120 Timo Flink Jude 14 is a typical NT usage. Similarly, the phrase ἔλεγον ὅτι appears only 13 times elsewhere, from which only 8 occurrences are textually undisputed100. Again, the usage without ὅτι is preponderant with 65 hits (the NA27). Of course, the author of Jude had his own idiosyncrasies, which may or may not conform to the general tendency of different authors elsewhere, but it shows that the inclusion is rare phenomenon and cannot be dismissed lightly. If the second ὅτι was absent from the “original” text, it needs to be explained why scribes added it here against the preponder- ant usage but not in Jude 14, which includes a direct “quotation” from 1 Enoch. This is noteworthy, because the absence of ὅτι is more Classical than Hellenistic Greek101. The inclusion of the second ὅτι may be a scribal emendation as suggested by Albin102, but there exists no good reason why early scribes would make a perfectly sensible clause cumbersome by add- ing another ὅτι and so deviate from the common literary usage. The only possible explanation in such a case is a harmonisation to the parallel passage in 2 Pet. 3,3. This is, however, unlikely because there is no close verbal correspondence between Jude 18a and 2 Pet. 3,3103. It is more likely that the scribes omitted the second ὅτι for better readability to emulate Classical Greek. Therefore the ὅτι in Jude 18 is transcriptionally a more difficult reading and more likely the “original”104. In contrast, the text in Jude 14 is not in dispute and it lacks ὅτι, which perhaps sets the style of the author when ὅτι is taken as a re- citative, though Wasserman correctly cautions us not to read too much into this as a single example says little of the author’s style105. Also, the literary skills of Jude seem to favour the absence of ὅτι. Bauckham de- scribes Jude’s style as ‘lively and vigorous’. The vocabulary is rich and varied with numerous hapax legomena, yet the sentence construction is relatively simple, though parataxis is rare. The author of Jude used great economy of expression106. This increases the likelihood that the absence of ὅτι is the “original” reading, because the second ὅτι makes the clause Mt. 27.47, Mk 3.21, 22, 6.14*, 15 (twice), 35, Jn 4.42, 6.14, 7.12, 9.9, 10.41, and Acts 100 2.13. Textually undisputed occurrences are underlined. It should be noted that there is a minor variation of ἔλεγον vs. ἔλεγεν in Mk 6.14, but this does not change the general formula λέγω plus ὅτι. BDF §397:3. 101 Albin, Judasbrevet, 618. 102 Wasserman, The Epistle of Jude, 311, notes as a possibility that there may be a syn- 103 tactical, structural parallelism between 2 Peter μνήσθηναι … τούτο πρῶτον γινώσκοντες ὅτι and Jude μνήσθητε … ὅτι ἔλεγον ὑμῖν ὅτι. I find this unconvincing due to a lack of verbal coherence as a whole. Kubo, P72 and Codex Vaticanus, 48. 104 Wasserman, The Epistle of Jude, 311. 105 Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, 6. 106