TMKauthor

Thought it’s often stated as such, Jesus never directly quotes the book of Enoch. What we do find though is an apparent critique of Enochic traditions rather than quotations of them. In John’s Gospel, Jesus seems to speak against claims that Enoch ascended to heaven and descended again as the Son of Man to bring knowledge to the elect on earth. A claim within Enoch which ascribes the Son of Man from Daniel 7 to Enoch, and therefore not Jesus. John 3:13–15 presents Jesus stating, “No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man;” a formulation that directly challenges the Enoch narrative where the patriarch fulfills this role. The broader picture shows that Enoch exercised significant influence on early Christianity, with the theory of demons in Luke 11:24–26 finding parallels in inter-testimonial literature like Enoch’s teachings, and the judgment scene in Matthew 25:31 presupposing the corresponding scene in Enoch. Yet this influence appears to be implicit rather than explicit. The relevance of such Pseudopigraphical literature on the Gospel authors has them draw on these commonly known Jewish concepts and imagery without attributing content eventually written down in Enochic texts directly to Jesus as quotations. The absence of direct quotation is telling. Jude explicitly quotes Enoch by name as prophecy (though Enoch never prophesied in the section quoted from 1 Enoch 1), demonstrating that early Christians could cite Enoch formally when they chose to do so. That the Gospels do not employ this same method suggests Jesus’s sayings were not presented as Enochic citations, even where conceptual overlap existed.