Enoch was so righteous that God took him, yet his book is crap?
But is it really his book? There are a bunch of other gospels too, but they aren't real.
Certainly Jude was impressed by the Book of Enoch - he mentions it by name. And Jesus quotes or paraphrases quite a few passages from Enoch (the Enoch that is part of the Ethiopian Orthodox Canon). Peter seems to speak of information from the Book of Enoch.
But is the book we have from Ethiopia, the Book of Enoch in Ge'ez, really the Enoch to which Jude, Peter and Jesus referred? There is no way to know.
One thing is certain about the Book of Enoch that we have: if you read it and accept it as part of the canon, it changes a lot of traditional ways of looking at things, and forces the acceptance of the thought that the Genesis reference to the Nephilim means that angels did mate with women and create offspring. That, in turn, explains why some Jews thought the idea that God Himself would mate with a human woman and produce a child (Jesus) was obviously monstrous and evil - that if it were TRUE, that's not GOD who did that, but some fallen angel. It helps explain why some Jews saw Jesus's miracles but ascribed them to dark powers, not God.
Jesus' answer: "Can Satan cast out Satan?" is really not a satisfying answer of all. Of course Satan can sacrifice a pawn or two to gain a bigger prize. Human generals of all nations sacrifice the lives of some soldiers under their commands in diversions to make surprise breakthroughs on other fronts, naval commanders send in small ships to delay enemy forces knowing full well that those small ships will almost certainly be destroyed with hundreds of deaths of our their own men. The Americans sent the Doolittle Raid to bomb Tokyo knowing that the planes had nowhere to land, would all be lost, would crash-land in China, and that all of the crews might be captured by the Japanese.
Human commanders ROUTINELY sacrifice some of their own soldiers' lives as pawns on the battlefield - ROUTINELY. American commanders do it. We don't like to talk about it that way, but that's what holding forces are. The men at the Alamo were sent to hold the town to buy time - THEIR lives were forfeit from the moment they were sent. The Marines sent to Wake Island to defend it were going to be overwhelmed and die or be captured, by the Japanese no less.
The notion that Satan cannot cast a few demons out of people to make a big show - with those demons suffering and having to travel through the wastes to find someone else to possess - is trivially obvious. Which is why Jesus' argument was not persuasive to the listeners. "Can Satan cast out Satan?" Who knows? Satan can certainly cast out a few demons in order to win a bigger battle.
One of the views of those who were adamantly opposed to Jesus was that HE was a Nephil - the offspring of some evil angelic power and a human woman (which would be a very good reason why the Virgin Birth was not trumpeted left and right when it happened. Consider how medieval and Reformation Era CHRISTIANS would have handled a Virgin Birth: "She's a witch in league with Lucifer - burn her!" The Jews of Jesus' time weren't LESS superstitious, and they had the Book of Enoch to look at for tales of fallen angels mating with humans to make heroes and monsters.
The Greeks, for their part, did too: Hercules and Aeneas, Dionysius and Achilles, Perseus and Helen of Troy - all the offspring of gods and humans. It was easier for the Greco-Romans to accept Jesus, son of God, than for the Jews too. And Enoch gave the Jews the ability to see Jesus as the son of a demon prince and a harlot.
So, sure, IF Enoch - the real, original Enoch - really wrote a book way back then, and we still really have it in the Ge'ez form, that's something.
But if, really, the "Book of Enoch" was fantasy fiction of Jewish zealots written 300 years BC, then we're not really reading about Enoch and the Nephilim, we're reading about Frodo and Sauron and the orcs - and just THINKING that an ancient novel is actually Scripture.
That is basically where the Latin and Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church came down on the matter, which is why Enoch was excluded. The Catholic Oriental Orthodox, particularly in Ethiopia, came down on the side of acceptance.
So, there was a time when the Book of Enoch was part of the Catholic and Orthodox Church, in the Ethiopian part of it. But after the Council of Chalcedon that part separated off, and with it, the Book of Enoch, other than as a reference by Jude. Most people don't realize the extent to which Jesus uses terms that come out of that book. The Apostles were likewise interested in it.
It does open the possibility that the Jews were right, that Jesus is the son of Satan and a woman - a Nephil, not a son of God - and that the miracles he performed (and since) have all been done by the power of Satan, to deceive people into worshipping Jesus and a Holy Spirit - polytheism - instead of the One True God YHWH.
It's possible.
If that is so, then Satan can do miraculous healings - of the blind, raising the dead, etc., and the battlefield becomes very complicated. Are those who follow YHWH even on the right side in such a case?
It's all possible, and Enoch opens up that whole front of battle.
But all that seems unlikely.
I'm a Catholic, the Church did not include Enoch in the Canon, and I believe that the Church has been empowered by God to infallibly make all such decisions. So therefore whatever Enoch is, it does not have the authority that anything else in Scripture does - and that means that I can read Genesis the way I read it and don't have to consider the stories in Enoch to be real history.
I think that Enoch is a 3rd Century BC Jewish "Lord of the Rings", written in Greek, that it was well known, so Jesus quoted the language in parts of it, but that it probably does not recount anything that really happened.
I think that Peter, and especially Jude, really thought that Enoch was real history, so they referred to parts of it. But I think they were mistaken. And the Holy Spirit, speaking infallibly through the authority of the Catholic Church, made sure that error could not become actual doctrine by making sure that the Book of Enoch never got into the Canon.
Of course, other Christian Churches are not infallible on such things, and Enoch is a great story - not as interesting as Frodo, Sauron, the Ring and Mt Doom, but interesting nevertheless - so they may accept the novel as quasi-Scripture and move forth from there.
When I do that (put myself in a position where Enoch IS Scripture), then I conclude that the dinosaurs were probably nephilim - offspring of angels and lizards and birds - and that a key purpose of the Flood was to wipe them out. That angels still could do that after the Flood but that God restrained it. And that Jesus is unique because he is the sole example of The One True God, YHWH fathering a child with a human woman.
The biggest problem with including Enoch as Scripture, though, is not the story itself. It's a feature of the story. Enoch claims that we saw the place where the Four Winds are stored and sent forth upon the earth.
But if Enoch were actually taken up into the real sky, he would, instead, have reported the startling fact that the world was a round ball - not that the winds are stored somewhere, or that the stars go through gates when they rise and set. The structure of the sky that Enoch describes is an imaginative, and obviously false, ancient impression of things. Had somebody REALLY gone up into the sky, he would not see the gates where the stars go, or the containers of the winds. He would see what astronauts see.
So, Enoch reports ancient fables about the structure of the skies, but it reports them as facts.
What that MEANS is that if Enoch is in the Bible, then you can complete discount ANY facts in the Bible that contradict what we know. If ancient fables about where winds and stars go is Biblical, then the truthfulness of the Biblical text ITSELF is entirely thrown into question. Are ANY of the creation stories or miracles real? If the Bible says the stars go through a gate at sunrise, that the sun goes through a gate at sunset, and the winds are stored and released upon the earth, and then gathered up again - then the Bible cannot be taken as a source of fact, because those things are all untrue.
That, then, makes it very easy to discount the other things that seem miraculous or unlikely, and the Bible becomes ancient legend. And maybe Jesus and God become that too.
Those of us who have encountered miracles and spirits directly still have those experiences, but there is no particular reason to attach our own experiences to the Christian legends, then.
Truth is, for me, the Book of Enoch is a game changer. If it's in the Bible, then the entire Bible could be a work of fiction, because parts of Enoch are CLEARLY and UNAMBIGUOUSLY untrue, whether read in English or in their original languages.
But it's not in the Bible. God kept it out, through the Holy Spirit firmly guiding the Church.
The fact that Enoch is out, but Jude explicitly and Peter more subtly used it, means that the Apostles themselves are NOT the ultimate authority over the message of God - the CHURCH itself is. For Jude believed in the book of Enoch, and he was an Apostle. And Peter did too. But Peter and Jude, one sixth of the Apostles, and the chief apostle, like Paul, are not God. God is God, and God the Holy Spirit dwells in the Church, preventing the CHURCH from being in error even where the Apostles were, and even where they wrote their erroneous opinions into the Bible.
The presence of Enoch in or out of Scripture changes everything.
People who want religion to be like Lord of the Rings love Enoch.
People like me recognize that Enoch is literally false in some places, and that it's presence within Scripture destroys the claim of truth of Scripture.
Jude can REFER TO Enoch, as a story, Jesus and Peter can QUOTE Enoch, but that doesn't make Enoch Scripture. God made sure that it was not included, at the Council of Carthage, and re-ratified that decision at the Council of Trent. God spoke through the Church, infallibly, and thereby the bulk of Christianity dodged the "Enoch bullet".
Which is a good thing, because that way madness lies.
