The Church Cut the Book of Enoch From the Bible.. Grok Read It and Found Out Why

The book of Enoch isn't in your Bible. The New Testament quotes it anyway, as prophecy. And when archaeologists opened a Christian monk's grave in Egypt, it was lying there with him, in Greek, in two different hands. The church had cut it from the Bible, and he took it into the ground. Grock has now read the book, and the men who threw it out. Next to the reason everyone quotes, they wrote down another one, and it isn't the one you were told. Two hundred angels come down on the summit of Mount Hermon, and their leader is nervous he's afraid he'll be the only one left to pay the penalty of a great sin so they all swear together binding each other with curses and go down to the daughters of men their children are giants in the version most of us can read they're three thousand ell's tall well over a kilometer taller than a Burj Khalifa and a half they eat everything people can grow when people can't feed them anymore the giants turn on them and devour mankind They devour each other as well and drink the blood. Enoch is the man the angels turn to. He writes down their plea for forgiveness and reads it out until he falls asleep. The answer comes back, no. Your petition will not be granted unto you throughout all the days of eternity. Jude's letter gives Enoch's words as a prophecy. Behold, he cometh with ten thousands of his holy ones. And that quote nearly cost Jude its place. Jerome wrote, about 300 years later, that Jude's letter was rejected by many because it quotes the book of Enoch. It stayed in by age and use. Even the church's historian in the 4th century still listed Jude among the writings people argued over. Another early Christian letter quotes Enoch with three words, the scripture says. For that writer, Enoch was scripture. Grok has a view on why it's gone, and anyone can read it. Grokipedia is an online encyclopedia, and its page on the Book of Enoch carries a line at the top, fact-checked by Grok. It gives the reasons you'll find everywhere. The book was written late, under the name of a man who couldn't have written it. It was used by sectarian movements, one breakaway Christian sect in particular, and that contributed to suspicions of heterodoxy among Orthodox leaders. And according to the page, Augustine dismissed it for inconsistencies, false statements, and because it wasn't in the Hebrew Bible. It's a careful machine. Someone once asked it whether the word Kophéphé appears in the Book of Enoch. It checked. It doesn't. That leaves two suspects. A book written late under a borrowed name and a sect. One man who fought for the book in writing had already heard the doubts about where it came from and he fought anyway. Tertullian was a Christian writer in Carthage and about 200 years after Jesus he sat down to tell Christian women what not to wear his source was this book the angels who rushed from heaven on the daughters of men he wrote were the ones who showed people metals and herbs spells the interpretation of the stars jewelry dyes and that black powder itself where with the eyelids and eyelashes are made prominent eyeliner came from fallen angels. For Tertullian, whatever's born is God's work, and whatever's plastered on top of it is the devil's. He also admitted the book is not received by some, because the Jews didn't count it either. His guess was that people couldn't see how it had survived the flood. Noah was his answer. Enoch's great-grandson could have carried it through, and if the flood had destroyed it, Noah could equally have renewed it under the Spirit's inspiration. He had an idea about why the Jews had dropped it. It may now seem that they rejected it for the same reason they rejected nearly everything else that tells of Christ. The book's defense sits in a lecture about makeup, and the same pages show people were already pushing it out. The doubters started out by making fun of it. A pagan critic claimed the book's angels had cried and that their tears had become the hot springs. The Christian who answered him turned it into a joke. Tears are salty, and most hot springs are fresh, so nobody would call them angels' tears, unless indeed the angels cried fresh water. A century and a half after Tertullian, a bishop in Gaul told the story of the angels gathering on Hermon and added that there's a book about it. I do not know whose. From then on, the book fails to secure a single favorable notice. The joking stopped there. A synod of bishops met at Laodicea in Phrygia and ruled that no psalms composed by private individuals nor any uncanonical books may be read in the church, but only the canonical books. Nobody even knows the year. It falls somewhere in a stretch of almost 40. What's certain is that the book Jude had quoted couldn't be read aloud where Christians gathered anymore. A book of church rules from the same years gave it a name. Among the apocryphal books of Moses and Enoch and Adam and Isaiah and David and Elijah, it warned, these were pernicious and repugnant to the truth. Jerome filed it among the apocrypha as a very well-known book under bans like these the book gradually passed out of circulation and knowledge in the western church pernicious Tertullian had called it scripture not two centuries before so the answer the book's critics give that it was never cut because it was never in doesn't hold nobody bans a book from being read in church unless it's being read in church the men who did it wrote their reasons down and the one they wrote isn't the one they're remembered for a byzantine monk some 400 years later copied the chapters about the angels into his history of the world and set a warning beside them his warning was that books like this shouldn't be taken seriously especially by the simpler people because jews and heretics had corrupted them his copy kept details the others don't have the mountain where the angels swore their oath was cursed so that there shall never depart from it cold and snow and frost and And his Greek gives them three sorts of children instead of one. Giants, Nephilim, and Elohim. For about nine centuries, those few pages were all the West had of the book. That's losing something in the age of the Vikings and getting it back the year of the Boston Tea Party. Even those pages had to be dug out. A scholar found the monks' chronicle in what had been a French queen's library and printed the angels' chapters. They were in paradise lost about 60 years later. One church never let go. In Ethiopia, the book was scripture, and in the 15th century, an emperor's reforms made that official. The Ethiopian church still reads it today, in a Bible of 81 books, and the only complete copies on earth are in its old language, Ge'ez. While Europe had a monk's warning, Ethiopia had the whole thing. Europe went looking for the rest. A French collector got a manuscript out of Egypt that he was sure was the book of Enoch, and for decades, Europe believed he had it. A scholar of the language finally read it and showed it was a different book entirely, and the hunt was back where it started. It took a Scottish explorer to go and get it. James Bruce reached Ethiopia, and four years later he was back in Europe with three copies of the complete book. He found it standing immediately before the Book of Job, which is its proper place in the Abyssinian canon. One copy went to the King of France, another to Oxford, and the third he kept. A fourth he gave to the Pope, and it sat in Rome unrecognized for more than two centuries, until a scholar traced it back to Bruce. Europe had the lost book in its hands and still didn't believe the man who'd brought it. A historian who studied the reaction blames his arrogance, vanity, and pettiness, and his boasts, embellishments, and lies. Bruce's Oxford copy became the first English translation, made inside the Bodleian Library, And it was so hard to get hold of that people in Germany decided the translator had suppressed it. Asked to publish the Ethiopic text itself, he said, I cannot, the manuscript not being my own, but belonging to the University of Oxford. Bruce had been dead about 90 years when a French archaeological mission at Akhmim in Upper Egypt opened that monk's grave, in a cemetery Christians had used for a thousand years. little book in it had 33 pages, bound in leather gone black with age. First came the Gospel of Peter. An apocalypse of Peter followed, bound in upside down and back to front. After them came the Book of Enoch in Greek, in two pieces, the second in a different hand. Somebody kept reading it, right through the ban. But a copy in a grave can't say when the book was first written, and Grock's first suspect is that it was written late, under a borrowed name. Bedouin found a cave near the Dead Sea a little over 70 years ago, Cave 4. In it were 575 manuscripts, most of them in tatters, a jigsaw with no picture on the box. Among the pieces were copies of Enoch in Aramaic, and the oldest had been copied a century and a half or more before Christ. One of them is about the sky. An angel shows Enoch six gates where the sun rises and six where it sets, and a year of exactly 364 days. Genesis gives Enoch 365 years of life. A year, a day, and a quarter short sounds like nothing, but in 30 years your calendar is a month off, and the book warns about four days people leave out of the count. Men go wrong therein. The cave held the giants too, in a separate book, and every part of Enoch was there except one. The chapter's about the son of man. An apologist says the first suspect is right that it's no earlier than the third century BC and not written by or in the time of Enoch Jude quoted it anyway and people were copying it before Christ late and borrowed explains why people doubted it but not why a church order put it among the pernicious books Tertullian said the Jews dropped the book because it spoke of Christ in those missing chapters a Son of Man is named before the sun and the signs were created and the kings of the earth shall see and recognize how he sits on the throne of his glory. The Gospels use that title for Jesus. The Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins. Those chapters end with Enoch taken up to heaven, where an angel tells him who the Son of Man is. The Ethiopic text has the angel say, Thou art, Enoch himself. The English translation that's still free online, the one you're most likely to find when you look this book up, was made by R.H. Charles a little over a century ago. His version has something else at that line. This is the Son of Man who was born unto righteousness. He argued that a passage had been lost and that a scribe had changed the text, so he put in a passage he'd reconstructed himself, and he owned up in a footnote that the Ethiopic reads, Two verses on, he did it again. This time it was the whole verse, turned from the second person into the third, so that it refers to the Son of Man and not to Enoch. Modern translators print what the manuscripts say. You are that son of man. Not one scrap of those chapters turned up in the cave that held every other part of the book. Whether Tertullian was right stays open. Grok's second suspect is the sect, and its page calls Tertullian a key Montanist figure. But one scholar went through every time Tertullian used Enoch and found that those passages came before he joined that sect, with one possible exception. That suspect falls away. Grok's headline leaves out a different heretic, one who did real damage. Mani, who founded a religion, seems to have revised a related book about the giants and made it one of the holy books of his followers. A church list of books not to be accepted would later name The Book About Og the Giant of Whom the Heretics Assert That After the Deluge He Fought With the Dragon. It doesn't name Enoch, but the giants were keeping bad company now. Half a reason, and none of them explains the anger in those lists. and the book didn't stay cut. This April, a congresswoman posted five words. Read the book of Enoch. More than 25,000 people liked it. An apologist's rebuttal got a little over 3,000. For every like the correction got, read it got seven or eight. A well-known commentator replied that her book club had just discussed what each fallen angel introduced to humanity and got 7,000 likes of her own. Even the oldest Ethiopic copy came back. In Berlin, there's a manuscript whose pages carry a 17th century commentary on the Book of Revelation. A team spent about 12 days photographing those pages under different colors of light, 10 years ago. Under the commentary were pieces of at least 9 older books, most of them from the 14th century or earlier. One was the oldest Ethiopic copy of the Book of Enoch anyone has. Someone had written about the end of the world straight over it. None of those copies brought the reason back with it. and the men who cut it had written that down too. A Christian chronicler, not long after Tertullian, noticed that the copies of Genesis disagreed. Some said the ones who came down to the daughters of men were angels of heaven. Others said sons of God. He chose. The sons of God, he decided, were the descendants of Seth, human beings. Within about a century, that reading had, as one scholar puts it, for all practical purposes, forced the angelic reading from the field. The old reading became a crime against the faith. A bishop in Brescia put it on his list of heresies. To another churchman, the story of the angels and the women was a blasphemous fable. A third thought it stupid. On the Jewish side, a rabbi used to curse anyone who called them children of God, and the rabbis put Enoch himself in the ledger of the wicked. The last major writer to hold the old reading, perhaps, wrote just after the year 300. Augustine wrote with Rome freshly sacked by the Goths. He didn't deny Enoch had left some divine writings, because Jude quotes him, but they weren't among the books the Hebrew priests had kept, for their antiquity brought them under suspicion, and it was impossible to ascertain whether these were his genuine writings. He did write that the apocryphal books contain so many false statements. He was more specific about which ones. Augustine believed in giants. On the shore at Utica he saw a man's molar tooth so big that, cut down to teeth like ours, a hundred, I fancy, could have been made out of it. He believed it belonged to some giant. He wrote about a woman in Rome just before the Goths came, so tall that surprising crowds from all quarters came to see her. The giants were never his problem. In his words, the writings under Enoch's name contain these fables about the giants, saying that their fathers were not men and are properly judged by prudent men to be not genuine the sons of god were according to the flesh the sons of seth the church didn't cut the giants it cut their fathers grok ends up there too past its headline further down the page it says Augustine favored a Sethite interpretation of Genesis 6 over the Anakim angel human unions influencing western christianity to view the book as non-authoritative It says the book recasts the origin of evil as cosmic rebellion rather than solely human sin. That's the reason in their own hand. Somebody decided which answer you were allowed to hear about where evil comes from and it wasn't this one. In Genesis, evil comes in with a man, a woman, and a piece of fruit. In this book, it comes down a mountain 200 strong and teaches us swords, spells, the stars, even writing with ink and paper, because men were not created for such a purpose. The whole earth was corrupted by what one angel taught, and the book puts it on him, to him ascribe all sin. The pages that monk took into the ground with him were those chapters, the angels on the mountain.