How a Text Lost Everywhere Else Survived in Ge'ez

First Enoch and Jubilees were both widely read in the centuries around the turn of the era, quoted by New Testament writers and cited by early church fathers, and then dropped from the canon nearly everywhere as Christianity's center of gravity moved west. Their Greek and Aramaic originals survived only in scattered fragments, some not recovered until the Dead Sea Scrolls finds at Qumran in the twentieth century confirmed that Enoch had circulated in something close to its later form centuries before Christianity existed at all. The Ethiopian and Eritrean church tradition never dropped either book, and its Ge'ez translations, made from Greek exemplars sometime before the sixth century, are the only complete versions that survived anywhere in the world across the intervening fifteen hundred years. Western scholarship did not know this until the Scottish traveler James Bruce brought Ge'ez manuscripts of Enoch back from Ethiopia in 1773, and Richard Laurence's English translation from one of them, published in 1821, was for decades the only way most European scholars could read the book at all. A text the wider Christian world had let go of survived because one church's canon never let it go.