R. H. Charles

Robert Henry Charles was an Irish-born biblical scholar and Church of England clergyman who specialised in Jewish writings from the Second Temple period, the centuries just before and after the time of Jesus. He taught biblical Greek at Trinity College Dublin, became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1906 and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford in 1910, and served as Archdeacon of Westminster from 1919 until his death in 1931. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Charles translated and edited a long list of texts that were outside the Bible but widely read in antiquity: the Book of Enoch (1893, revised 1912), the Ethiopic Book of Jubilees (1895), 2 Baruch (1896) and the Ascension of Isaiah (1900). With the Slavonic specialist W. R. Morfill he produced the first English version of 2 Enoch (1896). His two-volume Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913) gathered these works in one place.

His translations are now in the public domain, which is why they appear on free archives such as sacred-texts.com and are quoted across the internet. Modern scholars have newer editions based on more manuscripts, including the Aramaic fragments found at Qumran, but Charles's wording remains the most familiar English text of the Watchers story.