Setting the Scene

It is commonly thought that before Scaliger, early modern European interest in Enoch was primarily kabbalistic, philosophical and occult in nature, not least because beyond the church fathers, the chief sources for data about the book were the Zohar and Menahem Recanati’s Perush Bereshit.Footnote ¹⁰ According to these accounts, even the citation of Enoch’s prophecy in Jude 14–15 did not provoke much philological discussion, but interested commentators for its implications for Jude’s canonicity.Footnote ¹¹

This characterisation is indeed broadly correct, although it is worth noting that there was a third vein of interest in 1 Enoch, a vein best characterised by the work of the Flemish grammarian Johannes Drusius (1550–1616).Footnote ¹² From the late 1580s, Drusius set the book of Enoch up as the ideal test case for contested questions around the value of the apocrypha and the significance of lost books of biblical prophets and patriarchs. Drusius’s correspondence shows that whenever he was asked difficult questions—for example, about whether any sacred books had perished, or what to make of patristic citations of missing texts—Enoch dominated his response.Footnote ¹³ As a text which was referenced by the oldest patristic writers, which was cited in the New Testament, which claimed authorship by a prophet, and which had a venerable advocate in Tertullian, 1 Enoch was the perfect case study for how Protestants should deal with challenging examples of parabiblical texts.Footnote ¹⁴ In Drusius’s hands, this study was not neutral but part of his broader argument that Protestants should not overreact to Catholic attacks on scripture by denying the value of extra-canonical texts. For example, although some Catholics had used the loss of sacred books to argue for the insufficiency of scripture, Drusius insisted that it was fine for Protestants to admit that sacred books written by prophets and patriarchs had perished, since not all sacred books had been admitted into the canon and only canonical books had been divinely protected against extinction.Footnote ¹⁵ 1 Enoch was one such lost sacred book, and in his comments on Jude 14–15 Drusius even translated Enoch’s quotation into Hebrew to show what this book might have looked like.Footnote ¹⁶

Although Drusius was an unusual scholar, he was not the only one for whom 1 Enoch was linked to the problem of lost sacred books. The great Reformed theologian Theodor Beza made the same association in his New Testament annotationes, in the process even noting himself that “many” sacred books had perished—although he was more equivocal about whether Enoch might be among them.Footnote ¹⁷ One of Drusius’s correspondents, the diplomat Robert Beale (1541–1601), was intrigued enough by Enoch’s apparent antiquity and potentially sacred status to ask Drusius for a summary of the “judgements and testimonies of the ancients” about it, a request which prompted Drusius to produce as many witnesses to the book as he could muster.Footnote ¹⁸ Nor was this a solely Protestant phenomenon. For the Spanish Jesuit Alfonso Salmerón, the book of Enoch loomed large in his discussion of lost biblical books. He thought it unlikely that lost books had ever been canonical but conceded that they could have been written “with divine wisdom.”Footnote ¹⁹ In other words, prior to Scaliger’s publication of the Syncellus fragments, there was a small but elite undercurrent of interest in 1 Enoch that viewed it not just as a pawn in debates over Jude’s canonicity or an object of occult fascination, but as an ancient, potentially sacred lost book.

This undercurrent is important because it—more than the better-known kabbalistic interest—would set the parameters for the seventeenth-century conversation over 1 Enoch. Furthermore, Scaliger’s introduction of the Syncellus fragments played into this undercurrent more than historians have hitherto realised.Footnote ²⁰ Scaliger’s oft-cited concluding comments on the fragments were, without question, contemptuous, describing it as a “false book” full of “odious, tedious and shameful” things.Footnote ²¹ His prefatory remarks on the fragments, however, presented a more complex picture. Since these remarks set the paradigm for subsequent discussions, it is worth taking a moment to examine them.

Scaliger opened his discussion by noting the disagreement between Africanus and Eusebius over the identity of the “sons of God” who took wives from the “daughters of men” in Gen 6:2, whether these were human men (following Africanus) or fallen angels (following Eusebius).Footnote ²² Next, Scaliger cited an excerpt from Zosimus of Panopolis in keeping with the latter opinion, which related how “ancient and divine writings” had taught that fallen angels had coveted human women and taught them secret arts.Footnote ²³ Following this, Scaliger noted that these angels were called the ἐγρήγοροι (watchers) in sources such as Cedrenus and Clement of Alexandria, and that this tradition of calling angels “watchers” or “wakeful ones” lay behind the word עיר in Dan 4:10, which the Sixtine Septuagint’s scholia interpreted as a synonym for ἐγρήγορος.Footnote ²⁴ At this point Scaliger introduced the Syncellus fragments of 1 Enoch, specifying that this book was not only utterly relevant to this discussion (“omnino ad hoc argumentum facit”), but was also the source both for ancient opinions about angels and the citation in Jude (even though the Syncellus fragments did not contain 1 Enoch 1:9, the snippet quoted in verses 14–15).Footnote ²⁵

Scaliger offered this overview through a dense and untranslated collection of Greek quotations, the logic indicated tersely through his sparse Latin. The overall effect was to establish the existence of a very old tradition of interpretation of Gen 6:2—a tradition already in place before Africanus’s time and recognised as ancient by the time of Zosimus—which called angels ἐγρήγοροι, viewed fallen angels as capable of lust and procreation, and believed that such fallen ἐγρήγοροι had taught their human consorts secret arts. Next, Scaliger demonstrated that some parts of this ancient tradition had contact with the canonical biblical landscape, since it was reflected in Dan 4:13. This not only indicated that the tradition was definitively pre-Christian, but possibly astonishingly old, since early moderns believed that the book of Daniel was written by the historical Daniel. Finally, Scaliger implicitly dismissed the possibility that 1 Enoch was just another first- or second-century Christian manifestation of this tradition (as seen in figures like Clement of Alexandria) by stressing that 1 Enoch was the source of ancient opinions on angels (“a quo omnia. . . desumpta sunt”) and was excerpted in the book of Jude, thus dating the fragment to sometime after the life of Daniel and before the birth of Jesus.Footnote ²⁶

Scaliger, in short, brought the tradition of beliefs about angels expressed in 1 Enoch much closer to the Hebrew Bible than anyone had previously, presenting it not merely as a late, deviant stream of exegesis of Gen 6:2 but as a very old tradition reflected, even if obliquely, in the indisputably canonical and ancient book of Daniel. He then positioned the Syncellus fragments as the most ancient surviving expressions of this tradition. Indeed, even in the rude remarks which he suffixed to the fragments, Scaliger threw in comments which stressed 1 Enoch’s antiquity, noting that it was a “vetustissimus” book and—more intriguingly—that any half-decent Hebraist could tell that it was translated from a Hebrew original.Footnote ²⁷

The subtle ambivalence underwriting Scaliger’s introduction of the fragments would be rapidly reinforced. Only the year after Scaliger published his Thesaurus temporum Drusius printed his commentary on Sulpicius Severus’s Historia sacra. Severus had followed the “angelic” interpretation of Gen 6:2, viewing the “sons of God” as angels seized by lust for human women. This comment prompted Drusius to offer a long analysis of the validity of this interpretation, in which he emphasised not only that this was the oldest strand of exegesis, “once commonly agreed upon by the learned” (haec opinio jam olim communi consensu doctorum), but also that it was a philologically and historically legitimate understanding of the phrase “sons of God,” even if it was theologically incorrect and had now been disproven.Footnote ²⁸ Drusius had made the same point in earlier works, but never so exhaustively.Footnote ²⁹ His publication in 1607 thus not only bolstered Scaliger’s analysis of the antiquity of the beliefs expressed in 1 Enoch, but also made it exceptionally difficult for scholars to ignore these findings. Prior to Scaliger and Drusius, many eminent exegetes had either ignored the angelic interpretation of Gen 6:2 or cursorily dismissed it.Footnote ³⁰ After Scaliger and Drusius, scholars not only had to concede (and try to neutralise) the antiquity of this reading, they also had to acknowledge what seemed to be its source in 1 Enoch.Footnote ³¹

We must not take these conclusions too far. Scaliger was not Drusius: his 1591 treatise on the apocrypha was scathing about extra-canonical texts, mirroring his derisive comments on 1 Enoch.Footnote ³² Yet as this section has shown, something more complicated than straightforward dismissal underwrote his remarks on the Syncellus fragments: even his observation that the fragments were translated “ex Hebraismo” was significant, given that he was adamant that other apocryphal books had never existed in Hebrew originals.Footnote ³³ Despite his sneers, the drift of Scaliger’s introduction served to highlight 1 Enoch’s antiquity and historical significance: Scaliger seems almost torn between a theological need to denigrate the fragments and a philological recognition that they might contain something ancient. This reading of Scaliger is confirmed by his reception: by the mid-seventeenth century, scholars such as Johann Heinrich Hottinger were criticising Scaliger for being too positive and unduly increasing the fragments’ authority by “attributing the remotest antiquity” to them.Footnote ³⁴ Neither was Hottinger alone: the Swiss Reformed theologian Johann Heinrich Heidegger similarly criticised Scaliger in 1667.Footnote ³⁵ Indeed, as the next sections argue, Scaliger’s ambivalence would be influential, setting the stage for the emergence of three trends that would dominate discussion of 1 Enoch for the next century.

After Scaliger I: The Ambivalence of Antiquity

The first of these trends manifested differently among Protestants and Catholics, but in both cases it was fuelled by a recognition of the antiquity of 1 Enoch and the interpretation of Gen 6:2 it espoused.Footnote ³⁶

Within the Protestant world, this trend was spearheaded by Drusius. For Drusius, the Syncellus fragments offered an unprecedented opportunity to make good on his arguments about the loss of sacred books and the value of the apocrypha. Seven years after Scaliger, Drusius’s efforts resulted in a treatise dedicated to Enoch.Footnote ³⁷ The first half of this treatise was a summary of the state-of-the-art wisdom on Enoch as man and prophet, from how to spell his name to the meaning of his removal in Gen 5:24.Footnote ³⁸ The second half was focussed on the book of Enoch, and it was here that Drusius made his most controversial arguments.

The first point Drusius made was that the historic Enoch, seventh from Adam, prophet and patriarch, did indeed write a book. While many were loath to identify the apocryphal book of Enoch as this book due to its “many fables about angels,” Drusius did not see this as an obstacle: numerous ancient books had suffered interpolations and corruptions, and 1 Enoch could be among their number.Footnote ³⁹ Next, Drusius established that Jude’s citation from this apocryphal book was acceptable because despite its corruptions, it still contained sacred and divine matters.Footnote ⁴⁰ Furthermore, the complete book of Enoch was extant in Jewish communities (a point he believed was evident from Menahem Recanati), and Scaliger had published fragments from it.Footnote ⁴¹

Drusius’s characteristically understated prose makes it easy to miss the astonishing import of these comments: he believed that the Syncellus fragments were genuine remnants of a book written by the antediluvian patriarch Enoch, a book which had suffered much corruption but which nevertheless retained enough of Enoch’s divine content that Jude could cite from it.Footnote ⁴² This was a striking admission from one of Europe’s most serious and sensible scholars. From the sixteenth century, the problem of antediluvian literature—the question of whether texts existed before the flood and could have survived it—was bound up with the question of whether Enoch wrote books.Footnote ⁴³ As the Spanish Jesuit Benedictus Pererius put it, “if [Enoch] left behind any writing, without doubt it would be necessary to admit that of all the writings from the creation of the world, his would be the most ancient and indeed the first.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet in the century before Drusius, the problem of Enoch’s writing was treated primarily by magicians and esoteric philosophers. Within these circles, men like the Venetian alchemist Giovanni Agostino Panteo attributed mysterious scripts to Enoch, and occultists like John Dee and Edward Kelley generated other Enochian characters by scrying.Footnote ⁴⁵ Self-regarding philologists like Scaliger dismissed such activities out-of-hand.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, with his treatise on Enoch, couched in erudition and written in dry, judicious prose, Drusius had brought the possibility of Enochic antediluvian literature surviving to contemporaneity into the realm of sober historical scholarship.

With the impressive antediluvian antiquity of 1 Enoch established, Drusius pivoted back to his argument about the importance of Protestants recognising the loss of sacred books.Footnote ⁴⁷ Drusius maintained that such recognition should not upset the integrity of the canon, since not all sacred books had been granted canonicity.Footnote ⁴⁸ It was crucial, in Drusius’s eyes, not to collapse these two categories. To do so would not only expose Protestants to accusations of historical inaccuracy (there were, after all, multiple patristic and scriptural attestations to lost biblical books): it might also be the start of a slippery slope towards denying any merit at all in apocryphal works. This would be a grave error, for, as 1 Enoch showed, these texts held enormous historical and moral value and perhaps even contained vestiges of divine truth.Footnote ⁴⁹ To give up such rich resources for some phantom advantage against Catholics was, as Drusius outlined elsewhere, profoundly misguided.Footnote ⁵⁰

Among Protestants, Drusius offered the most favourable account of 1 Enoch. However, the sense of the fragments’ antiquity that fuelled Drusius’s enthusiasm generated complex responses in other parts of the Protestant world. Hugo Grotius found surprising resonances of the text elsewhere in the New Testament, noting that Enochic ideas about angels seemed to lie behind 2 Pet 2:4 and Jude 6.Footnote ⁵¹ The 1658 edition of Scaliger’s Thesaurus temporum followed suit to alter and expand Scaliger’s comments on the fragments to change what had been, in the 1606 edition, an identification of 1 Enoch as the source for the citation in Jude 14–15, to an identification of an allusion to 1 Enoch 10:11–13 (which was preserved in the Syncellus fragments) in Jude 6.Footnote ⁵² This ambivalence even percolated into vernacular discussions: the English cleric-geographer Samuel Purchas translated the fragments into English for his popular travelogue Purchas his Pilgrimage, explaining that his motivation was “the antiquity of it” as demonstrated “in that Tertullian citeth it” plus that “the Greeke Copie [was], as the Phrase testifieth, translated out of Hebrew.”Footnote ⁵³

Within the Catholic world, even stronger claims were made for 1 Enoch than Drusius would have dared. An early example comes from the Jesuit Nicholas Serarius’s 1612 commentary on Jude. Like Drusius would three years later, Serarius argued that the book was a degraded antediluvian relic, written by the real Enoch before suffering interpolations but nevertheless retaining residues of truth.Footnote ⁵⁴ Unlike Drusius, however, Serarius used this account to argue that the book had initially been canonical (“a principio fuit canonicus”) before it became corrupt and so lost its status. In this way, Serarius absorbed 1 Enoch into a Catholic argument (which Serarius set out in his prolegomena) for the insufficiency of scripture, making the fragments into the perfect example for how canonical books could become corrupted or perish.Footnote ⁵⁵ Other Jesuits made the same point. The Flemish Jesuit Cornelius a Lapide, writing in the 1610s, described how the book had been “purum & sincerum” before its current “corruptum & depravatum” state.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Jesuit exegete Jean de Lorin agreed with Serarius that the book of Enoch had been canonical before its corruption.Footnote ⁵⁷ These were the sort of claims which Drusius feared would push Protestants into a defensive position over 1 Enoch: given Drusius’s history of conflict with Serarius, he may even have had him in mind when composing his 1615 treatise.Footnote ⁵⁸

Positive Catholic opinions on 1 Enoch extended well into the century and were not always accompanied by arguments for its one-time canonicity. Writing over forty years after the fragments’ publication, the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher doubted that 1 Enoch was ever canonical, and yet in other respects went further even than Serarius in his affirmation of the fragments.Footnote ⁵⁹ Kircher openly introduced the fragments as proof of the existence of writing before the flood.Footnote ⁶⁰ His comments relentlessly stressed their antiquity and their conformity with what ancient authorities had said about the real book of Enoch.Footnote ⁶¹ He highlighted his agreement with Scaliger that Dan 4:13 showed evidence of contact with Enochic ideas about angels and offered a defence of the problematic Enochic angelology by outlining ways in which its apparent assertion of angelic corporeality could be compatible with Roman Catholic understandings of the operations of demons and spirits.Footnote ⁶² Although Kircher acknowledged that the autograph of Enoch had perished, he maintained not only that the fragments’ content was antediluvian, handed down by a providentially unbroken chain of inheritance, but even that they had a high level of consonance with canonical scripture and patristic thought:

Although such a statement was radical by the standards of the early seventeenth century, by the time he wrote in 1653, Kircher’s willingness to see concord between 1 Enoch and canonical scripture was not the most extreme Catholic outlook on the text. As we will soon see, Kircher’s comments would have looked tame compared to the ideas of the Parisian Capuchin friar and controversialist, Jacques Boulduc.

In the meantime, as this section has shown, Scaliger was not alone in his sense that there was something ancient about the fragments, and his terse but suggestive comments pushed many after him in the same direction. A surprisingly large number of these scholars did not merely think that the fragments were ancient, but that they were genuine, albeit corrupted, antediluvian relics written by the prophet Enoch. For these scholars, this position was the best way to reconcile the unacceptable theological implications of the Enochic angelology with the exegetical and philological evidence for its antiquity. In the hands of Catholics, especially Jesuits, this played into arguments for the corruptibility of canonical scripture, and this was a tendency which persisted throughout the century; even Kircher’s comments acted as an argument for the authority of tradition. In the Protestant world, no scholar would prove as willing as Drusius to advocate for the fragments, even though some recognised their influence on the New Testament beyond Jude 14–15. This was no accident. By the mid-seventeenth century, it had become much harder for Protestants to offer positive opinions on 1 Enoch. This was because of the emergence of the second trend in the fragments’ reception: their hardening confessionalisation, accelerated by their invocation in a polarising theological controversy.

After Scaliger II: The Hardening Confessionalisation of 1 Enoch

The Catholic claims made about 1 Enoch’s former canonicity signalled the beginning of its assimilation into confessional controversy. Such claims would always have provoked a counter-reaction among Protestants: after all, as the German Lutheran theologian Balthasar Bebel put it, they “shattered the security of the [Protestant] faith” (fidei nostrae ἀσφάλειαν convellit) by throwing the integrity of the canon into doubt.Footnote ⁶⁴ As Drusius had feared, this counter-reaction rapidly restricted the space for nuanced or positive views of the apocrypha, let alone of 1 Enoch, among Protestants. Writing in 1633, the French Huguenot André Rivet expressed his shock at Serarius’s assertion that Enoch had been canonical, insisting that the book was a late Jewish forgery.Footnote ⁶⁵ Rivet placed firm restraints on what Apostles could do with apocrypha, stating that Jude must have had a divine revelation confirming the prophecy’s truth: otherwise, it would have had no more authority than its apocryphal source.Footnote ⁶⁶ The political theorist Petrus Cunaeus offered a more vicious take-down, describing the book as counterfeited by “nugatores” (jokers) with the intent of deceiving future generations: the whole discussion around 1 Enoch, Cunaeus said, was “anile” (foolish).Footnote ⁶⁷ Hottinger agreed: to his eyes the book appeared “spurious and forged” (ὑποβολιμαῖον fuisse, & νοθεύοντα).Footnote ⁶⁸ Such intense confessional pressure even led some Protestants to declare that Jude must have cited Enoch’s prophecy through means other than a written book, whether by divine revelation or tradition.Footnote ⁶⁹ We can also see the imprint of this Catholic argument in Joannes Ernest Grabe’s insistence that Christians never admitted Enoch into the canon.Footnote ⁷⁰

As this shows, tussles over 1 Enoch in the context of the canon simmered throughout the century. But although the book’s confessionalisation began in these debates, it was hastened by a separate controversy ignited by the work of the aforementioned friar Jacques Boulduc. In 1626 Boulduc published a work, De Ecclesia ante legem, which contained the most surprising perspective on 1 Enoch in early modernity. Boulduc’s book tried to prove that before Moses, in antediluvian times, there had been a fully-fleshed out Church with festivals, sacrifices, rites and ceremonies.Footnote ⁷¹ It was transparent in its polemical motivations: as a later critic said, it was an attempt to “drag, violently, the ceremonies, decrees, orders, and societies of the Roman Catholic Church out of the worship of pious antediluvian people” and thereby construct an argument for the Roman Catholic Church’s antiquity and conformity with primeval religion.Footnote ⁷²

To construct this argument, Boulduc wrought an elaborate (but not entirely consistent) exegetical framework. According to Boulduc, Adam’s son Seth was the founder of the priesthood, which in antediluvian times had two names: “sons of Seth” and “sons of God.”Footnote ⁷³ This latter name was used for angels before it was applied to the priesthood.Footnote ⁷⁴ In this era the faithful were called nephilim. This term was commonly translated as “giants” but the nephilim were not literally giants for, Boulduc declared, their name came from the verb נפל (to fall) because they prostrated themselves in worship “like Christians.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The first monastic order had been established by Enos (the Enoscaei, an order Boulduc described as “Carthusian-like”), but other orders had sprung up afterwards, including a more worldly order called the “Cainites” (Cinaei).Footnote ⁷⁶ Although originally the Cainites lived piously and pretended to be true sons of God, to the point that they were referred to metonymically as “angels,” they soon fell into wickedness, practising magic and abandoning their clerical vows of celibacy.Footnote ⁷⁷ These were dark times, when even the devout indulged their carnal desires and married impious women.Footnote ⁷⁸ As such, God sent a prophet, Enoch, who was a monk of the Cainite order, to reform humankind and encourage the Cainites to mend their ways.Footnote ⁷⁹

At this point Boulduc introduced the book of Enoch. With some smugness Boulduc explained how his revised vision of antediluvian history demonstrated that the book contained “no false doctrine or error.”Footnote ⁸⁰ By reading the fragments through the above framework, it became clear that they were an account of how the priesthood, in particular the monastic order of the Cainites once known as “angels,” left their school on Mount Hermon, abandoned their vows, and sullied themselves with wicked women.Footnote ⁸¹ Misunderstanding of terms like “sons of God,” “angels/watchers,” and nephilim had promulgated errors about corporeal angels having sex with women and gigantic men roaming the earth.Footnote ⁸² Yet the fact that so many fathers, like Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria, believed such absurdities demonstrated the precious greatness of the book.Footnote ⁸³ Indeed, as Boulduc explained, since Enoch’s translation meant that his bones could not be preserved, his writings were left instead as a “most sacred proof and pledge” for posterity (scripta tanquam sacratissimum pignus ac depositum), diligently edited by Noah to include matters from the period after Enoch’s translation and preserved by Noah through the flood.Footnote ⁸⁴ The Syncellus fragments, then, were not only remnants of an antediluvian text written by Enoch and edited by Noah: they were pretty much uncorrupted, profoundly sacred, and a witness to a history untold by the Bible which (conveniently) proved the antiquity of monastic orders like Boulduc’s. This text, concealed for so long, should now be “put back under the lamp, so that it may shine for all those who are in the house of the Church,” even as the loss of the rest of it ought to be lamented.Footnote ⁸⁵

Boulduc’s treatise had a polarising effect on discussions over 1 Enoch. A long controversy over the origins (and, by implication, legitimacy) of monasticism had raged in Christian Europe since the Reformation: as Jan Machielsen has shown, by the first decade of the seventeenth century this controversy had reached its peak, pulling in heavyweights such as Robert Bellarmine, Cesare Baronio, Nicolaus Serarius and Scaliger.Footnote ⁸⁶ This controversy had focussed around whether monasticism existed in the apostolic period, although many Catholic commentators (including Bellarmine) traced its ultimate origin back to Enos.Footnote ⁸⁷ Within this context, Boulduc was striking for two reasons. Firstly, his argument for Roman Catholicism as the perfect expression of pre-Mosaic primeval religion meant that he went much further than his predecessors in how closely he thought Enos’s “monasticism” correlated with contemporaneous Roman Catholic practice.Footnote ⁸⁸ Secondly, by the time he wrote in 1626, the argument over monasticism appeared to be cooling off, with its biggest names having died by 1621. Boulduc thus seemed to be throwing new fuel on an old fire with an unashamedly radical image of antediluvian history. Moreover, his (equally extraordinary) claims about the Syncellus fragments were tightly woven into this provocative account.

Protestants were appalled by his audacity. The Lutheran Bishop of Zealand Hans Poulsen Resen read Boulduc’s book with horror in 1627 and asked the theologian Nicolaus Petraeus to refute it.Footnote ⁸⁹ Petraeus never got round to the task but others were already at work, as can be seen in the earliest critique of Boulduc, embedded into a disputation given by Jacob Schaller and supervised by Johannes Dorschaeus at the University of Strasbourg in 1627. This work identified two especially shocking aspects of Boulduc’s account: that he saw the book of Enoch as a sacred text, and that he claimed the watchers were monastic congregations.Footnote ⁹⁰ It listed all the unacceptable theological consequences that would flow from elevating 1 Enoch’s status and ended by denying not only every Catholic claim for the book but even some previously safe Protestant ones. The book of Enoch was not once canonical; the Syncellus fragments were neither canonical nor sacred; a book of Enoch did not exist in the Apostolic era; in any case, Jude did not take his citation from an apocryphal text.Footnote ⁹¹ Here was the exact kind of Protestant overreaction Drusius had feared.

Indeed, from the 1640s, Protestant university disputations not only frequently featured Enoch, but always did so with an accompanying mention of Boulduc.Footnote ⁹² This pushed mid-century Protestants towards more negative views of the fragments than their early seventeenth-century forebears. At Leipzig in 1647, Daniel Henrici supervised a disputation by Johann Müller which highlighted Boulduc’s reading of 1 Enoch as particularly offensive.Footnote ⁹³ In 1652 at the University of Copenhagen Wilhelm Worm gave a defence supervised by Bangius and devoted to a refutation of Boulduc’s exegesis of Gen 6:4, which Bangius published the same year.Footnote ⁹⁴ At the University of Leipzig in 1660, the newly-named professor of theology Martin Geier oversaw two dissertations on similar themes. The first, by Johann Benedict Carpzov II, was dedicated to the identity of the nephilim, with Boulduc’s “insane opinion” taking centre-stage.Footnote ⁹⁵ Like Dorschaeus and Schaller, Carpzov neutralised Boulduc by denying any hint of 1 Enoch’s antiquity, dismissing the text as a late rabbinic “hypobolimaeus” (forgery).Footnote ⁹⁶ The second disputation, defended by Johann Friedrich Leibnitz, followed the same path, declaring that 1 Enoch was “apocryphal, fictitious, and suppositious” (apocryphum, fabulosum & ὑποβολιμαῖον).Footnote ⁹⁷ Like Dorschaeus and Schaller, this disputation separated 1 Enoch as much as possible from Jude’s citation, concluding not only that Jude did not cite from a complete version of the Syncellus fragments but even that Jude did not cite from a written book at all.Footnote ⁹⁸ Boulduc was of course singled out for his account of 1 Enoch’s antiquity, but this criticism was also implicitly extended to Drusius for his belief in the same.Footnote ⁹⁹

Boulduc’s spectre haunted Protestants well into the second half of the century. In debates delivered at the University of Strasbourg and published in 1665, Balthasar Bebel gave an account of antediluvian worship levelled chiefly at Boulduc: as in the above cases, this pushed Bebel into viewing 1 Enoch as a late forgery.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ At the University of Wittenberg in 1670 August Pfeiffer presided over a disputation by Caspar Petrus Hülsemann in which Boulduc again featured prominently, now almost fifty years after he had first published.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Like so many other Lutherans at this point, Pfeiffer not only viewed the fragments as a sham but also denied that Jude cited Enoch’s prophecy from an apocryphal book.Footnote ¹⁰² Thirteen years later, at the University of Jena, Boulduc’s work on Enoch was still being targeted on the grounds that it “strove to break through the authority of divine scripture” by making a lost text divine.Footnote ¹⁰³ The Jena disputation even noted a revealing trend among recent Protestant commentators on Jude: they had avoided mentioning the book of Enoch at verses 14–15, instead attributing Jude’s knowledge of the prophecy to tradition or divine revelation.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

As these university disputations illuminate, Boulduc’s brazen claims turned 1 Enoch into a topic of hot theological controversy. Over the course of the seventeenth century this resulted in a harder Protestant line on the Syncellus fragments, especially among Northern European Lutherans in Germany and neighbouring Denmark. These theologians felt it was too risky to grant any antiquity to 1 Enoch at all, lest such concession open the way to Catholic claims for its divinity or canonicity and, thereby, arguments for the incompleteness of scripture. Gone was Scaliger’s ambivalence, let alone Drusius’s vision of the book as an antediluvian relic. In the eyes of these later Protestants, the Syncellus fragments and, by extension, the whole of 1 Enoch was a late forgery detached from the Old and New Testament alike.

On the surface, this account might seem to support tropes about a growing battlefield mentality and narrowing of Protestant theological possibility in the era of high orthodoxy. Yet this pressure also generated greater complexity in another area of scholarship on 1 Enoch. It is this more complex scholarship that constitutes the third trend in the seventeenth-century reception of the fragments.

After Scaliger III: The Genre of 1 Enoch

This trend began with the publication of the most important analysis of 1 Enoch after Boulduc, Thomas Bangius’s 1657 Caelum orientis. Bangius was no middling theologian: he had been appointed Professor of Hebrew at the University of Copenhagen in 1630 and later became Keeper of the Royal Library.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ He published successful Latin textbooks and had international ambitions, sending his works to the famous English Hebraist John Selden.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It is unsurprising, then, that he had been watching the debates over 1 Enoch with interest. Like so many other Northern European Protestants, Bangius was galvanised by Boulduc’s weaving of the book into an argument for the antediluvian origins of monasticism. Indeed, as we have seen, upon his appointment to Professor of Theology in 1652 one of Bangius’s first duties was to supervise a dissertation refuting Boulduc’s interpretation of the nephilim.

However, Bangius was troubled by the positive accounts of 1 Enoch that had spread among Catholics and some Protestants since Scaliger published the fragments. Refuting Boulduc could not alone combat this trend. As such, the first half of Bangius’s Caelum orientis was dedicated to disproving the fragments’ authority and antiquity. In this respect, his work is another example of the hard confessionalisation of 1 Enoch. However, the way Bangius went about his task illustrates how unexpectedly complicated the ramifications of this trend could be. Bangius did not merely attack 1 Enoch with the usual weapons such as its association with magic or the scepticism of church fathers like Jerome. Nor did he simply assert that Jude’s citation came from divine revelation rather than a written book (although he did make this point).Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Instead, he tried to eliminate any consonance between 1 Enoch and the biblical landscape by divorcing it from the genre of apocryphal and parabiblical texts altogether. Relying on his close reading of the fragments, Bangius argued that 1 Enoch was part of the corpus of rabbinic literature, with more in common with texts like the Ruth Rabbah than texts like The Shepherd of Hermas. This generic repositioning was intended to subvert any bearing the fragments might have on Christian scripture.

Bangius structured his argument around five “assertions.” The first two were straightforward: that there was a writing attributed to Enoch, but not only had it never been canonical, it was hardly even worthy of apocryphal status.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The third assertion was more complex: that the book of Enoch was no ancient relic of the prophet Enoch.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Rather, a detailed analysis of the fragments demonstrated, in Bangius’s eyes, not just that the text was postdiluvian, but that it arose from a perilous mixture of Jewish textual error and late antique philosophising.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Bangius systematically cycled through ideas presented in the fragments—beginning with the “angelic” interpretation of Gen 6:2 they espoused—to argue that these aligned more with neo-Platonic and rabbinic thought than with “genuinely” biblical or Christian concepts. For example, in the case of the “angelic” exegesis of Gen 6:2, Bangius argued that this had stemmed from a corruption in some codices of the Septuagint, which read ἄγγελοι τοῦ θεοῦ (angels of God) for υἱοί τοῦ θεοῦ (sons of God).Footnote ¹¹¹ Some of these corrupt texts had been admitted into ancient synagogues and thereby had inspired Jewish ideas about angelic lust as seen in Philo, Rashi, the Zohar, and the Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer.Footnote ¹¹² In Bangius’s account, these ideas had flowed from Jewish communities into nascent Christian ones due to the naïveté of the earliest church fathers.Footnote ¹¹³ In many cases, this diffusion had been aided by the regrettable entanglement of early Christian thought with neo-Platonic philosophy: this was especially true for the fragments’ concept of angelic corporeality, which aligned with neo-Platonic ideas about the subtle bodies of demons.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Bangius saw this same pattern of diffusion repeating itself for five different aspects of the fragments. He constantly emphasised how the text was “born Jewish and raised partly pagan” (ortu Judaicum. . . nutricatu verò partim ethnicum) originating from Jewish fountainheads, enabled by Jewish custodianship of scripture, before flowing into Platonic rivers and thence to incautious Christians.Footnote ¹¹⁵ With the repetition of this pattern demonstrated, Bangius made his fourth assertion, in graphic and violent language: “The Enochic fragment is a multiply-deformed foetus of one or many Jews, swaddled in Platonic bandages, received by the impure hands of Christians and by their vain quills—or rather, breasts—promiscuously nursed and suckled.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ It was only at this point that Bangius moved into his fifth assertion, which covered the usual problems around 1 Enoch’s association with magic.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Although Bangius’s account was as polemical as his predecessors, his approach to attacking the fragments marks a shift. Rather than accumulating patristic testimonies about 1 Enoch and dismissing the book on their authority, Bangius systematically compared the fragments with Jewish, Platonic, and early Christian writings, searching for intellectual affinities and shared assumptions, before structuring these findings into an historical narrative explaining 1 Enoch’s origins and dissemination. The result was to remove the fragments from the corpus of texts in which men like Drusius had placed them (the apocrypha and other parabiblical texts which might contain glimmers of divinity) and into a corpus of texts distrusted by Christians (rabbinic literature and Platonic philosophy). Bangius in effect argued that the genre of 1 Enoch had been historically misidentified: in taking the Syncellus fragments seriously as parabiblical texts, modern Christians risked replicating the mistake of early Christians.Footnote ¹¹⁸ His venomous description of the rabbinic and neo-Platonic literary and philosophical traditions to which the fragments, in his eyes, belonged was intended to underscore how badly scholars had misjudged them.Footnote ¹¹⁹

This new way of attacking the fragments by redefining their genre caught on. Many of the university disputations discussed above both praised Bangius for his efforts and followed his lead in describing the fragments as rabbinic.Footnote ¹²⁰ Christianus Schotanus, a professor at the University of Franeker even elaborated on Bangius’s account of 1 Enoch’s genesis by suggesting it originated among the Eastern Jewish schools of Israel and Babylon (according to Schotanus, the “Western schools” applied themselves more sensibly to scriptural exegesis).Footnote ¹²¹ As late as 1694, a disputation on Enoch delivered at the University of Wittenberg concluded that the fragments were written by a “platonising Jew.”Footnote ¹²²

Other scholars disagreed with Bangius’s conclusions but followed suit in attacking the fragments by redefining their genre. One scholar in particular offered an alternative: Johann Heinrich Hottinger, who (as mentioned above) had long been sceptical of 1 Enoch’s claims to antiquity.Footnote ¹²³ In 1662 Hottinger elaborated on his skepticism by printing a dissertation on the “supposititious books” of the Old Testament. Referring to the author of the Syncellus fragments as “Pseudo-Enoch,” Hottinger opposed his analysis to Scaliger’s, which he believed had granted the fragments too much authority and antiquity. Hottinger especially objected to Scaliger’s claim that the fragments had been translated from a Hebrew original. To Hottinger’s eyes, a close reading of the fragments could not support this conclusion.

For one, Hottinger contended that the angel names preserved in the fragments did not look like transliterations from Hebrew and could not be viewed as such without distortion.Footnote ¹²⁴ Secondly, he pointed out that there were significant divergences between the Enochic angelology and the angelology found in rabbinic sources. One divergence he noted on the basis of the excommunication formula originally found in the Kol Bo, which Vorstius had excerpted and translated into Latin in the notes to his 1644 edition of Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer.Footnote ¹²⁵ Accessing the text through Vorstius, Hottinger noticed that several names listed among the apostate angels in Enoch were listed among the good angels in this formula, a discrepancy which Hottinger believed threw doubt on the supposed rabbinic credentials of the fragments.Footnote ¹²⁶ This was not the only problem, however: Hottinger pointed out other areas in which the Syncellus fragments were “at odds with the common belief of the Hebrews” (repugnat communi Hebraeorum hypothesi).Footnote ¹²⁷

To explain these incongruities, Hottinger looked to recent scholarship on Jewish history. He argued that the fragments’ strange features were not characteristic of texts by Hebrew-speaking Jews, but rather characterised texts by Hellenistic Jews, whom, following the early modern consensus, Hottinger identified as Greek-speaking Jews who resided in diasporic communities like that at Alexandria and—crucially—knew no Hebrew.Footnote ¹²⁸ Hottinger catalogued other clues that he believed exposed the fragments’ Hellenistic (i.e. non-Hebrew) origins. For instance, the fragments distinguished between the γίγαντες (gigantes) and the Ναφηλείμ (Napheleim), which to Hottinger suggested that their author was unaware that γίγαντες was the Septuagint’s translation of נפלים (nephilim), whereas Ναφηλείμ was merely the transliteration.Footnote ¹²⁹ With glee, Hottinger also pointed out that the paronomastic phrase used by the fragment, Φαρμαρὸς ἐδίδαξε φαρμακείας (Pharmaros taught pharmaceutical arts),Footnote ¹³⁰ suggested that the book had first been composed in Greek. This, he argued, was analogous to how the History of Susanna betrayed its Greek origins to Porphyry with word-play that functioned only in that language.Footnote ¹³¹

By placing the fragments into the corpus of Hellenistic Jewish writings, Hottinger was making an even more decisive argument against them than Bangius. As Nicholas Hardy has shown, the category of Hellenistic Judaism was fraught with theological significance. Scaliger himself had used it to undercut several works at the heart of Catholic-Protestant controversy, from 2 Maccabees to The Letter of Aristeas.Footnote ¹³² Indeed, when Scaliger dismissed texts such as Susanna and Bel and the Dragon on the grounds that they were not translated from Hebrew originals, he did so as part of an argument that they were products of Hellenistic Judaism and so (as a consequence) spurious.Footnote ¹³³ This weaponisation was premised on the notion that Hellenistic Jews constituted a recent diaspora who had lost contact with their own sacred texts and been excessively influenced by their immersion in Greek culture.Footnote ¹³⁴ Scaliger’s aside in 1606 that 1 Enoch was translated from a Hebrew original self-consciously protected the fragments from this incriminating class of literature. In an environment in which some Protestants granted a surprising amount of authority to classical rabbinic literature—Robert Sheringham’s attribution of divine inspiration to the Mishnah being one example—Bangius’s repositioning of the fragments as rabbinic might not seem the securest way to discredit them.Footnote ¹³⁵ By contrast, from a Protestant perspective, if the fragments were indeed Hellenistic, no amount of clever manoeuvring could save them.

Debate over the fragments’ genre continued throughout the century. Writing five years after Hottinger, Heidegger repeated his arguments admiringly, claiming that the fragments’ style was Hellenistic, but proposing that their composition was even later than Hottinger supposed.Footnote ¹³⁶ Taking inspiration from Bangius, Heidegger suggested that the fragments were written by an early Greek Jewish convert to Christianity, who lived after Jude and muddled together Kabbalistic, neo-Platonic, and New Testament ideas to produce a confused mishmash. This, Heidegger declared, would explain why scholars like Scaliger had noticed literary affinities between 1 Enoch and the Epistle of Jude.Footnote ¹³⁷ The Dutch theologian Hermannus Witsius agreed with Heidegger.Footnote ¹³⁸ Others, such as Pfeiffer and Hülsemann, noticed the philological flaws in Hottinger’s argumentation, especially the erroneous logic behind his analysis of Φαρμαρὸς ἐδίδαξε φαρμακείας, and maintained Bangius’s judgement that the fragment was originally Hebrew/rabbinic.Footnote ¹³⁹

These analyses were, of course, filled with errors, confusions, and blatant prejudice and polemics. Yet, despite this, the work of these scholars represents the most textually attentive scholarship on the fragments in early modernity. These were the first efforts to locate the fragments in a particular historical milieu and literary genre. They offered, via detailed comparison with a range of Jewish and early Christian writings and close stylistic analysis, conjectures on the identity and profile of 1 Enoch’s author, from rabbinic Jew to Kabbalising Hellenistic convert to Christianity. They were far more sophisticated and textually grounded than earlier discussions of 1 Enoch’s canonicity, and yet just as theologically charged. This combination is no coincidence. As we have seen, it was the cumulative confessional pressure of decades of debate that pushed scholars to turn towards this more serious (even if still, by modern standards, wildly speculative) mode of study.

Conclusion: Fabricius and the Perils of Bibliography

One striking feature about the trends examined in this article is not only what they include, but what they omit. For one, much has been written about the collector Nicholas Peiresc’s attempts to locate a complete Ethiopic text of 1 Enoch.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Yet this search played a smaller role in early modern scholarly discussions than Peiresc’s enthusiasm implies. A perusal of Peiresc’s correspondence with Grotius on the matter is revealing. Grotius responded with coolness to Peiresc’s excited news of his acquisition of “a very ancient [Ethiopic] manuscript volume” of Enoch.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Even after Peiresc reported that his manuscript was longer than Scaliger’s fragments Grotius remained apathetic, stating that he was “currently occupied with Gothic texts” and that his “strong desire” was for a full copy of The Shepherd of Hermas, not Enoch.Footnote ¹⁴² There is a distinct sense throughout Grotius’s letters that, unlike The Shepherd of Hermas and comparable Greek texts, an Ethiopic version of Enoch would be late, later certainly than the Syncellus fragments, and therefore unreliable.Footnote ¹⁴³ It is similarly striking that so few Catholic writers building a case for 1 Enoch’s former canonicity thought to invoke its canonical status in Ethiopia. This was a scholarly world which prized antiquity above all else and which was still principally preoccupied with intra-confessional Western European disputes. These factors were crucial in generating interest in the Syncellus fragments, but they also resulted in an absence of serious interest in the Ethiopic Enoch among scholars from whom we might have expected more curiosity.

Indeed, this article has aimed to reconstruct the debate over 1 Enoch as it appeared in early modern Europe, by identifying the factors that generated interest in the fragments. It has shown that although the responses of early modern scholars to 1 Enoch were structured by theological concerns, these did not prevent the emergence of close readings of the fragments. Even before Hottinger and Heidegger were exchanging opinions on 1 Enoch’s genre, scholars like Drusius and Scaliger were offering erudite accounts of the fragments’ age and their place within the history of hermeneutics. Such discussions were complex and nuanced because they were confessionally charged, not despite it. This finding is in line with recent observations on the relationship between criticism and confession in the period.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In post-Reformation Europe, the pressure of theological controversy was the key generative force for the progress of philological scholarship. The development of biblical criticism cannot be detached from these forces, nor can it be detached from the uncomfortable assumptions (about Jews, Jewish-Christian relations, and inter-confessional dynamics) that underpin them.

Nor did these pressures end with the seventeenth century. Johann Albert Fabricius, whose influence still looms over studies of the “Old Testament pseudepigrapha,” was swayed in his own way by their legacy.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ One of his first comments upon introducing the fragments was to declare that they were composed by a Hellenistic Jew, following Hottinger.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ This holds a lesson for modern historians, who often use eighteenth-century works like Fabricius’s for a quick sense of early modern opinions on a topic. A perusal of Fabricius in light of this article demonstrates how misleading such short-cuts can be.

Fabricius’s survey of the judgements of “recent learned men” on 1 Enoch, for example, gave a wholly misrepresentative sample of the seventeenth-century debate. Here, Fabricius privileged Lutherans like himself (such as Pfeiffer), as well as scholars who were considered brilliant philologists by his own time: Scaliger, Grotius, William Cave, Grabe, Brian Walton, Richard Simon, and Witsius—even though several men on the list (Walton, Simon, and Cave in particular) had offered derivative, unremarkable comments on Enoch.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Elsewhere, Fabricius omitted inconvenient information: Drusius, lauded in Fabricius’s era for his linguistic prowess, was mentioned, but shorn of his suggestion that the fragment was antediluvian.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Perhaps most remarkably, Boulduc was relegated to the list of other interpreters closing Fabricius’s account, with no indication of the extent to which he had driven seventeenth-century discussions of the fragments.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Indeed, the whole Jesuit tradition of elevating 1 Enoch to former canonical or sacred status was altogether ignored. Kircher, who was still famous by Fabricius’s era, could not be overlooked (although Kircher’s positive comments about the fragment were omitted), but figures of less notoriety like Serarius were absent.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

These comments are not intended as a critique of Fabricius. After all, this would be to treat Fabricius as a contemporary historian, when the latest work in early modern studies has shown just how strongly theological pressures shaped purportedly “neutral” historical scholarship deep into the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Rather, it is to stress how careful we must be when treating eighteenth-century works as bibliographical resources. Such works not only weight early modern contributions incorrectly, they also selectively disregard texts and entire traditions for reasons which most modern scholars would not endorse. Hugo Grotius might have been a more judicious and astute biblical critic than Boulduc by both Fabricius’s standards and our own, but it was Boulduc’s eristic controversialism that had the greater impact in early modernity.