The Examined Text - The Genealogy of Jesus
The Family Nobody Talks About Part Three of Three
One of them wrote a letter that almost didn’t make it into your Bible.
The other one was killed at Passover, and almost nobody talks about it.
From the Study Hall
We’ve spent two weeks establishing who Yeshua’s family was and what happened to them. Now we’re going to focus on two of them specifically: Jude, the youngest brother, and James, the oldest after Yeshua.
Both of them wrote letters that ended up in the New Testament. Both of them led. Both of them died for what they believed. And both of them have been treated, for most of Christian history, as secondary figures at best.
Jude’s letter is shoved all the way to the back, right before Revelation, where most readers skip over it to get to the dragons. James gets a little more attention because his letter is longer, but he’s the one Martin Luther sharply criticized, questioning its place among the New Testament writings and famously calling it an “epistle of straw.”
Neither of them deserves this treatment. And both of them have something to say that we need to hear.
Let’s start with the youngest.
The Hebrew Behind It: Yehudah (יְהוּדָה)
Jude’s real name is Yehudah (יְהוּדָה). In Greek it becomes Ioudas. In English it becomes either Judas or Jude, and the reason we use two different English names for the same Hebrew name is specifically to keep Yeshua’s brother separate from Judas Iscariot in the reader’s mind.
Every other language on earth uses a variation of Jacob for James and a variation of Judah for Jude. Only English makes this distinction. And only English calls Yeshua’s brother by the name of the king who commissioned the most famous Bible translation in history.
His name matters because it connects him to one of the most significant tribal names in all of Jewish history. Yehudah is Judah, the son of Jacob, the father of the royal tribe, the line from which David came and from which the Messiah would come. Yeshua’s youngest brother carries the name of the tribe that defines the whole Messianic promise.
Rooted Here: Who Was Jude?
Jude may have been quite young when his brother was crucified. He doesn’t appear prominently in the Gospel narratives, and like the rest of the family, he’s among those who didn’t believe in Yeshua during the public ministry.
Then the resurrection happens.
By Acts 1:14, the brothers are in the upper room. By the time Jude writes his letter, he is a recognized leader writing to followers of Yeshua, most likely in diaspora communities with a strongly Jewish character. According to tradition, he was killed in 65 CE in Syria, likely alongside the apostle Simon the Zealot. He died before the destruction of Jerusalem.
His grandsons, as we saw in Part Two, were brought before Emperor Domitian decades after his death. That his descendants were still considered significant enough to drag before the emperor tells you something about the weight his name still carried in the community.
Rooted Here: The Letter That Almost Didn’t Make It
Almost no other canonical book has been as neglected and overlooked as the Epistle of Jude. It’s a single chapter, 25 verses, and it is genuinely one of the most intellectually dense and theologically provocative short documents in the entire New Testament.
Why has it been so neglected? Several reasons. It’s considered controversial. It’s difficult to follow. It contains archaic imagery and, here’s the part that makes people uncomfortable, it quotes directly from books that are not in the canon.
Jude quotes from the Testament of Moses in verse 9 and directly cites 1 Enoch 1:9 in verses 14 and 15. For readers who believe only canonical Scripture can be authoritative, this is a problem.
For readers who understand that the neat and tidy boxes of canonical, apocryphal, and pseudepigraphical didn’t exist in Jude’s time, that these were simply texts his community knew and respected, it’s not a problem at all. It’s a window into how first-century Jewish followers of Yeshua engaged with their full literary world.
Jude wasn’t borrowing from pagan mythology. He was drawing on the rich tradition of Second Temple Jewish literature that formed the intellectual and theological background of the entire New Testament.
The Book of Enoch in particular saturates the thinking of the Gospels and Paul’s letters even when it isn’t quoted directly. Jude simply quotes it openly, which is one of the reasons he’s more honest about his sources than some of his contemporaries.
What is Jude actually saying?
The letter is a scathing rebuke against false teachers who had infiltrated the community and were teaching that the spiritual freedom believers have in Messiah gives them license to sin without consequence. We’d call it cheap grace today.
In Jude’s world, it was teachers leveraging their positions to live however they wanted and telling the community this was fine because of forgiveness.
Jude is outraged and we can see that in how the letter doesn’t build slowly. It opens with urgency and doesn’t let up. He reaches back through Israel’s history and the tradition of Second Temple literature to make his case: God does not overlook the abuse of freedom. He never has. He never will.
He also does something worth noticing. He writes in carefully crafted Greek with a good vocabulary and a recognizable rhetorical style. But it’s Jewish Greek. Many scholars observe a strong Semitic influence in Jude’s writing, the kind that reflects a mind thoroughly formed in Hebrew thought and literature.
He appears comfortable working with Jewish traditions beyond the Septuagint alone, drawing on the wider world of Second Temple texts his community knew. Yeshua’s youngest brother was no intellectual lightweight.
Rooted Here: The Canonical Order Question
Here’s something worth thinking about.
In several of our earliest New Testament manuscripts, including Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, the Catholic Epistles appear before Paul’s letters. That means James, Peter, John, and Jude were not always positioned near the end of the New Testament the way they are in most modern Bibles.
The reasons for these different arrangements are debated, and we shouldn’t read too much into them. But they do remind us that the order of the New Testament books was not always presented exactly as it is today.
What interests me is the question it raises. Before you read another page of Romans or Galatians, spend some time with James and Jude. Read their fierce concern for holiness, community accountability, and lived faith. Then go back to Paul.
You may find that the apostles sound a lot less like they’re arguing with one another and a lot more like they’re addressing different problems from different angles.
Besorah Connection: James the Just
Now we come to the oldest of the brothers after Yeshua. Ya’akov HaTzadik. James the Righteous or Just.
James led the Jerusalem community from the time of Yeshua’s resurrection until his death in 62 CE. Thirty years. He presided over the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, where the question of Gentile inclusion was settled.
James's letter is one of the most Jewish books in the New Testament. Rooted in the wisdom tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures, it repeatedly echoes the teachings of Jesus, particularly those found in the Sermon on the Mount.
Martin Luther sharply criticized it because it seemed to contradict Paul on faith and works. What Luther missed is that James and Paul are not in conflict. They're addressing different problems. Paul is fighting against the idea that Torah observance earns salvation. James is fighting against the idea that belief without action is real faith at all. Two different conversations, both necessary.¹
James was known throughout Jerusalem not just as the brother of the Messiah but as a man of extraordinary personal piety. He spent so much time in prayer that early tradition says his knees became calloused like a camel’s from kneeling. He was called Tzadik, the Righteous, not as a theological title but as a description of how people actually experienced him.
He was killed at Passover. Thrown from the Temple wall by the high priest Ananus, then beaten with a launderer’s club when the fall didn’t kill him. He died praying for his killers.
The Jewish historian Josephus records his death and notes the outrage it caused even among Jews who didn’t follow Yeshua. He was that respected. The revolt that eventually led to the destruction of the Temple had many causes, Roman governance, punishing taxation, nationalist movements, and deep political instability among them.
James’s death contributed to the tensions of an already volatile moment. It was one thread in a very tangled knot.
We talk about the death of Yeshua at Passover constantly. We rarely mention that his brother died at the same feast, thirty years later, with the same composure.
From the Study Hall
We’ve covered a lot of ground in these three installments. We started with the crowd in Nazareth casually naming Yeshua’s brothers to dismiss him. We ended with those brothers leading, writing, dying, and standing before emperors in his name.
Here’s what I want you to take with you.
The Christian faith was not invented by Gentiles. It was not handed down through Rome. It was born in a Jewish family, shaped by Jewish people who knew the Messiah personally, preserved through catastrophic destruction by people who carried his bloodline, and passed on through a community thoroughly rooted in Torah, in the Hebrew language, in Second Temple Jewish thought, and in the hope of Israel.
You are the inheritor of that. All of it. The rabbinical method of reading we use in this series is not a foreign concept. It is the native environment of the text. The Jewish questions are your questions. The Hebrew behind the words is your foundation. The family of Yeshua is part of your story.
Reading like you were always meant to means reading like that family read. Slowly. Carefully. With questions. With reverence. With the understanding that the text always has more to give than your first read revealed.
That’s what this study hall is for.
Discussion Question
Jude’s letter was read before Paul’s letters in some of the earliest canonical orders. Martin Luther sharply criticized James and questioned its place in the New Testament. The Book of Jude quotes texts that aren’t in the canon.
What does it do to your relationship with Scripture to know that the canon we have was shaped by specific communities with specific concerns, and that some of those decisions moved Yeshua’s own brothers toward the back of the shelf?
If this study opened something up for you, there’s more where this came from.
The Examined Text lives inside The Vault, where every week we slow down, ask better questions, and read Scripture like it was always meant to be read. This series was a taste of what we do in there every single week, working through the Hebrew, the Jewish context, the history, and the text itself with the kind of rigor and care most Bible studies never get close to.
If you’re ready to read like you were always meant to, The Vault is where that happens.
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Further Reading
Joshua Brumbach, Jude: On Faith and the Destructive Influence of Heresy (Lederer/Messianic Jewish Publishers, 2014). The definitive Messianic Jewish commentary on the Book of Jude. The first half provides historical and literary context; the second half is a running commentary on the text itself.
Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Book 20, Chapter 9. The Josephus account of the death of James. Available free online. Read it alongside Acts 15 and the Letter of James.
Richard Bauckham, Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church (T&T Clark, 1990). Goes deep into exactly the history we’ve been covering. Scholarly but accessible.
About the Author
Diane Ferreira is a Jewish believer in Yeshua, a published author, speaker, seminary student, wife, and proud mom. She is the founder of She’s So Scripture and She Opens Her Bible. She is the author of several books, including The Proverbs 31-ish Woman, which debuted as Amazon’s #1 New Release in Religious Humor, as well as Holy, Hormonal and Holding On.
She is currently pursuing her graduate degree in Jewish Studies in seminary, with her favorite topics being the early church and Biblical Hebrew. Diane writes and teaches from a unique perspective, bridging her Jewish heritage with vibrant faith in the Messiah to bring clarity, depth, and devotion to everyday believers.
When she’s not writing, studying, or teaching, you’ll find her curled up with a good book, crocheting something cozy, traveling, or playing her favorite video games.
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¹ Luther famously called James an "epistle of straw" because he believed it lacked the clear proclamation of justification by faith that he found in Paul. Although he questioned its value and apostolic authority, he never removed James from the New Testament. Luther's criticism should also be read alongside his later hostility toward Jews and Judaism, views that are widely rejected by Christians today and do not reflect the Jewish context in which both James and Paul wrote.
Excellent! Thank you for sharing this. Guess what I’ll be reading today.
Shabbat Shalom sister.