I noticed lately that YouTube now features channels operated professionally in the name of various music acts from my youth. Notice how I worded that; I seriously doubt all of them involve the actual musicians. Most of them appear to be the cookie-cutter work of publicists. It’s both very smart and just a wee bit creepy to me. On the one hand I can find high-quality copies of some of my long lost albums. Some of them are remastered and even better. I paid good money for them and the media simply wore out, got lost or stolen, or whatever. It’s so nice to hear again the music that helped propel critical moments in my spiritual and moral development: the likes of Bloodgood, Mylon LeFevre and Broken Heart, Edin-Adahl, even Stryper.
On the other hand, given the lack of personal interaction with the musicians on these channels, it just shows they don’t have much control over their own work. It symbolizes what is really wrong with the music as an industry and how ownership works so much against the artist and the audience.
At any rate, I’m using various means to capture the music and save it as MP3 files to share on my FTP site. To that I’m also adding some of the academic background stuff I discover once in awhile. For example, I found a good supply of reference material to the Judiazers that ravaged the first century churches. One site offered the letters of Ignatius (b. 35 AD) who served a great many of the founding churches in Asia Minor and Greece. It was he who first and best traced how the Judaizers spawned some elements of what became Gnosticism. In particular, he ran into Doceticism. It was little more than a cynical plow to disembowel the reality of Jesus as the Son of God. I’m adding that stuff to the collection on the FTP server.
I’m having a little more trouble with finding material about the False Messianic Expectations. I note that I stumbled across one of the few scholars to do any significant work on that. She was a favorite college professor back in the 1970s — Dr. Rowena Strickland. I seem to recall it was the subject of her doctoral thesis (she was one of the first female ThDs among Baptists back in the 1930s). She’s just an obscure footnote to the world, at most, but to me she was an intellectual giant and I owe her so much. Most of what she did to help me came later as I began to shed my attachment to the Dispensational Heresy. She was around to see that ugly crap shoved down evangelical throats and spotted the flaws right away, not to mention she saw first hand the heavy and hateful politics that put it in place.
At any rate, her work on Messianic Expectations has been virtually buried. She covered it so well in her classes that it’s burned into my memory. I’ve written it up for my book on OT History so I can share it. The references she cited in her original work will probably fade into obscurity in the academic world.
No, I cannot possibly explain why I feel so driven to collect all this stuff, but it seems morally right and gives me peace.
Actually, I do this because I realize that the “free ride” Internet services will come to an end soon and there’s no telling what will disappear. This is part of why I opened a second blog using paid space on a private server. Given the economic realities, that private server is more likely to still be there even after stuff like this WordPress service goes down. It’s not that what I have to say is so important in my own mind, but I can’t shut up and some of you seem to think you want to read it. So I’m trying to share what God has given me and I’m willing to use whatever resources He provides to do it. If you get tired of me, just stop reading and unsuscribe. I’m okay with that. As long as one person shows up and interacts with me I’ll keep doing this. God bless you.
