The Book of Enoch by Brian Godawa

Author:Brian Godawa [Godawa, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Embedded Pictures Publishing
Published: 2016-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

Here is the original text of 1 Enoch being quoted:

1 Enoch 1:9

And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones

To execute judgement upon all,

And to destroy all the ungodly:

And to convict all flesh

Of all the works of their ungodliness which they have ungodly committed,

And of all the hard things which ungodly sinners ‹have spoken against Him.[52]

While most Biblical scholars accept Jude’s quotation as being the prophecy from 1 Enoch, some deny this by arguing that Jude is merely quoting from a common source of 1 Enoch. This approach to interpretation hints at artful ad hoc dodging by pushing back the source into a “safe” past of unretrievable sources. But more importantly, it wouldn’t be consistently applied to other New Testament quotations. For instance, those same exegetes would surely not claim that Matthew’s quotation in Matt. 2:5-6 of a “prophet” that Messiah would be born in Bethlehem was from a further removed “common source” with Isaiah rather than from Isaiah himself. The list of these New Testament examples would of course be manifold.

Another approach to denying the influence of 1 Enoch on Jude is typified by Douglas Moo’s commentary on Jude. He writes, “To be sure, Jude claims that Enoch ‘prophesied.’ But this word need not mean ‘wrote an inspired prophetic book’; it could well mean simply ‘uttered in this instance a prophecy.’”[53]

On the face of it, this is a logical option, but not a probable one, unless one is willing to maintain a hermeneutical double standard. Yet again, applying this standard consistently forces one to conclude that Matthew was not affirming the total book of Isaiah when he quoted the prophecies, but only specific instances of prophecies from Isaiah. Something of which Moo would not want to be found guilty.

Of course, there are cases where apostles quote a saying as a singular cultural reference without connection to the rest of the source. Paul quotes the Stoic Aratus on Mars Hill this way (Acts 17:28), as well as Epimenedes of Crete (Titus 1:12), and Menander (1 Cor. 15:33). But the difference here is that Jude does not merely quote a verse from the book of 1 Enoch. He also follows the content patterns of 1 Enoch along with allusions and echoes of its phrases and language throughout his epistle.

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