Book of Enoch

Mmm, Enoch. I've always been saddened that it's not in the official Apocrypha, because it's damn cool. Doesn't seem fair that it only gets to be a pseudepigraphical work. Although 'pseudepigraph' is a fantastic word.

I've always heard the dating of the texts we've got as being:
1 Enoch: Aramaic fragments of this in the Dead Sea Scrolls, so it was definitely around in the 1st or 2nd century BC - the Ethiopic version that's accepted as the 'full' 1 Enoch comes later.
2 Enoch: there's only 14th century copies, but it's often assumed to date from the 1st century AD.
3 Enoch: the earliest copy is thought to be from the 6th or 7th century AD (originally attributed to a 2nd century rabbi, but), and it's definitely based on the previous two.

Enoch's presence in the Bible isn't that odd - isn't he just one mention in Genesis as yet another long-lived patriarch? And thence a rabbinical tradition, and thence 1 Enoch and its sequels.

Enoch is interesting because it's so very self-contradictory. You can really tell that it was written by dozens of different authors. I mean, they can't even keep the names of the fallen angels consistent (nor, indeed, of archangels - Uriel and Phanuel seem to be used interchangeably at points). And it's a wonderful mish-mash of different apocalyptic beliefs: the flood, the watchers, the fall of the angels, unlawful angel-human intercourse leading to giants who destroy the world (always made me think of the Hellenic Titans), the different heavens in 2 Enoch... I can't remember 3 very well, not even sure if I've read it, but isn't that an attempt to link the Enoch mythos with Caballism?

One of the Enochs is even quoted in the book of Jude (in the Bible). I mean to get to this eventually, but "eventually" is a receding horizon. (I suspected mark s of quoting the Book of Enoch on a thread on ILM once, but he neither confirmed nor denied it. Make of that what you will.)

Hell, I haven't even read everything in the Bible yet.

Wait, no actually he said it wasn't.

Hey, look at that, I knew I'd get the dates wrong! Yeah, I don't know much about it. I just got an official copy of the Book of Enoch today when I happened to just gaze my eyes upon it. I've always forgotten to look and my previous exposure to Enoch is from the bullshit of John Dee and Aleister Crowley, opportunists in their own right.

I'm looking forward to reading it, though. So far I've just read the preface about which books came from where and how badly they were mangled and translated. Obviously, I retained the datings rather well, huh? ;)

And yes, pseudepigraphical is an awesome word! ...Although what it means is less than awesome and it would be way cooler if it all came from the same time period, preferably that of 1 Enoch, of course.

I like any part of the Bible and related books that is not terribly boring, but I especially like the heretical stuff!

And, on a related note....

THE LEGO BIBLE

What a useful thing!

I read Enoch. It struck me at the time that the author(s) desire for spiritual revenge was almost febrile in its hallucinatory intensity. I found it repetitive, bizarre, sick and lacking in compassion. Yeah, I liked it a lot.

the book of enoch is no less valid (if you believe in
scripture) than any other book in the accepted bible.
it's not a oddball contender - it was canon at one time.
it's simply one of the more interesting scriptures that
was chopped out during the great whitewash of the early
centuries AD, when christianity was streamlined and the
truth was decided by committee and merged with
hellenistic thought.

when the christian establishment expunges a book of
scripture and covers it for thousands of years, there's
_got_ to be something going for it.

Especially The Gospel of Thomas.

Coincidentally enough, I was thinking about the book of Enoch just this morning. I'm re-reading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, and I was wondering if getting hold of the book of Enoch would be useful as background reading. Has anyone read both, and do they have an opinion on this?

haha suspected of quoting the book of enoch on ilm!! OH NO!!

also: suspect-by-reason-of-committee is diametrically to suspect-by-reason-of-conspiracy

Some of the stuff the orthodoxy excluded is interesting, yeah, but "it was excluded, so it's great" doesn't work very well. Most of it was left out because, well, it was crap and/or silly. The infancy gospels don't exactly make for an impressive biography of Jesus; the apocalypses didn't work very well together; and they picked the four Gospels which agreed together the most. (The Gospel of Thomas is great and largely orthodox-friendly, but it was likely used as a source for some or all of the others, and might not have been very widely-disseminated at the time. It makes sense to favor narrative over collections of sayings, when the two overlap.)

I'm not sure where Squirl gets "the book of Enoch was canon at one time." It was certainly never part of the orthodox Christian canon. It may have been part of an individual's suggested canon, because there were tons of those floating around, especially pre-Nicea, but those had as much weight as Amazon.com's listmania lists.

I don't remember much about the book(s) of Enoch (I remember that a bunch of different books were attributed to him, not all of them named for him, and at least some of them were apocalypses). I've read them, but they're only dimly related to my field, so they just didn't make much of a lasting impression.

Oh yeah, some of what's underlying what I just said might not be clear, so:

The thing about the various non-canonical Judeo-Christian texts is that when you're reading them you have to remember you're reading a product of a pre-Gutenberg culture, in a church which (in most cases, depending on which text you're looking at) was not yet catholic (small /c/), where the authors:

a) didn't have access to the whole of Judeo-Christian text (i.e., they were writing unaware of at least some, and likely most, of what other people were writing about -- so that when the later-generation Christian writers were filling in the blanks like "wait, what did Jesus do when he was very young?", they supplied contradictory answers; ditto "how's the world gonna end?"; ditto especially "when is the world going to end," as the answer was usually "right about ... now!", and then a few centuries would go by). Many of the texts we now possess are not mentioned in any of the letters of the early Christian writers; it's very possible they simply did not know of them;

b) were writing from very different viewpoints depending on what they or their community had been before becoming Christian or proto-Christian. Jews wrote about different things than ex-pagans; Jews who considered themselves still Jewish wrote about different things than Jews who did not;

c) did not, by and large, have the "if it's scripture, it's true and divinely ordained" view of scripture which Judeo-Christianity has largely espoused since; in all likelihood, many writers were writing things which were never meant to be read as literal fact. They were parables, metaphors, stories, demonstrations of principle.

For better or worse, the formation of the canon was informed by a desire for internal consistency, verisimilitude, and broad appeal. That first reason meant that canonizing one text necessitated excluding other texts from the canon. The second reason meant ditching most of the apocalypses, and even Revelation was a controversial inclusion. The third reason meant trying to include texts which were not too specifically Jewish, or which could be given a newly Christian interpretation or context.

Very little was deliberately covered up, any more than Crystal Pepsi was covered up: if it didn't sell, they stopped making it. If people weren't reading it, no one bothered making copies, which were time- and labor-intensive (moreso if translation was involved, since the Greek is often very bad in the early texts, and gentiles' command of Syriac and Aramaic often even worse.) Most of this stuff had enjoyed primarily local and regional popularity to begin with.

(That came out awfully long. You can tell I'm catching up on my academic reading.)

Tep OTM. What's your field? I'm most intrigued.

(my severe dislike of 'St' Paul partly stems from the fact that we surely could have had Ignatius in the canon instead. Or the Gnostics! Or the Marconians, or whatever they were called. Anyone but him, quite frankly.)

And of course it's not just in the creation of the Christian canon. The Book of Tobit is thought to have been a contender for inclusion in the Jewish canon, but was vetoed by the Rabbinical council. Apparently this is because the betrothal and marriage that take place in Tobit didn't quite tally with the officially-accepted way of doing things. (grain of salt: most of Tobit is pure folklore, and it's angel-based as well, so I'd say there were quite enough other reasons to keep it out.)

Scaredy Cat: I love John Dee and will hear not one word spoken against him. But, yeah, the non-canonical and heretical texts are often the most interesting: perhaps because it's impossible to read them except in the context of the religious mainstream, so they seem especially different and exciting.

I'm still holding out for the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.

Paul is someone who's done the most damage when he's treated out of context, I think. He's the most influential and canonical of the "the world is going to end tomorrow" school, and that was a huge influence in his theology, but the church hasn't really adjusted their usage of it accordingly.

Anyway, my field -- well, my specialty -- is essentially the history and development of Christian doctrine, especially in the first few hundred years (and I'd like to extend that to "the beliefs and practices of pre-orthodoxy early Christian communities," but of course there's just so little material there, and most of it is guesswork.)

The book of Enoch is, I think, the source of the origin of the very interesting archangel Metatron. Enoch ascended into heaven and became Metatron. Lately this angel has purpostedly been steering Carlos Santana's career.

Metatron is, I think, the understanding of the universe as a light matrix. This makes him a primitive archetype of modern physics perhaps. Idle speculation.

the book of enoch: robot in disguise!

Tep, why do you so casually accept the very IDEA of
a canon? Isn't the concept of an accepted canon
smother out independant religious thought and
individual introspection?

>Some of the stuff the orthodoxy excluded is interesting, yeah, >but "it was excluded, so it's great" doesn't work very well. Most of >it was left out because, well, it was crap and/or silly.

This is the official line that they've been feeding us for
centuries. Why should I buy it? Virgin birth, resurrection,
and all kinds of miracles are "silly" in a sense. All
scriptures are probably silly to an extent - just because
one faction wins the theological/political battle doesn't
mean that they were legitimate mouthpieces of god.

>For better or worse, the formation of the canon was informed by a >desire for internal consistency, verisimilitude, and broad appeal.

But can't we agree that this was a WRONG desire?
This is intellectual tyranny (and not
just intellectual) and a dogged antipathy towards free speech.

>Very little was deliberately covered up, any more than Crystal Pepsi >was covered up: if it didn't sell, they stopped making it.

What about the real warfare that took place between opposing
sects? Each faction really was interested in destroying the
other factions. Heresy was a real crime, and people died for it.
If I remember correctly, the breakup of the western roman
empire had a major religious element to it; many of the invading
barbarians followed Nestorianism or other heresies.

and perhaps I'm misreading your intentions but maybe you're
underplaying that - the christian on christian strife of the
first few centuries AD was a war of words AND swords.
I may be wrong, but my feeling is that for the "Catholic" church
to reign supreme, it must had to have fought harder, smarter,
and dirtier than the rest.

In that light, why shouldn't we give these other texts
serious consideration? I think "the mainstream christian
hierarchy suppressed it" IS a good reason to give a text,
at the very least, our openminded attention. Buearacracies
usually don't do a very good job of finding the truth.

archons, man, archons. too cool ...