Extra-terrestrial

It was also about these people that Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord has come with ^[n]many thousands of His holy ones, ¹⁵ to execute judgment upon all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their ungodly deeds which they have done in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.”  Jude 1:14-15 NASB

Enoch – Jude has described the character and the result of his opponents.  Now he employs ancient authority to back up his assessment.  The oddity of this verse is that he does not cite the Hebrew Bible.  He uses 1 Enoch.  Jude clearly believes that 1 Enoch has religious authority and is an inspired text.  Jude isn’t worried about a canon.  That idea developed much later in both Christian and Jewish circles.  At this point, what matters is divinely inspired authoritative texts, i.e., those accepted by the believing community.  It should be obvious that Jude’s community accepted a much wider range of inspired texts than we do today.  That raises some interesting questions about our view of what is inspired and what is canon, and how some texts were canonized and others weren’t.

Canonization was a process that began with the Christian Church.  It was not initiated by the Jews.  Even the Council of Jamnia in 90 C.E. was not a canonical council but rather a discussion of why certain books were considered holy.  No list of acceptable books was produced by that council.  In fact, the first “list” of books seems to have been about the time of Eusebius and Constantine.  Even that list contained what we now call The Apocrypha, books that were excluded from the Protestant version of the Bible during the time of Martin Luther.   That alone should give most of us pause.  It means that for more than 1000 years there were books in the Bible (the Catholic Bible) that were read and accepted by believers.  Suddenly, these books were excluded from Protestant Christianity.  You might want to ask why.

This passage in Jude is a citation from 1 Enoch 1:9.  Today this exists only in the Ethiopic version, but it must have existed in either Aramaic or Hebrew during Jude’s time.  In addition, there are other problems with this text.  It appears that early copyists modified the Greek text of Jude to fit certain phrases from 1 Enoch.

More importantly, Jude himself alters the text to fit his argument.  He changes the text of 1 Enoch from “Behold, he [i.e., God] will arrive . . .” to “Behold, the Lord came . . .”  Peter Davids suggests that this is because it was common in the early assemblies to interchange “Lord,” meaning “Jesus,” with “God,” but I don’t find this convincing.  His argument depends on the assumption that the apostles were Trinitarian.  There is no reason why “Lord” cannot be read as “God,” without meaning “Trinity” if we take the context into account.  Jude’s complaint about these false teachers has been their lack of respect for proper authority.  By employing “Lord” in the text, he emphasizes this fact.  Aside from the Trinitarian assumption, Jude’s deliberate alteration of the text follows that pattern of all the apostolic authors.  They felt no compunction changing the texts of their sacred documents to fit their arguments.  All the gospel writers do this.  So does Paul.  And so does Yeshua.  Clearly the idea of verbal plenary inerrancy was not part of their theological vocabulary.

The related Hebrew text is Deuteronomy 33:2, clearly meaning YHVH.  This also helps explain Jude’s verb tense (aorist).  The Hebrew text uses a similar verb tense (the Hebrew qatal perfect), indicating for Jude the inevitable and decisive act of God.

“The aorist indicative can be used to describe an event that is not yet past as though it were already completed.”  (Wallace, Greek Grammar beyond the Basics, p. 563).

There is no English equivalent of this tense.

What do we learn from this citation from an extra-terrestrial like Enoch (remember, he never died)?  Practically, we learn that Jude’s opposition were not pagans outside the faithful assembly.  They were people within the group whose behavior and teaching questioned the authority of God and the Torah (does that sound familiar?).  Theologically we learn that Jude’s assembly used a much larger number of “sacred” texts which they felt free to adopt to their own needs.  There was a lot more “flow” to their faith.  Perhaps we need a little less rigidity in our time as well.

Oh, and if you’ve never read 1 Enoch, now is probably a good time to do so.

Topical Index:  1 Enoch, inspiration, canonization, sacred, Jude 1:14-15

If you’re interested in a complete study of Jude, look for the audio and study notes on my web site CLICK HERE