Ber. – Berakot
m. Sanh – Sanhedrin
Musinius, Rufus
Frag. 13 – Fragment 13
Origen
Cels. – Contra Celsum (Against Celsus)
De Princ. – De Principiis (First Principles)
Pesh. – Peshitta
Pirqe R. El. – Pirqe Rabbi Eliezer
Philo
Conf. – De confusione linguarum (On the Confusion of Tongues)
Flacc. – In Flaccum (Against Flaccum)
Vit. Mos. – De vita Mosis (On the Life of Moses)
Mut. Nom. – De mutatione nominum (On Changes of Names)
De post. Caini. – De sacrificiis Abelis et Caini (On the Sacrifices of Cain and Abel)
Vit. Cont . – De Vita Contemplativa (On a Contemplative Life)
Plato
Crat. – Cratylus
Poet. – Poetics
Rep. – Republic
Pliny the Younger
Ep. – Epistolae
Plutarch
Mor. – Moralia
Cam. – Camillus
Pseudepigrapha
Apoc. Ab. – Apocalypse of Abraham
2 Apoc. Bar. – Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch
T. Ab. – Testament of Abraham
T. Isaac – Testament of Isaac
T. Job – Testament of Job
T. Levi – Testament of Levi
Seneca
Ep. – Epistulae morales
Seutonius
Jul. – Divus Julius
Vit Caes. – The Twelve Caesars
Shepherd of Hermas
Mand. – Mandates
Vis. – Visions
Sir. – Sirach
Tg. Ps.-J. – Targum Pseudo-Jonathan
Tatian
Or. – Oration
Tacitus
Hist. – Historiae
Wis. – Wisdom of Solomon
Xenophon
Hist. Graec. – The History of Greece
Inscriptions
AGRW – Associations in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook, edited by Richard Ascough, Philip A. Harland and John S. Kloppenborg (Waco, TX: De Gruyter/Baylor University Press, 2012).
Introduction to Jude and 2 Peter
General Introduction
No longer can we maintain the oft-quoted declaration made about three decades ago, that the so-called Petrine epistles (and Jude) are the most neglected books in the New Testament.1 True, the Gospels and the writings of Paul continue to dominate Biblical and Theological Studies, but the last fifteen to twenty years have seen a steady stream of publication of commentaries, journal articles, and conference papers that have increased the profile of General Epistle studies in the discipline. Such growth has even warranted the formation of a “James, Peter and Jude” section at the annual Society of Biblical Literature, which has brought a good discussion platform and engendered the publication of several significant studies including Reading Jude with New Eyes, Reading 2 Peter with New Eyes, and Reading 1–2 Peter and Jude: A Resource for Students.2 While the collective amount of publications in this area of the NT are only a fraction of volumes produced in the studies of Jesus and Paul, they nevertheless represent a positive trend.
My cursory count of stand-alone commentaries on 2 Peter and Jude (or James and Jude) has unearthed no less than twenty-five in the last twenty years, making an average of at least a commentary a year in the last quarter century alone.3 That is not counting commentaries in single volumes or stand-alone monographs, of specific aspects of the letters, or edited volumes. Needless to say then, the question of whether to write another commentary is indeed a genuine one, and one that I hope I can justify in this particular case. Even with this surge in publications, there have hardly been any works in the area that have sought to tap the methodological, theological, and cultural diversity that has been necessitated into the Biblical Studies discipline by postmodernism (Aichele 2012 is an exception). Hopefully, my maiden attempt in this commentary to integrate postcolonial readings will pave the way for more research that highlights the diversity of the discipline.
Commentaries in Biblical Studies, for the large part, have remained the domain of Euro-American white male commentators who over the years have directed their inquiries of the Bible to matters they deem relevant to the text. Unfortunately, these were driven and constrained by the particular concerns of these individuals’ Euro-American worldviews, cultures, religious flavors, and positions of power, authority and privilege. Mostly, these a priori concerns were unacknowledged, and even when they were, these commentators assumed their views to be universal and representative of all of humanity. Since the western culture has been dominant in world affairs, and has cast its influence over many different parts of the globe through colonialism and other forms of foreign occupations, the western authors have tended to assume that they spoke for all peoples or that their interpretations captured all a text could say.
This rather myopic perspective on interpretation has meant that western scholars have controlled the discourse in Biblical Studies and have set the agendas and questions to be addressed, oblivious to the diversity and difference that readers from different cultures would bring to the interpretive process. The advent of postmodernism, has cast a long shadow on this form of thinking, making it plain that the role of the author/interpreter is never neutral, and that all knowledge is the product of the speaker’s background, upbringing, culture, gender, wealth, language, privilege or lack thereof, power both political and social. Therefore, one cannot claim to speak for “all” people. This is also true of the writing of commentaries. They represent the writers’ points of view, shaped and influenced by their background—cultural, historical, social, economic, educational, etc. One who writes from a position of privilege, power, authority, and influence cannot claim to represent the views of the persons who, on the other side of the equation, are colonized, oppressed, enslaved, powerless, and otherwise
