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?
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:
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,
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.
