apocrypha

126:3.6In the course of this year Je­sus found a pas­sage in the so-called Book of Enoch which in­flu­enced him in the later adop­tion of the term “Son of Man” as a des­ig­na­tion for his be­stowal mis­sion on Uran­tia. He had thor­oughly con­sid­ered the idea of the Jew­ish Mes­siah and was firmly con­vinced that he was not to be that Mes­siah. He longed to help his fa­ther’s peo­ple, but he never ex­pected to lead Jew­ish armies in over­throw­ing the for­eign dom­i­na­tion of Pales­tine. He knew he would never sit on the throne of David at Je­ru­sa­lem. Nei­ther did he be­lieve that his mis­sion was that of a spir­i­tual de­liv­erer or moral teacher solely to the Jew­ish peo­ple. In no sense, there­fore, could his life mis­sion be the ful­fill­ment of the in­tense long­ings and sup­posed Mes­sianic prophe­cies of the He­brew scrip­tures; at least, not as the Jews un­der­stood these pre­dic­tions of the proph­ets. Like­wise he was cer­tain he was never to ap­pear as the Son of Man de­picted by the Prophet Daniel.

126:3.7But when the time came for him to go forth as a world teacher, what would he call him­self? What claim should he make con­cern­ing his mis­sion? By what name would he be called by the peo­ple who would be­come be­liev­ers in his teach­ings?

126:3.8While turn­ing all these prob­lems over in his mind, he found in the syn­a­gogue li­brary at Naz­a­reth, among the apoc­a­lyp­tic books which he had been study­ing, this man­u­script called “The Book of Enoch”; and though he was cer­tain that it had not been writ­ten by Enoch of old, it proved very in­trigu­ing to him, and he read and reread it many times. There was one pas­sage which par­tic­u­larly im­pressed him, a pas­sage in which this term “Son of Man” ap­peared. The writer of this so-called Book of Enoch went on to tell about this Son of Man, de­scrib­ing the work he would do on earth and ex­plain­ing that this Son of Man, be­fore com­ing down on this earth to bring sal­va­tion to man­kind, had walked through the courts of heav­enly glory with his Fa­ther, the Fa­ther of all; and that he had turned his back upon all this grandeur and glory to come down on earth to pro­claim sal­va­tion to needy mor­tals. As Je­sus would read these pas­sages (well un­der­stand­ing that much of the East­ern mys­ti­cism which had be­come ad­mixed with these teach­ings was er­ro­neous), he re­sponded in his heart and rec­og­nized in his mind that of all the Mes­sianic pre­dic­tions of the He­brew scrip­tures and of all the the­o­ries about the Jew­ish de­liv­erer, none was so near the truth as this story tucked away in this only par­tially ac­cred­ited Book of Enoch; and he then and there de­cided to adopt as his in­au­gu­ral ti­tle “the Son of Man.” And this he did when he sub­se­quently be­gan his pub­lic work. Je­sus had an unerring abil­ity for the rec­og­ni­tion of truth, and truth he never hes­i­tated to em­brace, no mat­ter from what source it ap­peared to em­anate.

136:1.6There was one fea­ture of the be­stowal of Mi­chael which was ut­terly for­eign to the Jew­ish con­cep­tion of the Mes­siah, and that was the union of the two na­tures, the hu­man and the di­vine. The Jews had var­i­ously con­ceived of the Mes­siah as per­fected hu­man, super­hu­man, and even as di­vine, but they never en­ter­tained the con­cept of the union of the hu­man and the di­vine. And this was the great stum­bling block of Je­sus’ early dis­ci­ples. They grasped the hu­man con­cept of the Mes­siah as the son of David, as pre­sented by the ear­lier proph­ets; as the Son of Man, the super­hu­man idea of Daniel and some of the later proph­ets; and even as the Son of God, as de­picted by the au­thor of the Book of Enoch and by cer­tain of his con­tem­po­raries; but never had they for a sin­gle mo­ment en­ter­tained the true con­cept of the union in one earth per­son­al­ity of the two na­tures, the hu­man and the di­vine. The in­car­na­tion of the Cre­ator in the form of the crea­ture had not been re­vealed be­fore­hand. It was re­vealed only in Je­sus; the world knew noth­ing of such things un­til the Cre­ator Son was made flesh and dwelt among the mor­tals of the realm.

95:4.3This wise man of the Nile taught that “riches take them­selves wings and fly away”—that all things earthly are evanes­cent. His great prayer was to be “saved from fear.” He ex­horted all to turn away from “the words of men” to “the acts of God.” In sub­stance he taught: Man pro­poses but God dis­poses. His teach­ings, trans­lated into He­brew, de­ter­mined the phi­los­o­phy of the Old Tes­ta­ment Book of Proverbs. Trans­lated into Greek, they gave color to all sub­se­quent Hel­lenic re­li­gious phi­los­o­phy. The later Alexan­drian philoso­pher, Philo, pos­sessed a copy of the Book of Wis­dom.

96:1.53. El Shad­dai. It is dif­fi­cult to ex­plain what El Shad­dai stood for. This idea of God was a com­pos­ite de­rived from the teach­ings of Amen­emope’s Book of Wis­dom mod­i­fied by Ikh­na­ton’s doc­trine of Aton and fur­ther in­flu­enced by Mel­chiz­e­dek’s teach­ings em­bod­ied in the con­cept of El Elyon. But as the con­cept of El Shad­dai per­me­ated the He­brew mind, it be­came thor­oughly col­ored with the Yah­weh be­liefs of the desert.