HistoricalChristian.Faith

The New Testament (Jude & 2 Peter) on the Sons of God

Dates: c. AD 60–90 (apostolic era) · verse pages: Jude 1:6 · Jude 1:14 · 2 Peter 2:4 Summary: Two short epistles — Jude and 2 Peter — refer to "the angels which kept not their first estate" being held "in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment," and Jude names Enoch, "the seventh from Adam," as a prophet, quoting 1 Enoch directly. The earliest Christian writers (Clement, Justin, Tertullian, Origen, Hippolytus) read these passages as the New Testament's own witness to the Genesis 6 / Watchers event — the very point Fr. Stephen De Young presses. This page collects that witness and the patristic reception surveyed here, and flags one contested passage (1 Peter 3:19, which the patristic witnesses surveyed here read as human, while most modern scholarship — and De Young — read as the imprisoned Watchers).

Claims & evidence

Jude: the angels who left their estate, and Enoch as prophet

Jude makes two moves the angelic reading rests on. First, the imprisoned angels:

And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day. (Jude 6, KJV)

Second — and decisively — Jude quotes 1 Enoch by name as prophecy:

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, KJV)

The phrase "the seventh from Adam" is itself the hook De Young uses for the Sumerian-King-List parallel (the seventh antediluvian king); see De Young's page.

2 Peter: angels that sinned, cast into Tartarus, beside the flood

2 Peter places the sinning angels immediately next to Noah and the flood — the Genesis 6 sequence:

For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment; And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person… bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly. (2 Peter 2:4–5, KJV)

The verb behind "cast them down to hell" is tartaróō ("consigned to Tartarus") — the term De Young and Damick flag, and a distinctively Greek word whose use here (where Jude 6 has only "chains and darkness") is weighed as a Titanomachy borrowing on the argument page 2 Peter's "Tartarus" as a Greek/Titanomachy borrowing (assessment: plausible). Hippolytus of Rome (c. 235) uses exactly this imagery of "fallen angels chained in Tartarus as punishment for their sins."¹

The earliest Fathers read Jude/2 Peter as the Genesis 6 angels

The ante-Nicene writers read these epistles as the angelic/Watchers event — the same figures already on this timeline: - Clement of Alexandria (c. 215), on Jude 6: "the angels who had obtained the superior rank, having sunk into pleasures, told to the women the secrets which had come to their knowledge." - Justin Martyr (c. 165), on Jude 6: the angels "were captivated by love of women, and begat children who are those that are called demons." - Tertullian (c. 220), on Jude 6: "those angels… who rushed from heaven on the daughters of men," who disclosed metallurgy, herb-lore, enchantments, and astrology. - Origen (c. 253), on Jude 6: the "sons of God" who "took for themselves wives" are among those who "left their own dwelling" and "did not preserve their own principality." - Tertullian and Clement, on Jude 14, treat Enoch as genuine prophecy — Tertullian arguing the book survived (or was restored after) the flood, "since Enoch… has preached likewise concerning the Lord… Enoch possesses a testimony in the Apostle Jude."

Each is quoted in full and sourced on that Father's own detail page; the cross-reference here is that they are commenting on Jude/2 Peter, i.e. reading the New Testament itself as teaching the angelic origin of the giants.

A contested passage: 1 Peter 3:19's "spirits in prison"

De Young also enlists 1 Peter 3:19–20 ("he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; which sometime were disobedient… in the days of Noah") as part of the angelic chain — reading the spirits as the imprisoned Watchers. This passage is genuinely contested: a weak leg by patristic-reception lights (every commentator surveyed here reads the spirits as human — the Descensus to the dead, or Christ preaching through Noah) but a strong one by modern-critical lights (where the Watchers reading may be the majority — Dalton, Bauckham, Davids, Schreiner). It cuts across the timeline rather than sitting at one date, so it is adjudicated on its own page rather than here: see 1 Peter 3:19 — the "spirits in prison". Jude 6/14 and 2 Peter 2:4, by contrast, need no such qualification — they carry firm support in both eras, which is why they remain on this timeline page without flag.

Notes

• This entry gathers the patristic comment on the key verses (Jude 1:6, 1:14; 2 Peter 2:4; 1 Peter 3:19–20) bearing on the "NT witness" De Young raised in the Lord of Spirits podcast and the Tucker interview — see De Young's page.
• The witnesses on Jude/2 Peter are the same early Fathers already in the angelic column (Justin, Clement, Tertullian, Origen), which is itself the point: for the first three centuries the angelic reading and the New Testament's "angels that sinned" were taken to be the same thing.
• How Jude and 2 Peter use the Watcher tradition — as a stock judgment-paradigm turned on the false teachers of their day (Jude 5–7's triad of judgment-types → "likewise these," v. 8; 2 Peter 2:4–9) — is weighed on the argument page The Watcher legend as a paraenetic exemplum against the false teachers (assessment: sound). It is the companion to the canonicity question: the epistles deploy 1 Enoch's material as an authoritative judgment-oracle without the early Church ever canonizing the book.