Fr Ben Garren

When Enoch had lived for sixty-five years, he became the father of Methuselah. Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah for three hundred years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him. (Genesis 5:21-24)

Dear Siblings in Christ,

Fan-Fiction is not a new genre. This thing happens when a group of people become so enamored with a text that they want to fill in the gaps, tell new stories about their favorite characters, or take things places only they could ever imagine. These unauthorized, often amateur, authors have been about for thousands of years. In many cases their interpretations and additions to stories are mistaken for the stories themselves. We see this in a variety of ways at Christmas where our nativity sets, favorite hymns, and pageants often involve characters and details that add all type of characters and story lines to what is found in the Gospel.

In the four hundred years before Christ was born much of what was written about Hebrew Scripture took the same form as what we have done with the Christmas Story. Adding little details here and there, giving characters robust back stories, writing entirely new story lines about what really must have gone down in the book of Genesis and other texts. If there is some part about the creation myth, the stories from before the flood, or about the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Hebrew peoples that has made you scratch your head a bit… you are not alone. In the time of Jesus an entire corpus of works, now known as the Pseudepigrapha, had been written striving to answer the very same quandaries you and biblical scholars are curious about today. My category for this type of engagement with scripture is Sacred Fan-Fiction.

The hero, or at least major character, of Sacred Fan-Fiction is the Patriarch Enoch. He has only four verses about him in Genesis, is listed as a ancestor of Jesus by Luke and referenced in both the Letter to the Hebrews and the Letter of Jude. The references in Luke and Hebrews will work if all we know about Enoch comes from Genesis… but the reference in Jude comes directly from Sacred Fan-Fiction, the First Book of Enoch. The stories told about Enoch speak to his having all various types of visions of the heavenly host, describe all varieties of angels, and try to make sense of some of the unclear parts of Genesis. Many who read them feel the story is less clear after having read them.

This is pertinent today because February 3 is one of a few occasional Feasts of Enoch within Christendom… though devotion to this patriarch is rather rare and his feasts are seldom celebrated. As we continue in this Christmas Season and head for Epiphany, and as we continue to see all variety of things that are not-quite biblical in our carols, imagery, and potentially even sermons, it is good to remember that Sacred Fan-Fiction was something alive at the time of Jesus, popular amongst the authors of the New Testament, and something that we all do naturally as we mediate and make sense of the Sacred Story that we are all caught up in.

Pax,
—Ben