This thesis is about the application of modern literary criticism to the epistle of Jude. One of the major questions it asks is "What happens to a text (Jude) when a reader reads it using one of these literary theories?" Or to put it a different way, "What does this way of reading emphasise which may have been neglected, ignored, or treated as irrelevant by other forms of reading?" The answers to these questions have been constructed around three loci: the reader, the text, and the author. Within the chapters constructed around those foci, the issues of power and desire, knowledge and language are brought to the forefront by the methods used for reading Jude. These methods include ideas drawn from reader response criticism, feminism, psychoanalysis, intertextuality, the study of tropes, structuralism, and post-structuralism. These methods and the ideas which they highlight are drawn together to comment on the relationship between the reader, the text, and the author and to accent their access (or lack of it) to desire, power, knowledge, and language. The epistle of Jude becomes an epistle that is about power and desire just as much as it is an epistle about "false teachers" and about a community of people known by the name Beloved.

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. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)