How the New Testament writers, you know "that all this theology about the deity of Christ
and pre existence and Messiahship, and...
this is all invented by the church later and thrown back into the New Testament."
Well, yeah, except for books like Enoch that have all that stuff in it
a couple 100 years before Jesus showed up.
But in terms of Enoch, like as modern day Christians, why should we care?
Like why is studying? I guess, on the one hand, why is studying that important?
And in terms of literature, how does it relate and differentiate itself from the Bible?
Because, I feel like unless you maybe lean a little bit more into the areas
that you study, or some of our friends who spend time
in that magical place we call Christian Middle Earth.
Right.
Some people never even heard of Enoch, other than references in the Bible,
so they don't even know what we're talking about yet.
Yeah, I mean, the quick answer to why it matters is that Enoch,
the book of Enoch, scholars refer to it as first Enoch, there's actually more than one.
But the first one is the one that counts because it dates before the New Testament.
It is a piece of literature written by very theologically faithful conservative Jews,
a Jewish writer.
And there are a number of things in it, thatpre sage, not only, you know,
presage New Testament theology, even Messiahnism.
For instance, the second volume, the Parables of Enoch, chapter 37, through 71,
that's actually an emphasis in that section of the book.
So you will have, you know, how many of us have been treated, to the TV show,
it's always around Easter or Christmas, you know, the TV show,
the magazine on the impels shelf at the grocery store,
you know, where it says, "the Christ of faith versus the Jesus of history",
you know, trying to drive a wedge between these two things,
and how the New Testament writers, you know,
"that all this theology about the deity of Christ and pre existence
and Messiahship, and this is all invented by the church later
and thrown back into the New Testament."
Well, yeah, except for books like Enoch that have all that stuff in it
a couple 100 years before Jesus showed up.
So it's a really good example of how Jews were thinking about Messiah prior to Jesus.
There's a lot of other stuff in the book that bleeds into the New Testament,
or that comments and shows you how Jews and serious people,
they think the Hebrew Bible is the Word of God, like we do, okay.
But how they're thinking about the Old Testament, but also, you get this streams of interpretation
that when you get to the New Testament, it's like, "okay, you know,
if I had read the Book of Enoch, I would think; 'I've seen this before.'"
So it really cuts off at the knees at
a lot of these notions that New Testament writers are just making stuff up.
They're not.
They are firmly within one strand of what we would call intertestamental Judaism.
And it's very interesting to see how they were handling Old Testament passages,
and how that compares with what the New Testament writers are doing.
So it contextualizes what New Testament content is about Messiah and about other things;
the book of life, these "heavenly books", there's a lot of stuff like that in Enoch.
Lake of Fire, final judgment, just the general apocalyptic stuff,
that you're reading the book of Revelation.
Guess what? Enoch was there first, you know.
So there are these threads that just run through from the Old Testament,
through the serious Jewish community in between the Testaments,
on into the New Testament. And so it just helps us be better readers
of the New Testament, we kind of know, and can get at what they're...
we can pick up what they're laying down a little more, because we have
some of this other literature to help us show how they were thinking,
what they were basing these interpretations on in certain passages
in the Old Testament or just commentary within their own community
about; "look at all this stuff in the Hebrew Bible. I wonder what it means?
How do we connect the dots?"
So they're busy in between the Testaments doing that, and the New Testament writers
will often repurpose and utilize that sort of content.
So it helps us be more intelligent readers of the stuff that is inspired.
I don't think Enoch was inspired.
I understand the question because there were a few early Church figures
that thought and argued that Enoch should be included in the canon,
which was a debate that was overwhelmingly lost.
And those guys owned up to it, you know, it's like, "okay, we lose, we assume the Holy Spirit
has guided the masses of the church in one direction and it ain't ours, we're okay with that."
So I know why the question is asked, but a book doesn't have to be canonical
or inspired to be useful.
You know, Peter quotes for Enoch, Jude quotes from Enoch.
There's stuff in the gospels that are directly traceable to things in Enoch.
It has its fingerprints on the New Testament in a lot of places,
even if it's not a direct quotation, so it's useful to know what in the world the book's about.
And that's why I'm doing the readers commentary.