No description available.

This thesis investigates how understandings of history in diverse texts of the Graeco-Roman period illuminate Lukan eschatology. Two strands of Lukan scholarship have contributed to an enduring tendency to underestimate the centrality of eschatology to Luke/Acts. Hans Conzelmann's thesis, that Luke focused on history rather than eschatology as a response to the parousia's delay, has dominated Lukan scholarship since the mid-twentieth century, with concomitant assumptions about Luke's politics and understanding of suffering. Recent Lukan scholarship has centred instead on genre and rhetoric, examining Luke/Acts predominantly in relation to ancient texts deemed the same genre while overlooking themes (including those of an eschatological character) that these texts do not share. This thesis offers a fresh approach. It illuminates the inherent connections between Luke's understanding of history and its end, and demonstrates significant ways in which Luke's eschatological consciousness shapes key themes of his account. By extending comparisons to a wider range of texts, this study overcomes two clear methodological shortfalls in current research: limiting comparisons of key themes to texts of similar genre, and separating non-Jewish from Jewish texts. Having established the need for a new examination of Luke's eschatology in Chapter 1, in Chapter 2 I set out the study's method of comparing diverse texts on themes that cut across genres. Chapters 3 to 6 then consider each key text and Luke/Acts in relation to a different aspect of their writers' conceptions of history: the direction and shape of history; determinism and divine guidance; human culpability and freedom; and the present and the end of history. The analysis shows that in every aspect of history examined, Luke/Acts shares significant features of the texts with which, because they do not share its genre, it is not normally compared. Setting Luke/Acts in conversation with a broader range of texts highlights Luke's periodised, teleological view of history and provides a nuanced picture of Luke's understanding of divine and human agency, all of which is affected in fundamental ways by his portrayal of the present time already within the final period of history. As a result, this study not only clarifies Lukan eschatology, but reaffirms the importance of eschatology for Lukan politics and theodicy.

The colonists living in the new United States after the American War for Independence were faced with the problem of forming new identities once they could no longer recognize themselves, collectively or individually, as subjects of Great Britain. After the French Revolution American politicians began to weed out the more radical political elements of the newly formed United States, particularly by painting one of the revolution’s biggest defenders, Thomas Paine, as unworthy of the attention he received during the American War for Independence, and fear ran throughout the states that an anarchic revolution like the French Revolution could bring the downfall of the nation. State, local, and regional organizations sprang up to fight Jacobinism, the legendary secret group of murderers and anarchists that fought against the French government. This distressing situation gave rise to new literature that sought to describe the “real” origins and background of Jacobinism in the War in Heaven and in Eden, and a new movement against Jacobinism was established. Fears about the organization of secret societies did not wane in the decades after the French Revolution, but worsened in the last half of the 1820s when a Freemason, William Morgan, disappeared under mysterious circumstances in connection to an exposé of Masonry he had written. Most Americans assumed that Freemasons had abducted and murdered Morgan in order to keep their oaths and rites secret. One influential early American who was influenced by this socio-historical was Joseph Smith, Jr., the founding prophet of Mormonism. Smith interpreted the Eden narrative in light of the movement against secret societies, and literary motifs common to anti-Jacobin literature during the period provided language and interpretive strategies for understanding the Eden narrative that would influence how Smith produced his new scripture. Only a few months after the publication of the Book of Mormon Smith edited the version of Eden found there into the text of the Bible itself and made the biblical narrative conform to the version found in the Book of Mormon through his own revisions and additions.