Here is a case in point. Around the eleventh century, in the Byzantine-ruled Balkans, some Christian school or church had a library. On its shelves stood a dazzling array of authentic ancient texts, mainly Jewish in origin, and some dating back to the time of the Second Temple. All those books were wildly heretical by the standards of pretty much any Christian church of the time, east or west, but also of contemporary Judaism. Had they attracted wider attention, bishops and rabbis would have had to toss a coin to decide who got to light the pyre on which they should be destroyed. Yet somebody in authority preserved those texts, and translated them to ensure their wider distribution. Were it not for those translations, every trace of those works would have been lost, to the point that we would never have suspected that any of them ever existed. This is one of the best examples I know of the overwhelming power of sheer chance in determining which books survived from antiquity.I remain to be convinced that 2 Enoch is a first-century work or that we have any idea who wrote it. (See here for a survey of the issues.) But his point remains valid and important.
For more on Old Testament Pseudepigrapha preserved only in Slavonic, see here and here and links. (With apologies for the dead links.) An English translation of the Coptic fragments of 2 Enoch will be published in MOTP2.
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