Acknowledgements
This monograph is the principal output of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, which ran through the academic year 2021–2022. I am deeply grateful to the British Academy for this award and for all that it has made possible. In particular, I would like to thank Ken Emond, Charles Hamilton and Helen Langan for their help in the administrative process associated with the award. Historically, the research that led me to this project was also funded by the British Academy, through the Postdoctoral Fellowship that I held at the beginning of my career (which enabled me to publish an edition of the Slavonic Texts of 2 Enoch) and then through a small research grant on the Enoch literature and Contemporary Theology, principally associated with Philip Esler. My debt to the Academy, then, is enormous, and I am sincerely thankful for the support that it has provided to my work, to my career and to my subject area. During the process of application for this fellowship, Loren Stuckenbruck and John Collins played crucial roles and I am likewise indebted to them.
More broadly, my work at the University of Aberdeen is supported by the Kirby Laing Foundation and the development of this project would not have been possible without their generosity in funding my position. Along with the Foundation itself, I want to extend thanks to Katy Hockey and J. Thomas Hewitt, who successively held the Kirby Laing Postdoctoral Fellowship before their appointment to permanent positions at the University and whose collegial support made the development of this project possible. J. Thomas was particularly involved in helping with doctoral supervision during the period of my research leave; without that assistance, I could not have completed the work within the funded period. I also want to thank Graeme Benvie, who acts as the principal liaison between the University and the Foundation and whom we consider to be a vital member of our department.
The department of Divinity at the University of Aberdeen is a remarkably collegial and supportive place to be and the project has benefited immeasurably from that context. I want to thank all colleagues in the department, but especially Tom Greggs, Philip Ziegler and Paul Nimmo, who played specific administrative roles in the department that were connected to this submission. In the School of Divinity, History, Philosophy and Art History—the bigger unit in which we are embedded—Paula Sweeney and Beth Lord (as successive Heads of School) and Robert Frost (as internal reviewer) also played important roles in the development and administration of my research. In the wider University, Sir Iain Torrance has been both practically and intellectually supportive, with his characteristic wisdom. I am sincerely grateful to all.
Some of my doctoral students were especially impacted by this study and were patient with me during the period of leave. I pass on thanks in particular to Melissa Tan, Rachel Danley, Hongchang Cho, Robert Costello, Michael de Fazio, Lisa Igram, Nick Mackison, Eric Russ, Cindy Cheshire, Olga Vasiloglou, Kyongmo Kim, Chris Lane, Brett Daane, Paloma Herrera, Daniel Thorpe, Andrew Wade and Andrew McNeil. Jonathan Berglund, as well as being patient with my circumstances as a supervisor, also collated and formatted the cumulative bibliography and deserves special thanks.
I continue to owe thanks to colleagues at the University of St Andrews, where the seeds of this research developed. David Moffitt, Elizabeth Shively (now at Baylor), Madhavi Nevader, T.J. Lang, Bill Tooman and Matt Sharp have all been crucial conversation partners at some point in its development and the library team have continued to be as helpful as ever, facilitating access to the collections there (and often extending loan periods beyond their normal limits). In the wider research community in Scotland, Matt Novenson, at the University of Edinburgh, has been a helpful dialogue partner. Across the U.K., Ivor Davidson, George van Kooten, George Brooke, Catrin Williams, Philip Esler and John Barclay have played important roles in working through some of the issues. Richard Bauckham kindly shared a draft of his forthcoming work on the Son of Man, which contained a useful engagement with the Parables of Enoch. Internationally, I am continually grateful to Christfried Böttrich, Basil Lourié and Andrei Orlov for their generosity as conversation partners, fellow students in this particular stream of Enoch’s wisdom. I am also indebted, as always, to Alexander Panayotov, for helping me to source secondary literature; he has continued to be a close friend since our days as postdoctoral fellows in St Andrews.
Two people are owed special thanks for their role in the development of this book. The first is the songwriter/recording artist Rie Sinclair. Conversations with Rie—whom I know through the work of the Centre for Autism and Theology—were the key factor in nurturing my sense that the work of Deleuze and Guattari has particular heuristic value to the study of the pseudepigrapha in late antiquity. The second is Annette Yoshiko Reed. As co-editor of the SVTP series, Annette provided the first stage of critical review on the monograph and then coordinated the peer review process after the initial revisions had been made. The book is generally richer and, at specific points, is more nuanced and careful because of Annette’s input and her incredible diligence as an editor.
I am grateful also to the anonymous reviewers who gave helpful pointers to relevant research and caught some residual errors in transliteration. At Brill, Marjolein van Zuylen, Laura Morris and Suzanne Mekking have all been wonderfully supportive in the process of taking this project from proposal to completion and Dirk Bakker deserves several awards for his diligence in the copy-editing and production processes.
Finally, I want to thank my family. The end of the project coincided with an extended period of illness for my wife, Jane, and this is a time that we will remember as difficult but blessed. During the last months of the fellowship, my father’s health declined after his 25 year journey with cancer. He passed away shortly before the final edits were completed. His own mother had passed away just two years previously, at the age of 106, as I was about to begin the study. Those two deaths coincided with the project’s beginning and end in ways that I cannot help but dwell upon and that represent something important to me about the passing of generations, the technological changing of the world and the fragile survival of Gaelic language and culture.
Grant Macaskill
Aberdeen, November 2023