New Testament Inspiration and Apocryphal Subtext: The Case of the Epistle of Jude

Burnet, Régis [UCL]

In his book Revelation and Authority, Benjamin Sommer advocates a participatory theology of revelation. Relying on the work of Franz Rosenzweig and Abraham Heschel, Sommer defines revelation as “a joint effort involving heavenly and earthly contributions; or the wording may be an entirely human response to God’s real but nonverbal revelation.” This means a dialogue between God and Israel, in which human words are provisional rather than definitive. Taking this idea to its logical final stage, Sommer then concludes that this never-ending dialogue inevitably muddles the boundaries between inspired Scripture and tradition. More accurately, the written Torah is a subset of the Oral Torah, and thus the fringes of the canon are shifting and blurring. I would like to show that the same applies to Christianity. If the Emmaus episode serves to build a kind of regulatory ideal of transmission according to which only inspired Scripture generates inspired Scripture, a precise investigation of the New Testament proves that things did not turn out this way. The Epistle of Jude is a case in point. In this letter, the one who presents himself as “the brother of James” and therefore, indirectly, the brother of Jesus, quotes, both implicitly and explicitly, texts that do not belong to the Torah-Prophets set. A historical analysis of what the Christian communities have done with it does not only enable us to generalize Benjamin Sommer’s thesis; it also helps to understand why and how the Christian churches have maintained in the canon writing that deviated so much from the Emmaus regulatory ideal.