EXTRACANONICAL SERIES
What Jude Knew
My dad thinks I spend too much time in books that aren't the Bible. We've been debating it for years. Then I found out the people who wrote Scripture were quoting them.
My dad and I argue about this stuff.
Not fight — debate. He’s my sparring partner on all of it. And one of his running positions is that I spend too much time in books that aren’t the Bible. Non-canon. Apocrypha. The stuff that got left out. His argument isn’t that it’s wrong — it’s that it’s a distraction. Why go looking in places the church decided weren’t authoritative?
It’s a fair question. I’ve been chewing on it for years.
Here’s the thing that changed the debate for me. It’s not that I decided the non-canon books were Scripture. It’s that I found out the people who wrote Scripture were quoting them.
THERE’S A BOOK IN YOUR BIBLE THAT QUOTES A BOOK THAT ISN’T
Jude 14–15. Look it up right now if you want. Jude — the epistle, your Bible, King James — quotes 1 Enoch 1:9. Word for word.
And when he calls Enoch “the seventh from Adam,” he’s not pulling that from Genesis. Genesis doesn’t say that. That phrase comes from 1 Enoch 60:8. Jude knew the text. He didn’t explain it or footnote it or tell his readers where to find it. He quoted it the way you quote something everyone in the room already knows.
So the question I started asking wasn’t whether 1 Enoch should be in my Bible. The question was whether the disciples actually studied it. Whether it was part of the world they lived in.
Kind of looks like it was.
WHAT I DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT QUMRAN
I’ll be straight with you — I’m not a scholar. I didn’t even know how to spell Qumran when I started down this road. Had to look it up. And once I knew what it was, I had to go deeper into that, and then deeper into what the Dead Sea Scrolls actually were, and what it meant that they found manuscripts there, and on and on. That’s just how this works for me. I can’t stop at the surface answer. Not because I enjoy the rabbit holes — because it matters too much to me to get it wrong.
So here’s what Qumran actually shows you.
Eleven copies of 1 Enoch were found there. Eleven. More copies than Ezekiel. More than most of the minor prophets. The community that preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls wasn’t tolerating 1 Enoch — they were treasuring it. The oldest fragment dates to the 3rd century BCE. This material was ancient when Jesus was born. It wasn’t fringe reading for a few weirdos in the desert. It was the theological air that Second Temple Jews breathed.
Jude wasn’t doing something unusual when he quoted it. He was doing what anyone educated in that world would do.
HOW I ENDED UP IN ETHIOPIA
This one starts with Vladimir Putin.
I was watching footage of him going to church during the early days of the Ukraine war and I thought — what is this? This man is doing things that are genuinely wicked and he’s lighting candles in an Orthodox church? And I remembered hearing about Soviet cosmonauts saying they saw no God in space, and I’m trying to reconcile that with little Putin going to services. So I started looking into what Eastern Orthodoxy actually was and what they studied.
That took me to Russian Orthodoxy, which took me to Eastern Christianity generally, which took me to some observations about the similarities between certain Eastern Orthodox practices and Islamic traditions. And I wanted to know which came first — because that matters. Turns out it wasn’t Eastern Orthodoxy borrowing from Islam. It may have been the other direction. That was interesting enough on its own.
But somewhere in that exploration I landed on the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. And I remembered friends telling me stories about miracles happening there — real ones, the kind that don’t get explained away easily. That stuck with me.
And then I found out they never removed 1 Enoch from their Bible. It’s been in their 81-book canon continuously since the 4th century. They never lost it. They never had a Council of Laodicea moment. They just kept reading.
For me, that was the plumb line. These are people without the same institutional layers Western Christianity has — without the same political pressures that shaped which books survived in Europe. They just kept what they had. And what they had included 1 Enoch.
That doesn’t make it Scripture. But it does mean the people who removed it from the Western canon weren’t doing it because the content was disproven. Nobody found an error and published a refutation. It just became inconvenient — and then it became invisible.
That doesn’t fly with me.
Nobody found an error and published a refutation. It just became inconvenient — and then it became invisible. That doesn't fly with me.
WHAT JUDE WAS ACTUALLY DOING
When Jude wrote his letter, he didn’t explain what 1 Enoch was. He didn’t tell his readers where to find it. He quoted it the way you quote something everyone already knows.
His readers knew the text.
They understood why “angels who did not keep their proper domain” (Jude 6) was a reference to something specific and well-documented. They knew the Watcher tradition. They knew who the seventh from Adam was. When Jude wrote, the library around Scripture was bigger than the one most of us are working with today.
We lost that library. And when you lose the library, the text starts to look strange in ways that aren’t the text’s fault.
THE EVIDENCE AT QUMRAN
11 copies of 1 Enoch found at Qumran — more than Ezekiel or the twelve minor prophets
9 copies of the related Book of Giants also recovered
3rd century BCE — oldest fragment, making this material ancient before Jesus was born
100+ years before Jude — Aramaic fragments predate the epistle entirely
THE REST OF US ARE CATCHING UP
A church in Ethiopia never had to rediscover any of this. They kept reading.
The rest of us are catching up. My dad and I are still arguing about it. I think that’s fine.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOUR STUDY
I’m not arguing 1 Enoch should be added to your Bible. That’s not my lane, and it’s not the point.
The point is simpler than that. When biblical authors cited sources, quoted traditions, and assumed shared knowledge — what were they assuming? What did the first readers of Jude and Peter and Revelation understand that we’ve had to rediscover?
The Scripture is the plumb line. Always. Nothing in these texts should contradict the biblical canon — they illuminate it, they don’t replace it. But understanding what the original audience already knew? That changes how you read everything.
The same people who gave us Sunday worship decided which books stayed in the canon. That’s worth at least a second look.
WATCH. OBSERVE. PROTECT. I AM.
REFERENCES & FURTHER READING
Scripture References
Jude 14–15 — Direct quotation from 1 Enoch 1:9 (KJV)
Jude 6 — Angels who did not keep their proper domain (KJV)
2 Peter 2:4 — Angels cast into chains of darkness (KJV)
Genesis 5:21–24 — Enoch walked with God and was not (KJV)
Hebrews 11:5–6 — By faith Enoch was translated (KJV)
Daniel 12:4 — Seal the book, even to the time of the end (KJV)
Historical & Scholarly Sources
Nickelsburg, George W.E. — 1 Enoch: A Commentary, Fortress Press, 2001
VanderKam, James C. — Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition, Catholic Biblical Association, 1984
Nickelsburg & VanderKam — 1 Enoch: The Hermeneia Translation, Fortress Press, 2012
Dead Sea Scrolls — Discovery and significance of Qumran manuscripts
Tertullian — Defender of 1 Enoch’s authenticity
Clement of Alexandria — Called 1 Enoch Scripture
Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church — 81-book canon, continuous preservation of 1 Enoch
Council of Laodicea (363 CE) — Formalization of Western canon exclusions
