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Rating: 
Summary: The Standard... Sorta
Review: Bauckham has done a fine piece of work with this commentary, and his thoroughness in the Greek makes his points quite solid. My only real complaint is his arguments for 2 Peter not being an authentic letter by the Apostle. Although I understand his arguments, I think some of his presuppositions and conclusions have some holes. Michael Green's (less extensive) commentary on these letters addresses some of these points, and I think makes a better case for Petrine authorship.Aside from that, Mr. Bauckham's work is top-notch and does a fine job of correcting some erronious teachings that stem from Peter's letter. For serious and in-depth study, this is the commetary to have.
Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding work
Review: Bauckham has produced a masterful commentary on these 2 largely ignored books. He has carefully researched the commentaries on these books and has offered much that is original. Many consider this book to be the standard work on these 2 books. His treatment of the authorship of II Peter is questionable but original. He thinks the book is pseudonymous, but he also thinks its recipients would have known so, so he doesn't see it as dishonest. Thus he sees his position as compatible with seeing the letter as authoritative scripture. If he is right, why was there so much emphasis on seeing the letter as genuinely Peter's in order for it to enter the canon? Some of his historical reconstructions are affected by this, but on the whole his exegesis is top-notch.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding work
Review: I agree with previous reviews. It is an outstanding work. I didn't know that the apocrypha books like Enoch also had such wisdom. Richard combines a collection of resources and his analysis is superb. If you thought the book of Jude was a flyby book, think again, it is a book for the matured, some of the truths in there are solid meat. FYI: Don't jump into conclusion that other commentaries in this series are as execellent as this as I have found out.
Rating:
Summary: Most in-depth commentary on 2Peter and Jude
Review: I'd agree with the reviewer from Syracuse, this is an excellent commentary reflecting the high standards throughout the Word series. My only reservations are that in several cases Bauckham follows traditional assumptions without considering other options. The first example would be in the assumption about the Assumption of Moses (no pun intended) in Jude 9. While the phrase "body of Moses" does suggest a connection with Jewish Testamental literature, the surviving Christian evidence is very flimsy. I certainly am not convinced by the verbal evidence that the Byzantine Palaea Historica is independant of Jude 9. Likewise all the other Christian evidence which features Michael telling the devil "may the Lord rebuke you" is most obviously explained as an attempt to explain Jude rather than a credible independent source. If Jude's aim was to use Zech3:1 to contradict the "false teaching" of 1En.9:1 then no further source is required. Also anyone reading Bauckham would think that the Christian evidence was a perfect fit for the missing ending of Jewish Testament of Moses, when it is clearly a different genre of pseudepigraphic literature. The second example is the dating. All commentaries assume Jude predates 2Peter, but the evidence is highly circumstantial. Whether one thinks Jude is pseudonymous is irrelevant, the differing Greek tenses used in the two books ("will be" 2Pe2:1 vs. "have slipped in" Jude 4) clearly imply that either the *(genuine or pseudonymous) author of Jude intended his readers to consider it the later letter, or the author of 2Peter intended it to be consider the earlier letter. And so what if Jude's quote of 2Pe 3:3 is not verbatim. How many NT quotes of the OT are verbatim? A third example is p.93 where faced with the dative TOUTOIS (prophesied to them) Bauckham says "this use of the dative is odd but must bear this meaning [prophesied about them]". Oh really? If one searches the Berkeley TLG CD-Rom, which contains most extant Greek texts, and count the examples of prophesy + dative meaning 'prophesy about' it becomes clear that if Jude had meant 'about them' he would have written PERI TOUTWN, and not TOUTOIS. It makes much better sense both in the context of the legendary Enoch prophesying to the Fallen Stars, and in the context of Book-of-Enoch prophesying to someone other than Jude's audience, and it respects the grammar of the Greek. It is only "odd" and "must bear this meaning" if one has already decided that Jude "must" feel positive towards 1Enoch. The above three examples may sound like niggling, but repeat them several dozen times over in the course of the book and you can't help wishing there was more rigour in testing the received wisdom. Otherwise it's still the best commentary on 2Peter and Jude.
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