But at the end of the day, even its defenders reached the point where they would...
they actually said stuff like this "hey, you know, I'm the only one still alive here
sitting around and thinks this book ought to be in.
But it looks like the Holy Spirit has moved to the mass of the church,
the mass of the believing community, and so I'm good with that."
Yeah, well, let's talk about that. Why wasn't it included in the canon?
And why didn't the Jews view it as something that was canonical?
Why did a few Christians, but most Christians not?
Can you just kind of speak to that story?
Yeah. The general reason why it was not considered canonical is that the Jewish community
had this notion that for something to be sacred literature,
it not only has to be tied to a prophetic, a historical prophetic figure from the biblical period,
but also it needs to be witnessed in the Hebrew.
Ok, as far as we know the Book of Enoch did not originate in Hebrew.
There are no Hebrew fragments of the book at all.
There are some Aramaic fragments that were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And that's noteworthy because the one community that gave Enoch an elevated status
was the sect that lived at Qumran.
You know, most people think that were the Essenes so we can just call them Essenes
for the sake of the discussion. But they quote Enoch,
along with something else of their own origin, The Temple Scroll.
They quote those two things in the same manner that they quote Old Testament books,
they quote Scripture, they have the same formulaic expressions.
And they also wrote commentaries on all the biblical books
plus Enoch, and The Temple Scroll.
So that tells scholars that these two books had a special elevated status
at the same level, but that was unique in Judaism, most of the Jewish community is like
"not, we're not buying it. Show it to us in Hebrew, and then we'll think about it."
In the early church that doesn't really apply,
because the early church is composed so much of Gentiles, you know,
we have the New Testament written in Greek. This is the Hellenistic period,
on to the Greco Roman period. And so the early church doesn't have this sense of,
"hey, it needs to be in Hebrew," which, of course they don't, because nobody could read it.
I mean, you can count the number of church fathers
that could read Hebrew literally on one hand.
So that just flies out the window. And so they just naturally look at it differently.
They look at the content, and they can see how the content mirrors
certain things in the New Testament. They have respect for the Jewish community
that did consider it important, even if it's not canonical.
So, it leaks into the discussion of the Canon with a few early church fathers.
But at the end of the day, even its defenders reached the point where they would...
they actually said stuff like this that, "hey, you know, I'm the only one still alive here
sitting around that thinks this book ought to be in.
But it looks like the Holy Spirit has moved to the mass of the church,
the mass of the believing community, and so I'm good with that."
Yeah.
"So, I'm not gonna worry about it."
Yeah.
"I guess I was wrong," you know, and so they just assumed that the Spirit would
show them what to recognize as canonical. It's kind of a nice thought
that just let it drop. Sort of be obedient to the leadings of Providence.
And today we have a very similar view of the canon, you know, it's about recognition,
we assume that the Spirit would you help people get it right. And they did, too.
That's why it gets more play. You know, it hits closer to home
because of a few early Church Fathers.
Yeah, so, in talking about the early church fathers,
we've got like Irenaeus and Tertullian,
and like one or two others that are like real prominent that
if I said their names our audience would be like,
"Okay, I've heard of those names before."
But like you said, there's this mass majority of scholarship that says,
"hey, this is not of the canon of Scripture,"
and they might even hold it as an important book of history,
in explaining some philosophical views of some of the Jewish people at that time.
But they wouldn't hold it as canon. Why was it rejected by them as canon?
The majority and not just this minority that we mentioned before.
I mean, after the first few centuries the enthusiasm for it dies out
just because of the numbers.
Again, people willing to let the mass of the of the leadership and the believing community,
assuming they're guided by the Holy Spirit and just letting it go.
But I think there's another factor here.
You know, you're right that I could show you articles;
there's a wonderful article by a guy named Schultz, his last name is Schultz;
on Irenaeus' view of sin, and it's Enochian through and through. He quotes Enoch in it,
you know, he has the sin of the Watchers in there, it's not just the fall,
we've got more than one rebellion going on. It's classic Enochian stuff.
But you know, he's not going to live forever.
And so even though people might have thought those thoughts,
and they're going to read somebody like Irenaeus who is tracing the idea
from Enoch into the New Testament, that's what's going to give the ideas,
the weight, but the book that Irenaeus is using for this
is not going to be so much of a factor. It's rather the ideas that are important.
But the opposite side of that coin is really Augustine.
You know, Augustine, part of his early story, he belonged to the sect of the Manicheans,
which he eventually parted ways with and really had some significant
theological disagreements, and the Manicheans revered the Book of Enoch.
So, I think Augustine had a little bit of an axe to grind there, too, you know,
because of his stature, that carries weight in the believing community.
So it just fell out of disuse. And as time goes on,
there's less and less of a concern for, "Hey, are we reading our New Testament
in light of what Jews in the intertestamental period thought?
After all this is their bible."
It moves from that to "what are the church councils say?" It moves to medieval people.
And that's not to say there's anything sinister there.
It's just the later stuff, the stuff that's divorced from the closer context becomes prominent,
because people have to write, and the leadership of the church has to write
and address specific questions in their own day.
And they become the focus points of theological discussion. It's not this other stuff.
Now it's this. And so, it's kind of a normal process and a normal transition.
But, you know, we're more sensitive today, just generally as academics,
to reading Scripture in its original context, which is not the church fathers.
It's not the medieval Roman Catholic writers or whatever. It's nothing post biblical.
We're more sensitive to that today because we have access to so much of the material.