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Thank you so much for your replies!

Perhaps you and Angel-Gal could decide which passages from the best Enoch version whould be likely to be most edifying, informative to post on this thread about such topics.

The problem with Enoch is that its antiquity can be proven – a copy found in the Dead Sea Scrolls was carbon dated to approximately 200 B.C.. Jude quoted it as Scripture. There are about 100 phrasings in the New Testament that appear rooted from Enoch.

The Jews however did not accept Enoch as part of their “canon” because it referred to Christ. And the Christian canon did not accept it because it was not part of the Jewish canon. (How bizarre, btw.) Some notable fathers of the Church protested, including Justin Martyr.

The bottom line is that the book of Enoch was kept, copied and perhaps altered by believers in diverse locations. And because the Enoch in the DSS is a copy – and fragmented at that – we are not assured that it is faithfully reproduced. With the Torah, the copies had to be so faithfully reproduced that even the slightest error caused the entire copy to be destroyed.

If all of this were not enough, the “New Age” believers have embraced the book of Enoch. And much of what you find on the Internet is some copy interpreted in some way by them.

IMHO, we must defer to the most recent and most scholarly translation available which is the one in Charlesworth’s Pseudepigrapha.

1 Enoch was translated from examining a 15th century Ethiopian manuscript comparing it with a late 18th century Ethiopian manuscript and the text of R. H. Charles. The oldest version was taken as the greater authority where there were differences. He also compares the oldest source to available Greek fragments. He looked at the Qumrun (Dead Sea Scroll) fragments in Aramaic but they didn’t influence his translation. As an example, here is a translation from a fragment of Enoch in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It refers to the height of the “giants” as 3,000 cubits. In his translation, the height is shown as 300 cubits.

2 Enoch is also provided in the Charlesworth collection. It is the Slavic version, very fragmented in 20 different sources. The differences are so great that they are shown in columns. This Enoch doesn’t look a lot like the 1 Enoch but it includes some fascinating prophesies.

3 Enoch is also provided in the Charlesworth collection. It is the Hebrew apocalypse of Enoch, a product of the Merkabah mystics. There is a direct connection between Merkabah literature and Qumran, the Jewish Kabbalah, etc.

IMHO, 1 Enoch is the most significant to the New Testament but one loses a lot of the “landscape” by not also reading about the other Enochs, fragments, etc.

However, until or unless a complete Enoch is recovered of as great or greater antiquity than the Dead Sea Scrolls – to which all of these fragments and “copies” can be compared, we cannot be completely confident that we have the whole manuscript. This is the sad result of both the Jews and the Christians not accepting Enoch in the various canons.

If anyone wishes to read up on Enoch, I very strongly suggest the Charlesworth collection and most importantly – pray about everything you read and let the Spirit guide your understanding - God alone is Truth and the Spirit alone can lead us into Truth. Likewise, I suggest that the Charlesworth collection be the primary source for excerpts on this thread.