Category:Enoch in Christianity (subject)

Overview

"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,

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

The book at a fairly early stage passed out of circulation in the church in both the East and the West. Origen, Jerome, Augustine and the Apostolic Constitutions rejected the text.

The canonicity of 1 Enoch however was recognized by the the Ethiopian church and the text translated into Ethiopic in the mid-fourth century (although the earliest mss dates from no earlier than the 15th century). The homelitical work Mashafa Milad ("The Book of Nativity") 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).

@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