Which Bibles Include the Book of Enoch? A Historical Guide

Part 5 of 10 — Deuterocanonical Studies Series

Most people assume the Book of Enoch was always outside the Bible — a curiosity from the margins of ancient religion, excluded early and excluded decisively. The reality is more complicated than that. For at least one major Christian tradition, 1 Enoch has been canonical scripture for over 1,600 years. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was copied more often than most books that made the cut. And the earliest Christians quoted it, cited it as prophecy, and wove its ideas into the texts we now call the New Testament.

So which Bibles actually include the Book of Enoch? Where has it been accepted, where has it been rejected, and what drove those decisions? We went looking for the full history — and what we found is a story of geography, politics, and theological disagreement that stretches across two millennia.

If you want to read the text itself as we go, you can open 1 Enoch in our Septuagint reader.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church: 1,600 Years and Counting

The most direct answer to "which Bibles include the Book of Enoch" is the Ethiopian Bible. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has included 1 Enoch — known in Ge'ez as Henok (ሄኖክ) — in its biblical canon for at least 1,600 years. It is not an appendix or a footnote. It is scripture, read in liturgy, studied by scholars, and treated with the same authority as Genesis or the Psalms.

The Ethiopian canon is the largest of any Christian tradition:

The Ethiopian church traces its roots to the earliest decades of Christianity. Acts 8:26–40 records the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch — a court official of the Kandake (queen) of Ethiopia — who was baptized by the apostle Philip. Ethiopian Christians regard this account as the foundation of their tradition, and their church developed largely independent of the Latin and Greek traditions that would dominate Europe and the Near East.

That independence matters. The Ethiopian church preserved texts that other traditions let go. And here is a fact that most Western readers do not know: until the modern era, the only complete manuscripts of 1 Enoch that survived anywhere in the world were in Ge'ez, the classical Ethiopic language. No complete copy existed in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, or Aramaic. The text survived because the Ethiopian church preserved it — because for them, it was holy scripture, and you do not lose what you revere.

The first European access to the complete text came through the Scottish traveler James Bruce, who brought three Ge'ez manuscripts of 1 Enoch back from Ethiopia in 1773. Richard Laurence published the first English translation from Bruce's manuscripts in 1821. Before that, European scholars knew 1 Enoch only from scattered quotations in the church fathers and a few Greek fragments.

The Dead Sea Scrolls: Evidence from the Ground

Between 1947 and 1956, roughly 930 texts were discovered in caves near Qumran on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. Among them were eleven fragmentary copies of 1 Enoch, all written in Aramaic — the language in which scholars believe the original was composed.

Eleven copies is a remarkable number. To put it in context, here is how 1 Enoch compares to canonical books in terms of manuscript copies found at Qumran:

Read that again. The community at Qumran copied 1 Enoch more than they copied Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, or Ezra. Esther — which is in every Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Bible — was not found at Qumran at all. Nehemiah has no separate manuscript, appearing only as part of an Ezra scroll.

Every section of 1 Enoch was represented among the Qumran fragments except the Parables of Enoch (chapters 37–71), also called the Similitudes. This is the section that contains the most developed "Son of Man" theology — and its absence at Qumran has fueled scholarly debate for decades. Some argue the Parables were written later, after the Qumran community had been established. Others propose that the Qumran community simply did not use that particular section. The question remains open.

What the Dead Sea Scrolls prove beyond dispute is that 1 Enoch was one of the most valued and widely circulated texts in Second Temple Judaism. The people who preserved these scrolls — whoever they were — treated 1 Enoch as important literature, copied and recopied it, and kept it alongside the Torah and the Prophets.

Early Christian Manuscripts

Outside Ethiopia and Qumran, 1 Enoch also appears in early Christian manuscript traditions, though only in fragments:

Codex Panopolitanus (4th–5th century)

In 1886–87, a Greek manuscript containing 1 Enoch chapters 1–32 was discovered in a Christian burial at Akhmim (ancient Panopolis) in Upper Egypt. The manuscript was buried with a Christian monk or cleric — suggesting that the text was still valued in Egyptian Christian communities in the late Roman period, even as church authorities in other regions were moving to exclude it.

Chester Beatty Papyrus XII (4th century)

Greek fragments of 1 Enoch chapters 97–107, now housed in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin and the University of Michigan. These fragments confirm that the Greek text of 1 Enoch was circulating among Christians in Egypt well into the fourth century.

Codex Sinaiticus (4th century)

The great Codex Sinaiticus does not contain 1 Enoch. But it is worth noting what it does contain beyond the standard canon: the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas, both bound alongside the books of the New Testament as though they belonged there. This tells us something important about the fourth century — the boundaries of "the Bible" were still being negotiated. The idea of a fixed, universally agreed-upon canon is a later development, not an early one.

Barnabas, for its part, quotes 1 Enoch directly and introduces the quotation with the phrase "the Scripture says" — treating 1 Enoch as authoritative in the same way it treats Isaiah or the Psalms.

Jewish Reception: From Reverence to Silence

In the period scholars call Second Temple Judaism — roughly 200 BC to 70 AD — 1 Enoch was widely read and deeply influential. The Qumran evidence alone makes that clear. But the text also shaped ideas about angelology, demonology, the messianic age, and the final judgment that appear throughout Jewish literature of the period.

After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, things changed. Rabbinic Judaism — the tradition that would define Jewish practice going forward — gradually narrowed its focus to the Torah and its authorized interpretations. The Mishnah (Yadayim 3:5) records debates about which books "defile the hands," a technical term meaning the text is sacred enough to require ritual handwashing after handling. The Torah and the recognized prophetic and wisdom writings had this status. Enochic literature did not.

The exclusion was not instantaneous. Traces of 1 Enoch's influence persist in later Jewish mystical traditions — the Merkabah literature, with its visions of the divine chariot and the heavenly throne room, echoes the celestial journeys of Enoch. The Hekhalot texts, which describe the soul's ascent through heavenly palaces, owe something to the Enochic tradition even if they never cite it by name. The ideas survived even as the text itself was set aside.

The Early Church: Acceptance, Then Exclusion

The trajectory of 1 Enoch in early Christianity follows a clear arc — wide acceptance in the first three centuries, followed by progressive exclusion in the fourth.

We trace the patristic evidence in detail in our companion post, What the Early Church Fathers Actually Said About 1 Enoch. The short version: the text was quoted or referenced by Jude, the author of the Epistle of Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Athenagoras, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Origen. Tertullian called it scripture. Clement cited it as prophecy. Jude quoted it by name in a text that would itself become canonical.

But by the fourth century, the tide was turning. Jerome, the translator of the Latin Vulgate, argued that Jude's quotation of 1 Enoch actually weakened Jude's own authority — some early Christians questioned whether Jude belonged in the canon precisely because it cited an "apocryphal" text. Augustine, while acknowledging the antiquity of the Enochic tradition, concluded that the text could not be trusted as scripture because it had not been preserved in the Jewish temple archives.

The institutional decisions followed:

• The Apostolic Constitutions (c. 380 AD) list approved books for Christian reading — 1 Enoch is not among them.
• The 60-book canon lists circulating in the late fourth century exclude it.
• The Council of Hippo (393 AD) and the Council of Carthage (397 AD) ratified canon lists that do not include 1 Enoch.

After Carthage, the question was effectively settled for the Latin West and the Greek East. 1 Enoch passed out of circulation in those traditions. Only in Ethiopia did the text retain its place in the Bible.

Modern Rediscovery and Accessibility

For Western scholars, 1 Enoch was a text known only from quotations until James Bruce's Ethiopian manuscripts arrived in Europe in 1773. The standard scholarly English translation, by R.H. Charles, was published in a revised and expanded edition in 1912 (building on his 1893 original) and remained the definitive English text for most of the twentieth century. Charles's translation — careful, scholarly, and readable — introduced 1 Enoch to the English-speaking world and remains in print today.

The definitive modern edition is the two-volume commentary by George W.E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam in the Hermeneia series (volume 1 in 2001, volume 2 in 2012). This work integrates the Ge'ez, Aramaic, and Greek evidence and provides the most comprehensive analysis of the text available in any language.

Today, 1 Enoch is more accessible than at any point in its history. You can read it in our Septuagint reader, explore its connections to the biblical text in our Bible Study Tools, or browse the full Septuagint Bible collection.

The Real Question

Here is what we keep coming back to. A text that was copied eleven times at Qumran. A text that Jude quoted as prophecy. A text that Tertullian called scripture, that Clement cited as authoritative, that shaped the language of 2 Peter and the theology of Revelation. A text preserved as holy scripture by a Christian church that traces its lineage to the apostolic age.

And yet, for most of Christian history in the West, this text was lost — not because it was destroyed, but because the traditions that excluded it simply stopped copying it. It survived only where it was still revered.

Why was such a widely-read, frequently-quoted text excluded? Was the content genuinely problematic — the angelology too elaborate, the apocalypticism too vivid? Or was it the politics of canon formation — the desire of fourth-century bishops to draw clean lines around an authoritative collection, even if it meant cutting texts that earlier generations had valued?

We do not think there is a simple answer. But we do think the question deserves to be asked — and that it can only be asked honestly if you know the history. Now you do.

Continue the Series

• The Book of Enoch and the Bible: Every Connection We Found
• Jude 14–15 Directly Quotes 1 Enoch
• What the Early Church Fathers Actually Said About 1 Enoch