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Annette Yoshiko Reed Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochic Literature New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005 Pp. xii + 318. $75.
To readers of this journal the name of Annette Reed is likely not unknown since she provided the lead article in JECS 12.2 (2004) on the innovative use of the demons in the writings of Justin Martyr. Her interest in the topic of the fallen angels goes back to her Princeton dissertation of 2002; this book is a revision of that thesis. Its theme is tracing "the reception-history of the Book of the Watchers [BW = 1 Enoch 1-36] from its composition in the third century bce until the early Middle Ages, by focusing on its distinctive treatment of the fallen angels as corrupting teachers of humankind" (5). Reed's emphasis throughout the volume is on the role of Enochic literature within early and middle Judeo- Christian relations.
After a twenty-three page introduction she pens three chapters which will likely be of more interest to scholars of ancient Judaism than early Christianity. Starting with the fourth chapter our author begins dealing in earnest with material that directly affects the study of patristics. Here she stresses "continuous communities" (= Jewish, then Jewish Christian, then gentile Christian) that kept Enochic literature alive (127-29) rather than any early parting of the ways. She feels the usual explanation of the church's "appropriation" of Jewish pseudepigrapha is undesirable,...