God’s Scribe: Encountering One Enoch in Image and Object

Professor Philip Esler and Angus Pryor have been working with Professor Grant Macaskill (New Testament, Aberdeen University), Professor Loren Stuckenbruck (New Testament, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) and Ethiopian theologians on a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust funded project entitled 1 Enoch and Contemporary Theology.

Pryor’s component of the research, as a practicing painter, is to make a set of twelve 2 x 2 metre paintings on themes and imagery from One Enoch and a large-scale model of an Ethiopian church, decorated inside and out with imagery relating to Enoch’s ascent to heaven (mentioned in Gen 5:22 but richly developed in One Enoch).

One Enoch is an ancient Jewish apocalyptic text (written in stages from 300-50 BC), which has been scriptural Old Testament for the Ethiopian Orthodox Tehawedo Church since about the 5th century AD. It develops the figure of Enoch in Gen 5:22, including Enoch’s at point serving as God’s scribe in relation to the ‘Watchers’ (the angels who abandoned heaven to marry human women).​​