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24 called God's friend. You see it is by deeds a man is justified, and not 25 merely by faith. In the same way, was not Rahab the harlot also justified by deeds, as she welcomed the messengers and dismissed them 26 by another way? For

Just as apart from the breath the body is dead,

So also faith is dead apart from deeds.

31 Crowd not to be teachers, my brothers,

Since you know we shall be the more heavily sentenced

2 For in many points we all stumble :

He is a perfect man who stumbles not in speech,

He is able to bridle his whole body as well.

3 If we put bridles into the horses' mouths to make them obey us,

We turn about their whole body as well.

4 Look at the ships too! for all their size and their speed under stiff winds, They are turned about by a very small rudder, wherever the impulse of the steersman decides.

5 So also the tongue is a small member,

6

Yet it boasts of great exploits.

Look at the forest kindled by a tiny fire!

And the tongue--that world of iniquity

The tongue proves itself a very fire among our members:

Besides staining the whole body,

It fires the Wheel of being,

Fired itself by Gehenna.

7 For every kind of beast and bird, of things creeping and marine, is tamed and has been tamed by mankind :

8

But no man can tame the tongue

Restless evil that it is, full of mortal poison.

9 With it we bless the Lord and Father,

10

And with it we curse men made after the likeness of God:

From the same mouth issue blessing and cursing;

My brothers, this ought not to be so.

11 Does a fountain send out fresh water and brackish water from the same

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Or a vine, figs?

No more can salt water produce fresh.

13 Who is wise and sage among you?

In meekness of wisdom let him show his deeds by good conduct. 14 But if in your heart you have bitter jealousy and factiousness, Exult not over the truth nor lie against it.

15 That is not the wisdom which comes down from above; Nay, it is earthly, sensuous, daemoniacal.

16 For wherever jealousy and faction exist, There disorder is and everything ill.

17 Whereas the wisdom from above is first pure,

Then peaceable, forbearing, pliant,

Full of mercy and good fruits, impartial, unfeigned.

18 Now those who make peace are sowing in peace uprightness as the fruit thereof.

41 Whence come wars, whence wrangles among you?

Is it not from this, from your pleasures that wage war among your members?

2 You desire, yet you do not possess.

You are envious and jealous, yet you cannot obtain.
You wrangle and fight, yet? you
do not possess,

Because you do not ask.

3 You do ask, yet you receive not;

Because you ask amiss, in order to spend upon your pleasures.

4 Unfaithful to your troth,

Do you not understand that the world's friendship is enmity against God?

Whoever then would be the world's friend proves himself God's

enemy.

5 Or is it idly, do you imagine, that the scripture saith,

Jealously he yearns for the spirit which he made to dwell in us"?

6 Now he grants greater grace: therefore it saith,

7

The haughty God resists,

But to the humble he grants grace.

Be subject then to God.

Resist the devil,

And he will flee from you:

8 Draw nigh to God,

And he will draw nigh to you.

Sinners, cleanse your hands!

Double-minded, purify your hearts! 9 Grieve and mourn and weep!

Changed be your laughter into mourning,
And your joy into dejection!

10 Humble yourselves before the Lord,
And he will raise you.

11 Defame not one another, brothers.

He who defames his brother or judges his brother,
Defames the law and judges the law.

Now if thou judgest the law,

Thou are not obedient to the law, but a judge.

12 One is lawgiver and judge,

13

He who is able to save and to destroy.

But thou, who art thou to judge thy neighbour?

Come now, you who say, "To-day or to-morrow we shall go to this 14 or that city, and spend a year there, and trade, and get gain"-you who are ignorant what life 3 shall be yours upon the morrow! For you are a

15 vapour, appearing for a little and then vanishing.

You should say

16 instead, "If the Lord will, we shall do this or that." As it is, you exult in your pretensions; all such exultation is evil.

17

He who knows, then, to do good yet does it not,

To him it is sin.

51 Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your impending griefs!

2 Your wealth lies rotten,

And your garments have become moth-eaten.

3 Your gold and silver are rusted over,

And their rust shall be evidence against you,
Yea, it shall devour your flesh like fire.

You have been laying up treasure in the last days.

1 Reading φθονείτε,

2 Adding zui.

3 Omitting [[]].

4 Behold, the wages of which you have defrauded the labourers who mowed
your fields, are calling aloud,

And the cries of the harvesters have entered into the ears of the Lord of
Sabaoth.

5 You have lived on earth in luxury and dissipation,

You have nourished your hearts, on the day of slaughter.

6 You have condemned, have murdered the upright man:

7

He does not resist you.

Be patient, then, brothers, until the arrival of the Lord.

Behold, the husbandman waits for the precious fruit of the earth,

Patient over it till it receives the early and the latter rain:

8 Be you patient also, strengthen your hearts,

For the arrival of the Lord is near.

9 Murmur not against one another, brothers, that you may not be judged : Behold, the judge is standing before the door!

10 As an example of hardship and patient endurance, brothers, take the 11 prophets who have spoken in the name of the Lord. Behold, we call those who have endured, happy. You have heard of the endurance of Job, and you have seen the end of the Lord, that the Lord is full of sympathy 12 and pitiful. But above all, my brothers, swear not: neither by heaven, nor by earth, nor by any other oath. Let your "yes" be a simple "yes," and your "no" a simple "no"-that you may not fall under condemnation.

13 Is anyone among you in hardship?

Let him pray.

Is anyone in good spirits?

Let him sing praise.

14 Is anyone among you sick?

Let him call for the elders of the Community,

And let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of

the Lord.

15 And the prayer of faith shall restore the invalid,

And the Lord shall raise him up.

Even if he has committed sins,

They shall be forgiven him.

16 Confess then your sins to one another,

And pray for one another,

That you may be cured.

Great is the effect of an upright person's prayer in its activity. 17 Elijah was a man with a nature like our own;

18

19

And he prayed earnestly that it might not rain,

And it did not rain on the land for three years and six months.
Then he prayed again,

And the sky yielded rain, and the land produced her fruit.

My brothers, if anyone among you err from the truth, and some one 20 turn him back, let him know that he who turns a sinner back from the error of his way, shall save his soul from death and hide a multitude of sins.

THE EPISTLE OF JUDAS

THE main indication of date in this forcible and brief letter is to be found in the nature of the error that is denounced. This is commonly and, upon the whole, rightly taken to be a phrase of that strange antinomian Gnosticism which spread over sections of the church especially during the second century. The epistle (unless the epistolary form be an artificial and literary device) is addressed to a definite, local, and recent manifestation of this libertinism within (12) the church. It is a word for an emergency. The immediate conditions soon passed out of knowledge, and it is unreasonable to expect the writing to afford clearly defined traces of a controversy with which writer and readers are already familiar. Still it is none the less possible from the writing itself to reconstruct with sufficient accuracy the spirit of its period, although the general tone of the letter points not to a genuine epistle but to a homily. In the background Gnostic tendencies are unmistakable: the stress laid on distinctions and classes (19, anodiopícovres, to which Ro 1617 is only a linguistic parallel), the claim to possess visions (8, évvπviatóμevo) and superior knowledge (16), the moral laxity (8.23), the repudiation of the OT God and of angels (8, κυριότητα ἀθετοῦσιν, δόξας δὲ βλασφημοῦσιν). Most critics concur in regarding these as consistent and decisive traces of the opposition which the church presented to the movement headed by the Nikolaitans (Apoc 26. 15) towards the end of the first century, and later by several sectaries, including Karpokrates. Their leading tenet1 was a licentiousness which obliterated the distinction between the natural and the moral (mapaχρήσασθαι τῇ σαρκὶ δεῖ), accompanied by ecclesiastical insubordination, and a violent antipathy to Judaism. Clement of Alexandria (Strøm. iii. 2, 6-10) found this error implied-though, as he thought, propheticallyin the epistle. Omit the "prophetically" and the correct historical standpoint is gained for the writing, i.e. somewhere among the rising currents in the sub-apostolic age, most probably after the beginning of the second century. This is corroborated by the references to the apostolic age as distant and authoritative (3.4.17)-the apostles being not merely scattered but dead, as the passage clearly implies-and to the faith as a crystallised entity (ἅπαξ παραδοθείσῃ τοῖς ἁγίοις πίστει, cp. 19), to whose historical origin the readers can look back.

2

The terminus ad quem is the period of the Muratorian Canon which includes Judas, or more closely, that of 2 Peter, which derives from the epistle. The mind of the writer appears to be filled with anger and surprise

1 As in the pastorals, it is met by denunciation rather than discussion, anger rather than analysis. But the situation is not yet desperate. The errorists, who are on the way of Kain (i.e. sceptics), are not altogether irreclaimable, and the church is evidently strong enough to carry the war into the enemy's camp. In 8. 10, as in Jas 21-14, an abuse of Pauline principles is implied.

2 On this demagogic eruption, cp. Zahn, Einl. ii. pp. 77, 85, 86. Like the other features of the situation, it rests on a theoretical propaganda of explosive ideas.

at the contemporary godlessness and libertinism (see Jacoby, NT Ethik, pp. 455-459), as if these were (*) for him at least a comparatively new departure. This (as Jülicher judiciously remarks) makes it advisable not to go too far down into the second century. On the other side the terminus a quo is probably to be found not merely in the Pauline epistles which it presupposes (especially Col-Eph), but in the Johannine epistles, or even in the pastorals, with which Jud-2 Pet have clear literary and religious affinities, no less than with the Didachê (parts of it written by author of Judas? Chase, DB, ii. p. 799 f.). Broadly speaking, the range for its composition is the first quarter-perhaps the first half-of the second century: neither within nor without the NT is there any evidence to justify a more precise date. So Hilgenfeld (Einl, pp. 739–744) and Volkmar, followed by most critics, including especially Mangold, Lipsius, Holtzmann (Einl. pp. 327-329; NTTh, ii. pp. 318-321), and Weizsäcker (AA, ii. pp. 160, 202). Völter formerly put it later than 140 A.D. Pfleiderer takes it similarly as the work of an Alexandrian Hellenist, written against the Karpokratian heresy (Urc. pp. 835-838), and this represents practically the position of several, like Hausrath and S. Davidson (INT, ii. p. 335 f.) and Cone (Gospel and its Interpret. p. 338 f.). But the narrower period, 100-125 (150) A.D., recently chosen and reasserted by Jülicher (Einl. pp. 181-187), McGiffert (AA, pp. 585-588), and Harnack (Chron. pp. 465-470), is upon the whole, certain. The relative order of Judas and the pastorals remains, however, quite an open question. It is attractive rather than safe to find the reference of Judas 17 (τῶν ῥημάτων τῶν προειρημένων ὑπὸ T. ȧTоσTóλv) in 2 Tim 31.2 43, 1 Tim 4; earlier prophecies might answer just as well (e.g. Col 24, Ac 2029, etc). The affinities with the Didachê (27-Jud 22, 41-Jud 8 etc.) are much more convincing, and probably indicate that the situation of both writings is fairly identical.

On this view the author is some unknown Judas who puts forward no claim to apostleship. His title "Brother of James," if it be authentic, is either an equivalent for "bishop" or a merely personal reference. If it does not refer to the author of "James," it must be supposed to have carried some weight at the time, although we have lost the clue to its local origin and appositeness. Unless the writing is to be regarded (with Harnack) as originally anonymous, or (with Pfleiderer, W. Brückner, Chron, p. 298; and Holtzmann, Einl. pp. 328, 329) as essentially pseudonymous —which is unlikely, as the primitive Judas was far from being a prominent leader it must be taken with this shadow upon the title. Grotius assigned its composition to Judas (Euseb. HE, IV. 5. 3), a bishop of Jerusalem in the reign of Hadrian, and in the dearth of evidence this seems not an unlikely guess, especially (TU, vIII. 1, 2) if the heresy is interpreted as Coptic or Syro-Palestinian Gnosticism. The remarkable use of the apocryphal literature and its legends in the epistle has suggested

1 Semler long ago put both it and 2 Peter between 150 and 200, the former, however, as an epitome of the latter.

2 Parallels collected by Spitta (cp. cit.); passages from Enoch by Chase in DB, ii. pp. 801, 802. The latter critic endeavours with great plausibility to connect the epistle with the brother of Jesus; but at too great expense, if such a date (a year or two after the pastoral epistles !) involves not merely the authenticity of the pastorals but the earlier date of the apocalypse and (apparently) of Hebrews. Such a literary construction is quite untenable. Further, ver. 4 does not imply a Pauline missionfield (p. 804). Had Paul a monopoly of preaching "grace"?

The literary dependence upon the Assumptio Mosis in ver. 9 must be maintained, in spite of Clemen's recent scepticism (KAP, ii. pp. 312, 314).

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