Jewish Jude

Now to Him who is able to protect you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory, blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time and now and forever. Amen. Jude 1:24-25  NASB

The only God our Savior – Peter H. Davids makes a telling point in his commentary on the letter of Jude.  He writes:

“ . . . as in v. 25 it is ‘God our Savior’ who is keeping them from falling and preparing to present them in his royal court.  In both cases this being is distinguished from ‘Jesus Christ’/ ‘Jesus Christ our Lord.’  Unlike 2 Peter, Jude does not allow for the possibility that the title ‘God’ is being applied to Jesus.  But this means that God the Father is the ‘sender,’ the active agent in loving, probably in selecting, protecting, and saving his readers.  This is not an austere or absent God, but a God very much involved in their lives.  He has been present in their selection, he is present in his love, and he will be present in their salvation, since the title ‘Savior’ here as everywhere in the NT is connected to eschatological deliverance rather than to the event of the cross . . . If God is presented as the family head, as the framework, so to speak, of all the good his people have received, Jesus is presented as his agent, as the leader of the people of God, as the sovereign of God’s kingdom.  Jude is Jesus’ servant, probably thought of in relationship to a king.  They are kept ‘by’ (NIV) or ‘for’ (NRSV) Jesus Christ (depending on how the Greek dative is read), the one reading viewing him as the king protecting his people and the other viewing him as the king who will receive his people. . .  This sovereign has delegates whom he sends out with his message (Jude 17, remembering that ‘delegate’ or ‘one who is sent’ is the meaning of ‘apostle’). . .  Finally, this Sovereign is the one through whom honor is given to God (v. 25), which means that he is viewed as a subking under God as high king.”[1]

We should not ignore this distinction if we want to understand the Jewishness of the apostolic authors.  While it is tempting to treat any reference to “Jesus” as Trinitarian, that paradigm wasn’t in place when these first century letters were written.  It took the Roman Catholic Church nearly another three hundred years to develop what has become a cornerstone of Christian theology; a cornerstone that separates Christian thought from Jewish practice.  Davids reminds us that first century models were based on agency, not ontology:

“Because the term ‘apostle’ has developed a religious connotation, we will generally use the term ‘delegate.’  For the NT writers the term itself was used in many contexts.  Although in secular Greek it was limited to military expeditions and seafaring ventures, Jews used an Aramaic/Hebrew term that our term translates to indicate a variety of people who were sent to conduct business in the name of the sender.”[2]

Davids is a Christian commentator so he has no Jewish axe to grind over this theological schism.  He simply notes that Jude is not Trinitarian, and that should lead us to re-examine our thinking about Peter, Paul, and the rest of those early authors.  The Jewish Messiah comes as God’s agent, not as God disguised in the flesh.  That was a perfectly understandable, and acceptable, concept in the first century.  It didn’t change until the Church adopted Greek ideas of being—and has held on to those Greek philosophical ideas ever since.

Topical Index: savior, agent, Trinity, Jude 1:24-25

[1] Peter H Davids, The Letters of 2 Peter and Jude (The Pillar New Testament Commentary), (Eerdmans, 2006), p. 30.

[2] Ibid, p. 35, fn. 4.