Does Jesus quote 1 Enoch?

JSRG said:

Oral tradition was very much a thing, and both Jude and the "Book of Enoch" could have been simply drawing on that. There is also the possibility of an earlier written source that both made use of but is no longer available to us, much like "the book of the annals of the kings of Israel" and "the book of the annals of the kings of Judah", which are referred to repeatedly in the Book of Kings as being a more in-depth history of the kings, but are now lost.

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Except there was a written source at the time. Can you name any other 'scripture' at the time which was actually just some oral tradition?

SeventyOne said:

It actually comes from Enoch 15. The concept is throughout that whole chapter but primarily verses 3 through 7. Speaking the angels who mated with women, He states:

You being spiritual, holy, and possessing a life which is eternal, have polluted yourselves with women; have begotten in carnal blood; have lusted in the blood of men; and have done as those who are flesh and blood do. These however die and perish.

Therefore have I given to them wives, that they might cohabit with them; that sons might be born of them; and that this might be transacted upon earth. But you from the beginning were made spiritual, possessing a life which is eternal, and not subject to death for ever. Therefore I made not wives for you, because, being spiritual, your dwelling is in heaven.​

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Very good..

Looks like you just proved that people don't realize that The Book of Enoch is quoted a couple of time in the canon...

Should make us think... really.

SeventyOne said:

Yes, and the kicker is that He also calls it 'scripture'.

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Agreed.. it's awesome.

friend of said:

What were the other times?

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Jude 14-15 King James Version (KJV)

14 And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints,


15 To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.

Scholars agree that Jude cites 1 Enoch in vv 14–15.4

He also talks of things that Enoch details when he states this:

Jude 6 King James Version (KJV)
6 And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.

Book of Enoch (Jude 1:4, 1:6, 1:13, 1:14–15,[22], 2 Peter 2:4; 3:13,[23][24] and John 7:38 [25]).

Dkh587 said:

I don’t think he is necessarily quoting it.

It’s a similar statement, sure, but it doesn’t concretely prove that he quoted the so-called book of Enoch.

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I guess.. then.. it would be necessary to find the "scripture" that Jesus was quoting.

Since Jesus states that He is quoting or referring to scripture.. right?

Dkh587 said:

Surely we can piece doctrine together on this, because he says to them, “you do not know the scriptures”.

It must be in the Law & Prophets(OT) in some fashion for him to say that.

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Must it? If so.. we should be able to see it, find it, read it.

SeventyOne said:

But you from the beginning were made spiritual, possessing a life which is eternal, and not subject to death for ever

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So this would mean that Adam and Eve were made to die, even before they ate the fruit! This seems to contradict popular teaching.

Hello @friend of, I don't believe that the Lord Jesus quotes or even loosely refers to the book of Enoch in Matthew 22. Rather, His statement about the Sadducees 'not knowing the Scriptures' was due to the fact that they did not believe in the resurrection of the dead, even though it is clearly taught in the Bible.

Why?

Because the resurrection of the dead is taught in the Prophets (e.g. Isaiah and Daniel), not in the Pentateuch (which were the only Books that the Sadducees considered to be Holy Scripture).

*(Since the Lord mentions them in this passage, it is perhaps worth noting that the Sadducees did not believe in the existence of angels either)

friend of said:

So let's see if it's true. So far I've found this verse which speaks on the matter—http://scriptural-truth.com/images/BookOfEnoch.pdf

1 Enoch 51:4 And in those days the mountains will leap like rams, and the hills will skip like lambs satisfied with milk, and all will become Angels in Heaven.

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The Lord tells us that we will become <LIKE> angels at the resurrection and beyond (on the New Earth), meaning that we will neither die, nor shall we marry or be married, nor procreate. In all of this we will be "like" the angels, but we do not <BECOME> angels, nor will the eternal abode of the saints be in Heaven.

--David

friend of said:

Matthew 22:29 Jesus answered, “You are mistaken because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. 30 In the resurrection, people will neither marry nor be given in marriage. Instead they will be like the angels of heaven."

I cannot find this quote, which expressly states that people will not marry, in the 66 books of the bible. I checked my NIV and NKJV and there was no footnote, strangely. Where did it come from and could it have been quoted from 1 Enoch? Jesus tells them they are mistaken for NOT understanding the scriptures, but which scriptures did Jesus have in mind when He told them about how things would be in future heaven with regard to marriage?

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You know, there is no consensus regarding the Old Testament canon, particularly the scope of the deuterocanonical books, even within Protestantism. For example, although most editions of the King James Bible omit them, the KJV actually includes 15 deuterocanonical books in a section called the Apocrypha, because the Church of England, while not regarding these books as doctrinally definitive, regarded them as edifying, and consequently Anglican and Episcopalian churches read these books, in addition to the 66 books of the KJV Old Testament, during Morning Prayer and Evensong, and they are also commended for private study in the 39 Articles of Religion. Here is a link to a PDF of the complete King James Version, including the 15 deuterocanonical books: http://www.davince.com/download/kjvbiblea.pdf

The Roman Catholics for their part have the closed canon defined at the Council of Trent, but my understanding is that this only applies to the Latin Rite, because the various Sui Juris Eastern Catholic churches in communion with Rome typically use the Bible version of the Orthodox church they separated from, so, for example, the Greek Catholics use the Septuagint and the Byzantine text used in the Greek Orthodox Church, the Chaldeans use the ancient fourth century Syriac Aramaic translation known as the Peshitta (which is as old and as valuable as the Vulgate, perhaps moreso, and which the translators of the KJV did consult). The Eastern Orthodox have minor variations in the Old Testament between the old Church Slavonic Bible and the main Greek Bible, and newer Church Slavonic and Russian translations. And each of the four Oriental Orthodox traditions (Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic and Armenian) has its own scriptural canon - I will be returning to the subject of the canon of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches at the end of this reply.

The idea that there are 22 books in the Old Testament is really the result of a opinion of St. Jerome, who translated directly from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek into Latin what became known as the Vulgate Bible, to replace an older Latin translation known as the Vetus Latina*, that those books which existed in Hebrew or Aramaic or a mixture thereof (Daniel, for example) were more important than those which were only extant in Greek (for example, the Wisdom of Solomon, which was composed in 66 BC). The Rabbis, who inherited the traditions of the Pharisees, for their part, settled on 22 books, and the Karaite Jews, who, like the Sadducees, rejected the oral traditions which the Rabbinical Jews wrote into the Mishnah and compiled into the Talmud, in favor of something like sola scriptura, agreed with the Rabinnical Jews on this point, and Martin Luther despite a general anti-Semitism, for some reason decided that canon was more reliable than, for example, various canons of Old Testament text proposed by the early church fathers such as Eusebius of Caesarea, Pope Athanasius of Alexandria** and Archbishop Gelasius of Rome.**

However, we have no idea what was actually regarded as canonical, or if there even was a canon as such, in Second Temple Judaism, beyond the most important books such as the five books of the Torah and certain other Old Testament texts whose canonicity has never been controversial (except among the Samaritans, who reject all of the Old Testament except for the five books of the Torah, which their edition of modifies slightly, with an interpolation into the Ten Commandments commanding worship from Mount Gerizim; they also have their own quite different book about Joshua; but we know they are in error specifically because our Lord Jesus Christ actually told us as much). Given the diversity of material in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the large amount of material we see in the Ethiopic tradition, and other examples of apocrypha, such as Psalms 152-155 which exist only in Syriac but are not considered canonical in any of the Syriac churches, I think its very possible there was, instead of a strict canon, a hierarchy of texts, with the Torah having the most importance, and other texts having varying levels of authority, particularly between the different branches of Judaism that existed at the time (for example, the deuterocanonical books extant only in Greek, and apparently written in Greek, would have potentially been very important among the Hellenized Jews, while these same works would have been regarded with derision by the Pharisees, whose successors, the Rabbis, later excluded them from the Jewish canon as defined in the Mishnah and the Talmud and as found in the Masoretic Text.

Most people agree that the Epistle of Jude quotes 1 Enoch, and indeed I have read this was a major reason for Martin Luther grouping it with three other NT books he had concerns about (Hebrews, Revelations, and especially, the Epistle of James, which he openly disagred with) in the back of his translation, the “Antilegomenna.”

So I think your theory could potentially be the case.

Below, there is no mention by any of these theologians where these scriptures of authority on the matter are to be found (I've read through them) and no mention is made of Jesus' source in the OT:

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Have you looked among the other Deuterocanonical/Apocryphal texts, both those regarded as canonical by at least one church, or by at least one Early Church Father, and those whose status is more definitively apocryphal?

So, is 1 Enoch canonical for this present day? Why or why not. I could be totally off-base in all this and I admit as much. I think it's worth exploring if anyone has any insight that'd be great. Anyone who's read 1 Enoch let us know what your thoughts are. I'm undecided. Probably not, but I'm open to suggestions.

God bless,

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Yes, it is canonical, if we return to the Ethiopic tradition I mentioned earlier. Both the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and the Eritrean Orthodox Church (which is really the same as the former, separated due to a civil war which resulted in Eritrea becoming independent of Ethiopia), regard it as canonical, and furthermore, the Ethiopic Orthodox tradition has two canons, a “narrow canon” with fewer books, and a “broad canon” with more, and 1 Enoch is in each.

The Beta Israel, or Ethiopian Jews, who mostly emigrated to Israel in the 1970s when threatened with genocide by the very evil Communist regime known as the Derg (which also brutally murdered Emperor Haile Selassie and severely persecuted Christians), also regard it as canonical; their traditions are very different from those of the Rabinnical (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Yemeni, etc) and Karaite Jews; their priests and levites for example still perform animal sacrifices.

I believe, but am not sure, owing to a scarcity of information, that the Ethiopian Catholic and Eritrean Catholic churches in communion with Rome, which, like other Eastern Catholic churches, use the same or similiar liturgy to the Orthodox church they have separated from (except for those who have no Orthodox equivalent, most notably, the Maronites, although their liturgy is closely related to the Syriac Orthodox and Syriac Catholic liturgy), also regard 1 Enoch as canonical.

It should be noted however that while the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox do regard 1 Enoch as canonical, I am reliably informed that in certain passages where the text contradicts the doctrinal norms of Oriental Orthodoxy, or indeed mainstream Christianity in general, they do not regard those passages as authoritative, but rather, regard them as being overidden by the sacred and ancient tradition of the Oriental Orthodox faith (a Nicene faith regarded as Christian on CF) which is derived from those books more universally regarded as canonical.

So the right way to approach 1 Enoch, or Jubilees, or any of the numerous other books that are in the Ethiopic canon but nowhere else, is in a way similiar to how the Anglicans regard the deuterocanonical books that are included in the King James Version and the lectionary for their Morning Prayer and Evensong services, which is to accept the work as edifying and important, important enough to be quoted at least by St. Jude in his epistle, but not infallible; to the extent these books, which we might call “Tritocanonical” contradict the more universally recognized scriptures, or the prevailing Christian doctrine, they should be considered overridden by those sources.

I also think its highly possible that these contradictions exist because of corruption of the text, and so when Jude quoted 1 Enoch, or indeed if as you suggest our Lord referred to it, they were referring to manuscripts which have since become lost, like so much else. So at one time, 1 Enoch might have been extremely important and uncontroversial, but fell from favor as a result of the proliferation of corrupt manuscripts in the confusion following the destruction of the Second Temple, and later, the near-destruction of Jerusalem, in 70 and 130 AD, and the severe persecution of the Christian church in the third century and especially by Diocletian at the turn of the fourth.q

Lastly I think I should just state what I hope will be obvious, and that is that everything I have written in this reply is specific to Old Testament apocrypha. New Testament apocrypha, with very few exceptions (such as the Shepherd of Hermas), was predominantly written by heretical Gnostic sects to support their doctrines, so the various Gnostic Gospels (the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Thomas, and so on), and other such works like the Acts of Thomas, the Pistis Sophia, the Tripartite Tractate and so on, should be regarded as, at best, grossly distorted by the mytiad heretical Gnostic cults, and in many cases, complete fabrications by those cults written to support their heresies.

JM said:

Enoch is a mess of a book with late attestation. It's more likely a book called Enoch had the quote added to it from holy scripture.

Yours in the Lord,

jm

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That’s entirely impossible because the book in question (there is only one, 1 Enoch), was composed 150 to 500 years before the four canonical Gospels were even written.

paul1149 said:

I've never seen this connection made before, and it's a very good one. All my commentators are silent on the subject, which is interesting.

My own reading of 1 Enoch was that the first section felt very canonical, but then the book became much more disjointed, and I could see its overall canonicity falling into doubt.

Probably the go-to guy on Enoch is Michael Heiser, who has written a few books on various aspects of its theology. He's come up with some out-of-the-box, challenging ideas that make for some real food for thought. Here's a lecture where he touches on the allusions to 1 Enoch in Scripture. Should the Book of Enoch be in the Bible? - Dr. Michael Heiser . You can skip to 15:00 to save time, and then again to 35:00. Heiser's main pertinent point is that even though there are references to 1 Enoch in scripture, there are Scriptural references to plenty of other works as well, works that we assuredly don't want anywhere near the canon.

That's a powerful argument, but then, in this Matthean verse Jesus does seem to reference His source, whatever it might be, as "Scripture". And without checking, I don't think anything like that is true of the other Scriptural allusions people usually point out.

In that video Heiser cites a very thorough source for Scriptural allusions to Enoch and other works. I found it at New Testament Allusions to Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha – biblicalia. Under the Enoch section you will find references to the Matthew verse at points 15 and 37, or just do a page search for 'like angels'.

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Bombaxo.org is such a fantastically useful site; I consult it all the time.

JacksBratt said:

Book of Enoch (Jude 1:4, 1:6, 1:13, 1:14–15,[22], 2 Peter 2:4; 3:13,[23][24] and John 7:38 [25]).

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When we consider this together with the Ethiopian Orthodox inclusion of the book in their canon, there is no doubt that 1 Enoch can be considered deuterocanonical (but I do think we should read it as the Ethiopians do, that is to say, defer to prevailing doctrine where the text appears to differ, due to the possibility of textual corruption).

We also really need to lose the idea that the Old Testament only has 22 books. The canon adopted for the Masoretic text was the basis of Rabinnical Jewish theology that postdated the resurrection of Christ, the evangelization of the nations by the Apostles, the destruction of the Temple, and later of most of Jerusalem following the failed revolt of the Jews in 130 AD, and other substantial events, as well as the schism between the early Christians and those Jews who did not accept Christ (it should always be remembered that many did; if you look at the membership of the various Christian denominations in the Middle East, you will find many people with Jewish last names or derivatives of Jewish last names, who believe they are descended from Jewish converts to the early Church).

This canon is of course entirely a legitimate work of Jewish theology, and is of interest to Christianity, just as the works of Josephus the great historian, Maimonides, a Yemeni Jew who was possibly the greatest philosopher of his era (truly formidable given the competiton in the form of brilliant Islamic philosophers such as Averroes, Avicenna, Al-Kwarizmi, and many others), the era immediately prior to the pre-Renaissance philosophical breakthrough in Christianity with Thomas Aquinas and Gregory of Palamas, and numerous other Jewish scholars and theologians, most recently the Karaite scholar Nehemiah Gordon.

However, given that the early Church did not use it, and neither did the 22 book Masoretic canon bind the liturgical traditions of the Anglicans, the various Roman Catholic liturgical rites, the Eastern Orthodox, and all of the Oriental Orthodox with the possible exception of the Syriac Orthodox (the Old Testament is not heavily used in Syriac Orthodox liturgy, and there are different variants of the Peshitta, which have different books), and given that even from a Sola Scriptura perspective there seem to be compelling references in the New Testament to these deuterocanonical or apocryphal Old Testament works, we ought to avail ourselves of them to the fullest extent possible, that being, that we do not read them in a manner that contradicts the existing doctrines of Catholic, by which I mean universal and normative, Christianity.

Tone said:

So this would mean that Adam and Eve were made to die, even before they ate the fruit! This seems to contradict popular teaching.

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Popular doesn't always equate to accurate.

SeventyOne said:

If he wasn't referencing written Enoch, are you implying he had an audio recording, or did he and Enoch have a chat over dinner?

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Enoch Walked With God (Gen. 5:22)

The scripture says that he "walked with God
after he begat Methuselah three hundred years."

The bible says Enoch died not seeing
the promises. The bible says no regular
man has been into heaven.

What does the book of enoch say?

JacksBratt said:

I guess.. then.. it would be necessary to find the "scripture" that Jesus was quoting.

Since Jesus states that He is quoting or referring to scripture.. right?

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Right.

He could be teaching a concept, that when putting many verses and teachings from the OT together, one could see and understand that humans will be like angels in the resurrection.

he doesn’t necessarily have to be quoting a specific verse.

JacksBratt said:

Must it? If so.. we should be able to see it, find it, read it.

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Yes.

I’m currently looking and seeing what I can find.

the scriptures can teach stuff without it explicitly saying it.