Was 1 Enoch Considered Inspired Scripture? ![rw-book-cover](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Kde9uUy13uU/maxresdefault.jpg) ## Metadata - Author: [[YouTube]] - Full Title: Was 1 Enoch Considered Inspired Scripture? - Category: #articles - Summary: #maklelan2976 - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kde9uUy13uU The book of First Enoch seems to have been considered inspired scripture within early Judaism and among the earliest Christians. Hey everybody, I'm Dan Mlelen. I'm a scholar of the Bible and religion. And the book of First Enoch is a compilation from the Henistic period. It brings together several originally independent compositions and they frequently conflict with each other. But to be fair, the Hebrew Bible frequently conflicts with itself and the New Testament frequently conflicts with itself. But first Enoch is definitely not historical. It is pseudopagraphic. Now during the periods of the composition of the text of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, there is no conceptual framework for a biblical cannon. That's something that develops afterwards in the second and the third centuries CE. But during the periods of the composition of the biblical text, you do have concepts of scripture, of inspiration, of prophecy. And this is our best clues at what was considered inspired scripture. But in that period, inspired scripture was not a carefully delineated collection of texts to the exclusion of all others. There were a wide variety of texts that could be considered scripture, and not everybody agreed on what was and was not inspired scripture. Now we do have people at the end of the first century CE for instance like Josephus talking about either a 22 book or a 24 book cannon. Now they don't use the word canon but they say these are the inspired books or these are the authoritative books but they never catalog precisely which books they are. And that's because what was important was the number, not which books were included. Because 22 and 24 were special numbers within late second temple period Judaism. 22 was the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. 24 was the number of letters in the Greek alphabet. And so it was considered poetic to say, well, the number of books that we consider inspired number 22 or 24, even if they never said these are the specific books that are included. So we can go through all kinds of mental gymnastics to combine books and say, "Well, these are all the ones that must have been included." But we just don't know because they never clarify. So when it comes to what was scripture in the first century CE or earlier, we have to look at what was referred to as scripture, what was referred to as inspired, what was referred to as prophecy, and how influential and common these texts were. And first Enoch tags pretty much all of these bases because when you look in the Dead Sea Scrolls, there were about as many copies of the book of First Enoch present as there were the book of Leviticus and more copies than there were copies of the minor prophets or Daniel or Proverbs or Job. The only books that actually outnumber the copies of First Enoch are Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and Psalms. So, it was a phenomenally influential text at Kuman, which was a pretty conservative group of late second temple period Jewish folks. Additionally, the book of First Enoch was phenomenally influential on Grecoman period Judaism as well as on Christianity. It is the origin of a lot of the ideas that later Jewish folks and early Christian folks had about hell, about Satan, about demons. These are things that are developed within the enoic literature and later taken up by Christianity and also mostly abandoned by rabbitic Judaism which tried to get rid of the influence of Greek philosophy and Grecoman social conventions and returned to strict exugesus hakic interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. But that influence remained in Christianity. And so when people talk about demons and Satan and hell today within Christianity, that is first Enoch that they are founding that understanding on. And we can see this in the New Testament itself. The letter of Jude in verse 14 literally quotes directly from the book of Enoch, but also introduces it as Enoch's prophecy. Here's the text. Verse 14. And it was also about these that Enoch in the seventh generation from Adam prophesied saying, "See, the Lord is coming with 10 thousands of his holy ones." So if you consider Jude inspired scripture, Jude considers Enoch inspired scripture because it's saying that this is a prophecy. And what is inspired scripture if not prophecy, if not God's inspired word? That is exactly how Jude considers this. And we even have later Christians arguing in favor of this. For instance, in a late second century text called on the apparel of women, we have Tertullan who dedicates an entire chapter to the authenticity of the book of Enoch. You can check out this page here and this page here. And at the very end, the very last sentence to these considerations is added the fact that Enoch possesses a testimony in the Apostle Jude. And there are a number of other ways that the book of Enoch comes through in the New Testament. For instance, in the book of Luke when Jesus says, "I saw Satan falling like lightning from heaven." A lot of people associate that with Isaiah 14 with Lucifer falling. And that's not actually where that is coming from. This is far more clearly a reference to the animal apocalypse and the beginning of the animal apocalypse where Enoch says, "I looked up and I saw a star fall from heaven and then a bunch of other stars came down to join that first star." And that first star was the head malevolent angel of the tradition of first Enoch, the one who led all the other angels to rebel. So even as late as the late 2nd century CE and into the 3rd century CE, there were many authoritative Christians who argued for the authenticity of the book of first Enoch. However, there were also those who push back. In fact, the entire reason that Tertullian writes about this is because he notes that there are some who doubt the authenticity of First Enoch. And this primarily had to do not only with its internal inconsistencies, but with its inconsistencies with other biblical texts that were considered more centrally inspired and canonical and also it would have had to have survived as a manuscript from before the flood. And some people considered that unlikely and that's one of the things that Tertullian addresses in his text. But when we look at how influential first Enoch was, when we look at how common the text was, when we look at references to Enoch as inspired, even within the text of the New Testament, we see that these authors considered it to be inspired, considered it to be historical, considered it to be authoritative. It wasn't until after the composition of the text of the New Testament that people became more critical of First Enoch. and it would later be rejected. However, not before somebody, perhaps Syrian missionaries, perhaps somebody else would take a version of the Septuagent, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that included the text of first Enoch as well as Jubilees down to the kingdom of Oxum. And that collection of texts would become the canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Toakado Church. And the preservation of first Enoch within that cannon is one of the only reasons we have the text to begin with because all the other manuscripts were lost to time until we discovered some fragmentaryary manuscripts at Kuman. But the only copies of the full text of first Enoch that we possess are those that are found written in Ethiopic that come from the Ethiopian Orthodox Toako Church's very very extensive canon. So as far as we can tell, late second temple Jewish folks and early Christians understood first Enoch to be inspired scripture and it was phenomenally influential on early Judaism and then on early Christianity. But the dogmas, the doctrines, the ideologies that originate in the book of first Enoch are still widespread and very influential and authoritative among even those who today reject the authenticity, the inspiration, the historicity of first Enoch. It was the most influential text of early Judaism and early Christianity that did not make it into the canon. But among the earliest Jewish and Christian folks, it seems to have been considered inspired scripture., Was 1 Enoch Considered Inspired Scripture?, YouTube, 01k8tezz4kf2t23fe7v9khg7gt.