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 subjugated. The respective points of view are colored by their respective social locations, political privilege (or lack thereof), and freedom (political, social, economic, etc.) that they have available.
This commentary series (NCCS), with its deliberate international, multicultural, multiracial representation of scholars has sought to correct that omission, albeit in its limited way. However small that gesture is, it is a significant recognition of the shifting composition of the community of biblical scholarship from the previous dominance of Euro-American white males, to one where there is an increasing significant presence of women, and of Latino/a, African-American, African, Asian, and Chinese biblical scholars. Each of these groups brings different questions to the text that previous commentaries, written largely by Euro-American white biblical scholars may have completely failed to address or may have done so from a biased (mostly privileged) position that did not cater to the needs of those in very different socio-cultural-politico-economic positions.
In a sense, one can speak of the Euro-America readings of the Bible as top-down readings (reading from positions of privilege, power, influence, etc.) versus the more recent crop of scholars from the Global South who represent a more bottom-up (reading from the position of the poor, colonized, enslaved, subjugated, etc.). Inevitably, the latter scholars also emanate from regions formally colonized or otherwise occupied, by western nations and are invariably shaped by that encounter. Much as the Enlightenment shaped the western civilization, colonialism and slavery shaped the lives of the communities over which these exercises of domination and subjugation were implemented. For this reason, the tendency to apply forms of reading that reflect a postcolonial vantage for the latter scholars seems inevitable for the non-western scholar.4
Another important factor is that there are constant advances in knowledge that may necessitate the revisiting of issues in the Bible thus justifying the need for new or updated commentaries. For example, the last ten years or so have seen the development of a robust discussion in historical studies about first century Greco-Roman associations (and small groups) within the Empire, which I have argued in this commentary can enhance our understanding of the communities of Jude and 2 Peter within their first century setting, for they seem to fit quite well into the category of these associations. Comparisons of structure, language, and practices between associations and Jude and 2 Peter imply a world where borrowing was common and puts in new relief certain features of these New Testament writings.
That is why the editors of this New Covenant Commentary Series have sought to put together a commentary series that is as internationally representative as it is possible, in order to allow different voices, from different parts of the world to air their thought about how they read and understand the New Testament.
Communities Of Jude And 2 Peter As Greco-Roman Associations
Beyond family gatherings, associations were the most common unofficial community gatherings in antiquity.5 They formed around common interests such as funeral guilds, labor groups, etc., and most involved regular informal gatherings that included meals, fraternizing and drinking. Philip Harland defines associations thus:
In broad terms, associations, synagogues, and congregations were small, non-compulsory groups that could draw their membership from several possible social network connections within civic settings. All could be either relatively homogeneous or heterogeneous with regard to social and gender composition; all engaged in regular meetings that involved a variety of interconnected social, ritual, and other purposes, one group differing from the next in the specifics of activities; all depended in various ways upon commonly accepted social conventions such as benefaction for financial support (e.g., a meeting-place) and the development of leadership structures; and all could engage in at least some degree of external contacts, both positive and negative, with other individuals, benefactors, groups or institutions in the civic context.6
In a subsequent study, Harland points out that these gathering were as much about socializing as they were about honoring benefactors, both human and divine. As such, the modern distinction made between social and religious aspects of associations is patently mistaken, and that “all associations were in some sense religious. . .”7 Reading the letters of Jude and 2 Peter as products of similar small groups will hopefully allow us to see them in a light that they have not quite been seen before. Since these letters reflect the writings of social groups that were part of the minority groups within the Greco-Roman empire, I have sought to read them in the context of Greco-Roman associations to highlight aspects they commonly share and how these in turn provide a window of understanding the rhetoric of these Christian letters.8
Both Jude and 2 Peter mention their communities’ regular meal gatherings or “love feasts” as the prime target of the infiltrators to propagate their untoward teachings (Jude 12; 2 Peter 2:13).