Does anyone have any insight on “The book of Enoch”?
🗣️ DISCUSSION 💬
I recently read thru it and I’m trying to get a little more background and resources that can fill in some of the blanks. Thanks in advance!
Edit: holy smokes, thanks everyone! I will definitely be making another thread after I do some digging!
Enoch is older than Christianity. If you want to know why it's not part of canon, ask the rabbinical scholars. The Council of Nicaea probably didn't even know of its existence.
Not true. They debated it.
Are you sure? I was taught that it was a topic at the Synodicon of Vetus, along with a number of apocryphal texts, and the only thing really decided there was the inclusion of Revelations as canon.
Nicaea only affirmed the four Gospels truth as writ and voted the Book of Judith into the canon, but didn't exclude anything that was already accepted.
Edit, and adding that one of the sticking points was that Enoch was largely oral tradition at that point, and the copies stored by the Coptic church were probably compiled by Athnasius himself while in exile.
I'm totally not sure. And my idea of the debate came from my increasingly poor and muddled memory conflating Nicaea with an apparently previous debate which had one of the church fathers (I can't remember who) being ultimately the last defender as, one by one, other fathers were persuaded against its divine origin, and he, too, gave up on the notion. That was well before Nicaea, from what I can tell now. I was not familiar with the Synodicon of Vetus at all (so that should tell you of my level of knowledge on church history); however, looking it up, Wikipedia (and I know that's far from an infallible source) said some interesting things about Nicaea in its article about the S of V. :