HistoricalChristian.Faith

George Syncellus on the Nephilim

Dates: c. 810 · Wikipedia
Summary: George Syncellus (d. c. 810/811), a monk of Constantinople, compiled an Ecloga Chronographica — a universal chronicle stitched from older sources. Into its antediluvian section he transcribed long Greek extracts of 1 Enoch's "Book of the Watchers," which he treats as real history: the angels (Egregori) descended in the days of Jared on Mount Hermon, took the daughters of men, and "bare … great Giants." He is thus the latest pre-modern witness in this wiki to the angelic / supernatural reading, and the conduit through whom both the Greek Enoch and Julius Africanus's Sethite fragment survive.

Claims & evidence

He transmits the Enochic Watchers narrative as antediluvian history — the angelic reading

And it came to pass when the Children of Men were multiplied, beautiful Daughters were born to them: and the Egregori [Watchers] coveted them, and went astray after them … two hundred that descended, in the days of Jared, upon the top of the Mountain of Hermon … and they took to themselves wives, and began to defile themselves with them, until the Flood … and they bare to them … the great Giants. Now the Giants begat the Naphilim…

— Chronography (Greek extracts of 1 Enoch 6–7), in William Whiston's translation, source. Syncellus closes the passage with his own colophon — "These things, says Syncellus, are taken out of the first Book of Enoch, concerning the Egregori" — placing the Watchers' descent at a fixed point in his world chronology rather than reading Genesis 6 of the line of Seth.¹ His chronicle preserves two large excerpts (roughly 1 Enoch 6:1–9:4 and 15:8–16:1, plus a Mount-Hermon passage with no surviving parallel), which he inherited not from Enoch directly but through the Alexandrian chronographers Panodorus and Annianus (c. AD 400) — yet he relays them under the heading "concerning the Watchers," i.e., as the fall of angelic beings who fathered the giants.²

The "apostolic apocryphon" label is De Young's, after Nicephorus — not Syncellus

Fr. Stephen De Young (Lord of Spirits, "Land of Giants") adduces Syncellus as a Byzantine witness who held the angelic reading — borne out by his own text (above). The "apostolic apocryphon" phrase, however, is De Young's own, and he credits it not to Syncellus but to St. Nikephoros I, Patriarch of Constantinople (d. 828): 1 Enoch is "best seen … as St. Nikephoros I … stated in the 9th century, as an apostolic apocryphon" — apocryphon because not read publicly, apostolic because it preserves in written form traditions that "formed a part of the apostolic teaching."³ The verifiable primary behind that gloss is Nicephorus's Stichometry, which lists Henoch (4,800 stichoi) among the apocrypha of the Old Testament.⁴ The label is therefore reattributed away from Syncellus: his contribution here is the transmission of the Watchers narrative as history, not any verdict on Enoch's canonical rank.

Notes

• Conduit, not only witness. The same chronicle is our source for Julius Africanus's Chronography Fragment 2 (the earliest Sethite statement) and for much of the Greek text of 1 Enoch that would otherwise be lost. Syncellus thus hands down both readings, but commits his own narrative to the angelic one.
• A tension in his sources. His immediate authorities pulled the other way: Annianus euhemerized the Watchers as one of the Sethite lines who set up a kingdom under Semiazos. Syncellus preserves the Enochic Watchers text anyway — a sign of how the angelic reading survived in the Byzantine chronographic tradition even as Western exegesis (already by Bede, c. 735) had settled on the Sethite line.
• Why he matters on the timeline. He fills the long medieval gap on the angelic side: after the Latin West went Sethite, this 9th-century Greek chronicle still relays Genesis 6 as the descent of the Watchers and the begetting of the Nephilim — the reading De Young seeks to recover.

Sources