From Scotteriology: a lengthy discourse (for him) about intertestamental literature and its connection to scripture

http://scotteriology.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/hung-like-an-angel/#comment-5922

I have written in a few spots on this blog about the significance of intertestamental literature on the development of ideas that are present in the New Testament writings and non-canonical literature from around that time. I grew up in a church tradition where the explanation was that God was silent for centuries and there were no prophets after Malachi.

Well, intertestamental apocalyptic literature suggests that there were actually plenty of would-be prophets of the Lord during this time and plenty of people actively seeking to discern what God's will was. At the risk of simplifying Scott's simplification, two streams of thought about what was wrong with the world were operating in Jewish thought during the intertestamental period. In one corner you had those who thought that if people just observed the Torah and were mindful to be faithful to the covenant that God would eliminate the problems in the world.

There was another stream of thought, perhaps best described as the apocalyptic genre, that saw the problem as not being in the control or influence of human agency. Nothing you could do could make the world not suck because spiritual forces and persons were at work to mess things up. Ergo, the books of Enoch and the legend of the Watchers. This was an example of how and why Genesis 6 tended to be seen as describing angelic/human hybridized breeding. Certain pastors (like Mark Driscoll) may dismiss this as the seed of Chucky theory and it's true Augustine dismissed the theory, and also true that after Jamnia Christians tended to move away from this view.

But, as actual NT scholars like Richard Bauckham have noted, this so-called "seed of Chucky" theory was not only accepted but universally accepted as the way to interpret Genesis 6 during the apostolic period. Citing Jesus' words that in the resurrection we will not marry but will be like the angels in heaven doesn't provide a real rebuttal to this interpretation in the apostolic period because the whole point of the legend of the watchers was that the angels did not keep their place and abandoned their posts in the heavens. As historian Jeffrey Burton Russell points out in his five-book series on the devil, the timeline for the fall of angelic beings shifts in intertestamental literature from the generation before the flood described in Genesis 6 to a point probably sometime before the creation of the earth by the time we get to Revelation and the synoptics.