Isaiah 7:14 also tells of the coming Messiah which is fullfilled in Matthew -- so taking out The Book of Enoch didn't have any affect on the prophesying of the coming birth of Jesus Christ.
The person Enoch is mentioned in the Old Testament. And in the book of Jude, also But that doesn't mean the Book of Enoch should be included in the Canon of Scripture.
We have the 66 books already in the Canon to inspire, encourage and teach us. Some of the ancient mysteries 'being revealed' are nothing more than mythology. Now we Also have the mystery -- that being Christ in us.
We Also have the information about the fallen angels mating with the women here on earth and the men of reknown being born. But the last part you've mentioned -- 'he is taught and escorted by various Holy Angels in the heavenly realms"
well -- some of that is what is called -- literary license? in otherwards taking fact and embellishing it to make it more interesting?!
God's Word is giving us the history of the Jewish people because that's the line that Jesus Christ came through. We have the major and minor prophets giving warnings encouragement about coming judegments from God. We are told about the angelic world -- various kinds of angels and their jobs. TheGospels telling us of the birth of Jesus Christ -- Christian living guidelines. The existance of both heaven and hell in the future of every person. In other words our need for the Savior.
You're putting a Lot of emphasis on The Book of Enoch and Not on the rest of Scripture. The Bible is God's Word -- the books taken out were done so for a Reason.
Personally, I'll stay with the 66 books -- they are more than enough to keep me occupied. And I Do read lots of other books. I've been in Bible all my life. And I'm an older adult.
There are many other men of the Old Testament -- Moses for one / Abram who was renamed Abraham. And Noah and his family. The book of Daniel and his activities. Lots of good reading and learning.
What was that reason Sue? From one of the books in my library.....
Belief in Embodied Angels Banned as Blasphemy
The later Church Fathers did indeed have difficulty with the Enoch
viewpoint and sought another explanation for the fall of the angels.
Perhaps they were uncomfortable with the implications of the story of
some among us who are not of us—men who are not men but fallen
angels. So they looked to the record of Lucifer’s fall in Isaiah 14:12–
15, which reads:
How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the
morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst
weaken the nations!
For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I
will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the
mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the
most High.
Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.
Some Church Fathers saw in these verses of Isaiah the story of the
fall of an archangel and subsequently that of his underlings, drawing
by “his tail” (pride), according to Revelation 12:4, “the third part of the
stars [angels] of heaven.” Thus, they saw the fall as being through
pride rather than through lust, as in the Enoch account.
The Fathers, it seems, came up with an idea—an easy way to avoid
the troublesome tale of embodied evil angels. They unanimously
chose the version of the fall of the angels through pride instead of
the Enochian version of the fall through lust, making it an either/or
equation.
The question is: Was their motivation in challenging the Book of
Enoch to avoid the controversial doctrine of the corporeality of the
wicked angels and their bodily presence upon earth? And if so ...
why?
Perhaps we can reconstruct the logic of their argument. If the angels
fell through lust, they must have had (or gotten) physical bodies to
outplay their physical desires. But if the angels merely fell through
pride, a corruption of mind and heart, they need not have had bodies
to consummate their sin. They could simply be those bat-winged
demons that whisper into men’s ears, inciting them to vanity of
vanities.
The latter explanation was, in theological terms, less problematical.
And to this very day—though the Genghis Khans, et al., have made
their grandiose entrances and exits, parading their superhuman or
subhuman vileness, as the case may be—that belief prevails.
I for one do not believe that the sin of pride does not require a
physical body to outplay itself. The preening of these devils—their
body fixations and perversions ad nauseam and a physical culture
based entirely on the pride of the eye, from body-building to fashion
to the decadence of the Cain civilization—is rooted in both pride and
lust and is the proving ground for fallen egos vying for attention and
acclaim through the success cult.
The love of money is also rooted in both pride and lust. These vices
feed on each other as acts of lust become an assertion of pride in
sexual prowess. Yes, pride is a physical boasting—“See me, see
how beautiful I am, see how I can do all things better than the sons
of God. See how I can defy the Almighty, commit any crime, abuse
every law, spurn his love—and get away with it!”
In fact, the sin of lust itself technically does not require a physical
body to stain the soul and life record of men or angels. For did not
Jesus teach that the sin of lust could be carried out mentally and
spiritually through an impure heart? “Whosoever looketh on a
woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in
his heart.” (Matt. 5:28)
It would seem that to dwell upon the flesh-and-blood aspects of sin
should cause a digression from the fact that the state of sinfulness or
virtue is a condition of the soul which may be carried to its logical
conclusion in contempt of the Almighty on any plane of habitation by
either men or angels, whether clothed with bodies earthly, astral, or
ethereal.
Notwithstanding, the Church Fathers who grasped at a few verses of
Isaiah as salvation from their Enochian dilemma overlooked the most
astounding story of all. The narrative, after detailing the fall of the
archangel Lucifer, outlines the contemptuous deeds, the earthly
deeds, of this ambitious “son of the morning,” calling him outright
“the man that made the earth to tremble.”
They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and
consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to
tremble, that did shake kingdoms;
That made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the
cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners?
All the kings of the nations, even all of them, lie in glory, every
one in his own house.
But thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch,
and as the raiment of those that are slain, thrust through with a
sword, that go down to the stones of the pit; as a carcase trodden
under feet. (Isa. 14:16–19)
Isaiah called Lucifer a man—giving strong indication that he believed
that the “cast down one” had walked the earth in the flesh, had
moved among mortals as one of them.
Cyprian (200–258), a pupil of Tertullian, noted the specific use of the
word man and used it as proof that the Antichrist—Lucifer—would
someday come as a man. Aphrahat, a fourth-century Christian
theologian from Persia, believed that Lucifer had already incarnated
—as Nebuchadnezzar, king of ancient Babylon.
But this phenomenal piece of evidence for the incarnation of fallen
angels was brushed aside by the other Church Fathers—if they ever
recognized it for what it was—who instead used the Isaiah passage
to launch another debate: the pride-versus-lust controversy.
Christian writer Julius Africanus (200–245) first opposed the
traditional story of the fall of the angels through lust. He even tackled
Genesis 6, verses 1–4, about the “sons of God” and the “daughters
of men”—a parallel to the Book of Enoch in approved Scripture. The
pivotal verses read:
And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face
of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,
That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they
were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.
And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man,
for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and
twenty years.
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after
that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men,
and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men
which were of old, men of renown.
Julius Africanus preferred to believe that the “sons of God” in
Genesis 6:2 who “saw the daughters of men” and “took them wives”
didn’t refer at all to angels, despite the fact that certain translations of
the Bible in his day explicitly read “angels of God” rather than “sons
of God.”
Julius Africanus thought that the verse referred instead to the
righteous sons of Seth who “fell” (in the moral sense) by taking wives
of the inferior daughters of Cain. He formed his opinion in spite of
the fact that both the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jude refer to
angels who left their first (heavenly) estate (Jude 6),which Julius
should have known, and also in spite of the fact that the term “sons
of God” is elsewhere used in the Old Testament to indicate angels,
which Julius also should have known.
The opinions of the Church Fathers soon flocked to this
interpretation. In the early fourth century, the Syrian authority
Ephraem also declared that Genesis 6 referred to the Sethites and
Cainites—and therefore not to the fall of angels through lust.
Hilary of Tours casually mentions the tale of the lustful fall of angels
as if it were folly—“about which,” he says, “some book or other
exists,” but notes, “We need not know those things which are not
contained in the book of the Law.” Syrian theologian Theodoret
simply called believers of the story in Enoch “stupid and very
silly.”
Then Jerome (348–420), Doctor of the Church and scholarly
Hebraist, got into the argument. Jerome branded Enoch as
apocryphal and declared its teaching similar to the Manichaean
teachings—which Jerome emphatically denounced as heretical.
These are Jerome’s words:
We have read in a certain apocryphal book [the Book of Enoch
] that when the sons of God were coming down to the
daughters of men, they descended upon Mount Hermon and
there entered into an agreement to come to the daughters of men
and make them their wives. This book is quite explicit and is
classified as apocryphal. The ancient exegetes have at various
times referred to it, but we are citing it, not as authoritative, but
merely to bring it to your attention.... I have read about this
apocryphal book in the work of a particular author who used it to
confirm his own heresy. What does he say? He says: The sons of
God who came down from heaven upon Mount Hermon and
coveted the daughters of men are angels descending from the
heavens and souls that desired bodies since bodies are the
daughters of men. Do you detect the source of the teachings of
Manichaeus, the ignorant? Just as the Manichaeans say that
souls desired human bodies to be united in pleasure, do not they
who say that angels desired bodies—or the daughters of men—
seem to you to be saying the same thing as the Manichaeans? It
would take too long to refute them now, but I merely wanted to
indicate the coincidence, as it were, of the book that opportunely
confirmed their dogma.
