Giants and Fallen Angels - The Context of the Book of Enoch

so today though we're talking about uh the ethiopic book of enoch and this is just sometimes called the book of enoch it's sometimes called the first book of enoch because there's actually bunches of books of enoch and we have to differentiate and so essentially this is the oldest and most important of the books of eunuch it's not that the books of enoch are all written by enoch necessarily and there's what you know first enoch second third and fourth eunuch like we have and they're just all part of a set they're coming from very different authors but they're just numbered later okay so we'll talk just to even talk about this particular book we want to have a little bit of background context about the bible and about the canon and so uh here we're going to be talking about we're talking about enoch we're talking about old testament or uh for what christians call the old testament uh also the hebrew bible for uh judaism um and so although um probably most people who are here who know but not all christians know um although it's published you know kind of as a single book i shouldn't walk over there i guess so anyway in fact uh the old testament is made up of multiple books that were not all written at the same time or place or anything like that and they all kind of come together to be by edited anyway they're all put together and now published together um you know in addition to those ones that made it in there were many many more texts that are sort of bible-like or also uh sound you know maybe sound like the bible and also are quite ancient and are written many cases in hebrew or aramaic or maybe in greek uh that are not included in the bible that didn't make it it so why did some make it into some not make it in so if we look at um how the canon emerged in judaism and rabbinic judaism so after the destruction of the second temple as the rabbis are meeting together and deciding what the canon is going to be they come up with three groupings of writings that get uh included and so there's an acronym that's tanakh here that's being made from torah nevi'im and ketuvim i don't speak hebrew so it's pronouncing this very badly but essentially law prophets and writings uh is how these go and that's also how they're organized so essentially the torah uh the most important in the in the christian christians that call this the pentateuch or the five books attributed to moses genesis exodus leviticus numbers and deuteronomy uh then the the prophets that essentially the from joshua well in this case they're grouped differently than how christians grouped him right so joshua judges samuel kings isaiah jeremiah ezekiel and then the 12 minor prophets that are all grouped together so everybody like jonah and everybody all in one book and then finally the writings which are things like psalms proverbs job song of solomon etc down to chronicles right okay so that's that and it's probably it's not clear when this canon is done there may well have been very early on some jews who kind of are keeping to this much more constrained canon uh and they are actually even maybe knocking some of these books out even so there might have even been more restrictions so a lot of them might have been there's arguments for example that song of solomon you know which is doesn't mention god and is really an erotic love poem maybe this shouldn't make it in right you know and so and so that's even true among um the rabbis as they're still arguing that but it's maybe fixed um by the early 2nd century rabbinic councils meanwhile before that uh in the third century bc then so hundreds of years before that there had been this very important translation of all the texts occurring in the hellenistic kingdom of egypt in alexandria so the site of the the great library so this uh greek repository of all learning is the goal and so uh tal king ptolemy all the kings are called ptolemy you know according to the uh legendary account um you know agrees that the the the bible of the the law of the uh of the jews is ancient enough and important enough that it also needs to be housed in the library of alexandria but of course it has to be translated into greek in order to make it be worth anything in there as far as and so they get together together um you know 70 actually probably 72 according to the tradition the magic number is probably 72 but anyway 70 scholars who are able to kind of according to the tradition anyway magical not magic but under inspiration translate the book you know kind of perfectly under divine guidance so the septuagint uh according to its own traditions or it's the traditions that are earlier surrounding it is also then inspired and so for greek speaking jews and also greek speaking christians the text is itself often has the same kind of scriptural weight as the original would have been in hebrew it's now become again a divine language and there's for many english christians for example they have decided that the king james bible has a similar idea because they have made up traditional stories that the king james scholars had as something similar happen um but that it doesn't those can't be those may be faith claims but they don't they can't be jived with history this claims about the 70 are also not historical probably right but anyway so this has a very different yes are there four books yeah so that's very good i almost went away from the screen right so you can see here that there is way fewer books in the in the hebrew bible than in the septuagint right and they're also grouped differently so um you can't read my slide here so as they're because they're too small away but you far away but there's more books that are making it in so the law is the same so the torah is the same the pentateuch here is the same the five books of moses but then we have a different grouping here instead of the prophets at first here we have history grouping and so it's essentially the readers here of the septuagint are more or less saying that joshua is not speaking the same way as a prophet isaiah is speaking this is too echoey and so anyway from joshua down through uh kings and chronicles uh and the other books that are that are more sort of historical uh are all getting loop locked into or put into this section and then these include a bunch of books that aren't in the jewish scripture so that's tobit judith uh maccabee you know four books of maccabees right yes when was the hebrew bible completed you're saying so i was suggesting that this canon so all out of these books these books were already written long before their where before the canon is finalized right so the last of the books to be written is like the book of daniel and so that's going to be i if i don't have a date on here i i'm not a dates person so i need to do it anyway it's it's at the time of the um the when the cellucids you know antiochus the fourth epiphanies when he just you know uh during the maccabee revolt so anyway so in the in do you know the date of that around 165 yeah so this is when the this is when daniel's written so daniel's the last book of the hebrew bible to make it in and it makes it in because um it pretends to be written much earlier than it is right and so because it's meant to be written at the time of the babylonian captivity and it's talking about that and and the council kind of believed that uh it makes it in when much much earlier books didn't make it in but then the canon is maybe formulated in the second century a.d okay and so in here we have like i say uh this is happening much earlier and so we're talking about um some of these earlier books uh and but when it's first starting although the translations go over time so books like daniel have made it in here but the book of daniel when it makes it in it also makes it in an expanded version and so some of these some of these books that are later like daniel and esther are longer in the septuagint and include chapters that aren't in the hebrew bible and so then it also includes things like like i say the book of tobit these books of the maccabees uh and then in the wisdom section so the wisdom section here is things like psalms and job and proverbs and song of solomon ecclesiastes but it also includes books like wisdom of solomon ecclesiasticus or sirach the psalm of solomon yes translated into english is the septuagint been translated into english was the question and so yes it has been so you can get a hold of that it is an important translation so it's initially a translation into greek the greek has now been translated into english question here so we'll get to that the question is is this the book that the um the catholics use as their bible and we'll get to that the catholics don't exist at the time yet as the when it's being translated but no isn't going to be the answer so the catholics have their own bible and we'll get to how that comes they have these books yes yes so we'll get so we'll get to that uh and then finally then the prophets people the prophets like isaiah are grouped here at the end of that but then there is again additional prophetic works that do not exist so for example uh baruch so it's an addition to jeremiah so jeremiah scribe is baruch and then there's a book of baruch that goes on yes so who were these 72 scholars so the question is who are the 72 scholars the answer is they're traditional it's a traditional story so we don't have any you know we can't say it's written after the fact they're jewish scholars who were learned in the text there's a massive jewish community in egypt and there's been jews there were jews in egypt very early on i mean obviously according to the traditional story uh everybody came out of egypt right but they also went back at the time of the destruction of jerusalem so we we are very aware of the receipts here if you'd like um no i'm saying for him uh the at the time of the destruction of jerusalem we think of the babylonian captivity so when the exiles all go to babylon but an equal number of people also flee to egypt uh and they have a community there and so for example the prophet jeremiah who is a prophet that is existing before the destruction of jerusalem he also then goes into exile in egypt where he's among the the egyptian community uh they and even in the jewish egyptian community even at a certain point um builds its own temple there in egypt and which is not the understanding later that later jews have that you can have temples outside of jerusalem but it is what the egyptians are doing anyway and so when egypt becomes conquered by alexander the great it becomes a greek center uh the capital of this great city of alexandria name that alexander founds uh there ends up being a massive jewish community there and it may well be more than certainly more than maybe are living in jerusalem because jerusalem is a smaller city so anyway jewish scholars and essentially with then there's more books that they have included in their translation than later let's say five centuries later are included in the hebrew canon when it's closed but there's even more books that don't get make it into this list right so let's go through let's talk about so from that uh from that basis we're getting to christianity we were asking about so when christianity then emerges in the first century a.d or the first century of the christian era christians are writing their own texts which ultimately become christian scripture are ultimately incorporated into the christian part of the bible the new testament when the christians are writing that text they that text we should point out is written in greek so that text even though uh the the first christians even though jesus uh is jewish and all of his disciples immediate disciples are all jewish and their native language would have been aramaic which is essentially an ancient syrian and so it's related very closely related to hebrew but anyway hebrew would have been their liturgical language so they read scriptures in hebrew but the language that they would be speaking every day is arabic anyway so when the crit no we none of the early christians though none of those people jesus doesn't leave any writings at all so jesus never wrote a book and talked about this is my gospel this is my message or anything like that and none of the early disciples wrote their message in in aramaic instead when christians got to writing they were writing in greek and when they have for example there are many places in let's say the gospels where they have jesus quoting then from the hebrew bible they aren't having him the way he would have actually talked he would have spoken in aramaic and then he would have said something in hebrew and then you would imagine that the translator who is writing uh the gospel down who's writing it into greek would then book translate let's say both the aramaic and translate the the hebrew that jesus is saying instead the gospel writers are writing their own greek story and when they quote out of the hebrew bible they quote from the septuagint right so this is not a a new translation of the text they are using the septuagint as the um as the version of the bible so it's all very important then for the early christians question does it lose its meaning anytime you translate anything things change uh and so unless yeah unless you are i mean this is one of the reasons why uh in islam you're not supposed to translate the quran right so you have to you're supposed to you know read that holy text in the original language so you're not losing meaning you have to study it and likewise judaism the the you know rabbinical school is you're continuously learning hebrew and aramaic so that you are able to get at the actual meaning of the text the meaning changes when you translate it and and so the way christians try to get around that is by looking at multiple translations and doing translation study all the time you know and so um but yeah if you're if you're approaching if you're a christian and you're approaching the bible only in english um you have you are definitely encountering a different text than you would be if you were an ancient hebrew reading it elizabeth my great aunt wrote a book called the hidden books i never read it it's about the old testament apocrypha and i think what we're talking about is the um books like esdras and tobit yes and so on that are in the septuagint but not in the canonical right testing yes so yeah we'll get to that and so we'll well specifically what the apocrypha are is that like you say so i'm just pointing out here though for early christians the situation is very important because they're using that as scripture they're not actually going back to the hebrew and they probably don't know hebrew so um the septuagint then is the basis uh for the christian old testament so when christians started uh christianity um some christians some early christians as we'll talk about next next week uh felt that the old testament was completely unnecessary and so in fact there's an early attempt the earliest attempt in christianity uh of making a canon was a kind of a radical uh guy named marcian who uh in this early second century who made a list where he absolutely excluded almost all the books of the new testament that we think of as the christian bible and he also uh said that the old testament is absolutely worthless and so he had a very extreme position that pretty much everybody reacted against right in the early christianity question yeah to get my head around it's a hypothesis that the texts for the new testament were written by jews who converted into this new religion or gentiles or jews and gentiles because why greek why wouldn't it be in in hebrew if they were originally jewish who then got converted right one would assume if it was written originally in greek that it would be greek authors or am i wrong with that assumption yeah no it's a good very very good question because it is a little strange and i'm pointed out because it's something that i think christians often don't think about um and so yes so so ever since the conquest of alexander the great so 300 you know 50 years or so before uh jesus is running around in his ministry uh the whole eastern half of the mediterranean and across persia even have been conquered by hellenistic kingdoms which is to say greek speaking kingdoms and part of the program has been to try to hellenize and rather try to greek guys all of the people and so um all through the zone that um for example of what we call you know what became the roman province of palestine uh but judea galilei all of those territories um those are interspersed with local people who are speaking aramaic and then people who have become hellenized and are speaking greek and so very close for example to just a couple of miles from jesus's hometown of nazareth there is a a hellenistic city where they're speaking greek and so and so that's all interspersed and so some of the people have all switched over and are speaking greek and so anyway to your point about are the early christian writings of the new testament are they primarily written by people who were jewish who then converted and became christians uh or are they just people who converted you know directly from paganism uh the the greek religion it's a mixture and so in some cases it will be from jewish people like paul but he is a jewish person who is born in a greek city so he's born in a city called tarsus which is in what's now turkey but it's turkey was there's no turks there at that time so turkey was a greek speaking part of the roman empire and so paul uh you know is probably primarily spoke greek even though he's a very jewish guy and so then a bunch of the other writers though like luke were probably never jewish and so they are probably people that have converted to the new religion directly from paganism and so in some of those cases so when luke is writing about stuff in luke's gospel luke doesn't know judean geography very well luke also doesn't know very much about how first century jews are actually practicing their religion luke is very very versed in the septuagint and so luke assumes that jews are continuing to be like luke has read about it in the old testament and so luke makes a bunch of errors that way and so anyway so that that kind of thing is happening okay uh so can i remind everyone that uh because we're live streaming this event if you have a question for john uh and you just raise your hand so that urgent brings the microphone to you because otherwise people can't hear you yeah thank you when they can't hear you they get mad at me okay i'll be better at that yeah so we will um remember to speak to the microphone we don't need it for hearing here but they need for the stream so um anyway then though this because like i say this set of books in this order that is what the christians then the christians who are primarily spread through the greek speaking world of the roman empire greek is spoken as a as a second language even in the western part of the empire that becomes their scripture and so uh even when um uh when it's being translated into latin in the fourth century uh after it's become the state religion of the roman empire and so now they need to have a good good uh latin version uh from the for the westerners who don't speak greek the vulgate of saint jerome takes he uses the same books in the same order that the septuagint has even though he himself goes back to the hebrew in order to make some of his translation augustine this is one of the things with saint augustine who's another contemporary leader in the west uh doesn't think is necessary because he says we the certificate is already perfectly translated because that was under inspiration so you can just take it from the greek and translate it directly into latin but jerome went back to the hebrew to do it but the organization and the number of books are taken from the situation so it is only if you can imagine in the 5th century then that the christian canon becomes fixed and so augustine has some meetings uh local councils in africa and the pope contemporaneously in the west is having those uh and that same kind of fixed list uh gets kind of adopted by the east as of the 5th century meanwhile that's at the simultaneously the rabbinic schools have started rejecting the septuagint so they don't in part because of the christians have kind of run away with it and have made it their own and also because the rabbis have maybe decided that hellenism has all these bad connotations and leads you bad ways there's an emphasis on going back to the hebrew texts and so the subtitles are are discarded uh when creating the rabbinic canon and so when the reformation occurs 500 years ago in the christian west so when the protestants break away from rome they also are doing that at a time you know after the renaissance of renewed interest in ancient texts and literary criticism and this sort of a thing and so they are also then going back to the originals and so they are also going back and translating they and they also their jews around and so they're able to look at the jewish texts and they say wait we have all these books in our bible that you don't have in your bible and judaism is older than christianity so maybe these books shouldn't have been added in and so then the protestants take them all out all the ones that are in that the jews don't have right and so this is exactly uh what elizabeth was talking about uh what protestants call the apocrypha what uh orthodox christians and catholics call the deutero if they hadn't didn't have such a long word it might catch on easier like apocrypha almost everybody says apocrypha because who wants to say deuterocanonicals it's kind of fun maybe we should say so and so these books are talbot judith the book of esther that has extra bits on it wisdom of solomon the book of sirach which is sometimes called ecclesiasticus not to be confused with ecclesiastes the book of baruch which is is kind of like the add-ons to the book of jeremiah the extra bits of the book of daniel and so this is books like the um the idol bell and the dragon and so if you've ever if you've ever know if you've read this and you've read the book of daniel and you have a story where the king of babylon is having this idol and he every day they they bring a feast to it and every night they close it up and uh and then they wake up in the morning and the whole feast and all the wine and everything's all gone and that's proving that the idol uh you know is uh you know consuming this god is really god because he's consuming all of this feast and uh and and the wine anyway and so then daniel is able to show the the king that all the priests of this particular pig and god are going in there and having a big feast every night and they're getting all this free food and everything and that uh and so then anyway once it once it becomes shown then then uh the king smashes all the smashes the idol and kills all the priests and you know anyway so that's one of the fun stories that is in the apocrypha but not in the regular book of daniel right and then the books of maccabees so this is the kind of history and the inter-testament period so of when essentially the jewish revolt against the uh the greek um syrian you know kings of syria okay and so then that leaves this kind of weird peculiar divide in the canons right so rabbinic judaism and protestant christianity have share a bible text list where it doesn't include the apocrypha whereas the orthodox christians and catholics share a bible that does include the deuterocanonical texts which are both the same texts right okay however okay so even though today rabbinic judaism doesn't use these texts as part of scripture many in the first century many first century jews hellenistic jews especially so in other words greek speaking jews who were in the diaspora so there were jewish communities all throughout the roman empire especially in the greek speaking east many of them didn't know hebrew and for them the septuagint is their scripture and that included then these deuterocanonical books and however and i would also point out here that even in the aramaic speaking parts of the of judea some of these jews considered the texts to be canon obviously early christians who were jews thought of these texts as being part of the canon as did for example three of these that are have been found among the dead sea scrolls uh so uh the group of um one of the jewish groups the essenes um were ascetics who had a kind of a monastic community an apocalyptic community a priestly community where they were waiting kind of for the end times and they were it's on the shores or near the dead sea uh and they had all kinds of texts and at a certain point they buried all the texts and then they're they're sacked fortunately they buried everybody should be going in in antiquity if everybody would have just gone and buried all their texts in the desert it would be wonderful but anyway uh anyway fortunately they did and and so as a result of that um we've recovered very very ancient manuscripts indeed of the bible but also extra biblical material including in this case bits of the books of tobits iraq and the epistle of jeremiah which is to say portions of then the apocrypha that are not in hebrew scripture today so if we take these books then of the septuagint and there's a bunch more of those obviously than what there were that made it into the protestant and jewish canons there are still plenty more books that didn't make it into um uh you know anyway the catholic canon you know so even though some of them were most all of them were scripture for somebody at some point whether or not it was ever very many people some people somebody thought it was scripture at least the original author and the immediate community that would have been around that author and then whoever wanted whoever bothered to copy it so if you can imagine the ones that we actually have that survive it's because it was important enough that somebody actually bothered to do something very expensive of hand copying a thing by hand and it actually has been copied enough times that it's come down to us uh there's plenty more of these that are lost than whatever we have that are that are written and saved so um anyway so these are found in a bunch of different collections uh for example these two volumes of old testament pseudepigrapha of which i have one of these here and when i was a teenager i would go to my library and my suburb and i would this is like two i don't have the other one here with me it looks like that anyway it's two of my absolute favorite books at a certain time point when i was an adult i realized and i was looking back and thinking about that i was realizing as an adult i can go buy things myself so i went and bought myself these and so anyway i was very happy to end up having these so they're called uh they're generally grouped by scholars or it's been called for a whole long time anyway these are called pseudopaygriffa so there's the canon then there's the deuterocannon or apocrypha and finally pseudepigrapha uh the word pseudopigrapha means falsely attributed so you know it's like uh if you ever think of a like writers when there's a ancient text that's not written by it so they might call it um uh pseudodionysius so duducian pseudodionysius the areopagite is pretty much my favorite writer right so so the guy a guy who actually you know bothered to pretend to be dionysius the aryapagite but anyway so pseudodianisius yes we need to get the microphone is it pseudodionysius the areopagite or is it dionysius the pseudoareopagite that's the one well the question would be is if there was if where there was a person who who was whose name actually was dionysius but i think that he's specifically pretending to be dionysius the areopagite so pseudodionysius is what he's usually called and pseudodionysius then ends up having a an amazing career he not only is very influential as a as a neoplatonist philosopher who really influences christian theology but also gets confused uh gets confused in the middle ages and so he becomes understood to have like ended his life in france where he was the apostle that converted the french as far as tradition has it and so if you've ever heard of if you've ever been to the monastery of sandini which is dionysius the areopogue yeah and then and then and sandini is very much a pseudo-pseudodionysius because it's a completely different donee different completely different deniasius but it got confused because with the pseudodionysius and so it's a pseudo-pseudo-dionysius is where and that's where all the kings of france are buried in the in the important uh monastery of pseudo-pseudo-dionysius the ariapagite yeah it's onto me so okay falsely attributed um because in general the books are written by people who clearly didn't write them or they're attributed to people who was not who were not the authors right uh that the problem with that is is that actually that same term though then pseudopographic um actually applies to lots and lots of books that actually made it in the canon much less the apocrypha as well right so for example the book of daniel daniel which we mentioned is the last of the books in the hebrew bible to have been written and it's even written partially in aramaic made it into the canon even though it's technically pseudopographical so in other words it's not written by daniel right like uh and also apocrypha is also kind of a crazy word because it means hidden books right but they're not hidden we know where they are we've never lost them so we know anyway so those are quite anyway it's a it's a nicer it's fun term uh okay so among the pseudepigrapha see the bigger that um there's a whole bunch of them these are ones that are just in my my couple volumes here right but there's a bunch more even in the volume so they're things like the apocalypse of abraham the apocalypse of adam the testament of adam the life of adam and eve the book of jubilees the testament of the twelve patriarchs the testament of the three patriarchs joseph vanasana out the apocalypse of zephaniah the fourth book of ezra the apocalypse of ezra the vision of ezra the apocryphon of ezekiel the second through fourth books of baruch the testament of moses the martyrdom of isaiah the treatise of shem the testament of solomon lots of books of more psalms the testament of job the book of enoch which we're going to be talking about and then the second third and fourth books of enoch so additional books of enoch that people have written so you can kind of see here a trend there's a lot of apocalypse right and so one of the things that's one of the things that's going to come through so all of these books are coming from that later time period when daniel you know is being oh that's really bad are coming from that later time period when daniel is composed the book of daniel and the book of daniel is one of the few apocalyptic books in the hebrew bible and so this is a period when second of second temple judaism when apocalyptic thinking has really come to the front and there are lots and lots of these books that have been made and so the fact that um that these let's say have been in the christian canon has met and have been rejected then late from the later rabbinic canon has kept meant that apocalypticism has stayed more with christianity than with judaism which largely moved on right okay so this is also at the dead sea scroll location so at qumran this place where the dead sea scrolls were found the essene complex among those were also fragments of the book of jubilees in the book of enoch so even though again this isn't making this isn't part of the septuagint and it's not part of the canons of the catholics or the orthodox they were part of the scripture used by the essenes in the dead sea scroll community also very widely the book of enoch was very widely used by early christians so for example the new testament author of the book of jude the epistle of jude quotes from the book of enoch even though it's not in the old testament as far as the christians are concerned so the epistle of jude is one of the shortest books in the bible the christian bible it's ascribed to any jude which is the same name in greek is judas which is judah right so that same name the brother of james or jacob which is to say the brother of jesus uh and so this is also even though it's canonical probably pseudopigraful because it's probably not written by jesus's brother's brother right this particular book is also interesting in that it's also reworked and re-edited and made into a much longer book that is pseudopographically ascribed to the apostle peter but was again not written by peter and that also is in the canon but in any event i'm just citing this to one to show the complexity of the canonical text history even but also to show that early christians just quoted from uh book of enoch as if it were part of the canon so here's the quote in jude now i desire to remind you though you are fully informed that the lord who once for all saved a people out of the land of egypt afterwards destroyed those who did not believe and the angels who did not keep their own position but left their proper dwelling he is kept in the eternal chains in the deepest darkness for the judgment of the great day it was about it was also about these that enoch in the seventh generation from adam prophesied saying quote see the lord is coming with ten thousands of his holy ones to execute judgment on all and to convict everyone of all the deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him and so that quotation then uh is the letter epistle of jude chapter one you know it's only one chapter long anyway verses 14 and 15 uh quoting first enoch or the book of enoch here chapter 1 verse 9. and you can kind of see again apocalypticism right that's a theme so end times okay so uh it was considered by the earliest christian writers the writers of the new testament consider it scripture scripture it's also by the next generation of christian writers who are called the early church fathers they also frequently quote this so the epistle of barnabas is one of the early christian books that didn't make it into the new testament and also early fathers like clement of alexandria and nathan agora so uranius tertullian and others also all quote from the book of enoch some of them some of them really really like tertullian really like it however by the time we get to the 4th century by the time christianity becomes the state religion of the roman empire when they're getting down to business and formulating everything making creeds and also deciding on the canon that's the time period when it started to be fall out of favor and so specifically both augustine and jerome who tended to not agree on many many things at all both agreed that enoch didn't didn't make their grade and so they and so anyway so since they both didn't think that enoch should be considered part of the canon and jerome was the person that was preparing the great latin translation of the text it ultimately did not and augustine was preparing the canon list it ultimately didn't make it into the canon so the question here so the question is why did augustine and jerome not consider the book of enoch worthy of the the canon oh that's the question also yeah so the the the art they argue that they don't believe that enoch is the writer so uh the part of the problem here is is that the book contin contains stuff that uh mark it out to be written you know much much later than the than when enoch would have been alive so enoch as a person who is living the seventh generation from from adam this would essentially be the oldest by far and away the oldest book in the bible if it did make it into the bible uh because uh the rest of the the bible as it's now understood um as far as augustine and jerome were concerned moses was the author of the of the pentateuch that's that also proves not to be the case now in other words it was those texts actually are written many many you know generations after when moses would have lived but enoch is so much further back that this book would have been you know incredibly agent and so they don't find that credible so now they're now that they're a little bit more sophisticated readers than some of the earlier christian writers like um irenaeus for example in less sophisticated guy yes there's a follow-up so they don't mind enoch apocalypticism apocalypticism wasn't fine legitimate percentage at all so they just don't think it was written by enoch so they don't they question it as being authoritative it's not as much i don't think it's as much the content that there were that they're as worried about um the content is in fact um one of the things that christians really liked about it so so there's a bunch of content there and actually as a result of that and we'll kind of see it when we look at some of the themes there's a bunch of the content that has stayed with us even though the text is gone uh and so because the content was exciting enough and it made its way into christianity um it became a traditional stuff in the same exact way um i'll mention for example there uh another so there's so many of these books not a lot of them don't make it in the majority of these books are not making it in right uh and so it's it's almost a question of why does anyone get in right as opposed to why do you get left out but one of the other incredibly um popular books is the uh proto-evangelion of is it james anyway it's a it's the one with mayor that tells all of the stories about mary as a child so there's a all story after story about um uh the mary the mother of jesus in this particular uh christian kind of proto it's called a proto-evangelion so proto-gospel which is to say it's story it's a gospel story before the gospel happens because it's actually happening in mary's lifetime and so this is really where almost all of the um ideas and stories about where mary you know what mary was even doing because mary doesn't have a whole bunch of stuff in the actual canonical gospels but almost all of the stories about mary including even the idea of the immaculate conception and everything like that are coming out of this book that didn't make it in and so there's lots of let's see there's even cathedrals i've seen in southern france where they have pictures that illustrate this book that didn't make it in there's a question over here just as an aside i see that jerome is writing on paper in a book and i was wondering when do they actually start using paper instead of scrolls right he's not writing pro well he's probably not writing on paper he he's probably either writing on par he's writing on either parchment or papyrus um so jerome still would have had access to papyrus so the coat so what you're seeing here and i've actually been drawing that i when i've been doing that that the originals are all written on scrolls right and and and then in in the jewish tradition scrolls continue to be used for the holy scripture right but christians are very early adopters of this new technology with books uh that is called you know in latin anyway it's called the codex and so a codex is a book like this right and so the difference between this and the scroll uh there's a there's a lot of there's a lot of efficiencies that happen with this thing that you don't have with the scroll so a scroll the way it works is you have like a page and they're and each one of these pages is essentially end to end to end and you and you have to turn the two different halves of the scroll or the one you know in order to kind of get to the page you want if you're trying to do any kind of quick referencing forget it you know a scroll you know you really almost have to just read it and ebook yeah you really it's really can't be doing that so this is and so anyway it this this technology is something that is happening in the um uh roman empire of the in the early first christian centuries and the christians kind of adopted really fast and so it's one of the things that happened and so most of the scrolls so scrolls or um scrolls or codices both could have been written on either parchment which is to say animal skin or on papyrus which is um we call you know we our word paper derives from this name papyrus which is a leafy plant you know that in egypt that grows in the nile that they pound together and they produce a paper-like thing one of the things that egypt did was export paper papyrus throughout the whole empire and so in rome they're still writing on papyrus until they lose egypt as a province and then they don't have it anymore they can't use it and so they switch entirely over to animal skin and so all the codices of the middle ages then are going to be written on parchment and it's only then in the 12th or 13th century that they invent paper making modern paper making back here there's oh you know there's one right here first i'm sorry yeah i was just wondering was it the greeks that um you know when you're talking about the mary thing was it written by the greeks because isis and all that oh because of the goddess isis kind of you know we sometimes think that the idea of a mary and isis being the mother yeah so um there were a bunch of uh so the question is i guess if in this um additional extra canonical books a book of christian scripture that didn't make it into the new testament um where there there's a much more elaborated um tales about essentially the mother of god right um we would have to we we'll have to have a lecture i think on this proto-evangelion uh and also maybe on the marian traditions um there are a whole bunch of different um like long-standing traditions of of mother goddesses and the birth of renewal god so gods that defeat death and so and jesus is one of those gods right and so some of these things that get uh some of these things you know are tropes that are that people are already aware of so the pagans are already very aware of and some of the imagery and so it's hard to say so it did the image that they already had a picture of for example a statue of a mother goddess that's holding you know a baby and things like that that may well have artistically influenced christians who are trying to tell the same story and there was one back here that kind of ties into what i was going to say so what were all these translators going back to when you first started what's their vested interest like the first guys if i really believe on on christ jesus and i want to spread the good news yes i'm going to go into my basement and do it in secret so that it's the most exact telling of what i believe you know what i mean but these guys have like st jerome who who commissioned him to do this like what would be the vested interest for him to leave out book of enoch like it says don't cut roots and don't you know you know fashioning meddling stuff the people of that time it's gonna be hard to convince them to follow something that's not you know what i'm saying sure so what like what was invested in like when did the interest start getting kind of power hungry like you know i i would i don't think that jerome for example is about being power hungry so he himself is an ascetic he um he has he is able to get finances from let's say i think it's i think he's financed by christian women who are interested in having this in their own language so that they can uh so they can actually have the scripture in latin and because they don't know the greek uh and he i think is very earnest in his devotion to this so i think again it's like um you know these earliest uh people like paul who they're you know ultimately they're not making a lot of money off of this uh they have a very strong convictions about it and they're probably doing it for that that reason um uh you can say later you know when this is also what's happening though at this time period um it is becoming a state religion and so now the religion does get intermixed up with the government right so it's in this time frame that the canon is being fixed that uh christianity is becoming a state religion and therefore the bishops who are the different leaders of the christian communities in the different cities are functionally great officials of the roman state and so as a result of that then there does start to be a vested interest in that because you want to maybe be the bishop because that's an important civic position where you know you have a nice salary and you live in a nice palace and that kind of thing okay okay so meanwhile so we have all that happening in the roman empire meanwhile um what ends up happening is there's places outside of the roman empire so the roman empire uh this is in the african part of the roman empire so there's egypt right and jerusalem the arabian peninsula the red sea the romans have trade with india and that trade is coming down from through egypt and uh also through petrol which is what wonderful place in jordan with all the rock palaces and everything so the um on the trade routes there is this kingdom called axum and so that's along the route right and so uh in the ethiopian kingdom of aksum so this is where ethiopia is now and it's also a precursor of ethiopia um it grew kind of from in this first 10 centuries of the christian era originally the people there are like everybody else they're pagans polytheists but the kingdom apparently there's indications was heavily influenced by judaism so there has been jewish spread ever since at first exile in egypt and so that has come down to that and at some point anyway then anyway one of the kings in the fourth century at the same time as constantine the emperor constantine converted and became and started the process of christianizing the roman empire uh king izana the second converted to christianity in aksum it made the state religion so here what about queen the queen of sheba yeah so yeah we'll talk about it so this is so part of the traditional understanding we'll we'll get to by the time beginning in the central middle ages um uh the i actually have a slide about it so we'll get there we'll get to there okay so this is this is earlier so this is a historic order later we have traditional understandings that emerge so king azana here um his he has a tutor named fermentius that guy is from syria he's a phoenician or a syria phoenician and he uh later then becomes when he converts the king he becomes the first bishop of aksum so they start setting up a christian church there centered around a bishop uh the kingdom adopts christianity's estate religion in 328 oxim then is the very first state to use the symbol of the cross on its coinage so already in the 4th century there's a coin with the cross and so if we kind of have this early this is an early this is kind of a early bit accelerating to the modern divisions of christianity i cannot come over here without feedback maybe i can so anyway this is kind of europe africa asia and so we have the the split that we're pretty aware of between the latin west so the catholic west and the orthodox greek orthodox east that extends up into russia so russia's part of the greek orthodox tradition and then north south division here between the protestants and catholics but are all part of kind of the latin west then further east so beyond what's now turkey in syria in iraq and then beyond the persian empire into india and then down here in egypt and down into ethiopia there's the churches of the um the oriental orthodox churches and the churches of the east which even though it sounds a lot like eastern orthodox is not eastern orthodox it's more eastern so ultra eastern orthodox is what we might say so beyond the eastern orthodox you know when you start saying that the west is here then there's actually a lot of east you know the orient is very there's more and more orient right you just have to keep saying east east east okay so of these divisions then protestant catholic eastern orthodox we're talking about then oriental orthodoxy and the churches of the east um they're already divided uh from the churches of the west including the eastern orthodox of the greek orthodox churches over christology so christology is this incredibly complicated thing and we'll talk about it next week because in the first couple centuries of these lost christianities people have very different answers to the question um we're monotheists but we kind of think jesus is god how we working that out you know this kind of thing so we think jesus is god but we're only there's only one god and jesus is praying to god so how does this kind of how does this all work right and so the ultimate formula that comes in the council of nicaea that constantine calls in the roman empire is you know that the father or creator is god that christ is god that this holy spirit is god but the father is not the holy spirit the holy spirit is not christ christ is not the father right so essentially the idea is one god but three persons and it's very very complicated and pretty much very few christians get it i think even now you know it's still complicated okay but let's say so but for the philosophy philosophically minded which uh ancient greeks were if anybody was um then there's a next question okay yeah now we have this idea that jesus is god but he was also a human so how what does that mean then does he have a nature where uh his real nature is that he's divine and that was always his nature even though he's in human uh form during his earthly ministry and that's what the churches of the east and historians say his nature is that he's god but he looked like a human and acted like a human when he's when he's in or does he have two equally balanced natures so is he both have a divine nature a fully divine nature and a fully human nature so that's diophasitism or does he have one nature only this christ nature which is both human and divine and so what's the answer for all protestants catholics in eastern orthodox which one the last one the third one the third one everyone okay with the third one no you're all heretics i told you i took christians it's the middle one so i told you no one gets no christians don't even get it okay so but essentially especially nobody in the west ever got it so this is why actually in the romans in the latin west they didn't realize they had any heretics until they created the inquisition in the middle ages and asked people what they actually thought and then they realized that everybody's a heretic so anyway valerie has a question yeah i sometimes wondered um you know of course the you know the release tremendous debates over um the nature of both god and jesus and and all of that but did they ever have any debates about how can one be both a son and a father at the same time like well jesus is the son of god but did they was that just like a loose metaphor or did they take that seriously so so jesus is the son yeah but he's not both the son and the father so the father is so this is a not equal sign so jesus isn't the father right lots of people no anyway so they but no so the way it works is that by saying that jesus is not um both the son and the father jesus is only the son right but they're both god right okay so one god three persons so the special quality of the of jesus is that he's begotten the special quality of the spirit is that he proceeds and the special quality of the father is the creator right so anyway it's complicated and it's hard to get right so the idea of it here then is that protestants catholics and the eastern orthodox agree in uh that the way where this thing works is diophasitism which is to say jesus is fully human fully divine possessing divine nature and human nature in harmony so that's how they work it out not so according to the oriental orthodox and the churches of the east so the oriental orthodox are jesus has one nature that is human and divine it's not seem like that's too much different but it's enough for them to split apart and same thing the divine nature overwhelms the human nature so that's nestorianism so that's this kind of syrian and uh chaldean churches the churches that go off into india and and the mongol empire and this is the churches in egypt and then down into ethiopia yes question so jesus can't be both jesus and god and the whole and jesus and the holy spirit but god can be both god and jesus because jesus is temporal based there wasn't before he was born there was no jesus i sinned no god was always there no jesus is eternal so there is no there was jesus before jesus was born so that what so the yes the human part of jesus is the human part of jesus is like you say only that's temporal but but christ is the second person of the trinity it's it's very hard to get like you say and so but so in the gospel of john the formula works like this in the beginning was the logos in the beginning was the you know which is sometimes translated as the word and the word was with god and the word was god and what it's saying is that when it's with god it's with the creator so in other words his word was with the father the creator uh but the word also is god in the same way that the creator is god we gotta we do have to move beyond fast so fast comment daniel but it's also courted in the bible jesus said i was before abraham that's right yeah so so there's a lot of different ideas that jesus is uh that existed has a pre-existence before he's born in the in the christian idea okay so that's enough on christology what ends up happening then is uh uh in the 7th and 8th centuries islam emerges out of the arabian peninsula and conquers uh the whole persian empire and then also uh the portions of the east roman empire that are not uh in union with constantinople so these guys in fact are being persecuted like crazy by the uh by their roman or byzantine leaders uh for their kind of harris their views of christianity are seemed deemed as heretical the muslims are very happy they're like we don't care what you what's the difference between what you're saying you know you're all not believing the correct way anyway because there's only one god you know there's not three gods and no matter how you christians you polytheistic christians are saying you know so anyway so anyway what ends up happening then is there's this latin west and the greek yeast and they're quite cut off then right from this christian ethiopian kingdom so uh the oriental orthodox churches so this is essentially ethiopian church the eritrean church and then the coptic church which exists under egyptian rule so maybe 10 of the egyptian population now has continued to be christian uh to this day i mean uh okay so the ethiopian orthodox church uh develops on its own traditions and these are some pretty cool traditions uh for example they have these uh there's maybe a hundred different this is one of the nicest ones but anyway a hundred different monolithic churches which are carved out of like one rock so you can kind of see the rock all around here that's been carved away this is not like built out of rocks this is just one rock that's what monolith means right uh and so um also we talked about this queen of sheba question right so from the 13th century so from the middle ages onward the king of the ethiopia uh claimed dissent from a guy a traditional guy or a legendary figure called menelek the first uh who is said to have been then the son of king solomon and the queen of sheba and so the queen of sheba is her in turn a legendary character in the from the book of kings in the old testament and she comes and visits solomon yep anyway so the idea is according to the ethiopian tradition is is that they had a tryst as solomon was want to do especially towards the end when he had 100 pagan wives and all this kind of thing and so then the queen of sheba went back to sheba which is across the red sea from aksum and essentially uh you know which is to say yemen and the axomite kingdom included yemen at a certain point and so they actually you know included both sides of the red sea anyway and so whether or not the axomites um or the ethiopians consider the queen of sheba whether sheba is actually yemen or whether it's aksum it doesn't so they own both of them at a certain point and they they more or less say queen of sheba comes back and her child is the the ultimate legendary heir or founder or whatever of the dynasty that becomes the ethiopian royal dynasty yes there's a right behind you yvonne uh maybe just to uh add a little temporal uh perspective uh aksum controls yemen around the same time that the prophet muhammad is born round 570 570 a.d yep and so it's continuing to be important even after islam um okay here's just another picture this these churches are so cool right i want i want one of those [Laughter] you should go make one yeah can you imagine was that like for defensive purposes or something i i think it's just to be cool ethiopia okay okay another thing they got so this is oxum the city of oxime in ethiopia this is a part of the the central church the cathedral of our lady mary of zion uh then there's a little chapel here that's the chapel of the tablet that's the temple nobody's allowed to go to into except for the top ethiopian clergy because inside there is kept according to the ethiopian church the ark of the covenant so why not they have that too so they've got that uh served so that whole movie about you know harrison ford they they they was not apparently not the real one because the real one is here okay and then of course they have their own bible oh there was a question um is there any historical validity for queen of sheba and i'm thinking does it relate to or is there any connections with the ethiopian jews or were they jews that migrated from palestine after or was there is there any historical connection with ethiopian jews and the queen of sheba it elizabeth wants to comment on that wait that's right that's right my stepmother was a musicologist and she had friends who were musicologists and one of them uh was in that part of the world and went uh um i can't remember exactly but she uh what she wanted to study wasn't available so she went to um study the music of the philosopher the ethiopian jews and she figured that they had in fact been christians who reverted to being jews judging by their music and their liturgy i don't know i don't think anybody knows but i i figure if they say they're jews and they worship like jews and they're treated like jews they're jews right but they might have been christians originally yeah so we'll have to um in terms of the what yeah take that back in terms of we'll you know we'll leave with who the exact um all the you know the exact status of the ethiopian jews to genetic testing but i can say from history the historical portion of it um so there is already like i said in the in the christian era so by the 300s and 400s so be i guess the 200s and 300s so before it converts to christianity there's already a big jewish presence and influence in acts of my kingdom and uh after the even after the axonic kingdom becomes christian uh over in yemen there is a jewish uh ruling dynasty uh that is actually ruling down their yemen and they actually at war with the axomites eventually and so one of the kind of in the heyday of that so there are very important jewish communities that are are down there in jewish influences and so there could have been jews very very there were jews very early down there um what i would say is that all of that massively um post dates when the queen of sheba would have been around so um i would i i personally question whether solomon is a historical figure um much less the queen of sheba so probably i would say that these are later stories so they're written closer to the destruction of the jerusalem temple and so for there to be historical basis for it i would think is unlikely so there are a lot of times a monarchy will almost always have um an origin story that come comes from somewhere important so the um the the the gus you know julius caesar is descended ultimately from aeneas you know who is a trojan prince who escaped from the trojan war so he's part of that homeric epic right uh likewise the because that's such a good story so that's also true for the kings of the franks you know so so that's also true for charlemagne you know he's also descended from a cloak a little-known trojan prince named francis actually turns out that's what the mayor of engines claimed anyway so so anyway there's usually those kind of things and so and so i would say that that's how where the kind of the ethiopian tradition comes from but it is a very ancient tradition of connection to judaism and and christianity okay so um one of the things that they have though is their own bible so they're cut off they're not part of these debates that are happening in the latin west with augustine and jerome about what should be in the bible and what shouldn't and so they have the same bible all the books that were in the septuagint so another is the same as the greek orthodox and also the catholics but they also then have five additional books the book of enoch the book of jubilees and three ethiopian books of maccabees which are different from the other books of maccabees that exist in the apocrypha okay so to actually get to the topic of enoch which we have to do otherwise you'll all die so who we'll all be as old as methuselah by the time we get to enoch right so anyway who was enoch um uh enoch is one of the legendary figures from that what i call the baguettes section of genesis so if so and so we get so and so we get so-and-so and so he's included in the lineage from adam to noah which is to say after the canaan abel story and before the flood story and so he's listed as the seventh from adam and is the great grandfather of noah so if we're going to do a one of the genealogy chart used you know from those begets adam and eve seth enosh keenan mahalia jared enoch is right here methuselah lamech noah and then noah's three sons him shaman japheth himself ham shem and japheth that's where jared is that's where jared is so i'll just read this is what the begets sound like so this is genesis 5 18 and 20. when jared had lived 162 years he became the father of enoch jared lived after the birth of enoch 800 years and had other sons and daughters thus all the days of jared were 962 years and he died and so almost all of the baguettes go like that so the formula for every one of these guys we don't know anything more about them almost than that and we'll have a formula the number of years is different for each one of them but more or less that's how they all go except for this one so so for enoch when enoch had lived 65 years he became the father of methuselah enoch before the formula goes jared lived after the birth of this one it says instead of that it says enoch walked with god after the birth of methuselah 300 years and had other sons and daughters thus all the days of enoch were 365 years so much less enoch walked with god then he was no more because god took him and that's it so that's all we got but that all by itself you can imagine in a whole list of begets where everybody's living all these thousand years long and yet we don't have any details of their lives at all until suddenly boom you know here we have uh he guy who lives only a much shorter time he walks with god and then he's no more because god took him so that uh has inspired a lot of let's say speculation and ultimately fan fiction so john we have only 16 more slides to go through in the next 15 minutes so i will suggest to everyone maybe we hold our questions yes until the end and we do a q a yeah we'll do it at the end thank you that's a good point i should have been doing it okay so we're just looking at the book of enoch itself now uh which we'll spend a little time at it so the book of enoch as we have it as divided into five sections or books and these probably are originally different texts so probably what's happened is that there's an editor who has put together a bunch of unique material and in some cases maybe we're putting some of the unique material together and maybe expanded it to make another portion of the book so what we have are called the book of watchers the book of similitudes or parables the book of astronomical writings the book of dream vision and the book of the epistle of enoch and these are different you know kind of in order the different chapters and the oldest parts here may be written as early as the 4th or 3rd century bc and so that's like the book of washers and this book of astronomical writings the book of astronomical writings we had back at the beginning of january we had a lecture on calendars and we mentioned how there was this whole book of jubilees where they completely changed the jewish calendar and created a brand new calendar and they rewrote the bible the biblical history in a book called the book of jubilees and this different calendar um which meant that they did all their religious services at a different time than all other jews that was also something that they liked a lot at qumran and so they had both jubilees and enoch and they're both on this kind of calendar and so it's talking about this kind of proposed challengical reform that gets retrojected back so this was the original calendar right this is the calendar that they had back in enix time and so that makes it makes it more important but we can also look at the calendar and say well the earliest it could possibly be based on how they created this calendar is like the fourth or third century probably okay and then the more recent stuff then would have been right in the first century let's say or the later maccabean period and so again there are prophecies about the maccabean revolt that are very very specific just like happens in daniel and that's why we can date daniel so cl so clearly because it it tracks the book of daniel tracks everything that happens exactly in the maccabean history all the way up until one a particular moment and then it goes wildly wrong so it gets the next part completely wrong it makes very specific errors very immediately after and so we can date daniel very clearly to when it was written right right up to here after that it was written and then it was wrong you know so essentially that's how we date daniel likewise here we can do that with enoch which is written parts of it anyway this book of the dream vision is predict making similar kinds of apocalyptic traditions i'm sorry apocalyptic predictions just like are in the book of daniel okay so we want to look at a couple little portions of the text and so one of the things that i first was always drawn to when i was a kid there's an expansion of this flood story so one of the few stories that exists in genesis about the time period before noah and so there is an explanation in genesis it's kind of brief and again we don't really understand what it's about um and that kind of begs for an expansion there's a vast expansion of that in the book of enoch that explains what's going on and so we'll read a little bit of it here it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters and the angels the children of the heavens saw and lusted after them and said one to another come let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children and some jazza who was their leader said unto them i fear ye will not indeed agree to do this deed and i alone shall have to pay the penalty of this great sin so he's got all these guys are they're like saying hey wouldn't that be great to go down and and and get some of these lady humans you know and they're like you're gonna he's like you're gonna turn on me and so no they said they say all institutive said let's swear an oath and all bind ourselves by mutual imprecations not to abandon this plan but to do this thing so they take a blood oath together and they were all in and say they were in all 200 who descended in the days of jared on the summit of mount hermon and these are the names of their leaders sam lazazz their leader uh eric eric labla ericobla ramiel blell tam lel ramel daniel ezequal barakujal aseal amaros bataro anal zakiel samsebel lots and lots of anyway lots of angels so this is way more angel names than we actually get in the bible right and so now we're to this era now where these are actually the fallen angels right so these are the bad angels and so we get a whole bunch of demon names uh here okay but then after after they go and do it and they they go and have the kids and they then uh create uh kind of a new kind of hybrid society one of the things they do in the story is then they also do this thing like prometheus does in greek mythology you know where he gives fire to people so all these angels now give all kinds of secret knowledge to humanity and so humans can now have uh cities and have weapons of war and they can have books and things like that because they're taught all these forbidden knowledge by the bad angels so then when that all happens back up in heaven the good angels are kind of looking down so then michael uriel raphael and gabriel looked down from heaven and saw how much blood being shed upon the earth and all the lawlessness being wrought upon the earth and they said to the lord of the ages lord of lords god of gods king of kings and god of the ages and that actually goes on i give you a dot dot dot there because otherwise okay take on forever thou see us what azazel has done so what one of these bad angels hath done who hath taught all unrighteousness on earth and revealed the eternal secrets which were preserved in heaven so he's given away all the secret knowledge they have gone to the daughters of men upon the earth they have slept with the women and defiled themselves and revealed to them all kinds of sins and now the women have borne giants and the whole earth is thereby filled with blood and unrighteousness and so this is the origin for example in the in the genesis story of you know the like people like goliath right so giants in the earth so god sends then um the archangel uriel to warn noah and his family of the coming flood and he sends michael and the other archangels to go after these fallen angels to bind them right and cast them into the pit and so anyway so this is a big expansion of a couple verses in genesis and it's actually way longer in evening than that so one of the things that this gives us though you know is this angelology and actually these names of the four archangels so this is a christian church that has michael gabriel i'm sorry michael it's in the order here uriel michael gabriel and raphael right and so there there they are in in the in the stained glass um and so this is becomes a very important source for angelology the book of enoch so for these archangels michael gabriel raphael and uriel they're only make they only make it into the um hebrew bible michael gabriel and raphael in the book of daniel here and then raphael is in the book of tobit which is actually one of the neutral canonical books of the apocrypha so it isn't actually in the tenoch right and so daniel again you can see this is again this one of this this late book uh the related book a book where they have these kind of apocryphal or rather apocalyptic concerns this is also really on the minds of the christians and so uh michael and gabriel have pretty important roles in in the christian new testament so gabriel is uh the herald of heaven that comes and has the annunciation for mary you know hail mary blessed are you among women uh likewise uh michael is in jude because of this quotation of the um of the book of enoch but he's also in the book of revelation as the angel with the sword that's casting you know lucifer out of heaven right and all three of those angels make it into uh the quran as well although raphael has a different name uh but it's understood to be anyway so they actually have different names close names um okay so this also then becomes uh the real like like i say it's in the that church we see those four angels even though uriel doesn't actually make it into any of the canon so there is not so also uriel is sometimes substituted with other names because there are other apocryphal books that say other that have other names but essentially that's what it is in enoch and so the most common one and so for example as people kind of created this kind of uh angels of the four corners of the earth uh the of the four elements earth fire and water of the cardinal directions of time and everything like that then they associate you know again the angels with those different points in various kinds of mysticism and also magic practices and other things like that and just stories about angels it's also then a source of this demonology right so we have all these names of demons so behold the names of those fallen angels and these are the names the first of them is sam jazza the second is artik the third is armen the fourth is kookabell you know and so on and so forth so we have lots and lots of names of devils that also then get mined for um black magic right and sorcery and things like that uh and part of the ideas of even the um later mythologies of of and elaborations of the stories of hell and things i'm under a quote a little bit of this one uh in the next tier of the fallen angels we have some of the things that these angels taught all of humans right uh so the secret knowledge so the third of the second tier of fallen angels is god your eel he who showed it to the children of men all the blows of death and he led astray eve by the way so now we have the identity of the person who did that and he showed the weapons of death to some of the sons of men the shield and the coat of mail and the sword for battle and all the weapons of death to the children of men and then the fourth is named uh penamui and he taught the children of men the bitter and the sweet he taught them all the secrets of their wisdom and he instructed mankind in writing and with ink and paper and thereby many sinned from eternity and eternity into this day so people are sending they've been told by the demons both the sword and the pen and they've been able to use those for unrighteousness ever since according to the book of enoch okay it's also uh and one of the reasons why it was so important to early christians it's also a big source of uh messianism and this was also why they elected it qumran so the dead sea scrolls people are very much people on the outs with the contemporary authorities in jerusalem they've been kicked out of of being able to be the priests in jerusalem and they looking forward to a day when they and their interpretation and their calendar and every other one of these kind of ideas about purity uh when a a massive apocalyptic event will occur and they will be the righteous ones that are going to be restored in a new jerusalem and a new temple messianic figures that are coming with that so for example here's another portion of enoch about about messiah so i saw and there i saw one who had a head of days and his head was white like wool so there's one big white-headed guy in sky and with him was another being whose countenance had the appearance of a man and his face was full of graciousness like one of the holy angels and i asked the angel who went with me so enoch is going through heaven's having this vision he's got an angel guide which is one of the ways you always have these kind of visions uh it's like in the book of revelation which is another apocalypse so i asked the angel who went with me and who showed me all the hidden things concerning that son of man who he was and whence he was and why he went with the head of days who is the son of man this title uh important apocalyptic title in second uh second temple jewish apocalypticism and the answer i'm sorry the angel answered and said unto me this is the son of man who hath righteousness with whom dwelleth righteousness and who revealed all the treasures of that which is hidden because the lord of spirits has chosen him and whose lot hath the preeminence before the lord of spirits in uprightness forever for in those days the elect one shall rise and he shall choose the righteousness and the holy from among them for the day has drawn nigh that they should be saved so you can kind of see here you know why this you know was something that early christians kind of read and looked forward to and they saw in terms of their understanding of of of jesus as as the messiah or as the greek version for that is christ um why they're kind of then seeing you know in the the title um in the gospels jesus frequently uses then is calls himself by the title son of man right the son of man it says this from that anyway this idea of again an apocalyptic future uh and it's about the salvation and the where the righteous are vindicated so um that's all we have time to dip our oars in but i'll just say then uh there's actually an amazing amount to this book it's a very um it's substantial it's a long book and it's had a very long reach so it has affected even though it didn't make it into the canon in the christian west it actually has ended up influencing our ideas about angels and demons and it also influenced it was also very characteristic of second temple jewish thought at least among the apocalyptic groups uh out of which christianity emerged and so when we go back and we look at these things we can kind of see christianity wasn't such a bizarre thing how did this thing come out of the root it's actually there is this stream that exists obviously the rabbinic proto-rabbinic part is also there too and there's already this division that happens between the two religions even before even before the candidates are formed so we'll conclude with that with the formal report of the lecture and uh we'll go ahead and to q aggressive [Applause] so we had to pause on the yeah questions or comments yes tell us who these different people are in this picture oh in this picture so i you know i'm pulling these are so i'm pulling illustrations from ethiopian bibles right and so because i just want to give people a flavor for them unfortunately i do not speak um you know the ethiopian liturgical language you know and so i can't actually go through and say what the caption says and who these people are i'm presuming over there there's an angel that's slaying a devil so there's very likely michael and that's very likely lucifer um anything sticking out at us at what these stories are i can't i can't i can't identify them all for you that's a devil yeah yep yep that's why i picked that one uh can you give a word on the uh there are three books or three or four books of enoch uh the tradition of of where it carried in thought between enoch one two three four yeah so um so this one is the one i bought this one out because this one is the important one so in like you say this one's called first enik these attributions of the numbers are later than the texts so essentially enoch is a we i read that in genesis right where we have that kind of um nuget of something that just makes people want to know more about that story right and so this is a figure you maybe aren't as worried about what happened to mahalo ill you know because we don't know anything about him so we don't have any books in mahalo but a lot of people wanted to think about what happened with enoch as this important figure and so a lot of people wrote enoch's stories and so i can even say that in our my own tradition in this in this church um we have from the 19th century a piece of scripture that's called essentially the vision of enoch that re um where there's a vis an enoch story you know that's told again about this like this is where the story of enoch is told and about enoch creating a perfect city where there's a city where everybody where there's you know it's essentially zion and a new jerusalem that was built in this time and so that in fact it wasn't only enoch that walks with god but an entire society is actually able to be made where they abolish poverty and suffering where they promote peace where they live life meaningfully together and that whole city then is taken up into heaven before the flood and so anyway i'm just saying that that's that would be maybe if we were going to assign it a number then that would be like fifth enik and so the other books i would say are either probably they're not related or there may be somebody who has seen this book of enoch and is writing more but it didn't but they are aren't part of the same tradition years of authorship were about 200 bc did i get that right yeah so different components of the book of this book of enoch that we were talking about today what's sometimes called first enoch are composed at different times the oldest parts are maybe from the fourth and third century and the latest parts are maybe from the first century bc when were they written so i don't have the dates in front of me i don't know i'm sorry john we either have to use the microphone or you have to repeat the questions okay yeah we have to so go give the microphone to someone just like i'm gonna take a picture of you guys thank you i'm sorry i gotta remember to take pictures part one uh the ethiopian liturgical language is that uh coptic egyptian no it's so i wrote it somewhere on here it's like gay a or gays i don't i i have it written down and i don't know it do you know the what it's called uh the liturgical language is guess okay so gay is and so this is to say ancient ethiopians so it would be in the ethiopian that they would have been speaking back when they translated the text you know in the in the four five hundreds or whatever it would have been and so then ethiopian has continued on to the to the present in this it's a more modern language and coptic is um is egyptian the ancient egyptian language as it was spoken in um hellenistic egypt so there's a bunch of greek loanwords and it's written in the greek alphabet or a modified version of the greek alphabet but it is the ancient uh it's it's a descendant of ancient egyptian yeah yeah okay anyway and so and so essentially that language got displaced uh by a related the related language of arabic when in the islamic conquest but coptic then continues to be the liturgical language of the coptic orthodox church which is in communion with the ethiopian orthodox church but their different church they're autocephalous okay part two um the the two quotations or two or three that you um provided from the book of enoch there was that theme that at least i picked up on about righteousness and that ethical dimension and mentioned one you saw one of the slaw earlier slides that in kurum that uh the book of enoch uh was part of that canon or part of that tradition uh is could you comment on the the the connection or the influence of this on um some of the the writings from the dead city scroll yeah so um i would say that this book is also from the same time period and the same basic genre and era you know so people which is to say jewish writers in aramaic and hebrew maybe who are kind of writing in that sec later second temple period so after um after the persian empire has fallen to the cellucids and the ptolemies and so in that kind of time period when greeks are ruling um syria and egypt and in some cases then when there is a period of independence for the jewish people under the maccabees so but still the maccabees almost immediately um the hasmonean kings even though they're jewish they aren't of the right as for a lot of the jews they aren't since they're not davidic they're not from the right royal house and they also are not zadokite so they're not from the right priestly line and so even though they call themselves king and high priest there's all kinds of um jews in the second temple period who feel that these hasmoneans don't have the right to be king or high priest and so a lot of them are are kind of on the outs and so they are sitting around in their own kind of like qumran they're sitting around essentially in their own kind of exiled self-imposed exile communities uh and they are waiting for vindication from god so um they have read and they understand you know that uh people who are are going to be you know when you look at the old testament if you are wicked you're eventually going to get cast down and you know and fall according to um the deuteronomic cycle and the people who are righteous are going to be vindicated and so they increasingly um look to kind of apocalyptic predictions of that happening and so and so i would say that this text fits very strongly into like a lot of the other apocalyptic texts that they are really excited about it qumran so they believe in multiple messiahs they're not particularly looking forward to a messiah that would be like jesus but they believe in actually multiple different spiritual messiahs a a priest messiah and a king messiah and so and there's a bunch of different predictive texts that are kind of interlaced with their kind of theology yes let's get that back at the very back would your guess be that jesus was familiar with the book of enoch it would be very hard to say so i don't know how the historical jesus it's hard for us to exactly identify um you know what we would say with the you know with what he's familiar with um to the extent that he's portrayed in the gospels so the jesus as portrayed by the gospel writers is very literate in the uh old testament um the old testament that they're using is the septuagint but again it's a it's a generations later that they're making that portrayal and they're using it um it could be so sometimes people like to draw a connection between for example jesus is ultimately his originally connected to john the baptist john the baptist is a reformer who is living out by the dead sea who is apocalyptic some people would like to connect him to qumran you know and if you're going to do that they've got it so it it's possible but um you know there are a couple yeah jane had christian are there followers of enoch in ethiopia to this day yes so this is in the canon so this book is in the ethiopian bible so it is this all of this is and and so as a result of that uh it has influenced different um some different traditions apparently in the ethiopian church so the ethiopian church has more um they have a lot more ideas about angels than anybody else has in their canon right because there's lots of angels and there's lots of demons there's lots of um of talk about the pre-existent messiah you know so there's a lot of apocalyptic predictions of the messiah that are in the enoch that we don't have in other other christian bibles and so as a result of their understanding of it ends up being a little different because it's in it's central to their bible they're christians yep it's just christians with one with five more books of the bible um just in the same way the catholics have a bunch more books of the bible than protestants yes daniel do you know about why the enoch named his son methuselah is anything written in that book why he named so um i would have to know so my problem in doing these things is that my my ancient language that i have is latin and so i don't i don't know hebrew so i don't know what methuselah means in i've heard i heard about somebody that meaning is when you pass away from this earth it will happen and okay some people are calculated and the the age of the methuselah when he the same time he died the flood happened yeah so so then what you would we would say then about that is is that you know the the the book is composed with that in mind right so it's either you can say it either way it's either the the god names that care a a person or a person has the inspiration his father is a prophet right so enoch is a prophet and so he names his son with that knowledge in mind or we understand it as a literary prophecy right and so it's written after the fact and and so that's with that intent literally and there's all sorts of puns like that in the hebrew bible so valerie had one i'm a complete heathen when it comes to remembering what and where is said in the bible and especially the new testament but did the young jesus not was he not did he not go missing at one point his family found them in debate with some or other yes elders at the temple on learned matters so yes i would assume that's indicative of his knowing you know scripture etc really well right so you're right so in the gospel of luke we have you know solely in the gospel look we have a story of the young jesus who's you know one of the signs that you know he's going to be who he is is that as a boy he's in the he found in the temple and he's um astounding all of the all of the scholars and and so there's when we're talking about when there's a question when i'm asked about the historical jesus that's very different from the jesus of the gospels so there's no particular reason to assert that that's a historical story it's a story of how luke understands jesus based on luke's theological text and writing and so the way jesus is portrayed in the gospel of luke yes jesus would have known everything right and so and so and so would have therefore known enoch you know one person who obviously was conversant with if not the book of enoch an awful lot of the stuff here was john milton oh yeah uriel i think shows up i think uriel is in paradise lost yeah i don't know if a lot of the stuff is important yeah i don't know so i'm not sure that if it's been re certainly found by the hand of that by the time milton has it but these some of these ideas still keep on you know in other words they retain some of these things oriole is certainly one of the soloists in haydn's creation okay which is book seven of paradise lost yes so whether he whether he directly has it he has intermediate texts then that give him those names but anyway those those names of those angels have been maintained in the traditions whether or not like i say same thing with um whether or not the that proto-gospel of mary uh stayed in the canon the story stayed there right and so you have a question here interested in the um ethiopian church uh it seems almost like a a lost tribe to use a bad metaphor but could you provide some information in terms do they have a is a pope is there a lineage that they claim that has been dissented uninterrupted is there like a priest king like a melchizedek or provide some more information historical information on the ethiopian church please yep so it goes back to i mean their founder is fermentius and so he will been the first bishop of aksum and so the church will be led at this point by a patriarch and so that the first patriarch will have been fermentius and it will have been a success you know apostolic succession going back to you know when you technically when you're the first guy that converts the place you're often called the apostle to the to the ethiopians and so fermentius would be that in the same way that um st patrick right is the apostle to the irish even though he's actually the irish patron saint is actually british right and that's not fun for the irish if they think about it anyway as a british guy who went over to ireland and converted everybody same thing i mentioned that the um the apostle to the french is pseudo-pseudo dionysius the ariepoguide anyway sandini anyway and so in the same way it would be that way and then there'd be an apostolic succession in aksum you know the bishops of x on the patriarchs all the way down to the present um they uh it's therefore a patriarch the patriarch these eastern churches are all autocephalous which means that um they're they don't recognize any other thing as being ahead of them however um they are in communion with the eritrean orthodox church which is more recent because eritrea is not part of ethiopia anymore and also with the coptic orthodox church so the patriarch of alexandria in egypt who all is a successor of saint mark according to egyptian tradition and so um you know i'm saying mark the evangelist is the apostle to the egyptians and so anyway so saint mark um uh uh so anyway that guy who's the current head of the coptic church also has the title pope and so there's very um is the only i think he's the only one who i know of anyway other than the the pope of rome that retains the title so the pope of alexandria or or patriarch and so he would be the first among equals in the within the communion the the alexandrian patriarch but the the one in aksum is is in communion with him but also autocephalous so follow-up follow-up question and this made me a little um off-center so um can is there a connection with this book of enoch the ethiopian church and rastafariaism yeah so the question yeah highly selassie right the last king of kings the last emperor yeah anybody else we can throw in but yeah those that connection okay so we'll we'll do this as the last question and a formal question okay i do have i do have one more question okay one more question so this is not the last this is the penultimate question and then and so rasta how does rasta fit into this and we're not supposed to say rastafarianism because rasta is against isms and so they're not anionism and they're anti-ism rasta emerges in uh uh the west it's a kind of a post-crypt christian um uh black empowerment religion uh that is both in the united states and anywhere in the west but also jamaica especially and um saw uh the last highly celestia the last emperor of ethiopia as being kind of a predicted second messiah and so um they created it's created a a very serious um religion that is in some ways a little bit that pulls from stuff from the ethiopian orthodox church but is its own religion on top of it and so it's not um highly selassie although was aware of it um did not claim to be this messiah and was does not not participate in the religion so it's a religion that has a kind of messiah figure who was alive and who's now passed away or maybe gone into occlusion you know so he's not um anyway with us in in the flesh but um it's developed on its own in its own tradition there is a rasta center here that we go to and encounter world religions and the practitioners are actually um very very serious in their interpretation of the text and that includes things like enoch so they are interested in in these books but they read them in their own particular way that is raster way that is not the same and it's not part of the ethiopian orthodox church and later had one uh yeah no it's not me but leon berg oh yeah from facebook is asking john if you have any thoughts about joseph smith junior enhancing the enoch story in the old testament right so i mentioned this before i said that we have in our church or tradition of an ex 19th century book of scripture which is an expansion essentially a vision of enoch and so it's part of what our church is traditionally called inspired version of the bible we now call it scholarly we call it the joseph smith bible revision because it's his own kind of personal revision of things it includes a long additional visions that he is writing and composing based on his own theology and philosophy and those kind of things uh or inspiration um so in the same exact way that i would don't consider enoch to be a historical character and so all of the scriptures as far as i'm concerned are written by about enoch are written by people who are trying to explore their own theological ideas and their own let's say in the case of the apocalypse here of the book of enoch here their own predictions for um that that eventually there will be an apocalypse and then also a society where uh where justice will prevail you know where all of this wickedness that we perceive in the world will finally end you know and there will be uh you know the lion will lie down with the lamb like over here on our peace seal so in that exact same way what joseph smith is doing is also that same kind of midrash composition of of holy stories or new sacred stories based on biblical figures last one i'm going to wrap it up because it's you've been talking about canon yes and i wasn't aware there was a jewish can yes so could you explain what canon is so what is a canon so canon is simply uh like it means essentially church law is what the the word is going to mean and so it it's so it's the law for what books make it in the list so it's essentially your official registry of the book so we now think of it's very easy for us to just have a bible as one book and we have we we live in this age of wealth or one ebook or whatever it is and so it's very easy in antiquity you never would have nobody had that there's only one or two full bibles you know that are coming to us from antiquity and they're very rich and they're in the vatican you know treasury and things like that nobody had that they had the reason why these things are all called books is they're all and they're all about the same length is that that's the length of a scroll and if the book is too long like kings it'll they'll break it up into first and second kings and it's two scrolls and that's why you know it's there's two books or ezra nehemiah are one book but they're broken up into two scrolls or whatever and so essentially all you have is that scroll you don't have the whole thing and so what you end up having is you may you're never rich enough to have the whole bible probably so you may well have five or ten scrolls and so you're not sure what what counts as bible and what counts is not bible so that's why you have a list and that list is the canon of what's what's legally officially the stamp of the church of what's of what it is and judaism has that too so the rabbis all decided this is the list and these are what counts and this is the order the first time we have it no it's hard to say no it's the both the development of the cannon is happening kind of simultaneously um as we saw but i guess yeah the rabbis are done with their cannon before the christians are done with their cannon uh but then that the rabbi's work goes on so they eventually come up with a much more let's say a secure system of getting it right so that each copy is going to be the same as each other one so the rabbis are much more diligent about that than the people in the west are who like i say mostly just read it in translation right so christians are a little bit more you know lackadaisical because for christians the difference is you know than christian christianity between judaism and islam is for christians the what the word of god is not the bible the word of god is christ christ it says like i said at the beginning with the with john in the beginning was the word the logos and the word was with god and the word was god and the word became flesh and dwelt among us so for christians you know christ and the spirit are just as important or not as what the as the text the text is meant to point us to god with that we'll end and we can talk discussion over snacks thank you guys [Music] you

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Published: Tue Jun 22 2021