Mighty in Sorrow by Jordan Krall

Author:Jordan Krall [Krall, Jordan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780615990040
Amazon: 0615990045
Publisher: Dynatox Ministries International
Published: 2014-03-13T23:00:00+00:00

THE INMOST DARKNESS

Robert M. Price

“If the light within you is darkness, how deep is that darkness.” (Matthew 6:23)

1.

Daniel was a first year student at the Miskatonic University Divinity School, a venerable if lately dubious institution for the study of theology. Venerable because of its many decades of service to the Congregational Church, dubious because of the declining rate of ministers produced over the last ten or twenty years. True, admission applications had fallen off a bit, concurrent with the shrinkage of the sponsoring denomination, along with all the formerly mainline Protestant bodies. But the dearth of graduating candidates for the parish ministry was inversely proportional to the number of students attracted to purely intellectual pursuits, which led them into the search for academic posts, even though these, too, were becoming rarer than hens’ teeth. Why? It seems that Miskatonic Divinity possessed a rather unique collection of ancient Aramaic, Coptic, and Greek manuscripts, many of them unknown to conventional scholarship or else branded as spurious forgeries, albeit without much in the way of close examination. Many of these writings were the fruit of delvings by one Reverend Enoch Bowen during a tour of Egyptian synagogue and mosque genizahs. Our Daniel was one of the many attracted to the prospect of new revelations in the crumbling pages (though now protected under glass) of these still-untranslated texts. He was at a distinct advantage, having devoted himself to Near Eastern linguistics while an undergraduate. Thus he found himself pretty much at home in what frustrated numerous others who sooner or later turned away in the hope that someone like Daniel should undertake a translation. The Miskatonic faculty had proven curiously reticent about taking on the job, perhaps because they already had some inkling of what the manuscripts contained. Indeed, Daniel had now received an unprecedented University scholarship, as well as a sabbatical from second-semester coursework, to begin the task. He approached the texts with a mix of thirsty eagerness and uneasy trepidation.

Learning of his mission, many of his erstwhile classmates and dormitory neighbors began to avoid his company, almost as if some threatening clouds were gathering about him. But Daniel, always a bookish and introspective fellow, hardly noticed. He was keeping company with spirits long dead, the authors of the old and quite heretical scriptures. As Daniel got an impression of the lay of the land, he began to surmise, perhaps to fear, that he had in hand the makings of a new and disorienting testament. There were several gospels of the Nag Hammadi type, though most were damnably clearer, not couched in the cryptic terminology, bordering on gibberish, of the published Gnostic treatises. There were a few revelation texts, too, though, in the style of Gnostic scripture, the gospel and apocalyptic genres largely overlapped. Granted, most of the conventionally religious would recoil from these texts as they had from the Gospel of Philip and the Apocryphon of John, discovered in 1945, provided they had even heard of them. But such intriguing documents often

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.