Epistle of Jude in the context of "Jude, brother of Jesus"

Michael, also called Archangel Michael or Michael the Taxiarch, is an archangel and the warrior of God in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The earliest surviving mentions of his name are in third- and second-century BC Jewish works, often but not always apocalyptic, where he is the chief of the angels and archangels, and he is the guardian prince of Israel and is responsible for the care of the people of Israel. Christianity conserved nearly all the Jewish traditions concerning him, and he is mentioned explicitly in Revelation 12:7–12, where he does battle with Satan, and in the Epistle of Jude, where the archangel and the devil dispute over the body of Moses.

The Third Epistle of John is the third-to-last book of the New Testament and the Christian Bible as a whole, and attributed to John the Evangelist, traditionally thought to be the author of the Gospel of John and the other two epistles of John. The Third Epistle of John is a personal letter sent by "the elder" (the presbyter) to a man named Gaius, recommending to him a group of Christians led by Demetrius, which had come to preach the gospel in the area where Gaius lived. The purpose of the letter is to encourage and strengthen Gaius, and to warn him against Diotrephes, who refuses to cooperate with the author of the letter.

Early church literature contains no mention of the epistle, with the first reference to it appearing in the middle of the third century AD. This lack of documentation, though likely due to the extreme brevity of the epistle, caused early church writers to doubt its authenticity until the early 5th century, when it was accepted into the canon along with the other two epistles of John. The language of 3 John echoes that of the Gospel of John, which is conventionally dated to around AD 90, so the epistle was likely written near the end of the first century. Others contest this view, such as the scholar John A. T. Robinson, who dates 3 John to c. AD 60–65. The location of writing is unknown, but tradition places it in Ephesus. The epistle is found in many of the oldest New Testament manuscripts, and its text is free of major discrepancies or textual variants.

Papyrus 72 is the designation used by textual critics of the New Testament to describe portions of the so-called Bodmer Miscellaneous codex (Papyrus Bodmer VII-VIII), namely the letters of Jude, 1 Peter, and 2 Peter. These three books are collectively designated as 𝔓 in the Gregory-Aland numbering of New Testament manuscripts. These books seem to have been copied by the same scribe. Using the study of comparative handwriting styles (paleography), the manuscript has been assigned to the 3rd or 4th century.

Although the letters of Jude (P.Bodmer VII) and 1-2 Peter (P.Bodmer VIII) in this codex do not form a single continuous text, scholars still tend to refer to these three texts as a single early New Testament papyrus.