https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110615449-007 Daniel Boyarin 6 The Quest of the Historical Metatron: Enoch or Jesus Annette Reed remarked that: For Gershom Scholem, the “combination of apocalyptic with theosophy and cosmogony” in 1 Enoch was “by itself sufficient to prove the essential continuity of thought” that linked early Jewish apocalyptic with later merkavah mysticism. However, recent advances in schol- arship, prompted by Peter Schäfer’s 1981 publication of the Hekhalot corpus, have thrown doubt upon Scholem’s theory that the two traditions evidence a “religious movement of a distinctive character” with an unbroken development from “the anonymous conventicles of the old apocalyptics” to the “Merkabah speculation of the Mishnaic teachers” to the “Merk- abah mysticism” of late and post-Talmudic times. 1 If Scholem’s approach could be deemed the first quest of the historical Metatron and Schäfer’s the second quest, I am now trying to stake out a different path, namely, a “third quest.” While it is unclear to me what “an unbroken develop- ment” means or is supposed to mean, it surely ought not to mean that nothing changed between 1 and 2 Enoch and 3 Enoch nor that Scholem meant to imply that. On the one hand, I wish to assert the essential correctness of Scholem’s intu- ition, while modifying it to read that the combination of cosmogony, even mete- orology, and theosophy in 1 and 2 Enoch and in the talmudic apocalypse of Bavli Ḥagiga does bespeak a diachronic connection of one sort or another between these two corpora.2 If, and this is crucial, the talmudic apocalypse can evince direct connections with the earlier Enoch texts, then the Metatron of the Talmud can plausibly be seen as a transformed Enoch himself, and this connection is not unique to 3 Enoch. Moreover, the further connections between the talmudic material and at least some of the Merkaba texts testify to further continuity. At the same time, however, I categorically deny that the necessary upshot of such diachronic connectivity is either a “distinct religious movement” or “unbroken 1 Annette Yoshiko Reed, “From Asael and Šemihazah to Uzzah, Azzah, and Azael: 3 Enoch 5 (§§7–8),” JSQ 8 (2001): 107. 2 “The Talmudic Apocalypse: Ḥagigah, Chapter 2,” in Wisdom Poured Out Like Water / Studies on Jewish and Christian Antiquity in Honor of Gabriele Boccaccini, Ed. by Ellens, J. Harold / Oli- ver, Isaac W. / von Ehrenkrook, Jason / Waddell, James / Zurawski, Jason M. (de Gruyter, 2018), 541–555. Notes: This is the text as delivered at the conference with added notes.