Why Did the Church Stop Teaching the Angelic View of Genesis 6?

Why Did the Church Stop Teaching the Angelic View of Genesis 6?

Angelic View: the reading that the sons of God in Genesis 6 were angels who took physical form, married human women, and fathered the Nephilim.

Sethite View: the reading that the sons of God were godly men from the line of Seth who married ungodly women from the line of Cain.

## Why Did the Church Stop Teaching the Angelic View of Genesis 6?

The church shifted because Augustine rejected the angelic view in The City of God in the early fifth century, and his influence carried the Sethite view into the Middle Ages. The Watchers Fallen says no new evidence prompted the change. The Book of Enoch also fell out of use in the West.

## What the Early Church Believed

From the first century through the fourth, the men who built Christian theology read the sons of God as angels and the Nephilim as their children. Justin Martyr wrote in his Second Apology, around 150 AD: “The angels transgressed this appointment, and were captivated by love of women, and begot children who are those that are called demons.” He argued that the Greek myths of gods fathering heroes were distorted memories of the Watchers.

Irenaeus affirmed that the angels who sinned were the sons of God who joined with the daughters of men, and that this sin connected to the Flood. Tertullian wrote that the angels who left God became the discoverers of forbidden arts, including astrology and sorcery, and tied them to Genesis 6. Athenagoras, Lactantius, and Ambrose held the same view. These men argued fiercely over other questions. On Genesis 6 they agreed.

## Augustine and the Turning Point

Augustine wrote about Genesis 6 in The City of God between about 413 and 426 AD. Platonism had shaped him, and he was uncomfortable with spiritual beings taking physical form. He acknowledged the older view and rejected it. He argued that angels have no bodies and cannot father children, and that the sons of God were the righteous descendants of Seth who married the ungodly daughters of Cain.

Within a generation the Sethite view began to displace the angelic view. By the Middle Ages the angelic reading sat at the margins. No manuscript changed the reading. No archaeological find challenged the older view. The text of Genesis 6 stayed the same. What changed was the framework one man brought to it and the institutional authority that carried his conclusions forward.

## The Problem Augustine Never Solved

If the sons of God were righteous men and the daughters of men were ungodly women, why did their unions produce giants? Ordinary men and women, however divided by ancestry, do not produce Nephilim. The text says these unions did. The Sethite view has no answer.

## The Book of Enoch Goes Silent

Tertullian cited Enoch, Clement of Alexandria knew it, and Jude quoted it. The book was not canon, but the early church treated it as a serious account of what the Watchers did and why God judged them. As the Sethite view spread, Enoch fell out of use in the West. It was not banned in any formal decision that history clearly preserves. Copies grew rare, and scholars stopped citing it.

It survived in the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, which never accepted the Sethite reading. The Scottish explorer James Bruce brought three copies back from Ethiopia in 1773. For more than a thousand years the Western church read Genesis 6 without the document the earliest Christians used to understand it.

## What the Book Concludes

The earliest Christians had access to 1 Enoch and the unbroken testimony of the apostolic tradition, and they found nothing in the angelic reading that contradicted the faith. The book states that Augustine’s influence made the church forget what it once knew.

## Keep Reading

Read the story: The Watchers’ War, Book One of the Watchers’ Series, follows pilot Caleb Lee and Dr. Elena Vasquez as the non-human intelligences behind the cover-up come into the open.

## Go deeper

The Watchers Fallen: They Were Not Supposed to Walk Among Us, by CK Quarterman.

Keywords: why did the church stop teaching the angelic view of Genesis 6, Augustine, Sethite view, angelic view, Book of Enoch, Justin Martyr, sons of God

## About the Author

CK Quarterman is a USAF veteran, independent author, and publisher at CKQbooks. He writes about the malaterrestrials, the evil earthbound non-human intelligences behind ancient and modern encounters, and about the Watchers, the Nephilim, and what the oldest texts say about them.

USAF veteran. CKQbooks. ckqbooks.com. Truth · History · Scripture