Semi-Random Musings (39)

For almost nine years, I have been reading the New Testament as closely as possible to the order in which I believe its writers composed its various component letters, gospels and prophecies. That’s well over a dozen times through. As I have commented here, it’s a very different experience from reading the NT in the order we find it in our Bibles. The intended significance of certain passages is much more obvious when you read your mail in the order the mailman actually delivered it.

The relative importance of Paul’s teaching about the return of Christ positively jumps out at the Bible student who stops to put his reading material in chronological order.

In 1 Thessalonians, the apostle distinguishes between the Lord’s return for his church and the Lord’s return in judgment on the world. The fact that this truth matters — and matters a great deal — is impressed on us not only by the oath under which Paul puts the letter’s recipients to pass it on to “all the brothers” (which is unique in all his writings), but also by the letter’s earliness in chronology. 1 Thessalonians was only the second letter Paul ever wrote to a local church, right after that one about the importance of the distinction between law and grace, which is literally a life-saver.

So then, what we find at the chronological beginning matters, as does what we find at the chronological end. 2 Peter is the last doctrinal book written by one of the original Twelve, assuming we believe (as I do) that Jude was written by one of the Lord’s younger brothers. Peter’s three-verse endorsement of the works of Paul (not an original apostle) as “scripture” takes on added significance when we realize the very last thing (apart from John’s apocalypse) the apostles wanted to say to the growing church was that you can trust those letters Paul wrote, all of which were in circulation by the time of Peter’s second epistle. In these letters, we find the substance of our faith. To the extent we edit away or ignore the “things in them that are hard to understand”, we are displaying ignorance and instability, contributing to our own spiritual ruin. Hey, the “first Pope” said so! J

In an era when Paul’s writings to the churches have become the most virulently attacked and grossly misinterpreted of all scriptures (not least in comments on our own blog posts), this is a vitally important piece of information to have on hand. So is Paul’s own testimony that the gospel he preached “is not man’s gospel”, and that he “received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ”. Where do we find that? Not coincidentally, it is among the very first doctrinal assertions in the very first letter Paul ever wrote.

So then, Galatians and 2 Peter serve as bookends to all New Testament teaching, starting and ending with the affirmation that the entire faith package comes from heaven itself and not from the pens of mere churchmen, however revered they later became.

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Speaking of Peter and Jude, I spent one morning last week reading the work of five or six different scholars on the “literary relationship” of Jude’s letter to the content of 2 Peter 2-3. I had been aware of the text similarities for years, but remained uninterested in the debate about who came first or who copied who until re-reading both books back to back.

Having done so, I’m still uninterested. It’s just another tempest in a teapot. Don’t get me wrong, the similarities are definitely there (nicely charted here), but the conclusions to which most commentators jump don’t necessarily follow from the available data. The “dependency question” is most frequently settled one of the following ways:

1. Dependence of 2 Peter on Jude
2. Dependence of Jude on 2 Peter
3. Dependence of 2 Peter and Jude on a lost document
4. 2 Peter and Jude share a common author

Both the theory that the two wrote entirely independently (coincidence) and the theory that the Holy Spirit dictated similar messages to the two men word for word are rarely entertained, for good reason, I think.

The common authorship conjecture is a non-starter unless one or both letters are frauds, as each letter plainly identifies its author in the first verse. The dependence of both on a lost document seems equally unlikely to me given the small window of time in which both epistles were written. If one book indeed depends on the other, my educated guess would be that Jude repurposed some content from Peter rather than the other way around.

One suggestion I have yet to come across is that both were quoting freely from some standing oral tradition of which we are unaware. What is evident if you read both carefully is that the differences are as notable as the similarities, maybe more so, including differences in style. Jude is more concerned with the wicked character of the false teachers and the scriptures that anticipate them, Peter with the potential effect of their lies on the belief in the doctrine of the Lord’s return prophesied earlier by Paul (“Where is the promise of his coming?” “All things are continuing as they were”). Despite their commonalities, they are different messages, making the question “What’s the point of having Jude in the Bible when its verses are just repeated in 2 Peter?” sound simply inattentive, which it is.

One point rarely considered is that the letters to the churches took time to circulate. There was a lot of geography to cover. Given the urgency of Jude’s message, in which he tells his readers that the false teachers are already in the churches (“certain people have crept in unnoticed”), we should not be surprised if he considered it necessary to duplicate parts of an existing message from an apostle for an audience who had yet to receive Peter’s original. He concedes in verse 3 that his original intention had been to write about “our common salvation”, but this issue became more pressing, and he refers to the predictions of the apostles that “In the last times there will be scoffers”, pretty much a paraphrase of 2 Peter 3:3.

After all, these things were not addressed either initially or primarily to you and me. We have the entire Bible to work with and the ability to compare scripture with scripture; many of Peter and Jude’s readers didn’t. When we take into account the historical context in which both books were written, some overlap of content is not only likely but almost inevitable.