“A principio fuit canonicus”: The Controversy over 1 Enoch in Seventeenth-Century Europe.

The past decade has seen significant advances in our understanding of the early modern reception of 1 Enoch. Thanks to the pioneering work of Ariel Hessayon, Annette Yoshiko Reed, and Gabriele Boccaccini among others, historians now have a detailed picture of the dissemination of Enochic texts in the period from Joseph Scaliger's 1606 publication of the Syncellus fragments to James Bruce's return from Ethiopia with four Enoch manuscripts in hand.

Building on their research, this article reconstructs the dynamics that generated and sustained interest in 1 Enoch in early modernity. Its starting point is the observation that, in many ways, it is surprising that 1 Enoch attracted much interest from early modern Christians at all. There were several factors—not least the incompatibility of Enochic angelology with early modern angelology—which, on the surface of things, ought to have mitigated against the Syncellus fragments gaining traction in seventeenth-century Europe.

To explain why interest in 1 Enoch prevailed despite these factors, this article offers three observations. Firstly, it expands our understanding of the nature of interest in 1 Enoch prior to 1606. Secondly, it corrects a subtle but far-reaching misinterpretation of Scaliger’s comments on the Syncellus fragments. Finally, it reconstructs three trends which arose after Scaliger’s publication of the fragments and which functioned to perpetuate interest in 1 Enoch. As the conclusion outlines, this account should interest not only scholars of Enoch's afterlives but also historians of scholarship for the light it sheds on the development of biblical criticism before the Enlightenment.