the-book-of-enoch-r-h-charles - Fallen Angels

Introduction XXX Vll
book in Enoch ; but concludes, against Hilgenfeld and Tide-
man, that the Parables could not entirely be the work of a
Christian; for if they were such, there would undoubtedly
have been some reference to the crucified and risen Christ such
as we find in Test. Levi ^^ *. The difficulties of the case are
met, he believes, by supposing that a Christian Apocalypse has
been worked into the tissue of an earlier Jewish production, and
that all the Messiah passages are due to the former. His chief
arguments are : (i) the title ' son of a woman " could not have
been applied by a pre-Christian Jew to a supernatural jNIessiah;
(ii) a consistent text is possible by an omission of the Messiah
passages, a text also which answers to the title placed at the
beginning of each Parable ;
(iii) the closing chap. 71 confirms this
view where in the description of a Theophany there is no
mention of the Messiah and the title 'Son of Man ' is applied
to Enoch; (iv) the Book of Jubilees, though using Enoch
extensively, does not cite the Messiah passages.
Of these arguments the only one that can still be maintained
with any show of reason is (ii), and this in itself will have no
weight if we bear in mind the want of logical secLuence and the
frequent redundancy characteristic of Semitic writings generally
and of Jewish apocalypses in particular. Moreover, in no in-
stance that I am aware of does any superscription in Enoch give
an exact account of the chapters it introduces.
Hauskath, ]\ eutestameuUiche Zeitgeschichie, Erster Theil,
3rd ed., 1879, pp. 185-189, 191-193. The oldest book,
1-36 72-105, is referred to the time of J. Hyrcanus. Tlie
Parables, with the exception of the Noachic interpolations,
were probably composed in the reign of Herod the Great.
Hausrath thinks that the Messiah-passages may have won
somewhat of a Christian colouring in the process of translation
from Hebrew to G-reek and Greek to Ethiopic by Christian
hands.
LiPSius, art.
' Enoch ' in Smith and Waee's Dictionary of
Christian Biography, vol. ii, 1880, pp. 124-128. (1) The oldest