1Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, according to the faith of God’s chosen ones and the knowledge of the truth which is according to godliness, 2in hope of eternal life, which God, who can’t lie, promised before time began; 3but in his own time revealed his word in the message with which I was entrusted according to the commandment of God our Savior, 4to Titus, my true child according to a common faith: Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ our Savior.
5I left you in Crete for this reason, that you would set in order the things that were lacking and appoint elders in every city, as I directed you— 6if anyone is blameless, the husband of one wife, having children who believe, who are not accused of loose or unruly behavior. 7For the overseer must be blameless, as God’s steward, not self-pleasing, not easily angered, not given to wine, not violent, not greedy for dishonest gain; 8but given to hospitality, a lover of good, sober minded, fair, holy, self-controlled, 9holding to the faithful word which is according to the teaching, that he may be able to exhort in the sound doctrine, and to convict those who contradict him.
10For there are also many unruly men, vain talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision, 11whose mouths must be stopped: men who overthrow whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for dishonest gain’s sake. 12One of them, a prophet of their own, said, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, and idle gluttons.” 13This testimony is true. For this cause, reprove them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith, 14not paying attention to Jewish fables and commandments of men who turn away from the truth. 15To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but both their mind and their conscience are defiled. 16They profess that they know God, but by their deeds they deny him, being abominable, disobedient, and unfit for any good work.
Jude’s quotation comes from the non-canonical book known as “The Book of Enoch,” a book that was compiled over a two-hundred-year period, completed immediately before the birth of Jesus. Although Jude quotes from it, the Book of Enoch is not considered canonical by a large majority of Christianity. Some traditions use it, though, and the most complete copy of the book was preserved in the Ge’ez language of the Ethiopian Church. Although it is supposedly the visions of Noah’s great-grandfather, Enoch was likely composed between 350 B.C. and the time of Christ. It purports to be Enoch’s prophetic visions concerning the apocalypse. Because of Enoch’s use of the phrase “Son of Man,” as well as its similarity to the book of Daniel, the work has been of great interest to scholars studying the Bible’s use of the term.
The oldest known copies of Enoch were found at Qumran’s cave four and date to between 30 B.C. and A.D. 20. Epigraphic studies on the Qumran Enoch have found that they were written by the same scribe as several other Dead Sea Scrolls. These fragments of Enoch, written in Aramaic, cover about a fifth of the book.
The exact citation found in Jude is from Enoch 1:9. Enoch was a highly respected book by many early Christians and Jews of the era, including the community at Qumran, even though Jude does not call the book Scripture. Jude’s use of non-canonical writing in verses 14-15 does not mean that his writing is false or that he is mistaken, similar to the use of the Assumption of Moses in Jude 9. Rather, Jude was writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and was recounting this event as true; consequently, we can be certain that it did happen. In fact, the theme of God destroying the ungodly is a common theme in the Bible (Ps 78:49; Isa 13:11; Joel 1-2). The judgment of which Enoch prophesied is yet to be fulfilled and relates to the second coming of Christ after the tribulation era (2 Thess 1:7-10). Although the prophecy in Jude does not reveal any new information, it is a good summary of the certainty of the coming universal judgment by God.
The passage shows the man Jude’s great awareness of the culture in which he lived and the audience to whom he wrote. It also shows that when the Bible quotes other sources or speaks of events, it does so with accuracy and truth. A non-biblical source may contain truth, even if it is not inspired. Jude is not the only biblical author to quote or refer to non-biblical texts. For example, Paul quoted the Greek philosophers Cleanthes and Aratus in Acts 17:28, Menander in 1 Corinthians 15:33, and Epimenides in Titus 1:12.
Bibliography. Baez-Camargo, Gonzalo, Archaeological Commentary on the Bible (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1984), 260-61; Boccaccini, Gabriele, ed., Enoch and the Messiah Son of Man: Revisiting the Book of Parables (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2007); Martinez, Florentini Garcia, Qumran and the Apocalyptic: Studies on the Aramaic Texts from Qumran (Leiden: Brill, 1992 ), 2; Nickelsburg, W.E., “The Dead Sea Scrolls: Dead Sea Scrolls Spotlight: The Book of Enoch,” Biblical Archaeology Review 33 (2007): 64-65, accessed April 12, 2010, http://members.bib-arch.org/publication.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=33&Issue=5&ArticleID=14.