1 Enoch 46-48, 71 · Connection
The Son of Man in the Book of Enoch
A pre-existent figure called the Son of Man, enthroned as judge — what the Parables say, and why their date is the whole argument.
Where the passage sits
Chapters 37 to 71 of 1 Enoch are called the Parables, or the Similitudes. They are a distinct block with their own vocabulary — God is 'the Lord of Spirits' here, a title barely used elsewhere in the book — and they are the section that draws the most attention from readers interested in the New Testament.
That is because of a figure who appears in chapter 46 and recurs throughout: one called the Son of Man, the Elect One, and the Righteous One, who sits in judgement over the kings and the mighty.
The scene in chapter 46
Enoch sees two figures. One has a head of days, with hair white like wool. Beside him is another being whose face has the appearance of a man and is full of graciousness, like one of the holy angels.
Enoch does the sensible thing and asks his guide who the second figure is. The answer is that this is the Son of Man who has righteousness, with whom righteousness dwells, who reveals what is hidden, and whom the Lord of Spirits has chosen.
The imagery here is not invented from nothing. The white-haired 'Ancient of Days' and 'one like a son of man' both appear in Daniel 7, and the Parables are plainly working with that material. What is new is that the phrase has hardened into a title for a specific figure with a specific job.
Named before creation
Chapter 48 goes further than Daniel does. The Son of Man's name was named before the Lord of Spirits at that hour — and then the text reaches backwards past the beginning of the world.
The passage also calls him a staff for the righteous, the light of the Gentiles, and the hope of the troubled of heart, and says that he was chosen and hidden before the creation of the world. Two verses later the chapter refers to those who have denied the Lord of Spirits 'and His Anointed' — the ordinary word for messiah.
“And at that hour that Son of Man was named in the presence of the Lord of Spirits, and his name before the Head of Days. Yea, before the sun and the signs were created, before the stars of the heaven were made, his name was named before the Lord of Spirits.”
The twist in chapter 71
At the end of the Parables, Enoch is taken up into the heaven of heavens and brought before the Head of Days, and an angel speaks to him about the Son of Man.
What the angel says is genuinely contested. Charles's 1917 translation reads 'This is the Son of Man who is born unto righteousness' — a third-person identification. A number of other translations render the same line as direct address: you are that Son of Man. Charles also flags a passage lost from the manuscripts immediately before this point, which is part of why the sentence is hard to pin down.
The difference matters enormously. On one reading the Parables end by identifying Enoch himself as the heavenly figure he has been watching. On the other they simply point him out one last time. This is a translation and text-critical dispute, not a settled fact, and any retelling that states one reading without mentioning the other is overselling.
Why the date is the whole argument
The obvious question is whether a pre-Christian Jewish text already had an exalted, pre-existent Son of Man — which would make the Gospels' characteristic term for Jesus part of an existing conversation rather than a new coinage.
The obstacle is evidence. Aramaic fragments of every other section of 1 Enoch turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran. The Parables did not. That absence is the single most argued-over fact about this block of text.
Charles, writing in 1917, dated the Parables to roughly 105-64 BCE, comfortably before the New Testament. Some twentieth-century scholars, weighing the Qumran silence, argued for a date well into the Christian era instead, which would reverse the direction of any influence. The broad position among specialists today places them around the turn of the era — late first century BCE to first century CE — but this is a judgement about probabilities, not a documented date.
What can honestly be said
It is fair to say that the Parables contain a figure titled the Son of Man who is chosen, hidden before creation, and seated in judgement, and that this is striking to anyone who knows the Gospels.
It is not fair to say the Book of Enoch predicted Jesus, or that the Gospels copied Enoch, or that the matter is settled in either direction. Some readers take the parallels as evidence that the Gospel writers drew on a current of Jewish thought this text preserves; others take the Parables as a later text drawing on the same scriptural well as the Gospels, or on the Gospels themselves. The text as it stands supports the observation, not the conclusion.