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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.

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

The influence of Enochic traditions is noticeable in the major products of Ethiopian theology, from the Kebra Nagast ("The Glory of the King") to the Mashafa Mestira Samay wameder ("The Book of the Mysteries of Heaven and Earth") and the "Mashfa Seneksar ("The Book of Saints"). The 15th-century homelitical work Mashafa Milad ("The Book of Nativity") also contains 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).

Enochic traditions in the Slavonic Church

2 Enoch was probably composed in Greek (or perhaps freely translated from some Hebrew Urtext), and from the Greek was translated in Slavonic, 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. Until the end of the 15th century, when the first complete Slavonic Bible was completed (the Gennadi Bible, 1499), 2 Enoch (like 1 Enoch in Ethiopia) enjoyed an ill-defined semi-canonical status. 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. Even after the publication of the Slavonic Bible, as late as the sixteenth century, excerpts from 2 Enoch were included in the very popular and influential Great Menaion Reader, the official Russian Orthodox menologium compiled by metropolitan Macarius in the 1530s-40s.

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, 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 Mormon Church provide two examples of Christian communities in which Enoch maintains a high status and writings attributed to Enoch are preserved in their respective canons of scriptures.

@2014 Gabriele Boccaccini, University of Michigan

Bibiography

• Early Citations from the Book of Enoch (1897 Lawlor), essay
• 1 Enoch, Enochic Motifs, and Enoch in Early Christian Literature (1996 VanderKam), essay / In: The Jewish Apocalyptic

• Christian Adoption and Transmission of Jewish Pseudepigrapha: The Case of 1 Enoch / In: [[Essays on the Book of Enoch (200