Yudas 1:20

1:20 But you, dear friends, by building yourselves up in your most holy faith, by praying in the Holy Spirit, ¹ 

Yakobus 3:6

3:6 And the tongue is a fire! The tongue represents ²  the world of wrongdoing among the parts of our bodies. It ³  pollutes the entire body and sets fire to the course of human existence – and is set on fire by hell. ⁴ 

[1:20]  ¹ tn The participles in v. 20 have been variously interpreted. Some treat them imperativally or as attendant circumstance to the imperative in v. 21 (“maintain”): “build yourselves up…pray.” But they do not follow the normal contours of either the imperatival or attendant circumstance participles, rendering this unlikely. A better option is to treat them as the means by which the readers are to maintain themselves in the love of God. This both makes eminently good sense and fits the structural patterns of instrumental participles elsewhere.

[3:6]  ² tn Grk “makes itself,” “is made.”

[3:6]  ³ tn Because of the length and complexity of the Greek sentence, a new sentence was started here in the translation.

[3:6]  ⁴ sn The word translated hell is “Gehenna” (γέεννα, geenna), a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew words ge hinnom (“Valley of Hinnom”). This was the valley along the south side of Jerusalem. In OT times it was used for human sacrifices to the pagan god Molech (cf. Jer 7:31; 19:5-6; 32:35), and it came to be used as a place where human excrement and rubbish were disposed of and burned. In the intertestamental period, it came to be used symbolically as the place of divine punishment (cf. 1 En. 27:2, 90:26; 4 Ezra 7:36).