Greetings to all, in the name of the Lord.
‘Enoch,’ biblically, occurs 12 times. At this website ‘Enoch’ refers to a body of ancient writings about Enoch or attributed to him.
1Enoch is usually called ‘Ethiopic,’ because the text was found in Ethiopia about 200 years ago.
2Enoch is called ‘Slavonic’ after a text found in the library of Bucharest, Romania.
Many copies of 1Enoch were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In the early church, 1Enoch was revered as sacred writing, and cited by many early bishops (“Fathers”). It 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, much scholarly interest is flourishing around 1Enoch; it is arguably one of the hottest topics in biblical scholarship. A major international conference is held semiannually in Italy, devoted solely to Enoch; and there is no other such conference for any other apocryphal or non-canonical scripture.
The reason for interest in 1Enoch is that it is quite extraodinary and profound; it represents a ‘lost’ form of Judaism; it is almost certainly the text that was revered by the religious sect that eventually produced Christianity; it 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.
All of which raises several questions. First, why was 1Enoch so highly prized–and yet excluded from the canon?
How and why did it manage to be preserved in a remote Ethopic Church, and then, ‘miraculously’ as it were, come to be recovered–and then to be confirmed by a trove of copies amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls?
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: did the ‘right’ religion survived antiquity–or a wrong one?
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 modern-day near-death experiencers who are taken to heaven and shown the judgment of humanity.
And, lastly, 1Enoch, more than any other text, presents a cosmology of earthly rule by fallen angels.
So, again, the intruiging question. Did the true and right theology survive in the bible? Or a false one?
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 canonize, 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.
