As we all know, the book of Enoch was excluded from both Catholic and Protestant bibles:
Book of Enoch - Wikipedia
Why is that the case though? Enoch was listed as an Old Testament Patriarch, and many of the names of God's angels are listed in it.
Any ideas?
Because it was never regarded as canonical by the Christian Church outside of the rather peculiar case of
Ethiopia.
1) The book of Enoch wasn't written by the biblical Enoch; it was written in the Second Temple Period, probably around 300 BC.
2) It never enjoyed widespread prominence either in mainstream Jewish religion or, later, in Christianity.
The development of the Old and New Testament Canons, together making up the Christian Biblical Canon, was a fairly long and complex process; and the development of the Old and New Testaments developed differently:
The development of the New Testament can be broadly spoken of in two groups of books: The homolegoumena or "accepted books" and the antilegomena or "disputed books". The homolegoumena consists of the four Gospels, the Acts, the thirteen epistles of Paul, as well as 1 Peter and 1 John; they are homolegoumena because these were never disputed in the Church and were accepted and received incredibly early on as Scripture. The antilegoumena consists of the rest of what we today know as the New Testament, Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 & 3 John, and the Apocalypse of John (the Revelation); but it also included books that did not ultimately make it into the Canon, the Didache, the Shepherd of Hermas, the epistle of Clement (1 Clement), the epistle of Barnabas, and a couple others. Eventually, and largely due to time, the exact shape of the New Testament came about through the general consensus of the Church (there was no council or major top-down decision about this, it occurred rather naturally and organically).
The development of the Old Testament is a bit different. In Pharisaic Judaism there was a pretty standard acceptance of two sets of books: Torah (or the five books of the Pentateuch) and the Nevutim (the Prophets, consisting of the Major Prophets and the Twelve Minor Prophets). But the third category, Ketuvim or "Writings" was a lot fuzzier, it's safe to say that the Psalms were universally accepted, but the exact extent or contents of the Writings was an issue that was not itself resolved in Judaism until several centuries after Christianity and Judaism had split and gone their own ways. The issue is further complicated by the Septuagint, the major Greek translation of Jewish sacred writings which was made a couple hundred years before Jesus by a group of Jewish scribes and scholars in Alexandria, Egypt.
Christians, historically, more-or-less adopted the Septuagint as-is; but that doesn't mean that there weren't disputes over some of the books, there were disputed books. In the 39th Paschal Letter from St. Athanasius, in the mid-4th century, he outlines what books were to be accepted and read in the Egyptian churches (Athanasius being bishop of Alexandria), his list is also the first time we see all 27 books of the New Testament mentioned together. Athanasius' Old Testament would be pretty familiar to most Protestants to a point, Athanasius excludes Esther and places Esther in the category of apocrypha, whereas he includes the book of Baruch as canonical. However Athanasius' letter wasn't the first or last statement on the subject, and obviously the Bible has continued to include Esther (though, in different versions; Catholics and Orthodox embracing the Septuagint Esther and Protestants generally accepting the Masoretic Esther). Missing however from all differences and disputes about the Old Testament however? Enoch. Enoch was never given any serious attention in the disputes around the Old Testament; the Church by and large stuck with the Septuagint, and disputes over canonicity were restricted to within the Septuagint. A line of distinction was made, in some sense, between certain Old Testament books and other Old Testament books: The Old Testament Protocanon includes about everything Protestants would recognize as the Old Testament; the Old Testament Deuterocanon includes those books accepted by Orthodox and Catholics but largely not accepted by Protestants. But, again, Enoch was never part of either.
The non-use of Enoch in the regular life of the Church, its reading as part of Christian worship, meant it was never going to have a place in the Bible, because the Bible was shaped, over the centuries, by what was read and used in Christian worship. That's why there is no such thing as "lost books of the Bible", no books were lost from the Bible because the shape of the Bible was determined over the course of centuries by the general consensus of all the Faithful from across the Christian world.
It's for this reason that if we, for example, discovered a long lost letter from St. Paul, and we could verify that it is authentic, it still wouldn't be part of the Bible. The Biblical Canon has been shaped by two thousand years of Christian practice and experience; and while there are differences of opinion when it comes to the Old Testament Deuterocanon, and thus a difference in Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Bibles, what we have today is the result of that two thousand years of practice and experience. There's simply no place for Enoch in the Canon from two millennia nearly unanimous consensus of the Church; though again the Ethiopian Church is the peculiar case.
-CryptoLutheran
