Jude 1:17 f. But remember the words of the apostles, how they warned you that in the last times such men would be found. This passage plainly implies that the writer was not himself an apostle; some critics maintain that it also implies that the epistle dates from the sub-apostolic age. But the past to which the writer refers was the time when those whom he is addressing had received oral instruction from the apostles or some of them; that period of personal intercourse was now past, not necessarily because the apostles were dead, but because they were no longer living in that neighbourhood. If we suppose that the epistle was addressed to Antioch, the language is quite consistent with the situation in A.D. 63- 64, when Peter and Paul were in Rome and the other apostles had left Palestine.
Jude 1:18. The same prophecy, expanded so as to include an anticipation of the denial of the Parousia, is given in 2 Peter 3:3, though 2 P. gives it as his own prophecy. It has been urged that Jude is here quoting 2 P. and giving apostolic authority to it. But the prophecy itself was plainly a constant element in the apostolic teaching (cf. 1 Timothy 4:1; 2 Timothy 3:1-5; Acts 20:29), and Jude's reference to it in no way implies dependence on 2 P. The probability is that the writer of 2 P., finding the prophecy attributed by Jude to the apostles, quotes it as his own, in order still further to establish his identity with Peter.