The author and his readers

Jude … brother of James. Since there is a letter of James in the New Testament, claiming to be the work of the James who was a brother of Jesus, it is natural to assume that this Judas or jude (so called in English Bibles, presumably to distinguish him from Judas the traitor) is the Judas who is also listed among Jesus' brothers in Mark 6.3 and Matthew 13.55. Judas was a common Jewish name at the time. To distinguish himself from others, this writer discreetly identifies himself as the brother of the leader of the church in Jerusalem. This would have been enough to endow his message with some authority in the church.

What was said above (p. 270) about the authorship of the letter of James applies equally here. This writer uses idiomatic Greek but draws freely on the stock of a Jewish education, even showing knowledge of the Hebrew of the Old Testament. This is hardly the kind of learned accomplishment to be expected of a member of an artisan family in Galilee – though of course it is not impossible that he acquired these accomplishments later in life. Moreover, the situation to be combated, which is to do with sophisticated distortions of Christian belief, and the arguments used to warn against it, are more characteristic of the later writings of the New Testament than of the first generation of Christians.