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Jude Quotes a Book That Isn't in Your Bible · Theology Made Podcast

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  [music]
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  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to The Theology Made Podcast.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm Jordan Vale.
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  SPEAKER_00: In today's episode, we're going to look at how Jude quotes a book that isn't in your Bible.
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  SPEAKER_00: Right before Revelation,
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  SPEAKER_00: near the back of your Bible sits a letter you can read in about the time it takes
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  SPEAKER_00: to brew a cup of coffee.
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  SPEAKER_00: 25 verses.
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  SPEAKER_00: The author calls himself a servant of Jesus Christ and the brother of James.
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  SPEAKER_00: And about two-thirds of the way through, he quotes a prophecy.
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  SPEAKER_00: Behold, the Lord comes with 10,000 of his saints to execute judgment upon all.
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  SPEAKER_00: He names the prophet and he quotes the line with such confidence
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  SPEAKER_00: that you'd assume any reader could flip back a few hundred pages in the Bible
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  SPEAKER_00: and check it.
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  SPEAKER_00: So go ahead, flip back.
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  SPEAKER_00: Search Isaiah,
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  SPEAKER_00: search Daniel,
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  SPEAKER_00: or read all 39 books of the Old Testament if you have the time this afternoon,
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  SPEAKER_00: tomorrow, and the next day.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because the line isn't there.
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  SPEAKER_00: The book it comes from is missing from almost every Bible on earth,
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  SPEAKER_00: including the 1611 King James,
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  SPEAKER_00: the 80-book edition we opened on this show a couple of months ago.
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  SPEAKER_00: By late antiquity, it had fallen outside the biblical canon of the Latin West and Greek East.
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  SPEAKER_00: Only one family of churches still reads it as scripture, the ancient churches of Ethiopia.
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  SPEAKER_00: The prophet being quoted is a man Genesis says God took without ever recording his death.
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  SPEAKER_00: His name is Enoch.
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  SPEAKER_00: The man quoting him was, by the church's oldest memory, one of Jesus' own relatives.
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  SPEAKER_00: And this is the story of how the book he quoted became one of
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  SPEAKER_00: the reasons some early Christians questioned whether Jude itself belonged
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  SPEAKER_00: in Scripture,
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  SPEAKER_00: and how it waited a thousand years in a mountain kingdom until
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  SPEAKER_00: a Scottish explorer carried copies of it back to Europe.
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  SPEAKER_00: The letter opens with a name, Jude, which in Greek is Judas.
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  SPEAKER_00: English Bible is typically shortened, and you probably can guess why.
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  SPEAKER_00: He calls himself the brother of James,
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  SPEAKER_00: and the only James famous enough to need no further introductions was the James
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  SPEAKER_00: who led the church in Jerusalem.
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  SPEAKER_00: Mark's Gospel lists the brother of Jesus by name, and Judas is one of them.
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  SPEAKER_00: Scholars still argue about whether Jew wrote this letter himself or someone wrote it
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  SPEAKER_00: in his name,
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  SPEAKER_00: and the great traditions still disagree about what brother meant in that household.
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  SPEAKER_00: Either way though,
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  SPEAKER_00: the letter asks you to hear the voice of a man from Jesus' own family or
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  SPEAKER_00: at least close to it.
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  SPEAKER_00: So picture a relative of Jesus sitting down to warn the churches about intruders.
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  SPEAKER_00: When he needs an authority, he goes back to Enoch.
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  SPEAKER_00: The intruders are people who, as the King James put it, crept in unawares.
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  SPEAKER_00: They show up at the love feasts,
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  SPEAKER_00: the meals,
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  SPEAKER_00: where the whole congregation ate together,
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  SPEAKER_00: and Jude calls them hidden reefs at your feasts and clouds that carry no rain.
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  SPEAKER_00: To make his case, Jude goes into history, and the history he chooses is kind of odd.
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  SPEAKER_00: In verse 6,
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  SPEAKER_00: he mentions angels who abandoned their proper home and are now kept
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  SPEAKER_00: in everlasting chains under darkness.
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  SPEAKER_00: Genesis doesn't say anything about chains.
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  SPEAKER_00: In verse 9, he describes the archangel Michael arguing with the devil over the body of Moses.
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  SPEAKER_00: Again, a scene you could search the Old Testament for in vain.
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  SPEAKER_00: Origin of Alexandria,
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  SPEAKER_00: writing in the 3rd century,
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  SPEAKER_00: said Jude got the story from a Jewish work called The Assumption of Moses.
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  SPEAKER_00: A text usually associated with that work survives today,
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  SPEAKER_00: but its ending is missing along with the very scene Jude describes.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then comes verses 14 and 15.
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  SPEAKER_00: Don't you like the way it sounds in the King James?
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  SPEAKER_00: Now, set that beside the ninth verse of the first chapter of the book of Enoch.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it says, It's pretty much the same sentence.
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  SPEAKER_00: Jude even borrows the title,
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  SPEAKER_00: The Seventh from Adam, which the book of Enoch uses for its own hero.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's quoting closely enough that you can lay the two texts side by side,
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  SPEAKER_00: and he quotes it without explanation.
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  SPEAKER_00: Apparently expecting at least some of his readers to recognize the tradition
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  SPEAKER_00: and what he's doing.
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  SPEAKER_00: Paul quotes outside sources too.
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  SPEAKER_00: He cites a Greek poet and the philosophers in Athens.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he even has a line in the Corinthians from a comic playwriter.
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  SPEAKER_00: Evil communications corrupt good manners.
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  SPEAKER_00: And when Paul does that,
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  SPEAKER_00: he's just using words his audience already knew the way
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  SPEAKER_00: a preacher today might quote Shakespeare.
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  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I don't know a lot of preachers quoting Shakespeare.
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  SPEAKER_00: The way they might quote a different poet, like Tupac.
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  SPEAKER_00: Jude, he goes for a heavier word.
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  SPEAKER_00: Enoch, he says, prophesied.
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  SPEAKER_00: Genesis gives Enoch four verses.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's the seventh generation from Adam and the father of Methuselah.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he lived 365 years, one for every day of the solar year, which is probably no accident.
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  SPEAKER_00: Every man before him in that genealogy gets the same last line.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he died.
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  SPEAKER_00: Enoch's entry ends differently.
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  SPEAKER_00: Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's interesting.
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  SPEAKER_00: A man whose death Genesis never records had presumably gone somewhere
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  SPEAKER_00: and seen something,
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  SPEAKER_00: and in the centuries before Jesus,
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  SPEAKER_00: Jewish writers began filling that silence with visions.
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  SPEAKER_00: What we now call 1 Enoch,
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  SPEAKER_00: it's a collection of writings conventionally divided
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  SPEAKER_00: into five major sections composed over several centuries,
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  SPEAKER_00: and its oldest parts go back to the third century before Christ.
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  SPEAKER_00: The opening section is known as the Book of the Watchers,
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  SPEAKER_00: and it takes some of these strangest verses in Genesis 6.
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  SPEAKER_00: The ones about the sons of God and the daughters of men, and it builds out a whole story.
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  SPEAKER_00: 200 angels come down on Mount Hermon, bind themselves by an oath to take human wives.
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  SPEAKER_00: Their children are giants who eat everything the earth can grow and then start eating people.
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  SPEAKER_00: The angels also hand out special knowledge.
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  SPEAKER_00: One of them teaches men to forge swords and teaches women the arts of jewelry and eye paint.
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  SPEAKER_00: The flood arrives as God's answer to all of it,
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  SPEAKER_00: and when the giants die,
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  SPEAKER_00: their spirits stay behind to roam the earth as evil spirits.
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  SPEAKER_00: Enoch is the one sent to tell the Watchers they're finished.
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  SPEAKER_00: And along the way,
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  SPEAKER_00: he's carried up into a house,
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  SPEAKER_00: built a fire where God sits enthroned,
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  SPEAKER_00: and then led on a guided tour to the ends of the earth.
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  SPEAKER_00: So if you've ever heard a sermon explain demons as the ghosts of the Nephilim
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  SPEAKER_00: or wondered where Christians get the picture of angels chained in darkness,
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  SPEAKER_00: well, that's where it all comes from.
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  SPEAKER_00: The first Christians, they picked up that enthusiasm right where Jude left it.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Epistle of Barnabas, written around 1.30, cites Enoch by name.
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  SPEAKER_00: And at one point,
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  SPEAKER_00: it introduces material associated with the Enoch tradition with the words
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  SPEAKER_00: the scripture says.
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  SPEAKER_00: Justin Martyr in Rome and Arrhenius in Gaul both retell the story of the Watchers as
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  SPEAKER_00: if it was just history.
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  SPEAKER_00: And one of the book's loudest offenders was Tertullian or Carthage.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the setting of his defense tells you how ordinary the book was to him.
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  SPEAKER_00: Around the year 200, Tertullian wrote a treatise on how Christian women should dress.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's a long argument against jewelry and makeup, and to strengthen it, he cites Enoch.
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  SPEAKER_00: Since Enoch says the fallen angels were the ones who taught women cosmetics in the first place.
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  SPEAKER_00: So Tertullian ends up defending the boundary of the Bible in the middle of a lecture
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  SPEAKER_00: about eyeliner.
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  SPEAKER_00: He knows some Christians reject the book.
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  SPEAKER_00: Their objection is that the Jews don't keep it among their scriptures.
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  SPEAKER_00: And besides, how could a book written before the flood have survived it?
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  SPEAKER_00: And Tertullian has his answers.
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  SPEAKER_00: Noah was Enoch's great grandson, he points out.
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  SPEAKER_00: So the family could have preserved it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Failing that,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Holy Spirit could have restored it,
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  SPEAKER_00: the same way Jewish tradition said Ezra restored the scriptures after
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  SPEAKER_00: the Babylonians burned Jerusalem.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then in his mind, he plays the card that he thinks will end the discussion.
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  SPEAKER_00: Enoch, he writes, possesses a testimony in the apostle Jude.
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  SPEAKER_00: So that's Tertullian's logic.
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  SPEAKER_00: Jude quoted it, so Tertullian argues that Christians have a good reason to receive it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now, arguments like Tertullians have a hinge in them.
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  SPEAKER_00: If Jude vouches for Enoch, that also means Enoch can drag Jude down.
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  SPEAKER_00: And over the next two centuries, that's the direction the argument went.
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  SPEAKER_00: Origen, who quoted Enoch himself,
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  SPEAKER_00: admitted in the middle of the 3rd century that the books
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  SPEAKER_00: under Enoch's name weren't generally received as divine in the churches.
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  SPEAKER_00: When Eusebius wrote his church history around 325,
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  SPEAKER_00: he put Jude on the list of disputed books,
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  SPEAKER_00: the ones many churches knew but they still argued over.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then around the year 392,
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  SPEAKER_00: when Jerome compiled a short catalog of famous Christian writers,
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  SPEAKER_00: here's what he says about Jude.
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  SPEAKER_00: Jude left a short epistle,
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  SPEAKER_00: Jerome wrote,
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  SPEAKER_00: and because of quotes from the apocryphal book of Enoch, it is rejected by many.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then Jerome adds the sentence that helped keep the letter in your Bible.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nevertheless, by age and use, it has gained authority and is reckoned among the holy scriptures.
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  SPEAKER_00: So it's almost like Jude survived on seniority,
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  SPEAKER_00: or maybe more precisely on the long-standing use it had in the church.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then Augustine,
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  SPEAKER_00: as he often does, drew the line most of the church would eventually settle on.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the City of God,
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  SPEAKER_00: he grants that Enoch VII from Adam wrote some things by divine inspiration,
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  SPEAKER_00: since an apostle says so.
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  SPEAKER_00: The book circulating under Enoch's name, though,
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  SPEAKER_00: belongs outside the canon,
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  SPEAKER_00: because they were so old that nobody could trace how they'd been handed down.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so most of the church eventually split the difference.
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  SPEAKER_00: It kept Jude and his quotation while Enoch itself fell outside the canon.
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  SPEAKER_00: And you'll find Enoch described online as the banned book of the Bible,
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  SPEAKER_00: as if a council met one afternoon and burned every copy.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the record doesn't show that.
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  SPEAKER_00: The book faded in the same way an old hymn fades.
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  SPEAKER_00: One congregation at a time.
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  SPEAKER_00: Around the year 800,
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  SPEAKER_00: a Byzantine churchman named George Stenselis copied long passages about the Watchers
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  SPEAKER_00: into a chronicle of world history.
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  SPEAKER_00: And those excerpts were most of what Europe would know of Enoch for the next thousand years.
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  SPEAKER_00: At least one Christian in Egypt held on longer.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the winter of 1886-1887,
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  SPEAKER_00: French archaeologists digging in an old cemetery at Ackmin on the Nile opened
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  SPEAKER_00: the grave of a man they took to be a monk.
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  SPEAKER_00: He had been buried with a small parchment book,
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  SPEAKER_00: and inside it were the opening chapters of Enoch and Greek.
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  SPEAKER_00: And for those thousand years,
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  SPEAKER_00: a Christian in Paris or London could read Jude and have no way of looking up
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  SPEAKER_00: the source of Enoch.
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  SPEAKER_00: And in the 1630s,
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  SPEAKER_00: the French scholar Nicolas Cod Fabry de Peyresque acquired
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  SPEAKER_00: in Ethiopian manuscript out of Egypt convinced he had finally found Enoch,
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  SPEAKER_00: and it turned out to be a different book entirely,
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  SPEAKER_00: but the real one had been in Ethiopia all along.
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  SPEAKER_00: Christianity became the faith of the Ethiopian moral court in the 4th century,
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  SPEAKER_00: and King Yazana converted under the influence of a young man
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  SPEAKER_00: from Tyree named Frumatius,
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  SPEAKER_00: whom Athanasius of Alexandria consecrated as the kingdom's first bishop.
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  SPEAKER_00: And in the centuries that followed,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Bible was translated from Greek into the classical language of Ethiopia.
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  SPEAKER_00: And Enoch came along with it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And while the book was fading everywhere else, Ethiopian scribes kept copying it by hand.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the Bible of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church counts 81 books today, and Enoch is one of them.
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  SPEAKER_00: In 1773,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Scottish explorer James Bruce emerged from years of travel through North Africa
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  SPEAKER_00: and Ethiopia carrying three copies of the Book of Enoch.
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  SPEAKER_00: He had been gone looking for the source of the Nile.
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  SPEAKER_00: He came back carrying a book Europe had almost completely lost.
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  SPEAKER_00: He presented one copy to the Royal Library in Paris and another to a library
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  SPEAKER_00: in Oxford, and the third he kept bound into a complete Ethiopian Bible.
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  SPEAKER_00: And Bruce describes exactly where Enoch sat in the Bible.
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  SPEAKER_00: It stood immediately before the Book of Job,
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  SPEAKER_00: which he called its proper place in the Abyssinian Canon.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Oxford copy sat on a shelf for almost 50 years until Richard Lawrence,
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  SPEAKER_00: the university's professor of Hebrew,
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  SPEAKER_00: published the first English translation in 1821.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now notice the timing of that.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the same decade of the British
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  SPEAKER_00: and Foreign Bible Society decided its funds would no longer support Bibles
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  SPEAKER_00: containing the Apocrypha,
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  SPEAKER_00: an Oxford professor handed English readers a book Jude had been quoting Hall Long.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the last piece came out of the ground in 1952, in a cave above the Dead Sea, now called K4.
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  SPEAKER_00: Among the thousands of fragments inside were Aramaic copies of Enoch,
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  SPEAKER_00: some of them copied two centuries before Jesus was born.
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  SPEAKER_00: And when the scholar J.T.
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  SPEAKER_00: Millick published them in 1976,
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  SPEAKER_00: they broadly matched what Ethiopian scribes had been copying for centuries.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the fragments told us something else, too.
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  SPEAKER_00: At least ten Enoch manuscripts had been identified among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
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  SPEAKER_00: By comparison,
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  SPEAKER_00: only one small manuscript associated with Chronicles had survived,
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  SPEAKER_00: and no manuscripts of Esther were found.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now, manuscript counts aren't in a perfect census,
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  SPEAKER_00: and again,
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  SPEAKER_00: popularity,
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  SPEAKER_00: that's a different question from canon,
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  SPEAKER_00: but it still tells you something about what people
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  SPEAKER_00: in Jude's world were actually reading.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now, I'll leave the canon where your tradition puts it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Protestants landed at 66 books,
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  SPEAKER_00: Catholics at 73,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Eastern Orthodoxy, a few beyond that, and the Ethiopian churches we see at 81.
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  SPEAKER_00: Each of those lines emerged through long histories of argument,
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  SPEAKER_00: reception, worship, and theological reflection.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that conversation belongs to your church.
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  SPEAKER_00: What this story changes, though, is how you read the Bible you already have.
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  SPEAKER_00: The New Testament was written by people who lived inside a bigger library than
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  SPEAKER_00: the one bound in your lap.
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  SPEAKER_00: 2 Peter says God cast the angels at sin down into Tartarus and delivered them
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  SPEAKER_00: into chains of darkness to await for judgment.
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  SPEAKER_00: A passage that sounds a lot like the watcher's tradition preserved in Enoch.
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  SPEAKER_00: One section of Enoch called the parables describes a heavenly figure it calls
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  SPEAKER_00: the Son of Man Seed on the throne of glory to judge the world.
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  SPEAKER_00: Scholars still argue about whether those chapters were written before the Gospels or after them.
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  SPEAKER_00: And either answer puts the title Jesus used for himself more than any other
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  SPEAKER_00: into conversation with this book.
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  SPEAKER_00: Picture Jude's letter arriving at one of those house churches and being read aloud
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  SPEAKER_00: at a love feast, the lamps lit and the bread already broken.
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  SPEAKER_00: When the reader gets to verse 14, maybe some heads in the room start nodding.
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  SPEAKER_00: Some of them may have recognized the line immediately,
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  SPEAKER_00: the way you recognize the opening words of a hymn you've heard before.
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  SPEAKER_00: We hear the same verse the way you hear a voice through a hotel wall,
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  SPEAKER_00: one side of a conversation happening in the next room.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Ethiopian Christians have been listening to the whole conversation for 1,500 years.
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  SPEAKER_00: The rest of us have had it back in English for two centuries,
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  SPEAKER_00: and most of us have probably never opened it.
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  SPEAKER_00: So the next time a sentence in your Bible seems to come from nowhere,
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  SPEAKER_00: a name nobody explains or a scrap of a story that starts in the middle,
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  SPEAKER_00: it might be worth asking the question Jude's first readers may not have needed
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  SPEAKER_00: to ask.
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  SPEAKER_00: What were they all reading that I'm not?
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, thanks for listening to The Theology Made Podcast.
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  SPEAKER_00: If you found this helpful or encouraging,
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: please like and subscribe on whatever platform you're listening on.