2 (Slavonic Apocalypse of) Enoch

The text known as 2 (Slavonic Apocalypse of ) Enoch is known only from a number of manuscripts written in various dialects of Church Slavonic 1 and dating from the 14th–18th centuries. The oldest of these manuscripts is the fourteenth century ethical treatise Merilo Pravednoe (“The Scales of Justice”). This document, however, contains a heavily edited
and reworked version of 2 Enoch and, therefore, while being the oldest witness to the work it is also the witness of a very late stage in its transmission. Thus, one of the view points universally agreed by scholars is that 2 Enoch significantly pre-dates the 14th century. The manuscripts bear witness to two primary recensions of the work, generally known as the longer and shorter recensions, although if we are to be precise there are, in fact four recensions: very long, long, short and very short. 2 Vaillant, in his critical edition of the text3 made the judgement that, for the most part, the shorter recension was original and relegated
the material of the longer recension to an appendix, regarding it as the work of a later redactor. Against Vaillant, however, Böttrich made the simple statement that “spätere Kürzungen müssen nicht mit früheren Erweiterungen identisch sein,” 4 a comment that exposed a major methodological problem with Vaillant’s approach and reminds us that there
is no avoiding the difficult process of weighing up each point in the text and its diverse witnesses in order to establish which reading might be original.