Jude — Editorial Guide

This reading edition follows the Saints-priority English text. Source chapter and verse labels are retained, including textual additions and numbered gaps. Square or double brackets signal textual or translation qualifications retained from the companion edition. This is a V1 working translation awaiting specialist review.

Companion translation and editorial notes: Saints Translation: Jude [V1 Working Draft]

Textual and Christian reception notes

All twenty-five source verses were checked in literary units against SBLGNT’s Greek main text; the translation is retained. Every verse has a passage-specific textual note and verified Christian exposition or an explicit pointer to the author’s multi-verse treatment. Clement is read through the transmitted Latin tradition in English; Calvin through John Owen’s translation, with editorial comments separately identified. These sources do not replace the selected Greek. No manuscript apparatus, independent Enoch or Moses witness, or exhaustive reception history was collated. Independent specialist review remains outstanding.

Jude 1:1 — Text [G]: Doulos is the writer’s religious self-designation, rendered servant. Beloved follows ēgapēmenois; the dative after kept permits for/by Jesus Christ. James is explicitly the brother; further identifications belong to reception. Reception: Origen, Commentary on Matthew X.17 [OR], quotes Jude’s self-description while discussing Jesus’ family. Clement [CL], opening on 1:1, interprets his self-designation as humility despite kinship. These are received identifications, not a resolution of authorship. Calvin on 1:1 [C1] instead privileges sanctified; his preference does not replace SBLGNT beloved.

Jude 1:2 — Text [G]: Mercy, peace, and love remain three coordinated gifts, with repeated and. Plēthyntheiē is an optative wish, represented by May … be multiplied. Reception: Calvin on 1:2 [C1] treats mercy as the source of grace and allows love to mean divine love or mutual Christian affection; his editor’s narrower view is not Calvin’s conclusion.

Jude 1:3 — Text [G]: The participial opening about our common salvation leads into the necessity of an urgent appeal. It does not itself prove that a separate earlier letter existed. Hapax marks the faith’s once-for-all delivery; saints means its holy recipients. Reception: Calvin on 1:3 [C2] reads the urgent appeal as pastoral preparation against threats and the delivered faith as something to retain with perseverance.

Jude 1:4 — Text [G]: The single article links Master and Lord with Jesus Christ. Progegrammenoi means written about beforehand; the sentence does not name the writing. Grace is turned into aselgeia, shameless indulgence, and Christ is denied. Reception: Clement on 1:4 [CL] makes judgment follow impiety, rather than cause it. Calvin on 1:4 [C2] warns against using grace to license wrongdoing. Their theological explanations remain attributed.

Jude 1:5 — Text [G]: SBLGNT expressly reads Jesus. Hapax modifies the readers’ knowing in this word order; once for all is retained, though once/already is possible here. Afterward represents to deuteron, the judgment subsequent to deliverance. No manuscript collation is claimed. Reception: Clement on 1:5 [CL] interprets the punishment as corrective; his English presentation says Lord God. Calvin on 1:5 [C3], citing Lord, uses the example against careless reliance on privilege. Neither quotation determines the selected Jesus reading.

Jude 1:6 — Text [G]: The angels failed to keep their domain and have been kept in chains: the repetition of tēreō matters. Archē can signify domain or original position. Jude names neither Tartarus nor the angels’ individual identities; compare, without harmonizing, 2 Peter 2:4. Reception: Calvin on 1:6 [C3] treats the angels’ fall as a warning from greater beings to lesser and interprets their chains as a miserable condition, with final punishment still awaited.

Jude 1:7 — Text [G]: Other flesh retains sarkos heteras. Like these leaves the demonstrative’s debated antecedent visible: the angels or the people of Sodom and Gomorrah have been proposed. The cities’ sexual wrongdoing and the penalty of eternal fire are both explicit. Reception: Calvin on 1:7 [C3] relates like these to Sodom’s and Gomorrah’s inhabitants and understands their destruction as an image of final punishment. Clement’s abbreviated comment on 1:7 [CL] instead speaks of repentance through discipline. Neither reading silently settles Jude’s wording.

Jude 1:8 — Text [G]: Dreaming accompanies three distinct charges: flesh-defilement, rejection of dominion, and slander of glorious ones. Doxas is plural; the translation leaves their identity open. Compare the closely related wording of 2 Peter 2:10. Reception: Clement on 1:8 [CL] identifies the glorious ones as angels. Calvin on 1:8 [C4] applies the charge to hostility toward magistrates. This interpretive contrast explains why the translated noun stays open.

Jude 1:9 — Text [G]: Michael is named archangel; the dispute concerns Moses’ body. He refrains from a slanderous judgment and appeals to the Lord with an optative rebuke. Jude does not narrate the burial or name the written source of this episode. Reception: Clement on 1:9 [CL] associates the episode with Moses’ assumption. Calvin on 1:9 [C4] allows an inherited tradition and takes Michael’s restraint as a rebuke to abusive speech. Neither supplies a directly collated surviving Moses narrative here.

Jude 1:10 — Text [G]: The two knowledge clauses contrast what they do not know with what they understand by natural instinct. Their corruption is connected specifically with the latter. Unreasoning animals represents aloga zōa, also used in 2 Peter 2:12. Reception: Clement on 1:10 [CL] connects the animal comparison with appetite. Calvin on 1:10 [C4] distinguishes natural instinct from reason’s governance of desire.

Jude 1:11 — Text [G]: Cain’s way, Balaam’s paid error, and Korah’s rebellion remain distinct examples. Have poured themselves preserves exechythēsan’s force; pay belongs to Balaam’s clause, without an amount. The aorists portray these courses and their ruin decisively. Reception: Calvin on 1:11 [C5] connects Balaam with corrupt teaching for gain and Korah with disruption of the Church’s peace. These are applications of the three named examples.

Jude 1:12 — Text [G]: Reefs renders spilades; spots/blemishes is a traditional alternative. Love feasts translates agapai, unlike the deceptions of selected 2 Peter 2:13. Without fear can attach to the feasting or self-shepherding. Waterless clouds and fruitless, twice-dead, uprooted trees remain distinct images. Reception: Clement on 1:12 [CL] reads the dry clouds as lacking fruitful divine teaching. Calvin on 1:12 [C5] treats love feasts as signs of fellowship and the barren images as empty promise.

Jude 1:13 — Text [G]: The images continue from verse twelve. Shames is plural; wandering stars and the gloom of darkness must not be flattened into a general label for wickedness. Has been kept preserves the perfect and the letter’s recurring reservation motif. Reception: Calvin on 1:13 [C5] applies the waves to inflated speech and the stars to deceptive brilliance. His comparison with contemporary opponents is later polemical application.

Jude 1:14 — Text [G]: Enoch is explicitly seventh from Adam. The aorist came remains in the quoted prophecy, whose judgment is future in its literary setting. Holy myriads preserves the vast company without inserting an exact census or a list of beings. No independent Enoch manuscript was collated. Reception: Augustine, City of God XV.23 [AU], accepts Jude’s witness to Enoch while questioning writings circulating under Enoch’s name. Jerome, On Illustrious Men 4 [JE], reports objections to the quotation and Jude’s authority through age and use. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress I, §§89, 395 [BU], reuses the Lord’s accompanying heavenly company in composite judgment scenes; their other imagery is not all from Jude.

Jude 1:15 — Text [G]: Two infinitives state the coming’s purpose: execute judgment and convict. The repeated all and ungodly word-family deliberately accumulate the charge against deeds and speech. Against Him refers to the Lord of the quotation, which ends here. Reception: Calvin, on 1:14–15 within Jude 14–16 [C6], treats judgment of both deeds and defiant speech as a warning requiring vigilance. This is the passage’s exposition, not an independent commentary on each repeated ungodly term.

Jude 1:16 — Text [G]: Grumblers and faultfinders are separate descriptions. Their mouth preserves the Greek singular with plural possessors. Flatter people expresses the idiom admiring faces, motivated expressly by advantage; their desires and boastful speech remain connected. Reception: Calvin on 1:16 [C6] highlights the inconsistency between arrogant boasting and servile flattery for gain.

Jude 1:17 — Text [G]: The emphatic plural you turns to the beloved recipients. Remember is an imperative, and the remembered words belong to the apostles of Jesus Christ. No apostle or specific written letter is named here. Reception: Calvin, on 1:17–18 within Jude 17–19 [C7], joins the apostolic warning to Enoch’s older prophecy to steady the hearers against predicted corruption.

Jude 1:18 — Text [G]: Used to tell represents the imperfect elegon; last time is singular. The mockers follow their own ungodly desires. Compare 2 Peter 3:3, whose wording is last days and must remain distinct. Reception: In that same 1:17–18 exposition [C7], Calvin dates the last time from Christ’s first coming and describes scoffing as contempt for God and future judgment.

Jude 1:19 — Text [G]: SBLGNT has those creating divisions without the added themselves found in some earlier presentations. Psychikoi describes life unshaped by the Spirit, not a psychological diagnosis. The Spirit contrasts with the Holy Spirit explicitly named next. Reception: Calvin on 1:19 [C7] reads separation from Church discipline; editor John Owen’s note 201 argues for divisions within it. Calvin relates natural life to the absence of spiritual renewal. The editor’s judgment is separately attributed.

Jude 1:20 — Text [G]: Building and praying are participles leading into verse twenty-one’s command. Yourselves and your are plural: growth in the most holy faith is communal. Prayer is explicitly in the Holy Spirit. Reception: Calvin on 1:20 [C8] connects continuing growth in faith with love and prayer enabled by the Spirit.

Jude 1:21 — Text [G]: Keep is the main imperative of verses twenty–twenty-one. Love of God leaves the genitive open to God’s love and love directed toward God. Awaiting Christ’s mercy points toward eternal life, not a second independent command. Reception: Calvin on 1:21 [C8] connects perseverance in love with hope grounded in Christ’s mercy.

Jude 1:22 — Text [G]: SBLGNT has mercy and the accusative diakrinomenous, construed here as those doubting. It is not the nominative making a distinction found in Calvin’s cited reading. This first group continues into the next verse’s two groups. Reception: Calvin on 1:22–23 [C8] advocates adapting correction to each person. His two-group wording and making a distinction differ from the selected text.

Jude 1:23 — Text [G]: The selected text separately directs rescue from fire and mercy with fear. Tunic retains chitōn; flesh-staining remains an image rather than an explanatory replacement. These three groups across verses twenty-two–twenty-three must not be collapsed into a different textual arrangement. Reception: Calvin on 1:23 [C8] applies the stained garment to avoiding occasions of vice. Clement on 1:23 [CL] spiritualizes it as inward pollution.

Jude 1:24 — Text [G]: The dative recipient begins a doxology continued in verse twenty-five. Guarding against stumbling and presenting blameless are distinct infinitives; exultation qualifies that presentation. The selected object is you, not them. Reception: Calvin on 1:24–25 [C8] grounds human exhortation and rescue in God’s effective power.

Jude 1:25 — Text [G]: Only God our Savior receives the praise through Jesus Christ our Lord. Glory, majesty, might, and authority are all retained, as are before all time, now, and all the ages. SBLGNT does not add wise; the mediation and before-all-time clauses are explicit. Reception: See Calvin’s doxology exposition at 1:24–25 [C8], cited in the preceding note. His displayed biblical text adds wise and lacks two clauses retained here; this difference is reported from that presentation, not established by manuscript collation.

Sources for the notes

[G] Michael W. Holmes, ed., The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition (2010), official electronic Jude 1:1–25; main text only.

[CL] Clement of Alexandria, Fragments I.II, Comments on Jude, transmitted in Cassiodorus’s Latin translation; William Wilson’s English presentation, ANF 2. Exact verse comments identified in notes; no original-language collation.

[OR] Origen, Commentary on Matthew X.17, English presentation.

[AU] Augustine, City of God XV.23, paragraph beginning Let us omit, then; English presentation.

[JE] Jerome, On Illustrious Men 4, Jude; English presentation.

[BU] John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part One: judgment dream in Interpreter’s house and the Shining Ones’ account near the Celestial City, Gutenberg editorial §§89, 395. Later allegorical reuse; section numbers and cross-references belong to this electronic presentation.

[C1] John Calvin, Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles, Jude 1–2, translated and edited by John Owen. Later Reformed exposition; editorial footnotes are distinguished from Calvin’s body text.

[C2] John Calvin, Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles, Jude 3–4, translated and edited by John Owen. Later Reformed exposition; editorial footnotes are distinguished from Calvin’s body text.

[C3] John Calvin, Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles, Jude 5–7, translated and edited by John Owen. Later Reformed exposition; editorial footnotes are distinguished from Calvin’s body text.

[C4] John Calvin, Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles, Jude 8–10, translated and edited by John Owen. Later Reformed exposition; editorial footnotes are distinguished from Calvin’s body text.

[C5] John Calvin, Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles, Jude 11–13, translated and edited by John Owen. Later Reformed exposition; editorial footnotes are distinguished from Calvin’s body text.

[C6] John Calvin, Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles, Jude 14–16, translated and edited by John Owen. Later Reformed exposition; editorial footnotes are distinguished from Calvin’s body text.

[C7] John Calvin, Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles, Jude 17–19, translated and edited by John Owen. Later Reformed exposition; editorial footnotes are distinguished from Calvin’s body text.

[C8] John Calvin, Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles, Jude 20–25, translated and edited by John Owen. Later Reformed exposition; editorial footnotes are distinguished from Calvin’s body text.