Category:Enochic Studies--1700s

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Enochic Studies in the 1700s--Works and Authors

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Overview

In the 18th century, the interest of scholars remained focused on the Enoch fragments of Syncellus, which provided the only textual evidence for 1 Enoch. They were published in the works of Scipione Sgambati (Archivorum veteris testamenti, 1703), and Johann Albert Fabricius (Codes pseudepigraphus Veteris Testamenti, 1713-23). The Fragments were translated into French (Pierre Jurieu, Histoire critique des dogmes et des cultes, 1704), German (Johann Christian Nehring, Neun Bücher Sibyllinischer Prophezeyungen, 1719), and partly, in English (A Universal History, vol.1, 1747; translated into Italian in 1765).

In 1710 Pompeo Sarnelli authored the first commentary on the surviving portions of the Book the Watchers. Nicolas Antoine Boulanger and Paul-Henri Thiry d'Holbach used the Syncellus fragments in their work on Enoch (1762).

In 1773 the explorer James Bruce finally reached Ethiopia and brought back three copies of the Ethiopic version of the whole 1 Enoch. One copy was presented to King Louis XV of France and ended in the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris; a second was given to the Bodleian Library in Oxford; and the third was retained by Bruce for himself, being added to the Bodleian collections only after his death in 1794.

The "rediscovery" of the Ethiopic text deprived the Enoch Fragments of Syncellus of the centrality they had for two centuries in the early Enoch scholarship. The mss brought by Bruce were the first mss to be studied and published. However, they were not the only manuscripts of Ethiopic Enoch present in Europe at that time. At Rome there was indeed another copy of 1 Enoch, in the library of Card. Leonardo Antonelli; its provenance remains unknown. In 1775 the manuscript was examined by orientalist Agostino Antonio Giorgi, but remained untranslated and unpublished. Only after Antonelli's death, it was purchased by Angelo Mai and became part of the collections of the Vatican Library (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana).