The Only Non-Canonical Book the New Testament Quotes Directly

The Canon Debate, a collection of scholarship on how the biblical canons took their present shape, situates this book at an unusual boundary, quoted directly by name in the New Testament letter of Jude, which cites Enoch as prophesying about the coming judgment, yet excluded from the canon both of the Jewish scriptures and of every Christian tradition except one. That exception is the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, which alone among churches canonized 1 Enoch and which alone preserved the complete text, in Ge'ez translation, after the original apparently fell out of active copying everywhere else Jewish and Christian communities used Greek, Aramaic or Hebrew.

For centuries the Ethiopic text was the only complete witness scholars outside Ethiopia had access to. Fragments of the book in its original Aramaic later turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, confirming both that the work was genuinely ancient, older than the New Testament that quotes it, and that its transmission history split very early, one branch preserved fully by a single church tradition, other branches surviving only in scattered fragments or not at all. Jude's willingness to quote a book his own tradition would not ultimately canonize is itself part of what canon scholarship treats as evidence that the line between scripture and everything else was still being drawn, rather than already fixed, when the New Testament's own books were being written.