HistoricalChristian.Faith
HistoricalChristian.Faith
Enoch gets four verses of narrative and one of the strangest epitaphs in the Hebrew Bible. Seventh in the line from Adam, he “walked with God” three hundred years, “and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24) — alone among the antediluvian patriarchs, the genealogy that tolls “and he died” over every other name falls silent at his. On that silence, and on the number of his years — three hundred and sixty-five, the days of the solar year — an enormous literature grew. The New Testament reads the disappearance as a bodily translation that let him escape death (Hebrews 11:5); Jude makes him a prophet, the “seventh from Adam,” and quotes words of his about the Lord coming with his holy myriads to judge the ungodly — words found not in Genesis but in the apocryphal Book of Enoch (Jude 14–15). Around this figure Second Temple Judaism spun a whole pseudepigraphic corpus in his name — the Ethiopic 1 Enoch, the Slavonic 2 Enoch, the Hebrew 3 Enoch in which the patriarch is exalted into the angel Metatron — and made him the recipient of the secrets of heaven, the calendar, and the coming judgment. Was he a mere name in a list, spared death by a miracle? An author, and is the book that bears his name Scripture, given that Jude cites it? One of the “two witnesses” who never died and will return to face Antichrist? Or the seer swept up to walk among the angels — even, in the latest layer, to become one?
This page is a biographical tradition-timeline: not a life of Enoch — the canonical sources for that are four verses — but a history of what was said and believed about him across the centuries, set out earliest source first. Its “witnesses” are the datable sources that report on or interpret him: the Genesis genealogy and its echoes in Hebrews, Jude, and Sirach; the vast 1 Enoch and its sequels 2 and 3 Enoch; the Book of Jubilees; the Fathers who cited or defended the Enochic writings (Tertullian foremost) and those who set them aside (Jerome, Augustine); the tradition of Enoch and Elijah as the two undying witnesses of Revelation 11; and the long afterlife down to the Ethiopian Orthodox canon and modern scholarship. Much of the Enochic material — the fall of the Watchers, the origin of the Nephilim, the angels who taught forbidden arts — is weighed elsewhere on this wiki, on the Nephilim, pillars of Seth, astrology, and divine council timelines; this page hubs those threads rather than re-arguing them, and keeps to the figure of Enoch and the reception of the books that bear his name. The genuinely contested questions — is 1 Enoch inspired Scripture, given Jude’s quotation? is Enoch one of the two witnesses? did the patriarch become the angel Metatron? — are weighed on their own argument pages rather than settled by assertion.
Related doctrines: Figures of the Hebrew Scriptures — see also Balaam son of Beor · Melchizedek · Nimrod · Job · Naaman the Syrian · Jannes and Jambres · the Queen of Sheba · Jethro · Rahab of Jericho · Nebuchadnezzar · Og of Bashan · Cyrus the Great · the death of Moses · the curse of Ham · Shem son of Noah · Cain
The whole later tradition grows from a single terse notice and three backward glances at it. In the antediluvian genealogy of Genesis 5, where every patriarch’s entry ends “and he died,” Enoch — the seventh from Adam — breaks the pattern: he “walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years,” his days were “three hundred sixty and five years” (the count of the solar year), “and Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). The Hebrew “took” (laqach) and the missing death-notice together seeded the belief that Enoch did not die at all. The rest of the canon draws that belief out. The Epistle to the Hebrews makes it the second of its examples of faith: “By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God” (Hebrews 11:5).1 Jude goes further, making Enoch a prophet and quoting him by name: “And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgment upon all” (Jude 14–15) — words drawn not from Genesis but from the opening oracle of the apocryphal Book of Enoch (1 Enoch 1:9), the New Testament’s one explicit quotation of that book and the seed of the long debate over its authority. The deuterocanonical Wisdom of Sirach twice recalls him among the great forefathers — “Enoch pleased the Lord, and was translated, being an example of repentance to all generations” and “upon the earth was no man created like Enoch; for he was taken from the earth” (Sirach 44:16; 49:14).2 Four strands are thus already in the canonical portrait — the man who walked with God, the man translated so as not to see death, the prophet of the coming judgment, and (through Jude’s citation) the author whose book the church would have to weigh — and every later witness on this timeline takes up one or more of them.
The earliest and largest of the books written in his name, 1 Enoch is the wellspring of the whole later tradition. It is not one work but an anthology of five once-separate booklets — the Book of the Watchers (chs. 1–36), the Similitudes or Parables (37–71), the Astronomical Book (72–82), the Book of Dreams (83–90), and the Epistle of Enoch (91–108) — composed between the 3rd century BC and about the turn of the era, preserved complete only in Ethiopic (Ge’ez) but attested in Aramaic among the Dead Sea Scrolls (all but the Similitudes, the one section absent from Qumran). Beyond the Watchers-and-Nephilim myth it is famous for — the fall of the angels and the forbidden arts, weighed on the Nephilim, astrology, and pillars of Seth timelines, which this page hubs rather than repeats — its lasting bequest to the figure is a portrait: Enoch the “scribe of righteousness” whose eyes God opened, who is caught up through a house of crystal and fire to stand before the throne of “the Great Glory,” is shown the courses of the heavens and a 364-day solar calendar (matching his 365 years) and the coming judgment, and returns to write it down. This ascended seer is the Enoch every later witness — Jubilees, 2 and 3 Enoch, the Fathers — inherits.3 And its opening oracle, that the Lord “cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones… to execute judgement upon all” (1 Enoch 1:9), is the very text the New Testament book of Jude attributes to Enoch by name — the one explicit New Testament quotation of the book, and the seed of the long debate over its authority weighed at “The canonicity of 1 Enoch” (rated weak).4
A generation or two after the earliest Enochic booklets, the Book of Jubilees — a retelling of Genesis revealed to Moses on Sinai, written in Hebrew about 160–150 BC and preserved complete only in Ethiopic — distils the sprawling tradition into a single orderly notice of the man (Jubilees 4:16–25). Enoch is “the first among men that are born on earth who learnt writing and knowledge and wisdom”; he wrote down the signs of heaven, the calendar, and the sabbaths of the years; he spent six jubilees “with the angels of God,” who showed him “everything which is on earth and in the heavens”; and he “testified to the Watchers, who had sinned with the daughters of men” (the Watchers myth itself is hubbed to the Nephilim timeline, not re-argued here).5 Above all, Jubilees reads the terse “God took him” of Genesis 5:24 as a translation “in majesty and honour” into the Garden of Eden — which it ranks among the four holy places and calls “the holy of holies” — where Enoch does not merely rest but still works: recording the world’s judgment and, priest-like, burning “the incense of the sanctuary… before the Lord.” This fixes the three strands the later tradition runs with — Enoch the scribe/author (grounding Jude’s “prophesied”), the calendar-revealer, and the man translated to a paradise where he still ministers — and bridges the canonical “he did not die” to 2 Enoch’s heavenly ascent.6
The Slavonic 2 Enoch (the Book of the Secrets of Enoch) is the fullest early “heavenly-Enoch” text and the crucial middle term between the ascended scribe of 1 Enoch / Jubilees and the angel Enoch-Metatron of the later Hebrew 3 Enoch. Two shining messengers carry the patriarch bodily up through the (seven, in one stratum ten) heavens — past the fallen Watchers, the “Grigori,” imprisoned in the fifth heaven (the Nephilim myth, hubbed there, not re-argued here) — to the throne of God in the highest heaven. There, at the Lord’s command, the archangel Michael takes from Enoch his “earthly robe,” anoints him with holy oil, and clothes him in “the raiment of My glory,” so that the seer looks at himself and finds he has become “like one of His glorious ones… and there was no difference” from the angels — the first text to angelify the patriarch, seeding the trajectory 3 Enoch completes.7 Dictated the secrets of creation, he writes them in 366 books, is sent home for thirty days to instruct his sons, and is then taken up for good in a divine darkness — the fullest early narrative of the Genesis 5:24 translation. Its date is genuinely contested (a first-century-AD core is common, but it survives only in later Slavonic manuscripts and is disputed); its closing chapters (71–72) append the marvelous birth of Melchizedek, weighed on the Melchizedek timeline.8
Alongside the disputed book, the mainstream church kept a steady memory of the man of Genesis 5:24 and Hebrews 11:5 — and mostly without any interest in the Watchers lore at all. The earliest Christian comment on Enoch is also the very first entry in the church’s honour-roll of the righteous: Clement of Rome (c. AD 96) takes him as the primal proof that obedience is rewarded — “found righteous in obedience, he was translated, and death was never known to happen to him.” Cyprian reads the translation as a merciful rescue “from the contagion of this world”; Chrysostom, Cosmas, and Oecumenius make it the first public pledge that death itself will be “abolished.” Because Hebrews files Enoch under faith, the commentators stress that it was believing God to be “a rewarder” — not works — that pleased Him, and that (as Tertullian and Bede press) he pleased God with neither circumcision nor the law of Moses. To the natural question where the translated Enoch now is and whether he is still in the body, the Fathers return a firm refusal to speculate — Chrysostom calls it “superfluous,” Oecumenius and Theophylact “uncertain… unknown, since Scripture says nothing.”9 Two further readings recur. Many held Enoch’s death not escaped but merely postponed: he and Elijah are kept alive to return, confront Antichrist, and die at last as the “two witnesses” of Revelation 11 (Tertullian, Cosmas, Bede, Aquinas — a tradition of its own, developed beyond this page). And the Latin exegetes read the bare facts typologically: Augustine makes the seventh-from-Adam patriarch (whose name means “Dedication”) a figure of the church’s deferred resurrection-rest, and Bede turns his 365 years — the solar year — and the Greek “T” of his three hundred years walking with God into signs of perseverance and the cross. This consolidated block gathers that whole reception; its head-date is its earliest voice, Clement of Rome.10
With Tertullian of Carthage the figure of Enoch passes into Christian hands, and the question shifts from what the pseudepigrapha say about him to whether the book that bears his name is Scripture. Building On the Apparel of Women on Enoch’s account of the fallen angels, Tertullian pauses (I.3) to defend the book’s genuineness — and becomes the first Christian writer, and very nearly the only Father, to argue for it outright. He openly concedes it “is not received by some, because it is not admitted into the Jewish canon either,” anticipates the objection that a book “published before the deluge” could not have survived the Flood, and answers it twice: Noah, Enoch’s great-grandson, could have carried its contents through in living memory; or, failing that, the Spirit could have re-inspired it afterward, as Ezra was believed to have restored the Law lost in the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem.11 His decisive stroke is the argument every later advocate inherits: because Enoch “in the same Scripture has preached likewise concerning the Lord,” the book “pertains to us,” and — clinching it — “Enoch possesses a testimony in the Apostle Jude” (Jude 14–15), so “nothing at all must be rejected by us” and “every Scripture suitable for edification is divinely inspired.” He handles it as Scripture elsewhere too, quoting “the most ancient prophet Enoch” against idolatry (On Idolatry 4, 15). This is the high-water mark of Christian esteem for 1 Enoch and the sharpest ancient form of the Jude-implies-canonicity inference — the load-bearing counterweight to the later rejection by Jerome and Augustine, and the sub-claim weighed at “The canonicity of 1 Enoch” (rated weak).12
Alongside the debate over his book ran a reading of the man that made Enoch an actor in the last days. Scripture names exactly two men who did not die but were “taken” — Enoch, of whom “God took him” (Genesis 5:24), and Elijah, caught up “by a whirlwind into heaven” (2 Kings 2:11) — and an early, widespread tradition held that both are held in reserve to return, preach against Antichrist, be killed, and rise: the “two witnesses” who prophesy 1,260 days in sackcloth, are slain by the beast, and are raised after “three days and an half” (Revelation 11:3–12). The classic statement is Hippolytus of Rome’s: expounding Daniel’s last week, he assigns its latter half to “the two prophets Enoch and Elias,” who “will preach 1,260 days clothed in sackcloth,” and applies to them the whole of Revelation 11 — a “two forerunners” symmetry answering to John the Baptist before Christ’s first coming (On Christ and Antichrist 43–47, c. AD 200). Tertullian gives the underlying logic: their death was not escaped but “postponed… they are reserved for the suffering of death, that by their blood they may extinguish Antichrist” (A Treatise on the Soul 50).13 The reading was then dramatized in the Coptic Apocalypse of Elijah (the two descend, are slain, rise, and at the last “pursue the son of lawlessness and kill him”) and the Gospel of Nicodemus, which pictures Enoch and Elijah already waiting in Paradise, “about to return at the coming of Antichrist… to be slain by him at Jerusalem, and to be taken up alive again into the clouds, after three days and a half” — and became the standard medieval account through Adso of Montier-en-Der’s Letter on… Antichrist (c. 950). A rival identification (the two witnesses as Moses and Elijah, on the Transfiguration pairing) runs against it; this stratum narrates only the Enoch-and-Elijah tradition.14
The Hebrew 3 Enoch (Sefer Hekhalot, “the Book of the Palaces”) — a Merkabah/Hekhalot text ascribed to R. Ishmael but redacted in the fifth or sixth century AD, drawing on older Enoch-Metatron traditions — carries the trajectory to its furthest point. Where 2 Enoch first angelified the seer, 3 Enoch makes him the angel: R. Ishmael ascends to behold the chariot and is guided by the “Prince of the Presence,” who reveals that he is none other than the translated patriarch — “Because I am Enoch, the son of Jared,” taken from the generation of the Flood “to be a witness against them.” Enthroned on a seat “similar to the Throne of Glory,” made ruler over the whole heavenly household, robed and crowned, and given seventy names drawn from the divine Name, he is exalted higher than any other human in Jewish literature.15 The book’s boldest stroke is to call him YHWH ha-qaton, the “lesser YHWH,” “for my name is in him” (Exodus 23:21) — a near-divinization that collided with rabbinic monotheism in the famous “two powers in heaven” alarm, where the apostate Aher sees Metatron enthroned, suspects a second deity, and Metatron is lashed with “sixty rods of fire” to show he is no rival (b. Ḥagigah 15a). Whether the identification Enoch = Metatron holds, and what the “two powers” anxiety meant, is a contested question, adjacent to the exalted-mediator theme hubbed on the divine council timeline.16
Behind every use of the Enochic material ran a running question the church had finally to answer: was the Book of Enoch itself Scripture? On the strength of Jude’s quotation it stood high in the earliest centuries — cited with a Scripture-formula by the Epistle of Barnabas (c. 130), used as fact by Irenaeus, ratified as prophecy by Clement of Alexandria, and defended outright by Tertullian — but the reception was contested from the start: Origen, who is happy to cite the book, concedes that the writings bearing Enoch’s name “do not at all circulate in the Churches as divine.”17 By the fourth and fifth centuries the canon-defining Fathers set it decisively aside — Athanasius’s Festal Letter 39 (367) leaves it off both the canonical and the “to be read” lists; Jerome calls it “the apocryphal book of Enoch” (and notes that Jude’s quoting it was why Jude itself “is rejected by many”); and Augustine grants that Jude vouches for Enoch’s prophesying yet rules the writings under his name out of “the purity of the canon” on account of their uncertain, “too great antiquity.” Jerome adds the decisive point — that quoting part of a book (as Paul quotes a pagan poet at Titus 1:12) does not canonize the whole. The book then dropped out of the Greek and Latin Bibles entirely and was effectively lost to the West — known only from fragments in a few Byzantine chroniclers — until James Bruce brought complete Ge’ez manuscripts back from Ethiopia in 1773. It survives in the Old Testament canon of one communion alone, the Ethiopian (and Eritrean) Orthodox Tewahedo Church, which never rejected it.18 Whether that early esteem amounts to reception as authoritative Scripture across the early Church is the adjudicated question, weighed and rated weak at “The canonicity of 1 Enoch” — this stratum narrates the arc that argument gathers, rather than re-arguing the verdict.
The timeline closes where critical study takes up the whole tradition. The decisive modern development is textual: among the Dead Sea Scrolls of Cave 4 were found eleven fragmentary Aramaic manuscripts of the Enochic writings, edited in the standard editio princeps by J. T. Milik (1976). They confirm that four of the five booklets — the Watchers, the Astronomical Book, the Dreams, and the Epistle — already existed in Aramaic well before the turn of the era (the oldest Watchers copy palaeographically dated to the first half of the second century BC), and they turn up a conspicuous absence: the Similitudes (chs. 37–71), the one section with the exalted “Son of Man,” is attested in no Qumran copy — the datum on which the whole “Son of Man” dating debate turns. Milik pressed the silence into a thesis that the Parables are a Christian composition of about AD 270, but that overreach did not survive (Greenfield and Stone answered it within a year), and the field settled on a Jewish Similitudes of turn-of-the-era date. On the make-up of the book the standard account is the Hermeneia commentary of Nickelsburg and VanderKam: 1 Enoch is an anthology of five once-independent booklets composed in Aramaic between the fourth century BC and the turn of the era, extant complete only in Ge’ez.19 Behind the figure itself scholarship finds the Mesopotamian seventh antediluvian sage, Enmeduranki of Sippar, the sun-god’s city (VanderKam, Kvanvig) — the parallel this wiki rates sound at “The Sumerian King List ≅ Enoch”; and forward of it, the “Enochic Judaism” thesis (Boccaccini) that makes the corpus the deposit of a distinct Second Temple current, and the Enoch-Metatron scholarship (Orlov, against Scholem and Alexander) that follows the seer into the angel Metatron — weighed at “Did the patriarch Enoch become the angel Metatron?” (contested). Under all of it sits the plain honesty the survey rests on, and this page with it: the canonical Enoch is four verses in a genealogy, and the enormous Enochic literature is pseudepigraphic — written in his name across later centuries, not by him. What that literature is worth the argument pages weigh; that it was written about him rather than by him is the baseline they start from.20
The genuinely contested questions the timeline raises — whether Enoch is a literal actor in the last days, and whether he is the same figure the Enochic writings elsewhere set on the road to angelic exaltation — are weighed adversarially on their own pages, off the timeline.
Three readings of the unnamed “two witnesses” of Revelation 11:3–12 are advocated: the two are Enoch and Elijah (the only men who never died), Moses and Elijah (the Transfiguration pair), or not individuals at all but the Church’s prophetic testimony. The Enoch-and-Elijah reading is the earliest and dominant in the Church and coheres with the “must taste death” logic of Hebrews 9:27 — but the witnesses’ own signs in Revelation 11:6 (shutting heaven; water to blood and plagues) are coded to Moses and Elijah, not Enoch, and the “two olive trees” gloss of v. 4 (citing Zechariah 4:14) pulls toward a corporate reading that names no individual. Strong by the lights of tradition and theology, weak by the lights of the passage’s own imagery: contested.
The Hebrew 3 Enoch identifies the translated Enoch with the great angel Metatron, the “Prince of the Presence” and “lesser YHWH.” The claim splits by level. That the Hekhalot texts do make this identification is a plain fact of those texts (sound). That it is one organic development — the same figure carried across the whole arc from 1 Enoch’s scribe and Son of Man through 2 Enoch’s angelification — is genuinely disputed: a strong continuity case (Orlov) runs against an equally strong “two streams” case (Scholem, Alexander, Paz) that Metatron had independent roots (the angel Yahoel/Michael; the metator of Exodus 23:20–21) onto which Enoch was grafted late. And the further “two powers in heaven” / second-Yahweh payload — pressed as New Testament background — is contested in its own right, and runs into the tradition’s own policing of the figure (Metatron lashed to deny a second deity, b. Ḥagigah 15a). Uncontested at the level of the text, open at the level of derivation, over-freighted at the level of theological use: contested.
Related arguments elsewhere on this wiki. Two contested questions about the Enochic material are adjudicated on the Nephilim timeline and surfaced here rather than re-argued: “The canonicity of 1 Enoch — was it received as Scripture?” (rated weak) and “The Sumerian King List ≅ Enoch, the seventh antediluvian” (rated sound); and on the pillars of Seth timeline, “Is the pillars-of-Seth legend a displaced Enoch tradition?” (rated plausible).
The Genesis notice (KJV): “And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years… And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years: And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:21–24). The New Testament reads the disappearance as a bodily translation: “By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God” (Hebrews 11:5). ↩
Jude’s prophecy quotation: “And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds” (Jude 14–15) — a close rendering of 1 Enoch 1:9, the New Testament’s only explicit citation of the Book of Enoch (the authority question it raises is weighed at “The canonicity of 1 Enoch”). The praise in the Wisdom of Sirach: “Enoch pleased the Lord, and was translated, being an example of repentance to all generations” (Sirach 44:16) and “upon the earth was no man created like Enoch; for he was taken from the earth” (Sirach 49:14). ↩
On the five-booklet structure, the Ethiopic transmission and Qumran Aramaic fragments (all but the Similitudes), and the datings, see George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch: A New Translation and the Hermeneia commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004–2012) (overview), and earlyjewishwritings.com. For the portrait of the figure — “Enoch a righteous man, whose eyes were opened by God” (1:2), the “scribe of righteousness” (15:1), and the throne-vision “its appearance was as crystal… the Great Glory sat thereon” (14:19–24) — see the R. H. Charles translation (online). Fuller treatment on the witness page. ↩
“And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones To execute judgement upon all…” — 1 Enoch 1:9 (Charles), online, quoted at Jude 14–15. The authority question it raises is weighed at “The canonicity of 1 Enoch” (rated weak). ↩
“And he was the first among men that are born on earth who learnt writing and knowledge and wisdom… And he was moreover with the angels of God these six jubilees of years, and they showed him everything which is on earth and in the heavens… And he testified to the Watchers, who had sinned with the daughters of men” — Jubilees 4:17, 21–22, in the R. H. Charles translation (online). Date, Hebrew original, and Qumran copies: Charles, The Book of Jubilees (1902); James C. VanderKam, The Book of Jubilees (2001); survey at earlyjewishwritings.com. Fuller treatment on the witness page. ↩
“And he was taken from amongst the children of men, and we conducted him into the Garden of Eden in majesty and honour, and behold there he writeth down the condemnation and judgment of the world… And he burnt the incense of the sanctuary, (even) sweet spices acceptable before the Lord on the Mount” — Jubilees 4:23, 25 (Charles), online. That Jubilees ranks Eden among the four holy places and calls it “the holy of holies” is stated at 4:26. ↩
“And the Lord said to Michael: Go and take from Enoch his earthly robe, and anoint him with My holy oil, and clothe him with the raiment of My glory… And I gazed upon myself, and I was like one of His glorious ones. And there was no difference” — 2 Enoch 22:8–10, in the W. R. Morfill translation edited by R. H. Charles, The Book of the Secrets of Enoch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1896) (Internet Archive); the fallen “Grigori” (Watchers) in the fifth heaven are at 18:3–5 (online). Fuller treatment on the witness page. ↩
On the contested date, the two Slavonic recensions, and the Jewish-versus-Christian origin, see F. I. Andersen, “2 (Slavonic Apocalypse of) Enoch,” in J. H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 91–221, and the overview at earlyjewishwritings.com. The final assumption “in a darkness” is at 2 Enoch 67:1–2 (online); the appended Melchizedek birth-legend (chs. 71–72) is treated on the Melchizedek timeline at “2 Enoch 71–72.” ↩
“Let us take (for instance) Enoch, who, being found righteous in obedience, was translated, and death was never known to happen to him” — Clement of Rome, First Epistle to the Corinthians 9 (c. AD 96) (read the work). Cyprian, On the Mortality 23, reads the translation as rescue “from the contagion of this world” (read the work); Chrysostom on the “abolition” of death and the “superfluous” question of Enoch’s whereabouts, Homily on Hebrews 22 (read the work); Oecumenius and Theophylact, “where and how, it is uncertain… unknown, since Scripture says nothing” (Oecumenius; Theophylact). Tertullian on Enoch pleasing God “uncircumcised and in-observant of the Sabbath… without the burden of the law of Moses,” An Answer to the Jews 2 (read the work). Full treatment on the witness page. ↩
On the postponement / two-witnesses reading: Tertullian, “it was postponed… they are reserved for the suffering of death, that by their blood they may extinguish Antichrist,” A Treatise on the Soul 50 (read the work); Bede on Enoch and Elijah as the “two witnesses” of Revelation 11:3 and Aquinas’ three deferred deaths (Enoch / Elijah / Christ), Commentary on Hebrews 11 (read the work). On the typology: Augustine, “the translation of Enoch prefigured our deferred dedication… being the seventh from Adam,” The City of God 15.19 (newadvent.org); Bede on the 365 solar-year days and the Greek “T” (the cross), Commentary on Genesis on 5:23–24 (read the work). Full treatment on the witness page. ↩
“I am aware that the Scripture of Enoch… is not received by some, because it is not admitted into the Jewish canon either. I suppose they did not think that, having been published before the deluge, it could have safely survived that world-wide calamity… let them recall to their memory that Noah, the survivor of the deluge, was the great-grandson of Enoch himself… he could equally have renewed it, under the Spirit’s inspiration… as… every document of the Jewish literature is generally agreed to have been restored through Ezra” — Tertullian, On the Apparel of Women I.3, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4 (read the work; also newadvent.org). Fuller treatment on the witness page. ↩
“But since Enoch in the same Scripture has preached likewise concerning the Lord, nothing at all must be rejected by us which pertains to us; and we read that ‘every Scripture suitable for edification is divinely inspired’… To these considerations is added the fact that Enoch possesses a testimony in the Apostle Jude” — On the Apparel of Women I.3 (read the work), paraphrasing 2 Timothy 3:16 and pointing to Jude 14–15. Tertullian also cites “the most ancient prophet Enoch” as prophetic Scripture against idolatry (On Idolatry 4, 15, read the work). Whether this establishes that the early Church received 1 Enoch as Scripture is weighed at “The canonicity of 1 Enoch” (rated weak). ↩
“By one week, therefore, he meant the last week… of which week the two prophets Enoch and Elias will take up the half. For they will preach 1,260 days clothed in sackcloth” — Hippolytus of Rome, On Christ and Antichrist 43, applying Revelation 11:3–7 to the pair at §47 (read the work; also newadvent.org). The deferred-death logic: “Enoch no doubt was translated, and so was Elijah… it was postponed… they are reserved for the suffering of death, that by their blood they may extinguish Antichrist” — Tertullian, A Treatise on the Soul 50 (read the work). Full treatment on the witness page. ↩
“Elijah and Enoch will come down… They will pursue the son of lawlessness and kill him” — Coptic Apocalypse of Elijah (concluding section), trans. Anthony Alcock (PDF); “I am Enoch, who was translated by the word of God… now about to return at the coming of Antichrist… to be… taken up alive again into the clouds, after three days and a half” — Gospel of Nicodemus (Acts of Pilate), ch. 20 (text); and the standard medieval account, Adso of Montier-en-Der, Libellus de Antichristo (c. 950), trans. in W. Bousset, The Antichrist Legend (1896) (Internet Archive). The rival Moses-and-Elijah reading is noted on the witness page. ↩
“Because I am Enoch, the son of Jared” — 3 Enoch 4:2, in Hugo Odeberg, 3 Enoch, or the Hebrew Book of Enoch (Cambridge, 1928) (online; critical edition). The throne “similar to the Throne of Glory” and Metatron made “a ruler over all… the children of heaven” are at ch. 10; the seventy names “which the Holy One… took from His own name” at 48D. On the fifth-to-sixth-century dating and the Enoch-Metatron tradition, see Philip Alexander, “3 (Hebrew Apocalypse of) Enoch,” in Charlesworth, OT Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1 (1983), 223–315 (overview). Fuller treatment on the witness page. ↩
“And He called me THE LESSER YHWH in the presence of all His heavenly household; as it is written (Ex. xxiii. 21): ‘For my name is in him’” — 3 Enoch 12:5 (Odeberg), online. The “two powers in heaven” alarm — Aher sees Metatron enthroned, says “there are two… Powers,” and Metatron is lashed with “sixty rods of fire” — is at 3 Enoch 16 and, in parallel, at b. Ḥagigah 15a; see Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven (Leiden: Brill, 1977) (Internet Archive). ↩
The early esteem, named and dated: the Epistle of Barnabas cites Enoch with Scripture-formulas at 4:3 and 16:5 (read the work); Irenaeus takes the Enochic tradition as fact at Against Heresies IV.16.2 (read the work); Clement of Alexandria ratifies Jude’s Enochic prophecy in the Adumbrationes (read the work); Tertullian defends it outright, On the Apparel of Women I.3 (read the work). Contested from the start: Origen, “the books which bear the name Enoch do not at all circulate in the Churches as divine,” Against Celsus V.54 (read the work). Full treatment on the witness page. ↩
The fourth–fifth-century exclusion and the long afterlife: Athanasius, Festal Letter 39 (367) (read the work; newadvent.org); Jerome, “the apocryphal book of Enoch,” Lives of Illustrious Men 4 (read the work), and the Epimenides reductio, Commentary on Titus 1:12 (read the work); Augustine, “the purity of the canon has not admitted these writings… on account of their too great antiquity,” The City of God XVIII.38 (read the work), with XV.23 (newadvent.org). On the loss to the West, James Bruce’s 1773 recovery of the Ge’ez text, and the lone Ethiopian (and Eritrean) Orthodox Tewahedo canon, see R. H. Charles, The Book of Enoch (Oxford, 1912), Introduction (Internet Archive), and “Book of Enoch,” Catholic Encyclopedia (newadvent.org). The adjudicated question is weighed at “The canonicity of 1 Enoch” (rated weak). Full treatment on the witness page. ↩
The Qumran Aramaic fragments and the editio princeps: J. T. Milik (with Matthew Black), The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976) (Internet Archive) — eleven manuscripts (4Q201–212), the oldest Watchers copy (4Q201) dated to the first half of the second century BC, and the Similitudes (chs. 37–71) attested in no copy. Milik’s c. AD 270 Christian dating of the Parables was answered by Jonas C. Greenfield and Michael E. Stone, “The Enochic Pentateuch and the Date of the Similitudes,” Harvard Theological Review 70/1–2 (1977): 51–65 (DOI 10.1017/S0017816000017624; JSTOR issue); the field now dates a Jewish Similitudes to the turn of the era. On the five-booklet anthology composed 4th c. BC–turn of the era, see George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch (Hermeneia; Fortress, 2001–2012) (JSTOR). Full treatment on the witness page. ↩
The Mesopotamian seventh-sage background: James C. VanderKam, Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition (CBQMS 16; Washington, 1984), and Helge S. Kvanvig, Roots of Apocalyptic (1988) — the parallel rated sound at “The Sumerian King List ≅ Enoch, the seventh antediluvian.” The “Enochic Judaism” thesis: Gabriele Boccaccini, Beyond the Essene Hypothesis (Eerdmans, 1998) (Eerdmans). The Enoch-Metatron tradition: Andrei A. Orlov, The Enoch-Metatron Tradition (Mohr Siebeck, 2005) (Internet Archive), against the “two streams” view of Scholem and Alexander — weighed at “Did the patriarch Enoch become the angel Metatron?” On the pseudepigraphic character of the corpus and the four-verse canonical baseline, see the witness page. ↩