Judas, a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James, to those who have been called, who are beloved by God the Father and kept by Jesus Christ:

mercy, peace and love be multiplied to you.

for certain persons have slipped in by stealth (their doom has been predicted long ago), impious creatures who pervert the grace of our God into immorality and disown our sole liege and Lord, Jesus Christ.

while the angels who abandoned their own domain, instead of preserving their proper rank, are reserved by him within the nether gloom, in chains eternal, for the doom of the great Day ??7 just as Sodom and Gomorra and the adjacent cities, which similarly glutted themselves with vice and sensual perversity, are exhibited as a warning of the everlasting fire they are sentenced to suffer.

But these people scoff at anything they do not understand; and whatever they do understand, like irrational animals, by mere instinct, that proves their ruin.

These people are stains on your love-feasts; they have no qualms about carousing in your midst, they look after none but themselves ??rainless clouds, swept along by the wind, trees in autumn without fruit, doubly dead and so uprooted,

to execute judgment upon all, and to convict all the impious of all the impious deeds they have committed, and of all the harsh things said against him by impious sinners.

For these people are murmurers, grumbling at their lot in life ??they fall in with their own passions, their talk is arrogant, they pay court to men to benefit themselves.

they told you beforehand, "At the end of things there will be mockers who go by their own impious passions."

Now to him who is able to keep you from slipping and to make you stand unblemished and exultant before his glory ??25 to the only God, our saviour through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and for all time: Amen.