In collections of medieval manuscripts there often is found a treatise on fifteen stars, fifteen herbs, fifteen stones, and fifteen figures engraved upon them, which is attributed sometimes to Hermes, presumably Trismegistus, and sometimes to Enoch, the patriarch, who “walked with God and was not.”[1510] Indeed in the prologue to a Hermetic work on astrology in a medieval manuscript we are told that Enoch and the first of the three Hermeses or Mercuries are identical.[1511] This treatise probably has no direct relation to the _Book of Enoch_, which we shall discuss in this chapter and which was composed in the pre-Christian period. But it is interesting to observe that the same reputation for astrology, which led the middle ages sometimes to ascribe this treatise to Enoch, is likewise found in “the first notice of a book of Enoch,” which “appears to be due to a Jewish or Samaritan Hellenist,” which “has come down to us successively through Alexander Polyhistor and Eusebius,” and which states that Enoch was the founder of astrology.[1512] The statement in Genesis that Enoch lived three hundred and sixty-five years would also lead men to associate him with the solar year and stars. [Sidenote: Date and influence of the literature ascribed to Enoch.] The _Book of Enoch_ is “the precipitate of a literature, once very active, which revolved ... round Enoch,” and in the form which has come down to us is a patchwork from “several originally independent books.”[1513] It is extant in the form of Greek fragments preserved in the _Chronography_ of G. Syncellus,[1514] or but lately discovered in (Upper) Egypt, and in more complete but also more recent manuscripts giving an Ethiopic and a Slavonic version.[1515] These last two versions are quite different both in language and content, while some of the citations of Enoch in ancient writers apply to neither of these versions. While “Ethiopic did not exist as a literary language before 350 A. D.,”[1516] and none of the extant manuscripts of the Ethiopic version is earlier than the fifteenth century,[1517] Charles believes that they are based upon a Greek translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic original, and that even the interpolations in this were made by an editor living before the Christian era. He asserts that “nearly all the writers of the New Testament were familiar with it,” and influenced by it,—in fact that its influence on the New Testament was greater than that of all the other apocrypha together, and that it “had all the weight of a canonical book” with the early church fathers.[1518] After 300 A. D., however, it became discredited, except as we have seen among Ethiopic and Slavonic Christians. Before 300 Origen in his _Reply to Celsus_[1519] accuses his opponent of quoting the _Book of Enoch_ as a Christian authority concerning the fallen angels. Origen objects that “the books which bear the name Enoch do not at all circulate in the Churches as divine.” Augustine, in the _City of God_,[1520]