I've responded to your speculation.
Moses quoted from Enoch.
Jude quoted from Enoch.
The early Christians harmonized with what the book of Enoch presented about Jesus long before Jesus arrived.
The Jews taught from the book of Enoch in their temples.
The book of Enoch tells us Enoch wrote it.
You simply found people and AI who disagree...and posted their speculation as truth. Basically you reposted their speculation. You have zero proof Enoch didn't write the book of Enoch. (The first two. Illumination and Parables.)
Are you now going to say the only thing Noah took on board the ark was animals?
I have been a great reader and quoter of 1 Enoch as well as the others... and to know that ChatGPT syas he did not write it is more then a little sad to me.
The Book of Enoch is in the Ethiopian Bible.... WHY?
Here is what Grok has to say on the subject. Which is more simple then Chat but at the same time actually more understandable to me.
.
The Book of Enoch (usually called
1 Enoch in modern scholarship) is not considered to have been written by the biblical Enoch (the great-grandfather of Noah who “walked with God and was taken” (Genesis 5:18–24). Here’s why virtually all biblical scholars, historians, and experts in Second Temple Judaism agree it is a
pseudepigraphal work (written under a famous ancient name but actually composed much later):
1.
- The oldest manuscripts of 1 Enoch are in Geʿez (Ethiopic), but large portions survive in Aramaic from the Dead Sea Scrolls (Qumran).
- The Aramaic fragments from Qumran date physically to roughly 200–150 BCE, and linguistic analysis shows the texts themselves were composed between approximately 300 BCE and 100 BCE.
- Some sections are older than others:
- Book of the Watchers (chapters 1–36) → late 3rd century BCE (ca. 300–200 BCE)
- Astronomical Book (72–82) → possibly as early as late 3rd or early 2nd century BCE
- Book of Dreams and Epistle of Enoch → mid-2nd century BCE (around the Maccabean period)
- Parables/Similitudes (37–71) → debated, but most scholars place it late 1st century BCE or early 1st century CE
- This means the book was written 1,500–2,000+ years after the biblical Enoch would have lived (traditional biblical chronology places Enoch around 3300–3000 BCE or earlier).
2.
- The text contains clear references to events and ideas from the Hellenistic and early Roman periods:
- References to the “sons of the Greeks” and foreign kings in ways that fit the Seleucid period (3rd–2nd century BCE).
- The Parables of Enoch show knowledge of Seleucid and early Roman imperial ideology.
- The Animal Apocalypse (chapters 85–90) is a thinly veiled history of the world that culminates in the Maccabean Revolt (167–160 BCE) — an event that happened ~3,000 years after Enoch.
3.
- Pseudepigraphy (writing under an ancient worthy’s name) was an extremely common and accepted literary practice in ancient Judaism from about 300 BCE to 200 CE.
- Many works were attributed to Enoch, Moses, Abraham, Ezra, Baruch, etc., not because the authors were trying to deceive, but because they believed they were transmitting authentic revelation through that figure.
- 1 Enoch is part of a larger “Enochic tradition” that also produced 2 Enoch (Slavonic) and 3 Enoch (Hebrew, much later).
4.
- The book itself never explicitly claims “I, Enoch, wrote this in my lifetime.” Instead, it presents Enoch receiving visions and being commanded to write books for a distant future generation (e.g., 1 Enoch 81–82, 92:1, 104:10–13).
- This is a literary device that actually supports later authorship: the real authors believed Enoch had written secret books that were now, in the 3rd–1st centuries BCE, being revealed or re-copied for their own crisis-filled generation.
5.
- The Ethiopian Orthodox Church is the only major Christian body that includes 1 Enoch in its biblical canon, and even there it is recognized as having been transmitted and possibly expanded over centuries.
- Every other Jewish and Christian tradition (Rabbinic Judaism, Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox) treats it as non-canonical and post-Mosaic.
Summary
1 Enoch is a collection of writings composed primarily between the 3rd century BCE and the turn of the era by multiple Jewish authors living in the Second Temple period. They wrote in Enoch’s name because they revered him as the original recipient of heavenly secrets and believed to be especially relevant for their own time. It is not a forgery in the modern sense, but a revered pseudepigraphon — and definitely not a book that the antediluvian Enoch himself wrote.
I also asked Grok why the Book of Enoch , if not written by Enoch is in the Etheopian Bible. The reply.
The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) is included in the canon of the
Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (and the smaller Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church) for a combination of historical, theological, and cultural reasons—even though virtually everyone in that tradition also knows it was not literally written by the biblical Enoch himself. Here’s why it ended up in their Bible while being excluded everywhere else:
1.
- Christianity reached Ethiopia (Axum) extremely early — probably in the 1st–2nd century, and officially in the 4th century (around 330 CE) when King Ezana converted.
- At that time, the Christian biblical canon was not yet closed. Different regions used different lists of books.
- Ethiopian Christians received their scriptures and traditions from Egypt and Syria, where books like Enoch, Jubilees, and 1–3 Maccabees, and others were widely read and sometimes treated as scripture.
2.
- Before 100 CE, 1 Enoch was one of the most popular and authoritative Jewish books outside the Torah. Fragments of at least 11–12 copies were found at Qumran.
- It is quoted or alluded to in the New Testament:
- Jude 1:14–15 directly quotes 1 Enoch 1:9.
- Many scholars see influence in 2 Peter, Revelation, Hebrews, and several sayings of Jesus.
- Early Church Fathers such as Tertullian, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Athenagoras, and Origen treated 1 Enoch as scripture or nearly scripture in the 2nd–3rd centuries.
3.
- After the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE), most of the Christian world split, but Ethiopia remained in communion with the Coptic (Egyptian) Church and was cut off from Rome and Constantinople.
- While the Western and Byzantine churches gradually narrowed their canons (dropping Enoch, Jubilees, etc. by the 4th–5th centuries), Ethiopia simply kept the older, broader collection they had received in the 4th–5th centuries.
- No later council or pressure forced them to remove those books.
4.
- By the Middle Ages, 1 Enoch had disappeared in Greek and was known only in fragments elsewhere.
- The only complete ancient version was preserved in Geʿez (classical Ethiopic), translated from Greek around the 5th–6th century CE.
- Because Ethiopians had the full text and had always used it liturgically and theologically for centuries, they naturally kept it as Holy Scripture.
5.
- 1 Enoch’s teachings about angels, the fall of the Watchers, the origin of evil spirits, and the coming judgment fit very well with Ethiopian spiritual worldview and liturgy.
- It is still read in Ethiopian churches during certain seasons and is deeply embedded in their art, hymns, and demonology.
In short:
The Ethiopian Orthodox Church includes 1 Enoch in its Bible
not because they believe Enoch wrote it with his own hand in antiquity, but because:
- They inherited a very early, broad canon from the 4th–5th centuries.
- The book was treated as scripture by many early Christians.
- Ethiopia was never forced to conform to the narrower canons of Rome or Constantinople.
- They preserved the only complete text and continued to venerate it.
So for Ethiopians, 1 Enoch is canonical scripture, inspired by God and authoritative—even though (like almost all scholars worldwide) they acknowledge it was written centuries after the biblical Enoch, under his revered name, by later Jewish visionaries.
I finalized a third question with how do we know what we read in the bible about Enoch is true. The response
The question “How do we know that what the Bible says about Enoch is true?” is ultimately a question of
faith, history, and epistemology. There is no single, objective, knock-out proof that everyone will accept, because the events are placed in the very distant pre-historical past. Here’s a clear breakdown of what we can and cannot say with confidence:
1. What the Bible actually says about Enoch (it’s very little)
- Genesis 5:18–24 (repeated in Hebrews 11:5 and Jude 1:14):
- He was the seventh patriarch after Adam.
- He lived 365 years.
- He “walked with God.”
- “God took him” (he did not die in the normal way).
- Sirach 44:16 and Wisdom 4:10–14 (in Catholic/Orthodox deuterocanon) add that he was an example of repentance and was translated to heaven.
- That’s essentially everything. The Bible gives no details about what he saw, wrote, or did beyond “walking with God.”
Everything else people think they know about Enoch (visions of heaven, fallen angels called Watchers, the names Azazel, Semjaza, etc.) comes from
1 Enoch, not from the canonical Bible.
2. Historical / archaeological evidence about Enoch himself
- There is zero extra-biblical evidence (inscriptions, tablets, etc.) that a man named Enoch ever existed.
- The entire antediluvian (pre-Flood) patriarch list in Genesis 5 and 11 has no confirmation outside the Bible.
- The earliest written versions of the Genesis patriarch stories appear only around 600–400 BCE (or slightly earlier in oral form), meaning they were written down 2,000+ years after the events they describe.
So from a strict historical method, the existence of the biblical Enoch is
unverifiable — the same category as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the earliest parts of Genesis.
3. How most religious traditions answer the question
Different groups give different answers to “How do we know it’s true?”:
| Tradition | How they “know” the Genesis account of Enoch is true |
|---|
| Orthodox & Conservative Judaism | The Torah is divine revelation given to Moses at Sinai; internal divine authority, not external proof, is what matters. |
| Traditional Christianity (Catholic, Orthodox, most Protestants) | Scripture is inspired by God; the Holy Spirit guarantees its truth in matters necessary for salvation. Historical details about Enoch are not central to salvation, so they don’t require archaeological proof. |
| Ethiopian & Eritrean Orthodox | Same as above, plus they accept 1 Enoch as scripture, so they have an expanded, authoritative account of what Enoch saw and did. |
| Evangelical / Fundamentalist Protestants | The Bible is inerrant in all it affirms, including historical details. Some will say absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or that future archaeology will confirm it. |
| Academic biblical scholars (secular or religious) | The story is part of ancient Israelite foundational mythology. Its “truth” is theological and literary, not necessarily historical in the modern sense. |
| Skeptics / atheists | No independent evidence → no reason to believe the story is historically true. |
4. Bottom line you can honestly say
We do
cannot prove in a scientific or courtroom sense that the biblical Enoch existed or that “God took him” without dying. We possess the story because it was preserved and canonized by ancient Israel and the Church as sacred tradition. For billions of Jews and Christians across history, the story is accepted as true on the authority of divine revelation, not on archaeological or historical evidence.
So the real difference isn’t between “evidence for Enoch” and “evidence against Enoch” — it’s between two ways of deciding what counts as reliable knowledge:
- Trust in divine revelation and sacred tradition, or
- Requiring independent, verifiable historical evidence.
Both positions are intellectually coherent; they just start from different premises.
