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Enochic Studies in the 1700s--Works and Authors

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Overview

At the beginning of the 17th century, the Enoch Fragments of Syncellus were first collected by Isaac Casaubon in 1602 and published by Joseph Justus Scaliger in 1606. They were discussed by Johannes Drusius in 1612 and translated into English by Samuel Purchas in 1613.

Rumors about the existence of a complete copy of the Book of Enoch in Ethiopic strengthened. In 1610 the Spanish Dominican Luis de Urreta claimed to have found the title in a list of works presented to Guglielmo Sirleto, the Librarian of the Vatican, by Antonio Greco and Lorenzo Cremonese, who in the second half of the sixteenth century had been sent to Ethiopia by Pope Gregory XIII as part of a delegation. Urreta's position was popularized in the works of authors such as Samuel Purchas (Purchas His Pilgrimes, 1613), Nicolao Godinho (De Abassinorum rebus, 1615), George Sandys (A Relation of A Journey, 1615), and Peter Heylyn (Microcosmos, 1625).

Following these reports, the French intellectual and collector Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637) made strong efforts to recover the book. He thought he had reached its goal when a ms arrived from Egypt in 1636 thanks to the mediation of Gilles de Loches (Aegidius Lochiensis) and Agathange de Vendôme. The ms however remained unpublished and untranslated.

In 1652 Jacques Goar published the editio princeps of Syncellus' Chronography (Greek text & Latin translation). The fragments were also included in works by Athanasius Kircher (Oedipus Aegyptiacus, 1652-54), Thomas Bangius (1657), Johann Heinrich Heidegger (1667-81), and Gottfried Vockerodt (De societatibus et re literaria ante diluvium, 1687),

In 1667 John Milton's poem Paradise Lost gave a prominent role to Enoch and the myth of the Fallen Angels.

in 1659 Casuabon dismissed Dee's magic treatise as a work of sorcery, yet Enoch remained a popular figure in esoteric circles, and the model and object of mystical revelations.

Hopes to recover the lost book of Enoch suffered a major blow in 1681 when Ethiopist Hiob Ludolf demonstrated that the Ethiopic ms purchased by Peiresc contained the text of theological treatise with mere allusions to the book of Enoch.

For his antiquity the character of Enoch continued to be associated (or even identified) with other mythical figures of ancient wisdom. Kircher viewed him as the founder of Egyptian Wisdom and identified him with Hermes Trismegistus. The Jesuit Joachim Bouvet (1656–1732), a leader of the Figurist movement of Jesuit missionaries in China, claimed that Enoch and Fu Xi, the supposed author of the I Ching (or Classic of Changes), as well as Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus, were really the same person.