Well, sometimes on the podcast, we talk about textual matters. And Joe from Santa Barbara, California writes in, "Hello, Tony and Pastor John, Jude 9 and 14 to 15 confuse me. Where is Jude getting the information from these verses? Paul usually quotes the Old Testament and it tells us where he's quoting from at the bottom of our Bibles.

But I have no clue where Jude gets his quotations. I've asked others about these texts and they usually say something like Paul quoted pagan prophets. But it seems to me that Jude is actually quoting scripture. What do we know and what do we not know about who Jude is citing here?" Well, here's what we know and what we don't know.

Jude is not quoting scripture. That's pretty plain. He doesn't claim to be quoting scripture, but we'll get to that in a minute. Here's what we know and what we don't know. We know that Jude was in the middle of rebuking some arrogant opponents in the church, and we know that in verse 9, he does this by contrasting their willingness to blaspheme what they don't understand with the Archangel Michael's unwillingness even to pronounce a blasphemous judgment against the devil.

So that's the point. They're trying to rebuke their arrogance and presumption. And so he says in verse 9, it goes like this, "But when the Archangel Michael contending with the devil was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, 'The Lord rebuke you.' But these people blaspheme all that they do not understand." So we know that Jude refers to a situation at the burial of Moses where Michael, the Archangel, and the devil are disputing over what can be done with Moses' body.

And we know this is a story that's not in the Old Testament. Nothing is said except that God took care of the burial up there in the mountain. Nobody knows where he was buried. What we don't know for sure is exactly where the story comes from, according to verse 9.

There's more down lower in verses 14 and 15 that we do know, but here we don't know where it comes from. There is a Jewish book called The Assumption of Moses, written between the Old and New Testaments, which has a story like this, but Jude doesn't seem to be giving an exact quote.

So we can't say for sure that's where he's getting it. So the answer so far for verse 9 is we just don't know where he got that story. But he got it from somewhere, and he doesn't make any claim to get it from Scripture. Here's a further issue in verses 14 and 15.

Jude is still criticizing the ungodliness of his opponents, and this time he actually quotes a source outside the Bible. It doesn't say what it is. At least it looks like a quote. Most people think it's a quote, namely from 1 Enoch. This is a Jewish book written about 300 BC and not regarded as inspired or scriptural by Protestants or Catholics.

And it was not in the Old Testament that Jesus used and endorsed. Verses 14 and 15 are fairly close rendition of this verse. That's why everybody thinks, most people think it's a quote. These verses go like this. "It was also these that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied saying," so he's quoting now this prophecy that Enoch gives, "Behold, the Lord comes with 10,000 of his holy ones to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that the ungodly sinners have spoken against him." So Jude quotes Enoch, the seventh from Adam, a seventh generation from Adam, as prophesying, and he turns his words against the opponents as a judgment on them, and that's the judgment they can expect.

Now, here's the question. What does this mean for Jude who cites this from outside the Bible? Where did he get it? What's he doing? Here are two possibilities. One, he believed that even though these sources, first Enoch and wherever he got the verse nine idea, the story, these sources, though not inspired, contain truth that he's willing to use.

That's one possibility. A second possibility, and I kind of lean toward this one, but it's impossible to prove, namely that Jude knew that his opponents in the church, the people that he's so upset with, his opponents in the church loved to make use of first Enoch and maybe the assumption of Moses, these books, and they were their favorite books to use from, and so he's citing their own documents in an ironic way to bring them in a reverse way back on their own heads.

Now, that's where this issue about Paul quoting the poets becomes relevant, because that's what Paul did when he quoted the poets in Acts 17 from the pagan authors, he said, "God is actually not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being.

Even some of your own poets have said this, for we are indeed his offspring. Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think of the divine being as like gold or silver or stone or an image formed by the art or imagination of man." So Paul reached into sources that he didn't believe were inspired, saw something that was written there, drew it out, used it in a Christian way, and turned it back, as it were, on his conversation partners there in Athens.

So even though we don't know for sure, my inclination is to say that Jude chose to cite these extra biblical sources because his adversaries put such a high premium on them, and then he turned them around and used them to indict the very pride that was using them. Interesting.

Thank you, Pastor John. And thank you for the question, Joe. If you have a Bible question that you just can't quite figure out, or some issue that seems confusing to you, send us an email at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. That's our email address. And of course you can find our audio feeds in the episode archive of over a thousand episodes that we've released to date at our online home, desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.

I am your host, Tony Reiki. We'll be back on Wednesday. I'll ask John Piper, "When should we use satire to make a point?" You do not want to miss this episode. We'll see you next time on Wednesday. Bye. Bye. Bye.