his resurrection were. Such ideas characterized Jude’s theology just as much as they characterized Paul’s. Thus Paul cannot be seen as the inventor of such ideas about Jesus, as we shall now see.