Although one author may have borrowed from the other, the use of distinctive vocabulary and the presence of other differences indicate another possibility. Both authors may have drawn independently from a false teaching tradition, which circulated orally in the churches. This tradition may have been developed to help church leaders fight false teaching and moral carelessness in the daily life of the people of the churches. The Opponents or False Teaching in Jude and 2 Peter 1. The nature of the false teaching appears to be antinomianism and licentious.
Antinomianism is a reckless disregard for moral law, especially the moral principles of Scripture.
This view held that faith alone was needed for salvation and that an ethical change in the individual s life was unnecessary. The sin here is licentiousness, allowing behavior that is not ethical or proper. The false teachers held to a type of libertine attitude and regarded morality as a matter of personal and private choice rather than as a matter of God s moral law. 2 Peter adds that these false teachers instructed others not to accept the teaching of Christ s imminent return. That is, they doubted the apostles teaching on the subject of the Parousia.