"Know Your Enemies:" Rhetorical Semantics in the Epistle of Jude

Abstract

Scholarship addressing rhetoric in the Epistle of Jude has tended toward descriptions of the writer's tactic in terms of Greco-Roman rhetorical categories, or as evidence of a predetermined context. Such historical-critical concerns have unduly influenced rhetorical analyses and have not convincingly explained the writer's rhetorical strategy. One means of alleviating this deficiency is to understand rhetoric as a quality of the semantics created through grammar. This thesis develops a systemic functional linguistic methodology, which details many fundamental ways in which these rhetorical semantics are communicated through Koine Greek grammar in order to begin describing the rhetorical tactic of the writer. By explicating the LOGICAL and INTERPERSONAL semantics in the Epistle of Jude, it is demonstrated that the writer attempted to identify enemies of the addressed Christian community by their conduct, and to motivate the addressees of the epistle to "contend for the faith" by marshaling together in mutual support and by demonstrating mercy to these enemies.