Three New Testament Passages Cited for the Angel View: The Readings and Their Difficulties

The angel view rests most heavily on three New Testament passages. Here we set out the main readings scholars discuss, together with the difficulties each one faces.

Jude 1:6-7 And the angels who did not keep their own domain but abandoned their proper dwelling, He has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day — just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural flesh, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.

• The angel reading: The Greek behind “likewise” in verse 7 reads literally “in the same way as these” (ton homoion tropon toutois). On this reading, “these” are the angels of verse 6. The sin of the angels who abandoned their dwelling was union with human women, and the men of Sodom likewise tried to violate “other flesh” (sarkos heteras, rendered “unnatural flesh” in the YLV), namely the angels who visited Lot (Genesis 19:1-5). This reading draws on the story of the Watchers in 1 Enoch.
• Other readings: There are two. One holds that “these” are Sodom and Gomorrah themselves, within verse 7, and that “the surrounding cities” (Jude 1:7) sinned in the same way as those two cities. The other holds that Jude 1:5-7 lists three examples (the people who were saved out of Egypt and afterward did not believe, in verse 5; the angels who abandoned their dwelling, in verse 6; and Sodom and Gomorrah, in verse 7) because they share one feature: rebellion that crossed the place and boundary God had set. The sin of the first example, the wilderness generation, was not marriage or immorality but unbelief: they “did not believe” (Jude 1:5). That supports this reading. What ties the three examples together is not union with other flesh, but rebellion beyond the bounds God had fixed.
• The answer from the text: The men of Sodom did not know their guests were angels. To them they were the “men” who had come to Lot’s house (Genesis 19:5: “Where are the men who came to you tonight?”). Jude 1:6 also never names Genesis 6 or the flood. To connect the angels who left their dwelling with the marriages of Genesis 6 is a link that comes from the story told in 1 Enoch, not from the text of Jude.

2 Peter 2:4-6 For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into Tartaros(deepest abyss of imprisonment) and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; and if He did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when He brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; and if He condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to destruction by reducing them to ashes, having made them an example to those who would afterward live ungodly;

• The angel reading: Because the flood (verse 5) comes right after the sin of the angels (verse 4), the sin of verse 4 must be the event of Genesis 6, just before the flood.
• Another reading: Verses 4 to 6 simply list three judgments in the order Scripture tells them: the rebel angels, the flood on the ancient world, and Sodom and Gomorrah. Nothing in the passage binds verses 4 and 5 into one event.
• The answer from the text: Peter calls the object of the flood “the world of the ungodly” (2 Peter 2:5). The passage contains no word that makes the angels of verse 4 and the flood of verse 5 a single event.

In 1 Peter 3:18, Peter writes that Messiah was “put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.” He then continues:

1 Peter 3:19-20 in which He also went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few — that is, eight souls — were brought safely through water.

Here “in which” refers back to the spirit in verse 18: it was Messiah, in the spirit, who went and proclaimed.

• The angel reading: When “spirits” (1 Peter 3:19) appears without a qualifier, it often refers to heavenly beings, and “the days of Noah” (1 Peter 3:20) are named specifically. So these must be the angels who sinned in Genesis 6.
• Other readings: One is that these are the spirits of people who disobeyed in the days of Noah and died in the flood. Hebrews calls the righteous who have gone before “the spirits of the righteous who have been made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23), so human spirits are also called “spirits.” Another is that Messiah, by His Spirit, proclaimed through Noah to the people of Noah’s own generation.
• The answer from the text: Their disobedience took place “when God’s patience waited” (1 Peter 3:20). Peter himself explains why the Lord waits: He is “patient toward us, not wishing that any should perish but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). God’s waiting is directed toward people who are being given time to turn back. The same sentence also contrasts the disobedient with those inside the ark, “a few, that is, eight souls” (1 Peter 3:20), so the natural reading in context is that the disobedient were people outside the ark. And from the beginning, the story of salvation has been aimed at human beings, not angels: “For it is not angels that He helps, but He helps the seed of Abraham” (Hebrews 2:16).