 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit nakedbiblepodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heiser's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at nakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, Episode 93, The Book of Enoch in the Early Church. I'm your layman, Trey Strickland, and he's a scholar, Dr. Michael Heiser. Hey Mike, how are you feeling this week? Oh, good. I should say better. I had a cold after the Delaware event, kind of knocked me out for a couple of days, but pretty good now. I mean, almost over on the tail end anyway. Yeah, just a cold or? As far as I know, yeah, I got it from my brother. He came up for the Delaware thing, and we went out to eat a couple of times, and that was all it took, I guess. Thanks for bringing that up from Virginia. We'll blame it. We'll blame it on him. Yeah, blame it on the brother. Well, Mike, this show, we're going to be talking about The Book of Enoch in the Early Church, and I think we touched on it a little bit in the second half of Episode 90, if I remember correctly. Yeah, I would think so. I mean, we've flirted with this a couple of times, so this will be more or less a full-blown kind of treatment of the idea, and it'll be a little different than most of our episodes, because it's not going to be strictly a biblical discussion, but it'll be more of a canonical discussion, and I'm going to be quoting from some early church writers, but I get this question a lot. How should we look at Enoch? And I know, like you said, we have brought that up, but I want to add to that, and again, I'll repeat some of that, but I want to add to that substantially how early church documents, early church epistles, books that of course are not in the canon, but that reflect what people were thinking about Enoch at the time, what they say, and of course, important figures in the course of their writings. They do mention Enoch, and so I thought it would be a good episode, because I get this question a lot. People are interested in it, so I should preface what we're going to do by saying, I'm going to be quoting from a couple sources. One is Nicholsburg's massive commentary. It's actually two volume commentary on first Enoch, and again, first Enoch is the proper title for the book, what we typically call the book of Enoch. There's more than one book of Enoch, but the one everybody's sort of thinking of when they use book of Enoch as a phrase is first Enoch. Nicholsburg's commentary on that is massive. It's probably six, seven hundred pages at least, combined the two volumes. It's very technical, but he has an appendix, well, not appendix. It's part of his introduction on Second Temple Jewish attitudes about Enoch. In other words, what other Second Temple resources that sort of said what Enoch says or that interacted with Enochian material, and then that is followed by a survey of early Christian sources, early Church Fathers and whatnot, the same thing. How much of the Enochian worldview did these writers know and understand and embrace, and then what did they think about the book of first Enoch? I've pulled that stuff out of Nicholsburg's commentaries and made it a PDF, and that'll be posted with this episode on the Naked Bible Podcast website right next to the episode itself, so you can get the fuller treatment through that document. And then there's also going to be a link to Vanderkam's essay. James Vanderkam was an Enoch specialist for many years. He taught at Notre Dame, and he is a Christian. He belonged to a CRC Church. I don't want to use the past. I mean, he's still alive. I don't think he's at Notre Dame anymore, but he has a really nice essay on the reception of Enoch, first Enoch, in the early church. And again, it's even longer than Nicholsburg's. It takes a slightly different way of presenting the material, so you can get access to a lot of that on Google Books, not all of it, because it's copyrighted material. On more unseen realm, I have some screenshots, again, from the Google Books thing, so you can look there as well. But either one of those, if you want more information than what we'll cover here, there you have the links. So to jump in here, the book we know as first Enoch was well known to early Christians. That shouldn't be a surprise given some facts. First Enoch, again, is a substantially pre-Christian literary work. And what I mean by that is, most of the book that we again refer to as First Enoch predates the era of Christianity. Now, there are some questions about parts of the book being added during and after the Christian era, but for the most part, this is a clearly pre-Christian work quite substantially. So it's not, again, something that Christians would have composed, but there are what scholars call interpolations here and there, or at least speculated interpolations that could have come from the hand of Christian writers. And that alone would tell you something if that happens to be the case. It would tell you that they were Christians who revered the book and wanted to sort of supplement it or align it with, again, some of the things that perhaps books in the New Testament can and were saying and whatnot. It doesn't argue for its canonicity. It just argues that, hey, this was an important book and we want to put the right, make our contribution to this set of ideas. And that was very common for the period to, it's actually common in the Biblical period in the Hebrew Bible itself where a prophetic hand will come in later and update something to the current circumstances of the believing community. It's not unusual, but anyway, it's substantially pre-Christian. Second fact that would make it no surprise that early Christians knew about Enoch was that Christianity itself as a community, again as a theological or faith system was born out of Second Temple Judaism. Again, Christianity has deep Jewish roots. And in the Second Temple period, the Enochian material, First Enoch, was an important work. And then thirdly, New Testament writers either presuppose the content of Enoch or they utilize its content in what they wrote. And I'm thinking here's most specifically of Peter and Jude. I'm actually working on a book manuscript now for a specific publisher on the importance of the book of Enoch and even more specifically than that, the importance of the watcher's story for New Testament theology. So it's more than just Peter and Jude, folks, but Peter and Jude are the ones that we often think of as drawing most directly from Enoch. So early Christians knew this. They could read Peter and Jude's epistles. If they had a Jewish background, they would have been well familiar with where this source material on occasion that Peter and Jude used came from because they had read that. It wasn't a secret. Again, this wasn't an esoteric secret book or anything like this. It was well known and it was well known in the early church. So that naturally, again, that heritage contributes to a pretty understandable question among some early influential Christian writers. And again, one could presume Christians in general, that is, should first Enoch be considered inspired in the scripture in the manner of other books that we and they would put in the Old Testament? Ultimately, of course, the answer to this question was no, Christianity at large answered the question negatively, except for the church in Ethiopia, the Abyssinian church, as we might refer to it today, but basically the early Ethiopian church, they accepted the entirety of the Book of Enoch as part of its canon, but they were the only exceptions. But the discussion, as you can imagine, is nevertheless of interest today. I get this question a lot, which is why we're doing it as a topic. So what I'm going to do here is offer you an abbreviated survey of how select Second Temple Jews, certain groups in the Second Temple period or certain writers or writings in the Second Temple period, and then select early Christian books and writers assessed the scriptural status of first Enoch because there is language used about Enoch that very clearly tells us that the same question was being asked then, and you had people take different sides. So what you're going to hear, I'm condensing things, you can get the longer treatment with the Nicholsburg PDF and of course Vanderkam. I'm going to try to focus on writers that had some sort of positive assessment about first Enoch that, yeah, we should consider this scripture, we should consider this inspired. So I want the audience to at least know who those people were and that there were, again, important, influential Christians who came down on the side of yes as an answer to the question. So I want to focus on those guys, and then we'll get to, again, my own sort of assessment of this because there aren't too many of these that would answer the question yes, but there are a much larger group of early Second Temple Jews and early Christians whose writings, even if they didn't comment on whether Enoch, first Enoch was inspired or not, they knew the content well and they used it and embraced it and thought it was valid. Specifically, the whole Sons of God story, Genesis 6, the Watcher story, they accepted as, you know, this is the true account of, you know, a true account of what happened just before the flood. In other words, they weren't hiding behind things like the Sethite interpretation. So that is more familiar to us, so I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on the fact that they bought into, again, the content, at least the storyline content of the Watcher story in the first Enoch, but I want to focus today on, again, what some early writers said about it being inspired. So you ought to at least know who the people were that kind of held that view. Well, let's start in on the Jewish side with Second Temple Jewish material precursors, again, to this whole Enoch discussion that happens in the early Church, you know, should we consider first Enoch inspired, you know, what status do we assign it? There are a number, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, there are a number of Jewish sources that embrace the content of first Enoch. I'm going to point out a couple of them and then it's really going to be the Book of Jubilees and then Dead Sea Scroll material. The scroll material is important because that's sort of the evidence that we have in the, from the Jewish period, the best evidence anyway that we have that people were thinking about Enoch as something canonical. But let's jump in at the Book of Jubilees first, and I want to make a comment here about why Jubilees is very similar to Enoch, but there's a specific reason why Jubilees is sort of important for this discussion. And that is, among certain Jews, this is going to sound a little odd, but among certain Jews of the Second Temple period, there was sort of an assumption that the figure of Enoch, and therefore this material that bears his name, but that the figure of Enoch was actually more important in the progress of Revelation to the believing community than the Torah, than what Moses did. In other words, there were some Jews that thought Enoch sort of trumped Moses in status because, again, perhaps his chronological priority, but certainly also because of the material that was written, and that actually comes out in Jubilees. Now, in Jubilees, I'm going to quote a little bit from something I wrote for our company. I work at Logos and we have a Greek pseudopigraphy database of all the Greek material from that preserves the Book of Enoch. And I wrote the introductions to not only the Greek material that represents Enoch, that preserves Enoch, but all of the pseudopigraphy in Greek. And so I'm going to quote from my own introduction to the Book of Jubilees just briefly. And again, I'm doing this to make a fairly specific point here. I wrote, Jubilees is presented as the account of a revelation given to Moses on Mount Sinai. The book begins in the third person with God forewarning Moses that Israel will apostasize, but subsequently repent. The book then shifts to a first person accounting in the mouth of an angel. The angel speaks for God informing Moses about all that had transpired from the beginning of creation to the Israelite arrival at Sinai. Jubilees is thus a rewriting of Genesis 1 through Exodus 19. Hence, it's inclusion by scholars in the rewritten Bible, the expansion of biblical stories genre. Paleography of the surviving Hebrew fragments, again, this is of Jubilees, suggest a date of 125 to 100 BC for those fragments. But there are reasons to suspect, however, that the original document was composed at least 50 years earlier. So let's just call it 200 BC for Jubilees. Now you'll notice, it's the end of the quote, you'll notice that Jubilees is part of this rewritten Bible genre. So in the second temple period, there were Jews who thought it perfectly acceptable to expand upon the Torah. And again, they didn't accept Jubilees as canonical, but this practice was permissible. It was okay. I mean, these were still important books, Jubilees was quite an important book. Now, among Jubilees additions, again, to the biblical text, you actually get material from first Enoch that it forms part of those changes, those additions to what would have been the Torah. And again, this is why Jubilees and first Enoch are so similar in many respects. Now, I've earlier alluded in an earlier episode of the podcast, I can't remember which one, but we got to talking about the importance of the book of Enoch in the New Testament and in a few scattershot passages. And I mentioned Galatians three and four. This paper I heard a couple years ago at SBL, I blogged about it, about how the book of Enoch informs that the phrase that the law was added because of transgressions. And of course, the question was just whose transgressions are we talking about? And the paper, the guy who did the paper was suggesting that what Paul was thinking of was the transgression of the watchers. And if you presume that, and then read Galatians three and four against the backdrop of the sin of the watchers, it solves certain exogenical problems in Galatians three and four. Now, I'm bringing that up again, because Jubilees actually reflects that perspective by bringing content of first Enoch into the Torah and rewriting it essentially was saying, look, we think that the Enochian material is so important that it's at least as important as what Moses said. And it might be even be more important. So the figure of Enoch being elevated to the level of it in some cases, even beyond that of the figure of Moses, this was a this was a stream of thought that wound its way through the Second Temple period in certain groups, Jewish groups in that period. You have to remember, there was no one singular Judaism of the Second Temple period. There are multiple Judaism's Judaism's. Okay, we're used to these sex like Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes and all that sort of stuff. Well, that's part of the picture. You had people who would claim, you know, for obvious reasons and legitimate reasons that they were Jews, they were followers of the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But they didn't agree theologically on certain points, they didn't agree even in their approach to scripture in certain points. And there was sort of an Enochian strain, an Enochian current running through the Second Temple period where there were a number of Jews that thought, hey, you know, what Enoch has here is he shouldn't play second fiddle to Moses, to the Torah. Of course, if you were a Pharisee, you just don't want to hear this. Well, the thinking is that there are a number of New Testament writers that held Enoch in special regard, high regard. There's Jude, of course, there's Peter. And now we bring Paul into discussion, at least in Galatians three and four. So I'm setting the table here because I want you to know that the book is around during this period. Again, that's kind of an academic observation. But what's less obvious is how certain Jews looked at it in terms of it being on par with what Moses wrote. Of course, what Moses wrote was considered canonical. And so if you're considering what Enoch wrote on the same level to the extent that you're willing to take material from Enoch and bring it into the Torah and rewrite it and create this new book that we're calling Jubilees here. And even though you may not be claiming that that should be looked upon by the entire community as inspired, there were some Jews that would have looked at what you were doing and said, well, hey, Enoch's at the same level. You're putting him right in here with Moses with the Torah. So therefore, we should take this book, this book of first Enoch and look at it the same way. And there were some Jews who did that. And again, I'm trying to give you sort of part of the historical and logical flow of the idea where you really see its surface in fairly plain ways is in the Dead Sea Scrolls. You have certain scrolls there that make it evident that whatever Jewish hand was writing this particular scroll at a given point, that that person did consider first Enoch at the level of the Torah and considered it inspired. Now, I'm going to quote Nicholsburg here in a moment, but there are a number of scrolls in among the Dead Sea Scroll deposit repositories, a better word there, that come from the book of what we now know as first Enoch, especially the watcher story. And Nicholsburg kind of summarizes this, and then I'm going to read this quote to you and then pull one item out for discussion. Nicholsburg writes, the influence of the Enochic tradition at Qumran is evident in the community's possession of and actually multiple copies of texts that employ or quote from the Enochic texts. These include the Book of Jubilees, the Book of Jubilees is actually among the Dead Sea Scrolls, many fragments and portions of it there. There are eight scrolls again that have the Book of Jubilees and a related text close to Jubilees, but not quite. There are three texts that have that. There's also Nicholsburg continues the Genesis Apocryphon. There's one copy of that, a fragmentary Hebrew text from Cave One that contained a form of the story of the watchers very close to first Enoch 6-11. And the Qumran number for that is 1-Q-19. The Genesis Apocryphon, again this is me now intervening here, again I've mentioned this before, this is the text where you have Noah's parents having an argument over whether Noah was born from the watchers or not. The dad, Lamek, is a little suspicious and his wife, Batonosh, has to say, no, don't you remember the other night when we had intercourse and this is, of course it's your kid, quit making this nonsense up. That's the text, the Genesis Apocryphon, and it has a lot of Enoch in material in it. Let's go back to Nicholsburg here. In addition to Jubilees, Genesis Apocryphon, there's also a pressure on the story of the watchers. This is 4-Q-180 and 181. A commentary or expansion on the Apocalypse of Weeks, which is again part of Enoch, 4-Q-247 and the Damascus document, 8 copies of that, which knows the story of the rebellion of the watchers and a tradition about the giants and also appeals to the authority of the Book of Jubilees. Okay, unquote, there's the end of the whole quote. Now what I want to focus on is this thing called a Pecher. The Pecher, a Pecher text, these are of special interest because Pecherim, that's the plural, Pecherim are texts that interpret other texts, they're like commentaries. The Hebrew verb Pecher means to interpret. As Brook, a Dead Sea Scholar, comments, quote, the term has come to be used in modern scholarship of a literary genre of biblical commentary and the exegetical techniques used in it, unquote. So think of Pecher as a commentary. Producing a Pecher text on the story of the watchers indicates that the Enochian story was highly respected, if not considered scripture by whoever produced the Pecher. Now, again, there are Pecher texts known in the Dead Sea Scrolls, they're almost always of biblical books, Old Testament books, there's a Pecher on Habakkuk, there's a Pecher on Nahum, I mean these little commentaries, they're sort of line by line or phrase by phrase where they'll, the writer will quote something from a biblical book and then write Pecherot, which means its interpretation is, and then they'll do some interpretation. Since this is so heavily stilted toward Old Testament books, when you get a Pecher on Enoch in the same collection of books, the Dead Sea Scrolls, it really raises eyebrows that, okay, they wouldn't be writing a Pecher on Enoch unless they thought it was at the level of this other stuff. Now, we should recall, though, that again, this would just be one Jew's perspective, whatever, whoever scribed this was. You can't say that all of Judaism thought that Enoch, first Enoch, was at the same level as the Old Testament books we consider canonical. Some Jews thought it was, okay, that's the only point that we're making here. So the situation actually, I guess if I could use an illustration, is kind of similar to modern Christianity when it comes to Second Temple Judaism, there's lots of Christianities today. You got Protestant versus Catholic within the Protestant category, you got Lord knows how many denominations there are, but everybody refers to themselves as Christian, but there's significant theological differences and denominational preferences. Well, the same thing in Second Temple Judaism. You get a variety, and there were some who thought Enoch should be in there. It should be treated as Scripture. So again, that was a situation in early Judaism, Second Temple Judaism, and that attitude is also going to be reflected in the early church. So this is the broad point we're making, that just because you find an early church authority that said, I think first Enoch should be in the canon, I'm quoting it as Scripture, doesn't mean that that opinion should be binding on the whole church, because that opinion was around before there was a church within Judaism, and it was just one approach within the broader Jewish community. Same thing going on in the early church. So again, I just want to make that clear. I don't consider, and the listeners who have listened to the podcast for a while or heard me on other outlets know that I don't consider the book of First Enoch canonical. I actually think that the question doesn't mean a whole lot because if you consider the book valuable, you ought to read it and it ought to inform your biblical study because it informed Peter and Jude's biblical writing. It doesn't have to be canonical to do that. Who cares? But again, we're doing the episode because I know a lot of people do care. But my view is that it's not in the canon and it doesn't need to be, but I just want you to be aware that there are, again, early Christian sources that said, nope, should be in there. So let's transition now to the Christian stuff. And I'm going to be quoting from some documents. We don't know who wrote the stuff. And I'm also going to be quoting from early church figures that we do know historically. So let's just start with the Epistle of Barnabas. Now, this is something that is pretty early. The Epistle of Barnabas is dated to the 130s AD, probably written in Egypt according to scholars who focus on what we would call the apostolic father's material. Again, we don't know precisely who wrote the Epistle of Barnabas. We don't know if it was the Barnabas mentioned in the Book of Acts or not. Again, but the material we have goes back into the 130s and Barnabas would have been dead by then. So we just don't know. But this is probably the earliest Christian source that actually cites material from 1 Enoch as Scripture. Now, of course, Peter and Jude, their material is going to be older, but they don't have, Peter and Jude don't have a formulaic expression that says something like, as the Scripture says, or for Scripture says when they quote Enoch, Peter and Jude definitely do draw material directly from the Book of 1 Enoch, but they just don't add these kinds of expressions. Again, if they did, this wouldn't even be a debate. We would be having Enoch and the Canon, but since they don't, we had the debate. But the Epistle of Barnabas uses language like that. It uses the phrase, for Scripture says, and then it quotes 1 Enoch, what we know today as 1 Enoch 89, 56, verse 60, and some of verses 66 and 67. Comments about the destruction of the temple come right from Enoch, and the Epistle of Barnabas says, for Scripture says, and there you go. So he says the same thing. Again, whoever the writer uses the phrase, for it is written, get gropti gar, which is a common formulaic expression in the New Testament and elsewhere for citing something inspired, citing Scripture. The author uses it to quote loosely 1 Enoch 91, 13. So here you have three or four places in the Epistle of Barnabas where Enoch is cited as Scripture, cited with the same formulaic expressions. Justin Marder, a little bit later in his second apology, which was written, again, early church scholars, to the best of their ability, date this between 148 and 161 AD. And again, Justin presumes the watcher story that they cohabited with human women, taught humankind, forbid knowledge, all that stuff. And Justin, the reason his second apology is important for our discussion, is that he recognizes, in the course of his writing in the second apology, he recognizes parallels between the story of the watchers in Jewish texts, like Enoch, and Greek stories about, again, the Titans, the gods. So Justin knows the literature well enough to know that there are some clear parallels here, but he clearly, in his own writings, believes that the Jewish source, the Jewish version of events, which would be first Enoch, was superior in its truthfulness. So he had a higher view of the Enochian story. Now, that, it doesn't say, it doesn't prove that Justin thought first Enoch was inspired, but what it does show is that, okay, I got two versions of this, I'm going to accept the Jewish version as authoritative. And so since Justin does that, it suggests that he considered first Enoch, perhaps at the level of inspiration, but can't actually be sure. But it's still an important source because it shows a deliberate preference, a deliberate choice, as far as authoritative truth between these two sources. And Justin does not land on the secular Greek material, or the, you know, the classical, you know, Greek material that would have been part of their religion. No, he goes over to the, to the first Enoch side of that debate, says this is authoritative. Irenaeus is up next to get a little later moving chronologically. He lived roughly 130 to 200 AD, and his writings make it very evident that he knew first Enoch pretty well. He knows, knows it in detail in a lot of places. And it's also quite clear that he accepted the accuracy, the historicity of the watcher's story. Now, what's interest, of interest to us specifically, is in the 10th chapter of a writing that we call Irenaeus against heresies, the first section, section one. Irenaeus says something interesting. I'm going to read the whole quotation and pull out a few points to focus on. But Irenaeus writes, in the Holy Spirit, who proclaimed through the prophets, the dispensations of God, and the advance, and the birth from a virgin, and the passion, and the resurrection from the dead, and the ascension into heaven in the flesh, of the beloved Christ Jesus, our Lord, and his future manifestation from heaven, in the glory of the Father, to gather all things in one, and to raise up anew all flesh of the whole human race, in order that to Christ Jesus, our Lord, and God, and Savior, and King, according to the will of the invisible Father, that every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things on earth, and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess to him, and that he should execute just judgment towards all, that he may send spiritual wickednesses, and the angels who transgressed, and became apostates, together with the ungodly, and unrighteous, and wicked, and profane among men, into everlasting fire. Now that, again, harkens back, that's the end of the quote, that harkens back to the lake of fire topic that we did, again connecting that to the watchers. This is where the idea comes from, and here you have Irenaeus saying exactly the same thing, but what I want us to notice here is that what he does, you may have noticed as I read through that, that there are, in his sort of summary of doctrine, there are certain phrases taken from Scripture, as Irenaeus is waxing eloquent on all this stuff. There are certain wordings and phrases taken from Scripture, and he prefaced sort of that summary by saying that the church believes in the Holy Spirit, who proclaimed through the prophets the dispensations of God, the admins, the birth of all this stuff. And then he has, again, in the course of summarizing doctrine, he quotes texts that we would consider canonical. Well, right in the midst of doing that, he has this inclusion of the angels who transgressed and became apostates, together with the ungodly, and righteous, the wicked, the profane among men, in everlasting fire. So that has suggested to some that Irenaeus is lumping first Enoch material into some of these other New Testament citations, okay? Every knee should bow, things in heaven and things on earth, that this suggests that Irenaeus held Enoch to be one of the prophets, because what he's quoting from is prophetic Scripture, is canonical Scripture. Now, Vanderkam notes of this passage, again, he, and I don't think we can conclusively say that Irenaeus thought that way about Enoch. And I think Vanderkam's note is fair here. He says, quote, it is not impossible that Irenaeus, in the wording of his lines about the angels, is thinking of 2 Peter 2, 4 and Jude 6. But the language he uses does not reproduce their vocabulary closely. There is, however, some verbal similarity with first Enoch. If Irenaeus is here reflecting the watcher's story from first Enoch, then he is attributing it to the Holy Spirit's inspiration of the prophets, and including it within a brief statement of the Christian faith shared throughout the scattered churches, unquote. So what Vanderkam is saying, you could take what Irenaeus has written there and say, well, he's getting that from 2 Peter and Jude. And Vanderkam says, well, that's possible. But the verbal similarities are closer if you actually are looking at first Enoch in Greek. So it's equally possible that Irenaeus is thinking, you know, citing in his head, thinking in his head of first Enoch. Okay. And if that's the case, then Irenaeus is lumping first Enoch in with the other prophets, you know, with the inspired material that he quotes elsewhere in the passage. So we don't know exactly what was floating around in Irenaeus' head, but it's at least a possibility. The next guy, Tertullian, is the main figure in this whole debate. Tertullian was an early Christian writer from Carthage, lived roughly 155 to 240 A.D. He is famous, or depending on your view, infamous for being the early church's staunchest defender of first Enoch's inspiration. For example, in his work on the apparel of women, book one, chapter three, he calls first Enoch's scripture, just point blank. He calls it scripture and defends its status using, get this, using 2 Timothy 316. You know, all scripture is given by inspiration, God is profitable for doctrine. He actually uses 2 Timothy 316 to defend first Enoch being scripture. Now, here's the quote. It's a long quote from Tertullian, but just so that you get a flavor of what he's thinking, here we go. He writes, I am aware that the scripture of Enoch, I mean, right there, it is just point blank. I am aware that the scripture of Enoch, which has assigned this order of action to angels, is not received by some because it is not admitted into the Jewish canon either. I suppose that they did not think that, having been published before the Deluge, again, he assumes that Enoch himself wrote it. I suppose that they did not think that, having been published before the Deluge, it could have safely survived that worldwide calamity, the abolisher of all things. If that is the reason for rejecting it, let them recall to their memory that Noah, the survivor of the Deluge, was the great grandson of Enoch himself, and he, of course, had heard and remembered from domestic renown and hereditary tradition concerning his own great grandfather's grace in the sight of God and concerning all his preachings since Enoch had given no other charge to Methuselah than that he should hand on the knowledge of them to his posterity. Noah, therefore, no doubt, might have succeeded in the trusteeship of his Enoch's preaching, or had the case been otherwise, he would not have been silent alike concerning the disposition of things made by God, his preserver, and concerning the particular glory of his own house. I'll stop the quote right there. Tertullian is saying, the objection to the book of Enoch could survive the flood. It did destroy everything. Tertullian is trying to explain that because he's treating it as an objection to his view that Enoch should belong in the canon. Back to Tertullian, he says, if Noah had not had this conservative power by so short a route, there would still be this consideration to warrant our assertion of the genuineness of the Scripture. He could equally have renewed it under the Spirit's inspiration. Basically, if the other answer doesn't work, Tertullian is saying, well, the Spirit could have just inspired him to rewrite it. He could have equally renewed it under the Spirit's inspiration after it had been destroyed by the violence of the deluge, as after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian storming of it, every document of the Jewish literature is generally agreed to have been restored through Ezra. Again, that's kind of a myth, but Tertullian, that's his tradition about what happened to the Hebrew Bible during, again, the exile events. But since Enoch, back to Tertullian, but since Enoch in the same Scripture, there he goes again calling it Scripture, but since Enoch in the same Scripture has preached likewise concerning the Lord, nothing at all must be rejected by us, which pertains to us. And we read that, quote, every Scripture suitable for edification is divinely inspired. There he quotes 2 Timothy 3 16. By the Jews, it may now seem to have been rejected for that very reason, just like all the other portions, nearly which tell of Christ. So Tertullian knows that first Enoch, there's content in first Enoch that has, again, for those of you who, again, are familiar with my content, this will sound familiar if you're not, you're going to have to catch up. But there's two powers in heaven stuff in Enoch. Again, if you've ever seen or heard my two powers in heaven lecture, there are passages I quote from Enoch about, again, a Godhead, a Jewish Godhead. And so Tertullian knows this. And there's other content that points to the Messiah. So Tertullian's argument here is, look, even if the Jews don't accept this as canonical, we should, because it bears witness to the Messiah, again, to a divine Messiah, to the Godhead, to all this stuff. This is what we believe. And he says it tells us about Christ. So we should accept this book. Back to Tertullian. Nor, of course, is this fact wonderful that they did not receive some scriptures which spake of him, of Christ, whom even in person, speaking in their presence, they were not able to receive. So it's like, that's the end of the quotation for good now. But Tertullian winds up by saying, look, the Jews don't accept other stuff that pointed to Jesus, or they don't accept, you know, this interpretation or whatever. So material that reinforces the truth about the Messiah, that we should consider this canonical, we should consider it inspired. So that's his argument, really the guts of his argument. Now, in his treatise on idolatry, Tertullian discusses certain celebrations and practices of Christians, in other words, decorating doors with lamps and wreaths that he considers idolatry. To make his case, Tertullian quotes Enoch, okay? He quotes Enoch's work as a product of the Holy Spirit. So here's another Tertullian quotation, again, going after decorating your doors, because he just thought that was horrible. And he's going to use Enoch to warn Christians to not do this. So he's treating it as scripture. So Tertullian writes, but let your works shine, sayeth he, but now all our shops and gates shine. You will nowadays find more doors of heathens without lamps and laurel wreaths than of the Christians. What does the case seem to be with regard to that species of ceremony also? If it is an idol's honor, without doubt an idol's honor is idolatry. If it is for a man's sake, let us again consider that all idolatry is for man's sake. Let us again consider that all idolatry is a worship done to men, since it is generally agreed among their worshipers, that of four times the gods themselves of the nations were men. And he's referring to a pagan belief there. And so it makes no difference whether that superstitious homage be rendered to men of a former age or of this. Idolatry is condemned, not on account of the persons which are set up for worship, but on account of those its observances which pertain to demons. The things which are caesars are to be rendered to caesars, or he's quoting the Gospels. It is enough that he set an apposition there, too, and to God the things that are gods, again quoting Jesus, what things that are caesars, those to wit, about which the consultation was then held, whether the pole tax should be furnished to Caesar or not. Therefore, too, the image, whose it was. And when he had heard it was caesars, said render to caesars what are caesars and what are gods to God. That is the image of Caesar, which is on the coin to Caesar, and the image of God, which is on man to God. So as to render to Caesar indeed money, but to God rendering yourself. Now, he continues on, and he says, it's a little more railing about specific deity, relationships, door gods, and whatever. So he's really going off on decorating your doors here. And he says, of course, we know that though names be empty and and reigned, yet when they are drawn down into superstition, demons and every unclean spirit sees them for themselves through the bond of consecration. Otherwise, demons find no name individually. And there we find a name where they find also a token. Among the Greeks also, we read of Apollo, Therias, i.e., of the door, and Antelei, the demons as presiders over entrances. These things therefore, and I catch the quotation, these things therefore the Holy Spirit foreseeing from the beginning, forchanted through the most ancient prophet, Enoch, that even entrances would come into superstitious use. So he's basically saying, look, there's material in Enoch that talks about this stuff. And the Holy Spirit inspired Enoch to write about it for this occasion right here. And so Tertullian uses this passage forechanted or forewritten or forespoken by Enoch through the Holy Spirit to tell you Christians nowadays to knock it off, stop decorating your doors like this, because this is something we would associate with idolatry and of course, demons are associated with idolatry and demons are going to be using this in some way to harm you or pervert your thinking or whatever. So he very clearly links what Enoch wrote just broadly speaking. He's saying Enoch wrote about this stuff too. He equates that with the Holy Spirit, the activity of the Holy Spirit. So Tertullian is not ambiguous. I mean, he thinks that it should be considered part of the canon. Now, later in life, I've alluded to this before where he and others who defend that Enoch are going to say, well, nobody else is really jumping on the bandwagon here. And we're sort of the only ones, I'm sort of the only one out here sitting here defending this. So the Spirit we trust would have moved the mass of the community to recognize which books are canonical. And I'm the only one singing this song. So I must have been wrong. I mean, so he's going to bow again to what they believe about the providential activity of the Spirit ultimately. But Tertullian, again, very famous for being very clear in what he thought, at least in these writings here. Next, we'll look at Origen. And this will be the last one we look at. Origen, again, lived in the 180s to around 254. So AD was an early Christian scholar born in Alexandria, Egypt. And it's interesting, here you have Tertullian, again, from Carthage. Origen from Alexandria. Could it be, because Origen's going to go back and forth on this. He's going to be pro-con and ambivalent. But is this part of the reason why the Ethiopian church ultimately embraced Enoch as canonical? Because here you have two African scholars, African leaders in the early church who were very influential. I don't know, maybe. Maybe that had something to do with it, but ultimately we just don't know. But Origen, again, born in Alexandria, as Vanderkam notes, quote, in Origen's writings, one finds evolving attitudes about the Book of Enoch. And these follow chronological lines. He alludes to the book in four of his writings, all of which can be dated fairly accurately to specific stages in his career, unquote. So let's take a look at some of these. Just in general terms, I'm not going to quote Origen at length because it's fairly convoluted. I did that for Tertullian because it's so point blank. But Origen a little bit less so. But at one point, Origen considers the writings of Enoch, again, first Enoch, quote, authentic products of the patriarch and cites them as scripture. Quoting Vanderkam here. However, also he indicates that others in the church don't hold that position. So Origen is very honest. He says, hey, look, when it comes to Enoch, at one point in his career, he thought, well, okay, this is scripture. Again, just like Tertullian, we should treat it as such. But then, you know, also admitting that, well, not everybody would agree with this, just like Tertullian. Tertullian said that if you recall, a few minutes ago, he opens that passage by saying, hey, regarding the scripture of Enoch, not everybody thinks it's scripture. So Origen's doing the same thing. Since Origen does acknowledge, again, that not all the church embraces first Enoch as authoritative, you know that that's in his head. And later on in his writings, again, that's going to surface again. And ultimately, I'm going to quote Nicholsburg here, he sums up Origen this way, because again, like Vanderkam said, you know, Origen mentions it four times, you have this one affirmation, then you have this ambivalence, even with the affirmation, you get a little bit of, well, you know, other people don't agree with me and we need to make that clear. So it shifts from that into something that's just even more ambivalent about Enoch. So the Origen's enthusiasm for the book as far as its inspired status fades over time. But here's what Nicholsburg writes. Finally, one must consider Origen's claim that the churches do not accept the books of Enoch as divine. This strongest of Origen's negative statements about Enoch seems not to be a development out of Origen's previous ambivalence, but an acknowledgement of his ambivalence, an acknowledgement of the fact, which is one of several arguments that Origen uses to serve his purpose. Since his opponent cites material from Enoch, Origen emphasizes the book's questionable status in the churches. At the same time, the words of Celsus indicate that the stories about the watchers were known and transmitted in the Christian community. So what Nicholsburg's commenting on is that in the course of several of Enoch's mention or excuse me, Origen's mentions of first Enoch, he's interacting with it in relation to people he's writing against. And what Nicholsburg is saying is, look, since his opponents will also be using Enoch, Origen varies slyly. And again, does he really believe this now or does he still think it deserves canonical status? But he very slyly brings up the fact that Enoch as a source might not be the best source because lots of Christians don't accept it. So that's a fair statement. Again, in terms of his rhetorical argument, Origen uses that to his advantage to undermine his opponents when they use Enoch. And I think this is important because you're going to see some of this come out with Augustine. And Augustine is sort of the big, by his day, Enoch is poo pooed and Augustine is the one who champions the Sethite view and all that stuff. Part of it is Augustine's own history where he had been a member of the Manichees, the Manichean community after his conversion. And they revered the book of Enoch and he eventually splits and with the Manichees, they become opponents. And so Augustine just wants, he doesn't hold Enoch in higher regard or the watch or story, the literal view of it that the book of Enoch puts forth. And that influences Augustine to be opposed to it. And because of his stature, that becomes the dominant position in the early church. So you already see some of that here happening with Origen, where Origen could be read one of two ways, but his ambivalence is pretty apparent. Nicholsburg adds, just one more thought from Nicholsburg, he says, I conclude the following. Origen knew parts of first Enoch, the book of the watchers, the book of the luminaries, probably the book of the parables. He knew them well enough to quote, paraphrase, and summarize an occasional passage and to recognize Celsus's misrepresentation of the material. Origen considered the text to be authentic. Again, this is Nicholsburg's opinion. This is, he's trying to get inside Origen's head here. Origen considered the text to be authentic and Enoch to be a prophet whose writings were scripture. He occasionally cited the book, quoted a passage, even exegetated in order to support his exegesis of a biblical text, or to make a point that he could or would not base on a biblical text. At the same time, he acknowledged that the Enochic writings were not universally accepted as scripture, and sometimes with an eye to the possible skepticism of his readers, didn't invest a great deal in the probative value of these texts. In other words, he didn't, he didn't hang too much on Enoch because he knew his readers, a lot of his readers wouldn't be buying it as a source. So that's the end of Nicholsburg. So what Nicholsburg is saying is look, he thinks, Nicholsburg thinks that in his heart of hearts, Origen was just like Tertulli. And Origen accepted it as scripture, but again, for rhetorical purposes, would express ambivalence about it, wouldn't hang too much on it, because he knew other people weren't going to accept it, other Christians weren't going to accept it. But in his own heart of hearts, again, Nicholsburg thinks that Origen was following the same trajectory as Tertullian. Is Nicholsburg right? I don't know. But what the discussion shows and the way Nicholsburg ends his quote is the way I'm going to end this section of our episode here is that you did have serious, serious biblical scholars, early church scholars, leaders in the early church assigned canonical status to first Enoch. They quoted as scripture, they call it scripture, they say it's from the Holy Spirit. You can't get much stronger than that. And again, Tertullian even defends the view using 2 Timothy 3.16. So that much is very clear. It had its defenders in the early church and they weren't beaten around the bush, especially Tertullian. He was very consistent until he more or less, okay, here we are and I guess I wasn't right. That's that sort of thing. Well, all that being said, what it shows us again is that parts of Christianity were in the minority and this was their position. But their position didn't result in other Christians looking at them saying, well, you can't be Christian. You can't really be believers if you accept first Enoch as canonical. That means you're a heretic. That means you're outside the body of Christ. Nobody's saying stuff like that. That would have been absurd. What you have again, just like we have in modern times with quote Christianity, you had doctrinal disagreement and the doctrinal disagreement in this respect happened to be within the doctrine of bibliology. What do we consider part of the canon or not? This is actually a very familiar place. The problem is a lot of Christians don't know anything about church history. But Martin Luther could write vehemently against the book of James being in the canon and nobody bats an eye. Nobody would say that because he said this, there's, you know, Martin Luther was not a real Christian. He didn't really understand the Gospel. Again, it would be absurd. But this is sort of the attitude that, you know, among certain groups today, if you, again, revere Enoch, and if you want to include it in the canon, that somehow you're just, you know, a whack job and probably aren't even a believer and you're a heretic and, you know, why don't you go off and form a commune and, you know, all this kind of stuff. It's just, you know, it's just over the top. This would not have been the way the discourse was handled in the early church. The early church would have said, well, you know, Tertullian, bless your point of little head. You know, we love you. We know you're a believer. We're just not buying this Enoch stuff. And that would have been the end of it. There would have been no questioning Tertullian's commitment to Christ. Again, because of his position on Enoch. So I think we need to get beyond that. And likewise, Tertullian isn't questioning everybody else because they don't embrace Enoch. And neither was origin. Okay. Neither was Justin Martin. Neither, you know, that just wasn't on the radar. That sort of, and I'll say it, that sort of dumb discussion, you know, firing salvos from one side to the other over the issue of Enoch. That is not what you see. You see an honest questioning and people saying, hey, this is where I'm landing. You know, we're all believers here, but this is where I'm landing. Here's why I'm landing there. And let's just call it good. And they did. Now, again, since we're 2,000 years removed from this or, you know, 1800 or whatever, you know, from the lifetime of these guys, this is sort of a settled question, even though, again, in the Ethiopian, the Abyssinian African church, you know, we still have reverence for Enoch. It's still canonical there. But that should not be used as a basis for concluding that, oh, they're not real Christians down there, you know, because they belong to that group. Again, the issue with being a real Christian is, do you understand the gospel and believe it? You know, are you adding to the gospel? Are you adulterating it in some way? That's, you know, that's the issue with salvation. It's not this. So from my own view, you know, to wrap up here, I consider the question kind of moot. I don't see a compelling reason to embrace Enoch as canonical. It doesn't matter to me that Jude, you know, and Peter quote it, because biblical writers quote lots of stuff that we would not even for a moment consider canonical. When the Psalmist quote the Baal cycle, I'm not thinking, oh, I wonder if the Baal cycle should be in the canon. No, no, no, no, no, no. Again, the fact that something is quoted or something is paraphrased or something that the content of something is embraced and then re articulated into a book that is inspired. None of those things are arguments for the canonicity of the thing being utilized or the thing being quoted. That argument simply does not work. You will go in very, very bad, theologically bad, awkward, ridiculous, and frankly contradictory places with that logic, deeply contradictory, especially with something like the Baal cycle. So it's a non argument. A thing does not have to be considered inspired for a thing to be considered useful and important. And so Peter and Jude consider the book of 1st Enoch useful and important so much so that it helps them to articulate some points in their own writings about the angels that sin about again the watcher story. And we have that in the New Testament. We have material there that doesn't come from the Old Testament. The only place it comes from is from Enoch. Okay, and they took it seriously. It helped them articulate their theology. And that's fine. Happens all the time. You know, most people don't even realize what's going on in the Old Testament when they make these arguments for 1st Enoch being part of the canon on the basis of Peter and Jude. They're completely ignorant about what's going on in the Old Testament in this same respect. Since I'm not, okay, since I'm well aware of that material, I just frame the whole issue differently. It doesn't matter that it's quoted. I don't care if it's canonical. If I get to heaven someday, and Tertullian walks up to me with Jesus as, hey, Jesus has something to tell you. You were wrong about 1st Enoch. It really belonged in there. I'm not going to be disappointed. Okay, I'm going to say, oops, sorry. I was wrong. You were right. Let's enjoy eternity now in the global Eden. You won that one, Tertullian. I don't care. And so, I don't think that this has to be a divisive issue, even though, again, for many it is. Maybe I just get those kind of emails too often. I don't know. But that's, again, that's the story of the 1st Enoch reception in the early church. It had some serious proponents, but for the most part, people weren't buying it. And again, my assessment is who cares? It's a useful book. It's important to know the content of the book, because ultimately that will help you parse some things in your Bible, especially the New Testament, in a better way if you know what the writer is thinking when they're writing this or that, whether it be Paul, Peter or Jude. Mike, what did the early church think about the watchers themselves and the supernatural? Oh, the early church, I mean, they would have thought of them as real legitimate divine beings. You'll get other terminology used to them. You'll get sons of God. You'll get angels. You'll get holy ones. So they're not believing their figments of the imagination or just sort of spiritual straw men characters to make a story interesting. They're going to take it seriously, which is why, again, I recommend to listeners go up to where you downloaded the podcast, or if it wasn't directly online, go up to the Naked Bible Podcast site online and download Nicholsburg's file, because I think you'll be really surprised at how many writers in the early church, even if they don't comment on what they think about Enoch being inspired or not, they knew the story and accepted it. Again, they accepted the supernatural view of Genesis 6, 1 through 4, even as articulated in a book like Enoch. For them, this was biblical theology. If they would have read the chapters in my unseen realm about this, they would have gone, what's the big deal? Doesn't everybody think this way? Well, of course, nowadays, no. No, they don't. In fact, what used to be the dominant view in the early church is now a tiny minority view in the current church. There are historical reasons for that. All right, Mike. Well, that was a good one. I enjoyed the book of Enoch and the Watchers. I think everybody that listens to our show kind of gravitates toward this story, if you will. Yeah, I mentioned that the book I'm writing. I'm hoping to hand that thing in by the end of the summer. I can't really say more about it than that. It's nonfiction? It's nonfiction. The working title is Reversing Hermon, and the subtitle is The Importance of the Watcher Story for understanding the New Testament or something like that. Basically, everywhere that Enochian material is sort of the backstory, the backdrop to something in the New Testament. That's what the book's about. I'm going to take people through all those passages and show how the New Testament writer was thinking of Enochian material. If you're able to have that in your head, you'll understand the passage much better from that perspective, because that's the perspective according to which it was written. A good example is the head covering comment because of the angels. Again, that's an obvious one. We've done a whole episode on that on the head covering issue, but there are lots of things like that in the New Testament where Enoch is sort of lurking in the background. Certain things New Testament writers put in there can really only be understood well or successfully understood if you're thinking about Enochian content when you read that stuff in the New Testament. Well, I'll be looking forward to that book. It's one of my favorite topics. Hopefully, by the end of the year, it'll actually exist. I don't know that, but I'm hoping to get the manuscript in by the end of the summer. We'll be looking forward to that. All right, Mike, what can we expect for next week's show? Well, the next episode is actually going to build off this one. I mentioned the whole Galatians 3 and 4 thing about how the Enochian material is the backdrop for Galatians 3 and 4. That's what we're going to do in the next episode. I'm going to take people through Tyler Stewart's paper. That's the fellow who wrote the SBL paper I mentioned and discuss, again, what that paper was about and how to read Galatians 3 and 4, what some of the indicators are in that passage that point back to Enochian material and how, again, if you have that perspective in your head, how some of what Paul says there makes really good sense in light of the watcher's story. All right, Mike, well, that sounds good. Is there anything else you'd like to mention? I think that's it. Okay, we appreciate it. I just want to thank everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. God bless. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com. To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs, go to www.brmsh.com.