Garry W. Trompf, «The Epistle of Jude, Irenaeus, and the Gospel of Judas», Vol. 91 (2010) 555-582
A detailed case that the New Testament Epistle of Jude was written against the socalled Cainite sectaries, who were in possession of a Gospel of Judas as Irenaeus attests is presented here. Because the names Judas and Jude were the same, the good name of Iouda, especially as being that of a relative to Jesus, needed clearing, and subversive teachings — making Cain, Judas and other Biblical figures worthy opponents of the (Old Testament) god — had to be combatted. Since a Gospel of Judas has come to light, within the newly published Tchacos Codex, one is challenged to decide whether this was the gospel appealed to by the Cainites, and, if it was, to begin to grasp how they read a text which did not readily match their interests.
JUDAS 563
THE EPISTLE JUDE, IRENAEUS, GOSPEL
OF AND THE OF
nature ? One cannot want to foreclose that possibility, yet there are
reasons of weight against confining the social energies involved to
purely Jewish circles. What deters one from this conclusion is the
noticeable confinement of biblical scenarios cited in Jude to those
found between the Creation and Moses (indeed mainly Genesis sto-
ries, and with the two usages drawn from pseudepigraphical mate-
rials impinging on the figures of Enoch and Moses from early
Biblical history). We are naturally bound to enquire why this limita-
tion applies, since there are plenty of other candidates for disobedi-
ence and license available in Jewish scriptural narratives covering
later developments in Israelite-Jewish affairs (e.g., 1 Kgs 16–21; 2
Kgs 21; Hos 3). Given the present author’s previously published
analyses of responses to “the Jewish baggage of history†in early
post-New Testament times, and of typical or popular expectations
that a ‘new religion’ should offer a cosmic much more than an
earthly story, one possible candidate for the butt of Jude’s zeal
would be a species of early so-called “Gnosticismâ€. In “Gnosti-
cizing macrohistoriesâ€, as I have defined them, there is a myth-
icizing tendency to telescope history between the cosmologic and
prefatorial events in the Bible and the coming of the Christ, as if
everything in between is irrelevant and does not require “diges-
tion †24. The pre-Toraic interests addressed by Jude could reflect this
kind of over-preoccupation with ‘mytho-primordial events’. Hence
the argument, long ago championed by Adolf von Harnack, Otto
Pfleiderer and Adolf Jülicher, that the epistle attacks Gnostic liber-
tines, particularly, in Pfleiderer’s estimation, the second-century
Carpocrateans 25. This last group was sullied for interpreting the
newly proclaimed message of freedom from the Law (either Torah
more narrowly or nomos more broadly) as license to experience all
things, including normally unlawful sexual activity, and thus cele-
G.W. TROMPF, “Macrohistory and Acculturation: Between Myth and
24
History in Modern Melanesian Adjustments and Ancient Gnosticismâ€, Com-
parative Studies in Society and History 31 (1989) 638-648; G.W. TROMPF –
B. NASORAIA, “Reflections on the Rivers Scrollâ€, The Mandaeans. Proceed-
ings of the Twenty-Fourth International ARAM Conference on Mandaean Stud-
ies, University of Sydney 2007 (ed. S. ABOUZAYD) (Oxford) forthcoming.
VON HARNACK, Chronologie ; O. PFLEIDERER, Primitive Christianity
25
(London 1901) IV, 252-255; A. JÃœLICHER, Einleitung in das Neue Testament
(Tübingen 1906) I, 180.