You should really listen to Hank's answer in the link that Alan provided (I'll copy it here for your convenience - http://www.equip.org/audio/whats-you...n-his-epistle/)And there was great joy among them, and they blessed and honored and exalted, because the name of the Son of Man had been revealed unto them.
• 1 Enoch 69:26
And from that time on there will be nothing that will be destroyed, for he, the Son of Man, has appeared, and sits on the throne of his glory, and all wickedness will disappear before his face and depart; but the word of that Son of Man will be strong before the Lord of the spirits. This is the third Parable of Enoch.
•1 Enoch 69:29
And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up:
• John 3:14
The people answered him, We have heard out of the law that Christ abideth for ever: and how sayest thou,The Son of man must be lifted up? who is this Son of man?
• John 12:34
Like I showed before, Enoch was written AFTER the Exile, and it is apocalyptic literature, therefore it stands to reason that it would contain phrases already written in existing scripture in eschatological p***ages of Daniel and Isaiah. But it is fiction, even though it contains truth. Anyone today can write a fiction that contains universal truth, and it happens all the time. That doesn't make it inspired scripture. People were writing fiction since centuries BC that we know of, and we acknowledge it is fiction even though many supers***ious people took them as gospel truth, like the writings of Homer, the Vedic texts, and so on. We know that the writings of philosophers like Aristotle and Socrates contain universal truth, but we do not believe those writings to be inspired of God. The Gnostics wrote many things that they thought were inspired of God, (example, the Gospel According to Thomas), and we deny that it is inspired scripture, even though Gnostics accept it as scripture even today. Some people in the R.C.C. are also supers***ious enough to accept many unbiblical things because they think apocryphal and pseudoepigraphal writings are equal with scripture, enough to formulate dogmas about it. Many of such people and those in cults will be lost because of dogmas they believe that are unbiblical based on writings and sermons of false ideas, because they are a distraction from the true gospel of Christ. Just because the book of Enoch contains quotes from earlier scripture and from oral tradition, acts like prophecy, and is translated in bonified King James English, doesn't make it inspired of God. Paul quoted from secular philosophy in 1 Corinthians 15:33 and Acts 17:28, and there are other quotes even by Jesus (e.g. Mat. 16:2-3) in which they acknowledge the truthfulness of the statement, but do not acknowledge any inspiration of the source of the statement. It is not any particular statement or phrase that is usable/truthful in the writing that makes a writing inspired, but it is the whole of the writing that makes it a consideration for scripture or not. The Book of Enoch does not meet scrutiny because of the things I mentioned before:
1. Enoch is clearly post-exilic in text style; my sources put the writing at about 150 BC. Wikipedia states "although modern scholars estimate the older sections (mainly in the Book of the Watchers) to date from about 300 BC, and the latest part (Book of Parables) probably to the first century BC."
2. Enoch is called pseudoepigrapha because the writer is not Enoch, but claims to be.
3. Gen. 6:4 says "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." which clearly indicates that since the giants (nephilim) were there before the event, they could not have been the offspring of that union. Therefore, the basis of the nephilim origin in Enoch is not Biblical.
4. There are indications within Enoch that imply its fictional nature, such as: (1) Giants 3000 els in height, which would put them 4500 ft. tall. (2) he saw a vision in the land of Dan, which didn't exist until about 1500 years after Enoch.
5. The idea of a union between angels and women is problematic in scriptures such as Mat. 22:30 and Heb. 1:5.
Another pseudoepigraphal writing is the Epistle of Barnabas, in which it actually appears like it could be on the same level of scripture. But because it was not accepted in the early Church, not widely used, etc. it was not accepted in the canon. One can also discern its lack of inspiration compared with the canon of scripture. I recommend reading the 66 books of scripture canon many times to get familiar with real inspiration, and be skeptical of anything that has claims, but lacks the overall inspiration of the whole text.
TD