Really, it's a modern day myth Constantine expunged certain books of the bible? Maybe I read many books were left out due to a money issues for the commision of putting the canon together? Is that a myth too? I'll have to do more research....
Yes. The agenda of the Council of Nicea was not to decide what books to include in the Bible, or to decide on what deity to worship (as Tony Bushby would have it). It was primarily convened to achieve ecclesiastical unity on the Arian question (concerning the nature of Christ and his relationship with God), as well as address other ecumenical concerns. I think the myth (popularized especially by Dan Brown) was inspired by three separate things that occurred after the Council: Constantine ordered the books written by Arius to be destroyed in AD 325, he ordered 50 copies of the Bible to be written in AD 331, and Bishop Athanasius in AD 367 (a generation later after the death of Constantine) declared heretical books forbidden, which led to the destruction of gnostic books and the burying of the Nag Hammadi library. Somehow this got garbled into a story about how Constantine expunged books from the NT (usually claimed to be gnostic gospels) and ordered them destroyed.
Prior to the Nicene Council there was general agreement among orthodox churches on most of the contents of the NT, gradually developed into a broad consensus (the homologoumena) by the fourth century AD. The NT wasn't first "collated" or invented then. Disagreement at that time largely concerned disputed books (antilegomena) such as the General Epistles (James, Jude, 2 Peter, etc.), Revelation, and the Apostolic Fathers (e.g. Shepherd of Hermas, 1 Clement, Barnabas, etc.). These are the books variably attested in the early NT codices and canon lists (and to this day the disputed General Epistles and Revelation are absent in the Nestorian canon); this is somewhat akin to variability in inclusion in the open-ended Writings in the OT canon (sometimes including the Apocrypha, sometimes not) as opposed to the closed nature of the Torah and the Prophets. The antilegomena however did not include writings viewed as spurious (notha), which would have included all the "gnostic" gospels and other tractates found at Nag Hammadi. These books belonged to gnostic/non-orthodox communities that followed different religious traditions (such as Sethianism) than found in the orthodox churches that were in conflict with them. Similarly, the Sethian gnostics likely did not recognize many or most of the books that the orthodox churches regarded as canonical. Finally, the myth that the Nicene council decided the Bible canon is belied by the fact that that canon lists continued to vary in terms of disputed books for years afterward; the tendency to count Revelation among the antilegomena in fact was common even after Athanasius promulgated his canon list (there is even a chapter discussing this in Elaine Pagels' new book Revelations). And there wasn't one Bible canon but multiple canons in different communities (such as the different canons of the Nestorian Church and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church).
This is simply not true. There are at least 50 other gospels that the bishops commissioned by Constantine left out.
Umm, what? Constantine did not commission bishops to decide what books to include in the Bible. Nor were there that many other gospels in all. And as I said above, different communities used different gospels. The Sethian gospels were heavily steeped in Platonic jargon and sectarian concepts; it is no more surprising than asking why the New World Translation doesn't include 2 Nephi or Ether from the Book of Mormon. The orthodox bishops did not include Sethian books in their canon because they were not Sethian gnostics.
We have cases in the NT where James and possibly Jesus quote the book of Enoch.
Yeah, but what does that have to do with what I said about the myth about Constantine deciding the canon? It doesn't. 1 Enoch was regarded part of the scriptures by early Christians, but that is not representive of the later situation. To this day, it is still a part of the OT canon in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, but that was probably in part due to the greater isolation of Ethiopia outside the Roman Empire.
It wasn't that 1 Enoch was suddenly excluded from the Bible in the fourth century AD; it was well on its way out before then. One can compare its enthusiastic use by Tertullian at the start of the third century AD and its disputation by Origen a generation later. By the fourth century AD, Christians began to favor the rabbinical Hebrew canon and text (so the LXX shows increasing accommodations to the proto-MT), as Jerome famously advocated. 1 Enoch was not part of the rabbinical canon because it was an Essene book and the Pharisees did not recognize Essene books. Early Christianity drew strongly on Essenism, so there was an early wide acceptance of books later rejected by the churches. It was the rise of normative rabbinical Judaism that had an influence on Christian concepts of what the OT canon should include.
The book of Enoch was omitted because it has some really weird things like the watchers (or angels) having sex with birds etc. It also says the nephalim were a mile high and other rediculous nonsense.
The weird stuff about the Watchers or what not is not any weirder than a lot of the stuff in the OT (talking snakes and what not). And the height of the Nephilim as 300 or 3000 cubits tall in 1 Enoch 7:2 is probably a secondary gloss found only in the Akhmim version and the later Ethiopic; it is not extant in the original Aramaic and it is not found in the Greek version of Syncellus (as well as the allusion to the passage in Jubilees). Thus the recent translation by Nickelsburg renders the passage as "And they were growing in accordance with their greatness".
