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ENOCH ALSO
Brother Daryl R. Coats
ENOCH ALSO
August 2006
"Looking for that blessed hope,"
(Titus 2:11-14)
To the world at large (and probably to many believers as
well), one of the most mysterious people in the Bible is
Enoch. Yet most of the mystery surrounding this prophet
results from the unrepentant heart attitudes of false
teachers and not from lack of information.
The Seventh from Adam
Three times the Bible lists Enoch’s genealogy (Genesis
5; Luke 3; 1 Chronicles 1)—and another time reminds
us that he was Adam’s great-great-great-great
grandson (Jude 14). The great-grandfather of Noah, Enoch
was a man of faith who pleased and walked with God.
"And Enoch walked with God: ..." (Genesis
5:24).
"By faith Enoch ... had this testimony, that
he pleased God. But without faith it is impossible to
please him: ..." (Hebrews 11:5-6).
Because of his faith, Enoch never died.
"By faith Enoch was translated that he
should not see death; and was not found, because God had
translated him: for before his translation he had this
testimony, that he pleased God" (Hebrews 11:5).
"Translated" comes to English
from the Latin word "transferre"
("carry across") and means
"conveyed from one state, condition, or
place to another." The title page of your
King James Bible explains that it was "translated
out of the original tongues." According to
2 Samuel 3:10, God translated the kingdom of Israel
"from the house of Saul" and to the house of
David. Colossians 1:13 assures those of us who are saved
that God "hath delivered us from the power
of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of
his dear Son." Enoch was taken bodily into
heaven, never to die.
A Prophet without Honor
More than 2000 years before the first advent, Enoch
was also a prophet who foretold the second advent of the
Lord Jesus Christ:
"And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam,
prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with
ten thousands of his saints, To execute judgment upon all,
and to convince all that are ungodly among them of their
ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of
all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken
against him" (Jude 14-15).
The truth of the Lord Jesus Christ’s return with His
saints—and of its being prophesied hundreds of years
before the birth of Noah—is so hated by the world at
large that false teachers have resorted to two tactics in
an attempt to discredit it.(1)
1) They falsely attribute Enoch’s prophesy to a
pseudopigraphal book known as "1 Enoch"
(or "Ethiopic Enoch"). By
claiming that Jude quotes a work of fiction instead of
recording the actual inspired words of God under the
moving of the Holy Ghost, false teachers are actually
carrying out their own private agendas (whether
discrediting the Bible, as the sceptics do; or seeking to
establish counterfeit scriptures as "genuine,"
as the Mormons do; or trying to "prove"
that Jesus came back in A.D. 70, as many "preterists"
do). Here’s how the footnotes in two
perversions of the Bible do it:
"The quotation is not from the O.T. but a
pseudopigraphal book known as I Enoch, which is dated
somewhere in the second century B.C." (New
Berkeley Version).
"quoted from the book of Enoch, 1.9"
(Oxford Annotated Study Bible edition of the Revised
Standard Version).(2)
2) They change the verb tenses of Enoch’s prophesy
and/or delete the reference to the Lord’s saints in
order to make it refer to a past event that had nothing
to do with the Lord’s saints. Notice how the verse
is perverted in some of the counterfeit "bibles":
"Behold the Lord came with his holy myriads"
(Revised Standard Version).
"Behold, the Lord has come with His myriads
of holy ones" (New Berkeley Version).
"Look! Jehovah came with his holy myriads"
(New World Translation).
"Behold, the Lord came with many thousands
of His holy ones" (New American Standard
Bible).
"The Lord will come with many thousands of
his holy angels" (Today’s English
Version).
"Look! The Lord is coming with thousands of
holy angels"(Contemporary English Version).(3)
"The" Book of Enoch
The pseudopigraphal 1 Enoch (not to be confused with
other supposed books of Enoch) does indeed contain a
passage that (at least as translated by "scholars")
agrees almost word for word with Jude 14-15 as found in
the Authorized King James Bible. (Sounds fishy, doesn’t
it?) But the manuscript and textual evidence behind 1
Enoch suggests very strongly that its author quoted Jude
and not vice versa.
Of the various versions of "Enoch,"
only the Ethiopic contains the passage from Jude.(4)
Twenty-nine manuscripts of this version exist, all of
which date from only the sixteenth-nineteenth centuries.
That’s 1500-1800 years after Jude was written!(5)
Imagine the audacity of critics who ridicule the King
James Bible because it was supposedly based on "late
manuscripts" and yet endorse manuscripts of
1 Enoch that are even more recent than those. The only
conclusion that one can draw from its manuscripts is that
1 Enoch is a medieval forgery that interpolated Jude 14-15
more than 1000 years after the completion of the New
Testament scriptures.(6)
The textual evidence for any supposed quotations of 1
Enoch is likewise weak. Notice how "1 Enoch
1:9" appears in R. H. Charles’s The
Apocrypha and Pseudopigrapha of the Old Testament in
English (pages 189-190).
And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of [His] holy
ones
To execute judgment upon all
And to destroy [all] the ungodly.
And to convict all flesh
Of all works [of their ungodliness] which they have
ungodly committed,
And of all the hard things which [ungodly sinners] have
spoken against Him.
According to Charles’s own explanatory note (p. 189),
the bracketed words in the passage above are not found in
1 Enoch but are "supplied"
from "the Greek." In order to
support the false claim that Jude quoted 1 Enoch, this
translator had to add words from Jude to make his case!(7)
Prophecy or History?
Context makes clear the foolishness of false teachers’
changing the verb tenses in Jude 14-15. Even though it
uses historical examples as illustrations, Jude is
obviously referring to future events: "unto
the judgment of the great day" (verse 6)
and "the last time" (verse 18).
Past tense verbs make no sense in such a context. In
addition, verse 14 says that Enoch prophesied. Prophecy
concerns future events, not past ones. Furthermore, Enoch
prophesied 134-434 years before the birth of Noah. A past-tense
"prophecy" would mean that the
Lord came back more than 1000 years before the flood.
What nonsense!(8)
Despite the contrary claims of false teachers, the Bible
is clear that Enoch’s "prophecy came
not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God
spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." As
such, it is not subject to false interpretations that
change the tenses of its verbs. Believers have a "more
sure word of prophecy" than sceptics and
scoffers who place their faith in fables (2 Peter 1:19-21).
Notes
(1) In context, the "these" and "them"
of Jude 14-15 are false teachers who speak against God (verse
15) because they "have gone in the way of Cain and
ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward" (verse
11). It therefore is no surprise that today’s false
teachers try so hard to nullify Enoch’s prophesy.
(2) Jude is further discredited by false claims that
verse 9 quotes a pseudopigraphal work known as the
Assumption of Moses. Only one fragmentary palimpsest
manuscript of this supposed work exists, a Latin work
that postdates Jude by at least 500 years, and nowhere
does that work mention Michael, Satan, or the body of
Moses. But the second-century heretical teacher Origen
claimed that Jude quoted this work, and the secondary
testimony of one Bible "scholar" is more
important to false teachers than the primary testimony of
the work supposedly in question.
Modern Bible scholars simply assume that the Jude 9
quotes an unpreserved portion of the book (see R. H.
Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudopigrapha of the Old
Testament in English, Vol. 2, Oxford University Press,
1913, page 409). For example, notes in the Oxford Study
Edition of the New English Bible claims that the "source
material" for Jude 9 "perhaps stood in"
the Assumption to Moses (my emphasis). When pressed to do
so, scholars admit, "We possess today only a
fragment of the book, and cannot verify [!] the quotation"
(Charles Torey, The Apocryphal Literature, Yale
University Press, 1945, page 19, my emphasis). Yet the
absence of evidence doesn’t stop them from dreaming
(excuse me: "hypothesizing’): "At this
point the manuscript breaks off. If the quotations in
Jude and the Church Fathers belong to this work (as C.
Clemens assumes with respect to most of them), there
followed the death of Moses, the appearance of the
archangel Michael, Michael’s struggle with Satan.
... The fragmentary nature of this manuscript leaves room
for this and other hypotheses" (Leonard Rost,
Judaism Outside the Hebrew Canon, translated by David E.
Green, Abingdon Press,1976, page 148, my emphasis). Of
course, the fact that Jude’s supposed "quoting"
of the Assumption of Moses is only an unverified
hypothesis does not stop Leonard Rost from stating as
fact that "the Epistle of Jude in the New Testament
quotes the Assumption of Moses in v. 9" (p. 30)!
(And for whatever it’s worth, calling a sixth-century
Latin palimpsest manuscript "The Assumption of Moses"
is itself merely a "scholarly" assumption that
Origen told the truth and that the manuscript in question
contains the text of the same book that Origen referred
to. Instead of the Assumption of Moses, this fragmentary
manuscript ought to be titled the Assumptions of Scholars
and False Teachers!)
(3) The Oxford English Dictionary defines "myriad"
as "a numeral: Ten thousand." (That same
dictionary explains that the prefix "myria-"
means "ten thousand" in the "names of
weights and measures of the metric system.") The
word comes to English from the Greek :ØD4"*, which
is found in all Greek manuscripts of Jude 14. Half of the
counterfeit versions cited above left the word undefined;
the other half mistranslated it as merely "thousands"
or "many thousands"—all in an attempt to
discredit Bible prophecy!
(4) Some scholars claim that fragments of a Greek version
of "Enoch" were found at Akhmim in 1892 and
that supposedly it, too, contains the passage.
(5) Some scholars claim that one of the 29 manuscripts
dates "all the way back" to the fifteenth
century (1400s). Several of them, however, postdate the
King James Bible. Four of them date back only to the 1800s.
(6) The way to get around this problem is to claim that
despite the manuscript evidence, 1 Enoch actually dates
back to A.D. 500 (still more than 400 years after Jude
was written) and is a translation of an older and still
undiscovered Greek version. Talk about faith (Hebrews 11:1)!
(7) R. H. Charles’s intentionally vague note is
intended to make careless readers presume that "the
Greek" refers to a Greek version of 1 Enoch, but
that cannot be so. If a Greek version of 1 Enoch existed,
Charles would have translated it instead of merely using
it to "supply" words missing in Ethiopic. No,
"the Greek" can only be a reference to the
Greek text of Jude itself.
(8) Nowhere do the scriptures state or even imply that
the Lord came to earth with "myriads" of "angels"
or "holy ones" in the days before the flood. To
the contrary, the days before the flood saw the coming of
the unholy "sons of God" who "saw the
daughters of men ... and they took them wives of all
which they chose" (Genesis 6:1-4).
—Daryl R. Coats
August 2006
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