Category:Enochic Studies--1800s

Angelo Mai

• BACK to the ENOCHIC STUDIES--INDEX

Enochic Studies in the 1800s--Works and Authors

< ... -- 1400s -- 1500s -- 1600s -- 1700s -- 1800s -- 1850s -- 1900s -- 1910s -- 1920s -- 1930s -- 1940s -- 1950s -- 1960s -- 1970s -- 1980s -- 1990s -- 2000s -- 2010s -- ... >

Overview

Silvestre de Salcy was the first scholar to publish a translation (in Latin) of portions of the Paris manuscript of 1 Enoch, with notes in French (1800). His notes were translated into German in 1801 by Friedrich Theodor Rink.

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. Daniele Manin's commentary in 1820 was the last one based on the Enoch Fragments of Syncellus; it remains a testament to two centuries of scholarship on 1 Enoch based on the available Greek, Latin, and Hebrew sources before the recovery of the Ethiopic text, and an even more impressive accomplishment when one considers that the would-be renowned Venetian patriot and statesman, and future president of the reborn Republic of Venice in 1848-49, was then barely sixteen years old.

In 1821 Richard Laurence published the first English translation of the whole 1 Enoch, followed by the editio princeps of the Ethiopic text in 1838. Both works were based on the manuscript at the Bodleian Library. In 1831-33 Eduard Rüppell’s expedition to Ethiopia produced Germany’s first exemplar of the book at the Stadtbibliothek in Frankfurt am Main. Two German translations (Hoffmann, 1833-38; and Clemens, 1850) and a Latin translation (Gfrörer, 1840), contributed to make the book available to the scholarly community.

In the 1820s, Angelo Mai purchased the Enoch manuscript that belonged to the Antonelli Library and made it available for study at the Vatican Library. Mai also published in1844 a new Greek fragment of 1 Enoch he had discovered at the Vatican Library.

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). It was the last major development of the character of Enoch in a religious context.

In Enoch Restitutus (London, 1836) the Anglican clergyman Edward Murray suggested that the now published book of Henoch should be seen only as a corrupted version of the “original” mentioned by the Letter of Jude and other ancient authors. It was the final and failed attempt to harmonize the Hermetic tradition of the antiquity of Henoch-Hermes and his writings with the new discoveries. Murray’s book was poorly received; a tradition that for centuries had been at the center of scholarly debate suddenly appeared a worthless, fanciful theory with no legitimacy in Enochic scholarship.

@2014 Gabriele Boccaccini, University of Michigan