. . .

The older faith did not disappear. The people who preserved the Enoch traditions kept the older faith, the community of the Damascus Covenant seems to have kept the older faith, those who wrote the Qumran Melchizedek text knew the date at which the older faith would be restored, and it emerged as the framework of early Christianity. Jesus was proclaimed in the Letter to the Hebrews as Melchizedek (Hebrews 7:14–17, 22), 54 and John, in his vision recorded in the book of Revelation, saw the ark restored to the temple (Revelation 11:19).

. . .

We can never know for certain what it was that Josiah purged or why he did it. No original versions of the actual texts or records survive from that period, but even the stories as they have come down to us in various sources show that this was a time of major upheaval that was not forgotten. A thousand years after the events themselves, even mainstream Jewish texts remembered that the temple had been drastically changed, that large numbers of people had left the land, and that the true temple would only be restored in the time of the Messiah.