The Book of Enoch and the New Testament

“And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied,” writes the author of the Epistle of Jude, and goes on to quote from a book that is not found in any Bible or any New Testament of our day.

This is a problem that occupied Christian scholars for generations. The Epistle of Jude is part of the Church’s scriptures, and the book it quotes, the Book of Enoch, was removed from them. The epistle stayed in, and its source stayed out.

The explicit quotation

The Epistle of Jude is one of the shortest books of the New Testament, a single page in all. Its author warns against false teachers, and to strengthen his words he brings a prophecy. “Enoch, the seventh from Adam,” he writes, prophesied about such people, saying: “Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgment upon all.” The words are taken, almost one by one, from the first chapter of the Book of Enoch:

And look, he is coming with tens of thousands of holy ones to execute judgment on them. He will destroy the wicked and will call all flesh to account for everything the sinners and the wicked have done, and for all the evil they committed before him.

1 Enoch 1:9

Notice what the author does not do. He does not say “as it is written in a certain book.” He says that Enoch “prophesied.” As far as he is concerned, these are the prophetic words of a man who lived before the Flood, and they are as worthy of quotation as the words of Isaiah.

The imprisoned angels

The quotation is not the only trace. In the same epistle, a few verses earlier, there is mention of angels “which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation,” and who are therefore held “in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.” Whoever has read the Book of Enoch immediately recognizes the Watchers, who came down on Mount Hermon and were bound beneath the hills of the earth.

The Second Epistle of Peter returns to the same subject, and adds an interesting detail. To describe the place where the angels were imprisoned, it uses a Greek verb derived from Tartarus, the deep pit in which the gods of Greece imprisoned the Titans. Greek mythology and Jewish legend meet here in a single word.

And the First Epistle of Peter contains an obscure sentence that has occupied many commentators: Christ went and “preached unto the spirits in prison,” who had not listened in the days of Noah. Many scholars believe that here too the reference is to the prisoners of the Book of Enoch.

The Son of Man

The most fascinating connection, and also the most disputed, concerns three words: the Son of Man. In the Gospels Jesus calls himself this again and again, and speaks of the day when the Son of Man will sit on the throne of his glory and judge the nations.

The title is not new. Its source is a vision in the Book of Daniel, in which “one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven.” But between the Book of Daniel and the Gospels stands another work: the Book of Parables, the second part of 1 Enoch. There the Son of Man is no longer a passing image. He is a real figure, who exists even before the creation of the world:

Before the sun and the signs were created, before the stars of heaven were made, his name was named before the Lord of Spirits.

1 Enoch 48:3

Later in the book this figure sits on the throne of glory, and the kings and the mighty of the earth stand before him in judgment. The resemblance to the Gospels is hard to ignore.

Did the authors of the Gospels know the Book of Parables? Scholars are divided on this. The Book of Parables is the only part of the Book of Enoch not found at Qumran, and its date is uncertain. Many date it to around the turn of the era, that is, before the Gospels or close to them. What can be said with confidence is something more modest, and no less important: the idea of a heavenly judge called the Son of Man existed in the Jewish world of those days. Christianity did not invent it. It inherited it.

Further echoes

Whoever knows the Book of Enoch hears it in other places too. When Jesus says that in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels in heaven, he assumes something the Book of Enoch states explicitly: wives were not given to the angels, because they are spiritual and live for ever. The parable of the rich man and the poor man who died, with a great gulf fixed between them, recalls the separate chambers of the souls of the dead. And the Book of Revelation, with its throne, its books that are opened and its lake of fire, is written in the same language of visions as the Book of Enoch.

This does not mean that all of these were taken from it. The Book of Enoch and the New Testament grew from the same soil, the Judaism of the late Second Temple period, with its angels, its expectation of the day of judgment and its visions. And yet the English scholar R. H. Charles, who translated the book at the beginning of the twentieth century, judged that its influence on the New Testament was greater than that of all the other apocryphal books put together.

From love to suspicion

The early Christians read the Book of Enoch willingly. An early Christian work, the Epistle of Barnabas, quotes it as scripture. Church Fathers of the second century used the story of the angels who came down to explain where demons and idols came from. And Tertullian, who lived in North Africa around the year 200, defended the book passionately. If Jude the apostle quotes it, he argued, who are we to reject it? He even offered an explanation of how the book survived the Flood: Noah, Enoch’s great-grandson, could have preserved the tradition in his memory.

But in the fourth century the mood changed. The Church settled the list of its holy books, and the Book of Enoch was not included. Augustine admitted that it could not be denied that Enoch wrote words from God, since the Epistle of Jude says so. And yet, he ruled, the writings attributed to him were too ancient to be relied upon. Jerome, the translator of the scriptures into Latin, reports that there were some who wanted to reject the Epistle of Jude itself because of this quotation.

In the end a quiet compromise was found. The epistle stayed, and the book it quotes was removed. Only one church refused the compromise, the Ethiopian church, and thanks to it the book survived.

What one quotation teaches

It is common to imagine the scriptures of any religion as a closed set, whose borders were clear from the beginning. One quotation in one short epistle is enough to unsettle that picture. When the Epistle of Jude was written, the borders were not yet in place. A Jew who believed in Jesus could quote Enoch in the same breath as Moses, and nobody raised an eyebrow.

The borders were drawn later, by other people, for other reasons. The quotation stayed where it was, like a small window someone forgot to close. Whoever peeks through it sees a world in which the Book of Enoch was still, quite simply, part of the library.