Category:Enoch in Christianity (subject)

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Enoch in Christianity

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Overview

The Legacy of Second Temple Judaism

"Because the early church arose in the circles of apocalyptic Judaism, the Enochic texts and traditions were known and significantly influenced early Christian thought" (Nickelsburg, 2001, p. 82-83).

The status of "secret text" may be responsible for the paucity of explicit quotations of Enoch the prophet which are limited to a few documents, notably, the Letter of Jude (14-15), the Letter of Barnabas and the Christian Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. There are numerous allusions to Enochic traditions in the earliest Christian literature, and Enochic traditions seems to have played a central role in the formation of earliest Christian theology, especially concerning the doctrines of the origin of evil, demonology, and the Son-of-Man Christology.

Because of the prominence of Enochic traditions in the earliest Christian literature, the writings attributed to Enoch continued to enjoy a normative status in the first three centuries of Christianity, in sharp contrast with the silence of the early Rabbinic literature; see Enoch in Judaism.

From the fourth century, however, the attitude among Christians became decidedly more guarded, as attested in the 39th Paschal letter by Athanasius (367). “Who has made the simple folk believe that books belong to Enoch, even though no scriptures existed before Moses?"

Between the 4th and 5th century, the book of Enoch passed out of circulation in the church in both the East and the West, with the Ethiopian church and the Slavonic Church remaining the conspicuous exceptions. Jerome, Augustine and the Apostolic Constitutions rejected the text as "apocryphal" since it was not present in the Hebrew Bible.

Enochic traditions in the Ethiopian Church

When Christianity spread in Ethiopia in the mid-fourth century, the canonicity of 1 Enoch was recognized by the Ethiopian church and in the following centuries the text (along with the other "biblical" texts) was translated into Ethiopic, At the time of the establishment of the Ethiopian Church 1 Enoch still enjoyed vast popularity in Egypt; hence its presence in Ethiopia is not surprising. What was unique, was the lasting success of the book. Several factors contributed to the survival of 1 Enoch in Ethiopia. First, the text well adapted to the new environment, where it played an important role in the absorption and "christianization" of ancient pagan beliefs about the presence of angels and demons. Second, the Ethiopian Church interacted with a local form of Judaism which was not governed by the "rabbinic" rules that elsewhere shaped the formation of the "Hebrew Bible." Finally, the controversies against Gnostics and Manichaeans never dominated the theological debate in Ethiopia, nor did the imperial agenda in a region outside the boundaries of the Roman Empire.

There were indeed discussions in Ethiopia also about the canonicity of the text, yet it continued to be copied and preserved over the centuries and highly influenced the theology of the Ethiopian Church. The Kebra Nagast ("The Glory of the King," 13th cent.), a monumental work written in order to legitimize the Solomonic dynasty, contains references to the fallen angels and Enochic cosmology. An English translation of Kebra Nagast is in E.A. Wallis Budge, The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek: Being the History of the Departure of God and His Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem to Ethiopia, and the Establishment of the Religion of Hebrews and the Solomonic Line of Kings in that Country. A Complete translation of the Kebra Negast with Introduction (London: Martin Hopkinson, 1922).

In the 15th century the authority of 1 Enoch was definitively established as a result of the reform of Emperor Zar'a Ya'qob, who made it a centerpiece in his apologetical interaction with Judaism. Most of the earliest mss of 1 Enoch date from that period.

The influence of Enochic traditions is also noticeable in the major products of Ethiopian theology of the time; see Michael A. Knibb, Essays in the Book of Enoch, and Bruk A. Asale, Rediscovering the Effect of a Lost and Found Book: 1 Enoch’s Influence and Legacy in Ethiopian Christianity (unpublished paper presented by Bruk A. Asale at the Enoch Graduate Seminar, Montreal 2014).

The two homelitical works, Metshafe Berhan ("Book of Light") and Metshafe Milad ("Book of Nativity"), contain extensive extracts from 1 Enoch, particularly the Parables; see Kurt Wendt, Das Mashafa Milad (liber nativitatis) and Mashafa Sellase (liber Trinitatis) des Kaisers Zar'a Ya'qob (Louvain: Secretariat du Corpus SCO, 1962, 1963).

A third 15th-century homelitical work, the Metshafe Mistire Semay womeder ("Book of the Mysteries of Heaven and Earth," 15th cent.), was the ms puchased and brought to Europe in 1636 by Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc with the help of Capuchin Gilles de Loches (Aegidius Lochiensis) and Agathange de Vendôme. It contains so many references to the book of Enoch to be erroneously considered for some time a copy of the "lost" book of Enoch until Ethiopist Hiob Ludolf identified it in 1681 as an the Ethiopian theological commentary; see E.A. Willis Budge, The Book of the Mysteries of the Heavens and the Earth and Other Works of Bahayla Mika’el (Zosimas): The Ethiopic Texts Edited from the Unique Manuscript (Éth 37 Peiresc) in the Bibliotheque Nationale with English Translations (London: Oxford University Press, 1935).

Finally, the liturgical book "Mashfa Seneksar ("The Book of Saints") is yet another important testimony of the influence of Enochic traditions; see E.A. Willis Budge, Synaxarium: The Book of the Saints of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, printed and posted on the web page of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Debre Meheret St. Michael Church (Garland, TX USA).

Enochic traditions in the Old Slavonic Church

Enochic traditions in the Slavonic Chuch present a similar case. 2 Enoch was probably composed in Greek (or perhaps freely translated from some Hebrew Urtext), and from the Greek was translated in Slavonic after the 9th century, and preserved by the Slavonic Church along with other apocalyptic texts of Second Temple Judaism, notably, the Apocalypse of Abraham, 3 Baruch, and the Ladder of Jacob.

For some centuries, until the end of the 15th century, 2 Enoch enjoyed in the Slavonic Church an ill-defined semi-canonical status, similar to that of 1 Enoch in the early Ethiopian Church. It was included in the Palaea Interpretata, a 13th-century Slavonic collection containing fragments of biblical texts (from Genesis to Kings) together with apocryphal, exegetical, cosmographical, and anti-Judaic polemic texts.

The reasons for the preservation of 2 Enoch in the Slavonic Church are not clear, due also to the lack of documentation. At the end, 2 Enoch failed to gain full canonical status when the first complete ms of the Slavonic Bible was completed (the Gennadi Bible, Генна́диевская Би́блия, 1499), followed by the first printed edition in 1581 (the Ostrog Bible, Острожская Библия, 1581). However, excerpts from 2 Enoch were included in the very popular and influential Great Menaion Reader (Великие Четьи-Минеи, 1541; 2nd ed. 1552), the official Russian Orthodox menologium compiled under the supervision of Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow.

The Development of the early Church

The rejection of 1 Enoch from the Christian canon of the major Christian Churches and the loss of the entire text of 1 Enoch did not imply a complete disappearance of Enochic traditions.

First of all, the figure of Enoch remained part of the received "canonical" scriptures. Traditions related to Enoch were also mentioned in non-canonical texts preserved by the Church, notably, the Book of Jubilees, the Testaments of Twelve Patriarchs, the Life of Adam and Eve, the Testament of Abraham, and others.

Second, the Christian liturgy contained numerous allusions to Enochic traditions. For example, the ancient Rituale Romanum explicitly referred to Enoch together with Elijah in a prayer for the dying: Libera, Domine, animam servi tui (ancillae tuae), sicut liberasti Henoch et Eliam de communi morte mundi. Amen. (Breviarius romanus, titulus V, caput 7: Ordo commendationis animae).

Third, Enoch continued to be associated to Elijah as one of the humans who did not die and are now living in Heaven. As such Enoch was occasionally mentioned in some hagiographic narratives, notably, the life of Franciscan Benedetto Sinigardi (Arezzo, ca. 1190 - 1282), who according to the Istoria chronologica de' Padri Francescani was miraculously taken into Heaven and there conversed with Enoch and Elijah.

Finally, sections of the Book of Watchers were preserved in the tradition of Christian chronography. At the turn of the 5th century both Pandorus and Annianus of Alexandria used Enochic traditions to supplement the history and chronology of Genesis. At the beginning of the ninth century, George Syncellus reused and edited the Enochic extracts from Pandorus. The last known quotations of Enochic material are in the 12th-century chronographies of Michael of Syria (based on Annianus) and George Cedrenus of Byzantium (based on Syncellus).

Finally, it must be considered the relevance of Enoch in philosophical and esoteric circles. As Hermetic author Zosimos of Panopolis wrote in the 3rd-4th century, the art of alchemy was believed to be at the core of the ancient pre-deluge science. It was one of the secret knowledges taught by the fallen angels and inscribed after the Flood in the Book of Chemes, who some identified with Cam, the son of Noah and descendent of Enoch. Both in the Christian tradition (Roger Bacon) and in the Muslim tradition, Enoch was often associated (or identified]] with Hermes Trimegistus.

Reformation and Counter-Reformation

The controversies between Catholic and Protestant about the canon sealed the status of the book(s) of Enoch as rejected "apocryphal" texts in the West. The Enoch texts were included in the first "Protestant" collection of OT Pseudepigrapha published by Fabricius in 1713-23, as well as in the "Catholic" collection by Migne in 1853.

In the 1830s and early 1840s, the character of Enoch held a prominent place in the revelations of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter-Day Saint movement. In the Life of Moses (6-7) Enoch is introduced as a prophet of repentance, a seer, and the builder of a city "that was called the City of Holiness, even Zion" (7:19).

Contemporary Theology

Today, Enoch plays a very marginal role in contemporary Christian theology, where sometimes is involved in discussions about the identity of the Two Witnesses who appear during the Second woe in the Book of Revelation 11:1-14. Enoch is not counted as a saint in Roman Catholic tradition, though he has a saints day, July 26, in the Armenian Apostolic Church.

The Ethiopian Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints are the only two Christian communities in which Enoch maintains an authoritative status and writings attributed to Enoch are preserved in their respective canons of scriptures.

@2014 Gabriele Boccaccini, University of Michigan