Category:Enoch in Christianity (subject)

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). There are numerous allusions to Enochic traditions in the earliest Christian literature,

The status of "secret text" is mainly responsible for the of explicit references explicit quotations are limited to a few documents, notably, the Letter of Jude (14-15), and the Christian Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. .

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).

The Development of the early Church

The book at a fairly early stage passed out of circulation in the church in both the East and the West. Jerome, Augustine and the Apostolic Constitutions rejected the text. The last known quotations are in the chronographies of Michael of Syria (1166-1199) and George Cedrenus of Byzantium.

@2014 Gabriele Boccaccini, University of Michigan