Bible Review

The Ethiopian Falashas canonized Enoch.

Actually, in Greek it is in the aorist tense, signifying an event that was seen holistically as a past time. All the verbs used in Jude are in this aorist tense. The cumulative effect is to denote the end of a whole process.

Rebecca’s Children, Judaism and Christianity of the Roman World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). (See Bible Books)

On the other hand, we should not overlook the fact that in the first century the Romans recognized the Great Sanhedrin (Sanhedrin Gedolah) as the ruling body of Jews in Jerusalem. But as Charlesworth points out “an establishment must be distinguished from a normative theological system.”

The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and the New Testament (Cambridge University Press, 1985).

In addition a selection of the major Pseudepigrapha was published in 1984, edited by H.F.D. Sparks, The Apocryphal Old Testament (Oxford University Press).

Earlier, in 1773, some manuscripts of Enoch were brought to Europe, but they were translated into English only in 1821 and into German only in 1833.

See the first sidebar to this article.

See The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. by James M. Robinson and Marvin W. Meyer (San Francisco: Harper and Row; Leiden: Brill, 1977).