Magic Library

16

Extensive investigations have already been conducted regarding the age and the presumed author of the book. The result is that nothing certain can be determined about it. Not Tertullian alone *), but also several later ecclesiastical writers, and indeed even esteemed Protestant scholars long after the Reformation, have seriously asserted that it truly originates from Enoch, and have exerted all their wit to

in Syncellus had not escaped the two learned Jesuits, Schott and Kircher, even before Grabe and Fabricius, and that they used them for their doctrine of demons. But more on that elsewhere!

*) Scio Scripturam Enoch, says this church father in De Habitu muliebri On Women's Dress, Chapter III, "which gave this order to the angels, is not accepted by some, because it is not admitted into the Jewish treasury," etc. "I opine, they did not think that it, published before the flood, could have been preserved after that catastrophe of the world, which was the destroyer of all things. If that is the reason, let them remember that Enoch's great-grandson was a survivor of the flood of Noah, who at any rate, by domestic name and hereditary tradition, had heard and remembered about his great-grandfather’s grace before God and all his preachings; since Enoch entrusted to his son Methuselah nothing other than to pass on knowledge of these things to his descendants. Therefore, Noah could undoubtedly have succeeded in the delegation of preaching, or because he would not have remained silent otherwise, both about the disposition of God his preserver and about the glory of his house itself," etc. And so on—for with such hair-splitting arguments, that Enoch could have written the book, what must have determined him to write it, etc., Tertullian continues for several more periods. Because the name Enoch is mentioned in the citation in the Epistle of Jude, he takes this as new proof and concludes the whole thing with the following words: Eo accidit, quod Enoch apud Judam Apostolum testimonium possidet Therefore it happens that Enoch possesses testimony in the Apostle Jude. So much is certain: the book has a very distinctive character, a truly well-conceived, entirely special antiquity, and it is in this respect a precious monument of a vanished old time and old ways of thinking, no matter who it originates from.