Enoch as: The Go-Between
A Bridge Between Worlds
Found within the pages of the biblical record is the strange story of a man by the name of Enoch. Anyone familiar with The Bible is familiar with him. In both The Old Testament and The New Testament, it is related, in no uncertain terms, that “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, because God took him.”1 According to biblical scholars, Enoch is a man who holds the peculiar distinction of being the only patriarch whose life story does not end with the words: “And he died.” What is more, Paul elaborated on his story when he said, “By faith, Enoch was taken from this life so that he did not experience death. He could not be found because God had taken him away. But before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God.”2
So in the mouth of multiple witnesses, we have one of the most remarkable biographies—however brief—in all of Scripture, not to mention, this is the same man who supposedly penned numerous books as a result of his encounter with God. Yet flying in the face of such testimony, many of these same scholars—who all presumably believe in God’s ability to communicate—have chosen to repudiate the idea that Enoch actually wrote the books that bear his name. Attributing them instead to later writers, who allegedly borrowed Enoch’s name to lend authenticity to their own works, these so-called “experts” have categorized these texts as pseudepigrapha. In doing so, these remarkable books were stigmatized, and have ever since been tainted by equal parts of skepticism and doubt.
Story Continues Below
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Story Continues From Above
Even after the pioneering work of men like James Bruce and Richard Laurence, most biblical scholars insisted that The First Book of Enoch could not have existed during the time of The New Testament world, having placed its origins some three centuries after the birth of Christianity. That is, they did until 1947, when the unprecedented discovery of The Dead Sea Scrolls, in the Judean Desert, sparked a fervent, new wave of inquiry. Amongst the more than seven hundred fragmented documents discovered at Qumran, believers and skeptics alike were amazed to find remains of ten manuscripts of First Enoch, as well as several other works in the Enochic tradition, such as The Book of Jubilees and The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. Using carbon-14 dating, these ancient manuscripts were estimated to have been written at least as early as 200 B.C. No longer could anyone argue that these documents had not been produced before the birth of Christianity, or that these works were not in a position to influence those who walked and talked with Jesus of Nazareth.
More importantly, since those heady days of discovery, books like those ascribed to Enoch are no longer the sole property of cloistered scholars who discuss such arcane matters amongst themselves in darkened rooms, walled away from the rest of humanity, which is, according to them, bereft of their learned perspective. Now, thanks to today’s open-ended world of mass communication technology, those of us who choose to read these texts for ourselves are now in a position to come to our own conclusions, based on a comparison of them with their more familiar canonical counterparts. The fruits of such a labor are positively astounding. Far from lending credence to the pseudepigraphal theory of Enochic authorship, the resulting examination—free from the bias that often accompanies institutionally-sponsored reviews—demonstrates that these texts reveal an array of striking parallels between the teachings of Enoch and Jesus. In fact, it has been estimated there are at least one hundred known references in The New Testament that can be traced directly to the books ascribed to Enoch. In light of such a connection it appears that, more than any other figure in biblical history, Enoch stands as a veritable bridge between worlds, between that of The Old Testament and The New Testament.
