Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE APOCALYPSE OF ENOCH. About this time the first books attributed to Enoch appear to have been written. The apocalyptic Christian writers of the first century, the author of the Epistle of Saint Jude (verse 14), and the author of the Epistle of Saint Barnabas (chapters iv. and xvi.) quote as sacred literature the books attributed to Enoch. The Book of the Jubilees and the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs also use them largely. Celsus appears to follow them. What Jesus says in his discourses, as reported by the Evangelists, has some very striking coincidences with these writings. Irensens, Tertul- lian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, the Apostolic Coustitutions, and the most ancient lists of canonical books all mention them. Syncellus gives two large fragments from them. Since 1821 critical science possesses, translated from the Ethiopic, a Book of Enoch, ? certainly the one had in hand by the author of the Book of Jubilees, the author of the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, and Syncellus, but which does not entirely agree with the quotations in Jude, and the Epistle of Barnabas, and other Fathers of the Church. Thanks to a recent discovery by M. Bouriant, we now possess almost a third of the Greek text. The book, as we have it, evidently does not exhibit all the writings attributed to Enoch, which it gives us altered, retouched (certain interpolatious, as xc. 38, are evident). It is a compilation (Bi(9Xm ‘evgx, Orig.) from pieces that have had each a different origin. We can distingnish seven parts in it: namely, (a) chaps. i.-xxxvi.; (li) chaps. xxxvii.-lxxi.; © chaps. Ixxii.-lxxxii.; (/) chaps. Ixxxiii.- xciii.; (e) chaps. xciv.-cv.; (/) chaps. cvi. cvii.; (g) chap. viii. by itself. The part (a) is full of wild angelology, and corresponds to what …
