AUTHOR
AUTHOR
The writer was probably a Jewish Christian, for he shows that he knows such Jewish writings as the Assumption of Moses (Jude 9) and the Apocalypse of Enoch (14). He calls himself "Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James” (1) and, though he does not say which James he has in mind, it is generally held that this must be James the brother of Jesus, on the grounds that no other James in the early church was eminent enough to be referred to in this way without qualification. If so, Jude is himself a brother of Jesus (Mark 6:3). We may wonder why he does not say this, but James does not say it either (James 1:1); it seems that the brothers preferred to see themselves as servants of Christ rather than to claim kinship. In a spirit of true Christian humility, they preferred to class themselves with other believers rather than to take up a position that might be thought to assume a specially close connection with Jesus.
Many recent scholars hold that the writing is pseudonymous, 1but it is difficult to produce an argument for this. Why should anyone want to claim that a writing he had produced was written by Jude? As far as we know, Jude the brother of Jesus had no great reputation in the early church; certainly we cannot say that he was such a great man that people would naturally father their writings onto him. It is better to go along with the claim of the letter itself, that its author really was called Jude. There was a Jude among the apostles (Mark 6:3) and another Jude to whose name "Barsabbas” was added (Acts 15:22), but there is no reason for seeing the author as either of these. The probability is that the writer was Jude the brother of Jesus; if not, we have no way of knowing which Jude he was.