The Epistle of Jude

Jude has long been one of my favorite biblical books

3: Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.

This verse was suprememly important to me as a fundamentalist and what led me out of that communion. Quite simply it said, you can't ignore history. The faith was delivered "once and for all" to the saints and thus, could never have disappeared of the face of the earth. That led to me the study of Christian history and voila, I have to now put up with crap from the Catholic Bishops.

A couple of the verses that have most intruiged me in the Bible are in Jude:

5: I will therefore put you in remembrance, though ye once knew this, how that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not.
6: And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day . . . 9: Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.

Then there's

14: And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints,

Verses 5 and 6 are said to have come from an apocryphal book, The Assumption of Moses and verse 14 is said to have come from 1 Enoch. The reference to these books as Apocryphal may be unfortunate, because it makes it sound like they were some nutty texts out there. But from what I understand, there were many books out there, though not on par with scripture, were of supreme religious value and used widely. I venture to suggest that just as Catholics hold spiritual writings such as the Imitation of Christ as supreme religious value, so also did the Jews hold these books.

Either way, verses from these books clearly made it into scripture, which is why Jude barely made it into the canon. In doing a quick google search, I found this article on the issue which seemed interesting. I need to read the whole thing though.

The letter then ends with one of my favorite invocation of God ever:

24: Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy,
25: To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.

This is only rivaled by Paul in 1 Timothy 6:15-16, when he says:

15: Which in his times he shall shew, who is the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings, and Lord of lords; 16: Who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see: to whom be honour and power everlasting. Amen.

BTW, this entire post was inspired by a mention of Enoch in Paleo-Judica