The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

CHAPTER II
EARLY VERSIONS OF THE BOOKS OF ENOCH
THE ancient translations of the works attributed to Enoch have not yet
received sufficient attention. There are no studies, for instance, of the dates
of the translation of the various Enochic writings—studies that should take
as their starting-point a comparison of the vocabulary and phraseology of
the Greek Enoch with those of classical texts and, more especially, with the
language of the papyri of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Neither are
there any lists of quotations from the books of Enoch in early Christian
literature (Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Slavonic) other than Greek
and Latin patristic works.
THE
GREEK VERSION
The most important text of the Greek Enoch, which gives us the first part of
the Ethiopic Enoch almost in its entirety, is the codex Panopolitanus of the
sixth, if not the end of the fifth century. It was found, at the time of the
excavations undertaken by the order of S. Gr^baut, in the winter of 1886/7,
in a grave of the Coptic cemetery of Akhmim-Panopolis (in Upper Egypt)
which was in use from the fifth right up to the fifteenth century. Beside
the same body there lay a second manuscript, a mathematical papyrus
dating from the Byzantine era, certainly from before the Arab invasion.^ Our
manuscript, after a spell in the Gizeh Museum (hence the name Gizeh MS.,
which is now erroneous), became part of the collection of papyri in the Cairo
Museum.^ Grenfell and Hunt correctly date it to the fifth or sixth century,
as against the eighth-century dating of the editio princeps.
The Cairo codex 10759, as it is now, is composed of 33 leaves, 66 pages
(parchment, 16 cm. x 13 cm., bound; no original pagination). After a page
with the Coptic cross, comes the Gospel of Peter (pp. 2-10); then, after a
' Edited by J. Baillet in the Mimoires publids Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, Catalogue giniral
par les membres de la Mission archdologique des antiquitds dgyptiennes du Musie du Caire,
frangaise au Caire, be. i, Paris (1892), 1-89. N^^ 10001-10869: Greek Papyri, Oxford 1903,
^ Inv. no. 10759; see the description by B. P. p. 93.