In the name of the Lord, welcome.
‘Enoch,’ the name of a mythical figure in Genesis, appears 12 times in the Christian Bible (see this concordance).
Here at this website ‘Enoch’ refers to a body of ancient writings about or attributed to him. The two main ones are 1Enoch (called ‘Ethiopic’ because the text was found in Ethiopia about 200 years ago) and 2Enoch called [old] ‘Slavonic’ after the a text found by a professor Sukulow in some archives in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1886.
Many fragments of 1Enoch were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
For fairly accurate articles on 1Enoch and 2Enoch, see Wikipedia.
~
In the early church, 1Enoch was revered as sacred writing, with good reason. Early churchmen cited it often, largely because it seemed remarkably messianic and prescient of Jesus. The phrase ‘Son of Man,’ which figures prominently in the New Testament, also is prominent in 1Enoch.
1Enoch was included on several lists of canonical books. But after Constantine, 1Enoch was excluded from the eventual mainstream canon.
So too were many other texts which could justifiably have been included.
Today, scholarly interest is flourishing around 1Enoch; it is arguably one of the hotter topics in biblical scholarship. A major semiannual international conference, held in Italy, is devoted solely to Enochic literature. No other body of scripture I know of, currently commands such interest, either apocryphal canonical.
The reason for susch interest is that it 1Enoch is extraodinary and profound in a number of ways. For one thing, it represents a ‘lost’ form of Judaism in which the role of Moses and the Exodus is almost negligible. A second reason for interest (at least my own) is that 1Enoch concerns a heavenly visit by Enoch, which is reminiscent of near-death experience reports, yet the content does not carry the heavy political or polemical message that is so common in religious “revelatory” texts. On the contrary, it comes across as sincere and divine, albeit expressed in mythological thought form.
A third reason for interest is that 1Enoch lays out a cosmology of fallen angels ruling the world and deceiving everyone–a cosmology that seem much more plausible these days, given the amazing power and control of ruling global elites. One has to wonder why 1Enoch was thus apparently suppressed after having enjoyed extraordinary prominence in ancient times.
A final reason for interest is that 1Enoch is undoubtedly the text that was revered by the religious sect who eventually produced Christianity.
1Enoch also bears an uncanny parallel to the Pentateuch (i.e. the first five books of the Old Testament) and yet is quite dramatically different in content and theology.
One has to wonder about all this. 1Enoch raises deep questions. Again: why was it once highly prized–then excluded from the canon?
How and why did 1E manage to be preserved only in a remote Ethopic Church, and then, ‘miraculously’ as it were, come to be recovered again–and then, to be confirmed by a trove of copies amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls?
And yet, amongs the DSS, a major portion of 1Enoch was missing! Namely, the portion that most affirms the christian narrative.
What were the politics in early church centuries that caused the exclusion of not only 1Enoch but whole bodies of important and obviously authentic apostolic texts–while other texts of more dubious theological merit were canonized?
So one wonders: Did the ‘right’ religion survived antiquity–or a wrong one? A wrong religion devised by the Fallen Angels covering their tracks?
Now, one other thing to note is that 1Enoch, more than any other book, parallels the apocalyptic experience of John the Revelator, and also of Christian mystics and, in sense, of (again) modern-day near-death experiencers who are taken to heaven and shown the judgment of humanity.
You see, if–as 1Enoch represents it–fallen angels actually do rule the planet, would it not make sense for them to want to supress the one ancient textual witness which reveals this situation to the human souls whom these angels rule?
And if Jesus Christ authentically adhered to the teachings of 1Enoch–which it appears He might have–and if 1Enoch and other allied texts were suppressed so that alternative scriptures could be canonized, we have to wonder if the resulting portrayal of Christ’s teaching in Scripture is wholly authentic; or has it been corrupted from the 3rd century onward?
May God, the God of Truth, guide us into all Truth. Amen.
