Disavowed by the Jews like all other Scripture which speaks of Christ.[135]
But neither of these reasons was the real one. The Synedrion would have nothing to do with it, simply because it was more of a magic than a purely kabalistic work. The present day Theologians of both Latin and Protestant Churches class it among apocryphal productions. Nevertheless the New Testament, especially in the Acts and Epistles, teems with ideas and doctrines, now accepted and established as dogmas by the infallible Roman and other Churches, and even with whole sentences taken bodily from Enoch, or the “pseudo-Enoch,” who wrote under that name in Aramaic or Syro-Chaldaic, as asserted by Bishop Laurence, the translator of the Ethiopian text.
The plagiarisms are so glaring that the author of The Evolution of Christianity, who edited Bishop Laurence's translation, was compelled to make some suggestive remarks in his Introduction. On internal evidence[136] this book is found to have been written before the Christian period (whether two or twenty centuries does not matter). As correctly argued by the Editor, it is
Either the inspired forecast of a great Hebrew prophet, predicting with miraculous accuracy the future teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, or the Semitic romance [pg 083]from which the latter borrowed His conceptions of the triumphant return of the Son of man, to occupy a judicial throne in the midst of rejoicing saints and trembling sinners, expectant of everlasting happiness or eternal fire; and whether these celestial visions be accepted as human or Divine, they have exercised so vast an influence on the destinies of mankind for nearly two thousand years that candid and impartial seekers after religious truth can no longer delay enquiry into the relationship of the Book of Enoch with the revelation, or the evolution, of Christianity.[137]
The Book of Enoch
Also records the supernatural control of the elements, through the action of individual angels presiding over the winds, the sea, hail, frost, dew, the lightning's flash, and reverberating thunder. The names of the principal fallen angels are also given, among whom we recognize some of the invisible powers named in the incantations [magical] inscribed on the terra-cotta cups of Hebrew-Chaldee conjurations.[138]
We also find on these cups the word “Halleluiah,” showing that
A word with which ancient Syro-Chaldæans conjured has become, through the vicissitudes of language, the Shibboleth of modern Revivalists.[139]
The Editor proceeds after this to give fifty-seven verses from various parts of the Gospels and Acts, with parallel passages from the Book of Enoch, and says:
The attention of theologians has been concentrated on the passage in the Epistle of Jude, because the author specifically names the prophet; but the cumulative coincidence of language and ideas in Enoch and the authors of the New TestamentScripture, as disclosed in the parallel passages which we have collated, clearly indicates that the work of the Semitic Milton was the inexhaustible source from which Evangelists and Apostles, or the men who wrote in their names, borrowed their conceptions of the resurrection, judgment, immortality, perdition, and of the universal reign of righteousness, under the eternal dominion of the Son of man. This evangelical plagiarism culminates in the Revelation of John, which adapts the visions of Enoch to Christianity, with modifications in which we miss the sublime simplicity of the great master of apocalyptic prediction, who prophesied in the name of the antediluvian patriarch.[140]