Persian Influence and Israelite Apocalypticism

Perhaps all I'm really doing is embarrassing myself, but I just hate to think that I would spend days of my life researching a topic, and then the only person I would ever share my discoveries with would be my professor.

I know the thought has been burning in your mind: "Why, with the similarities of a metaphysical dualism, a deterministic world view, a complex system of both angelology and demonology, and fully developed ideas of resurrection and judgment, surely the post-exilic Jews must have gotten all their apocalyptic ideas from the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism! After all, they lived under Persian rule for 200 years."

If you want my thoughts on the matter, knock yourself out. I don't promise that it is well reasoned or well written. I only affirm that it is my own work.

What's even better is that this means I am FINALLY done with my work for the fall semester, and I'll have a couple of weeks to regroup and start getting ready for spring semester!

My Grad School Papers

On the one hand, I know that most people will have no interest in reading papers. On the other hand, a good part of why I blog is for my own sake. I've been working very hard on my MDiv, and really don't want to loose track of all the papers I've had to write. Though I have decided not to include some of them, I have now made .pdf files of several of my papers, and have made them available for download for anyone who is interested.

The ones I've included are:

• Principles For Long Term Effectiveness In Ministry
• Christian Responsibility And Environmental Ethics
• I Corinthians 5 Exegetical Paper
• Karl Barth and Natural Theology
• David Lipscomb and the 1906 Division Of The Restoration Movement
• Personal Theological Reflection Paper
• The Function Of Solomon's Temple
• The "Everything You Need To Know About The Mexico Trip Book"

I've added a permanent link on the upper right hand corner of my blog, so if you ever feel like trudging through, you're welcome to take a look at these. From time to time, I will probably add more. Because of the program I used to make them into .pdf files, some of the formatting became a bit skewed, but the content is all there.

I don't promise that they're good, but I worked so hard on them that I would really hate for them to simply vanish and never serve the purpose of sharing the information that I learned.

It's Paper Time

As much as it pains me, I'm going to have to decrease the amount of blogging I do for the next few weeks. I've got three papers:

1. I am writing about a proper interpretation of Genesis 6, what it means for God to "repent" or "relent". Did God know it would all go wrong, or does he deny himself foreknowledge? That sort of thing. It's a theological paper instead of an exegetical paper. That's due April 10th.

2. I have one for Christian ethics where I am going to tackle the subject of environmentalism. It's not a subject that I'm especially interested in, but it seems that you can't brush your teeth without someone screaming at you to "Go green!" as you do it. I'm going to try and decide what a Christian's responsibility is to his/her environment. This will end up being a sermon a few months down the road at OH.

3. I have to do a book review for my Providence & Suffering class. I think I'm going to use C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed. It's due near the end of April.

I may do some posting between now and then, but not with much frequency. I wish you all the best, and I'll look forward to posting more regularly once the grad school storm dies down.

-Mark <><