Traces of Early Acquaintance in Europe with the Book of Enoch

Abstract

To WHAT EXTENT the literature ascribed to Enoch was known in Europe during the early Christian centuries cannot be determined with certainty. The larger part of Ethiopic Enoch was extant in a Greek translation, as the Syncellus fragments and the Gizeh MSS show. There was also a Latin version, probably of the same portions, and no doubt made from the Greek. Twelve years ago ('The original language of the Parables of Enoch' in Old Testament and Semitic Studies in Memory ofW. B. Harper, Chicago, 1908) I attempted to show that Book II, comprising cbs. 37-71, was translated directly from the Aramaic, and that the strange silence of all Patristic writers as to this remarkable book, whose Christian coloring, at least in' its present form, would have been especially tempting to them, renders it doubtful whether it was ever translated into Greek. Some eminent Aramaic scholars, among them N6ldeke, declared themselves convinced so far as my first contention was concerned, but hesitated to accept the argumentum e silentio. Charles, in The Book of Enoch (Oxford, 1912) and Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, II (Oxford, 1913), criticises in detail both of these positions, and finds himself unable to accept either. I reserve for another place a more exhaustive consideration of his arguments than could be given in my articles on Enoch in The NAew International Encyclovaedia ed. 2 (New York, 1915) and the Encyclopaedia Americana (New York, 1918). The Slavonic Enoch was a translation of a Greek text which in its earliest form probably goes back to a Hebrew or Aramaic original. No MS. of the Greek text has yet been found, and it seems to have left no important traces in Byzantine literature, though