METAL

I was very excited for this movie. Such a shame. No chance I go see it now.

What? He possibly cheated on his wife…?

He has absolutely no business being in politics then.

Sounds pretty successful to me. The less the better.

I realized he’s a troll. Had me going for a while, I’ll admit.

Oh come on now Squirrel… You are massively overstating the case and you know it. I didn’t expect this from you.

Nobody denies that 1 Enoch influenced Second Temple Jewish thought or that New Testament authors were familiar with themes also found in Enochic literature. That is widely acknowledged scholarship. The problem is your leap from… “the NT authors were familiar with Enochic traditions” to “therefore the entire book was universally regarded as inspired Scripture by the early Church.” That doesn’t track.

Jude explicitly quotes a prophecy attributed to Enoch… Sure. Paul (or whoever) also quotes pagan poets approvingly. Menander, Epimenides, Aratus… That still does not canonize their entire corpus. A true statement or useful tradition can be cited without granting full scriptural status to the entire work surrounding it.

Also, thematic overlap is even weaker evidence than direct quotation. By that standard, shared imagery alone would canonize half of Second Temple Jewish literature. Shared concepts about angels, judgment, heavenly thrones, books being opened, etc., existed broadly in Jewish apocalyptic thought long before the New Testament canon was finalized. You are also blurring together “influential,” “popular,” “widely circulated,” and “canonical.” Those are not synonyms.

The Shepherd of Hermas, 1 Clement, the Didache, and the Epistle of Barnabas were also widely read and deeply influential in parts of the early Church. Some Christians even treated them very highly, yet they were still ultimately distinguished from Scripture by the broader Church.

And your “Rome scrubbed Enoch” claim ignores the fact that the canon developed across multiple regions of Christianity, East and West, over centuries. There is no evidence of some centralized Roman conspiracy removing Enoch from a universally accepted canon. The much simpler historical explanation is the obvious one… some Jewish and Christian communities valued Enoch highly, while most did not ultimately recognize it as inspired Scripture. Even your own argument quietly admits this diversity by appealing specifically to Ethiopia. If the entire early Church universally considered Enoch canonical, you would not need to narrow the appeal to one surviving tradition.

Finally, the pseudepigrapha point cuts against your argument, not for it. The fact that ancient religious communities produced many texts attributed to revered figures is exactly why the early Church became cautious about canonicity in the first place.

That sounds less like “he got one doctrine wrong” and more like he’s blending together multiple systems that do not naturally fit together. For example, saying UFO disclosure will supposedly “disprove eternal security” is not really an argument from Scripture. That sounds more like speculative theology mixed with eschatology and personal interpretation.

And on the forgiveness point, Scripture absolutely warns believers against persistent unrepentant sin, but saying “believers who fail to amend their ways will not be forgiven in this life or the next” is a much stronger claim than the text itself usually makes in the passages people debate over eternal security.

Likewise, taking condemnations aimed at Pharisees and directly inserting modern Protestants into the text as the primary target is a huge interpretive leap. You can make applications across time, sure, but application is not the same thing as original audience and meaning.

If that is in fact what he said, that absolutely is not what the Catholic Church teaches. It’s also an incorrect exegesis.

Guess I overlooked it. What doctrine did he get wrong?

He just did.

Jude quoting Enoch does not make Enoch Scripture any more than Paul quoting pagan poets in Acts 17 makes Greek poetry Scripture. Biblical authors sometimes quote or reference non inspired sources their audience would recognize. That only means the specific point being referenced is useful or familiar, not that the entire work is divinely inspired.

And yes, the Ethiopian Church includes Enoch in its canon, but the overwhelming majority of the early non-heretical Church did not recognize it as Scripture, and it was never accepted into the Catholic canon or the broader historic Christian canon shared by Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants.

Even many early Christians who found Enoch interesting still distinguished between “valuable to read” and “divinely inspired Scripture.” Those are not the same category. So no, “Jude quoted it” is not evidence that the early Church universally viewed Enoch as inspired. That argument is far too simplistic.

There were plenty of ideas in early Christianity that were shot down by the Church Christ founded. That doesn’t mean the early Church accepted it, just that there has always been heretics.

No it wasn’t. And just because it was referenced does not mean it was divinely inspired. Strictly historically relevant for some things.

Fair enough. If you are presenting them as personal speculation rather than established conclusions, then we are closer than it first sounded.

My point was simply that once scientific concepts, spirituality, and biblical language start getting blended together, people often begin treating the combination as mutually reinforcing even when the logical connections are not actually demonstrated.

For what it is worth, this is not really a “fundamentalist Christian” issue. Historic Christianity in general has always rejected the idea that humans possess an inner divine nature or latent godhood. That distinction between Creator and creature is one of the central dividing lines between Christianity and Gnostic style systems… but I can respect the honesty of “these are just my thoughts” far more than people who present speculation as settled fact.