What the Text Itself Has Shown: A Word to Fellow Students of Scripture

We have looked at the council of heaven (Job 1 and 2, and Job 38), the sons of God of Genesis 6, the records of heavenly beings appearing in human form, the way evil spirits use human beings, the three New Testament passages (Jude 1:6-7; 2 Peter 2:4-6; 1 Peter 3:19-20), the history of interpretation, the fall of Satan, and the dividing of soul and spirit by the sword of the Spirit. All of it has been drawn from the inner unity of the sixty-six books of the canon and from the setting of the Hebrew and Greek texts. We believe this is the most reasonable and most biblical explanation, standing in full harmony with the whole canon.

One final matter concerns Jude’s quotation of Enoch.

Jude 1:14-15 It was also about these that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of His holy ones, to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.”

Because Jude quotes the prophecy of Enoch, the seventh from Adam, we readily acknowledge that a tradition containing a true prophecy of Enoch existed in ancient times. The facts are these.

• A sentence close to Jude 1:14-15 appears in 1 Enoch 1:9, a book of the Old Testament pseudepigrapha (often loosely called apocrypha). The verse survives nearly complete in a Greek manuscript of about the fifth or sixth century (the Akhmim manuscript) and in Ethiopic manuscripts from much later. A similar sentence also appears in a third-century Latin work (Pseudo-Cyprian), but scholars disagree over whether it quotes Jude or Enoch.
• The Aramaic manuscript from Qumran (4Q204, also called 4QEnoch c, from the late first century BC, column 1, lines 15-17) preserves only about six complete words of this verse. The rest was filled in by the editors from the Greek and Ethiopic versions and from Jude (Milik 1976; Gentry and Fountain 2017).
• Jude’s wording does not match any surviving text of 1 Enoch exactly. For this reason, alongside the view that Jude quoted 1 Enoch freely, scholars have also proposed that 1 Enoch and Jude both go back to an older common tradition (Peter J. Gentry and Andrew M. Fountain, Tyndale Bulletin 68.2, 2017).

That Jude quoted one passage of Enoch’s prophecy does not mean that the whole of 1 Enoch as we have it must be received as truth equal to Scripture. Paul quoted a line from the pagan poets, “For we also are His children” (Acts 17:28), and he quoted a Cretan prophet and said, “This testimony is true” (Titus 1:12-13), yet he did not endorse everything those writers wrote. The 1 Enoch we have today contains mythological elements that conflict with core truths of the sixty-six books, beginning with Hebrews 1:5: the distinction between spiritual beings and living souls, the nature of angels, and the justice of God, who holds man to account.

So what the apostle Jude quoted was not the whole of 1 Enoch, which was later woven together with mythological stories, but the original prophetic tradition of Enoch handed down from ancient times. The compilers of 1 Enoch placed that same prophecy at the head of their own book (1 Enoch 1:9). We believe this is a sound judgment, faithful both to scholarship and to Scripture. Let us therefore stand firmly on the sixty-six books of the canon, which are without error, and with the sword of the word that pierces to the division of soul and spirit, discern the truth fully in these last days.