The story of angels stretches all the way back to the opening sections of the Book of Genesis. There, God posts cherubs as sentries at the gates of the Garden of Eden, following Adam and Eve’s expulsion. 

They take a more active role later in the same book, when three shadowy figures, sometimes referred to as men, other times as angels and even on occasion as God, appear to the elderly Abraham, sheltering from the noonday sun at Mamre, to tell him that his elderly wife, Sarah, is to have a much-wanted son.

And as if that revelation isn’t sufficient drama, Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, is subsequently entangled in Genesis in a life-and-death nighttime struggle at the ford on the river Jabbok, memorably recreated in 1940 by the British sculptor Jacob Epstein in an alabaster carving now in Tate Britain. Again, the visitor is variously described as a man, an angel or God. 

If angel, he — or she — is nameless. It took many centuries for that to change in the Book of Daniel among others. A reflection on the trauma of the Babylonian exile (and by association of subsequent military defeats), it was written around 165 BCE and presents for the first time fleshed-out angels — the fierce Michael (“who-is-like-God”) and the virtuous Gabriel (“God-is-my-strength”), who together act as guardian to Israel in its hour of need.

Then there is the smiling, benign Raphael (“God-heals”) in the Book of Tobit, thought to date from the fourth century BCE. Scholars sometimes dismiss Tobit as akin to colourful folk tale but artists and writers have long recognised how psychologically astute is this story of an angel who, in disguise, saves the extended family of a pious Jewish couple, Tobit and Anna, from a series of disasters that befall them. 

There is, for example, Andrea del Verrocchio’s 1475 luminous version of Raphael’s story, in London’s National Gallery, said to include details by his pupil, Leonardo da Vinci. Salley Vickers’s best-selling 2001 novel, Miss Garnet’s Angel, moves the action to modern-day Venice. Influenced not only by the author’s Christian faith, but also by her professional training as a psychoanalyst, the book asks if angels are a way we have embraced down the ages to express our very human existential fears.

For official Christianity, once it came into being, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael proved sufficient angels — or enough with names. It has resisted all efforts over the past 2,000 years to add others to the register. Some churchgoers, though, have their own additions. The Puritan poet John Milton, for instance, celebrates Uriel in Paradise Lost as “the sharpest sighted spirit in all of heav’n”. 

Uriel’s first appears in what is arguably the most significant text of all in the story of the angels, the Book of Enoch, sometimes called “First Enoch”, and dating from around the third century BCE. Its backdrop is much the same as that of Daniel and Tobit, a subjugated Jewish people placing their trust in angels to lead them back into God’s favour in a coming apocalypse. 

But, while Daniel and Tobit provide black-and-white outlines of the angels that are now so familiar in the modern imagination, the technicolour Book of Enoch throws in an abundance of angel names and introduces sinister shade as well as dazzling light. It tells of how a band of over-confident angels breaks away from God and falls into evil ways on earth.  They were to become the template for the Christian devil.  

Sometimes unfathomable to modern readers, and often excluded from the canon as a result, Enoch nonetheless contains so many of the notions about angels taken up in subsequent centuries, by both Jews and Christians, and today by that one in three of us who say we believe in guardian angels (including, curiously, one in six atheists).
One question has cropped up more time than any other as I have been researching the subject. Do I believe in angels? I certainly did as a child, growing up in Catholic Liverpool, saying my nightly prayers to beseech “Angel of God, my guardian dear” to “be at my side”.  

And as an adult, while I cannot produce a single feather from an angel’s wing to satisfy the tests of the our current scientific age for “proof”, what I can show is that people have not just believed in angels for millennia, they have placed their trust in them. They still do. Nowadays the only difference is that it is as likely to happen outside the framework of organised religion as it is inside.  

Angels remain what we might call our “unknown almost”, close enough to feel their presence in times of crisis, but far enough to be beyond our grasp. Like good poetry, they talk to spirit not body, the within not the without, the metaphysical not the physical.

Peter Stanford and Rabbi Julia Neuberger will be discussing his new book Angels: A Visible and Invisible History (Hodder, £20) at Jewish Book Week on March 3 at 5pm