Part 1— Church Resources, and Why Scholarship Can’t Be Separated from Doctrine or Discipleship

I sometimes hear criticism of my work or approach which seeks to shunt it aside by labeling it as “scholarly,” “academic,” or “educational.” These critics imply that to make use of such materials in preparing lessons inappropriately turns Seminary or Come Follow Me into an “academic” setting instead of a “doctrinal” or “discipleship” setting.  They argue that discipleship has no need of any scholarship. I find this false dichotomy somewhat frustrating, and I’ll address it more in part 2.

A number of General Authorities have disputed an intellectual/spiritual dichotomy, such as President Hinckley. “There is no clearly defined line of demarcation between the spiritual and the intellectual when the intellectual is cultivated and pursued in balance with the pursuit of spiritual knowledge and strength.”

Moreover, the Church has firmly embraced a more scholarly approach; this Old Testament year has seen a number of new Church manuals and guides: Come Follow Me, but also Scripture Helps: Old Testament, and Answering Gospel Questions, with its excellent principles. I have argued that these mark a significant shift in approach, on my blog here, and video here (popular) and here (organized, with slides and citations.) They take modern scholarship seriously, though it does not dominate.

So, two facts.

First, particularly from the 1950s onwards, Latter-day Saints were extremely skeptical about modern scriptural scholarship. While partly justified, the extreme degree was not; the 1980 Old Testament Institute manual relied heavily on seriously outdated scholarship from the 1800s, primarily Adam Clarke’s commentary (1825!) and Keil/Delitzsch (1861!) Surely there was good relevant material AFTER 1861.

Fact number two. As I argue in my October 2025 talk from FAIR, the Church’s approach today explicitly states the necessity of  “doing work to understand the past” and “reading in context” as a way of making sense of scripture. These principles and non-KJV translations are being strongly emphasized by Church leaders in multiple channels of communication. The new manuals model this new approach by drawing explicitly on current contextual scholarship.

What difference does this make? As it turns out, massive discoveries since the time of Clarke/Keil/Delitszch have completely reshaped our understanding of the Old Testament. Sometimes it merely complicates them, sometimes it greatly clarifies, sometimes it shows Joseph Smith in a very positive light. (Highly recommended article.)

If we are to read in context, we need scholarship that acknowledges and integrates the new understandings from those discoveries. These take three forms: archaeology, particular texts, and philology. I have an introductory video on this below, but I want to emphasize just how massive a shift this is with a timeline.

NB: some of the dates in this timeline are approximate, or are chosen for one particular large event in a series of minor cascading discoveries. Also note, just as Columbus landing on San Salvador in 1492 did not instantly reveal a detailed map of the Americas, the decipherment of a language did not immediately reveal a detailed and mature understanding of the texts written in those languages.  Scholars had to work for decades to really understand the languages, and only then could they start on the decades needed to really understand the meaning and importance of the texts.

Selected Timeline of Relevant Old Testament Discoveries

And this information comes directly from scholarship, from archaeology, from people spending years learning the ancient languages— some of which weren’t even known to exist in the 1800s— and reading the many many texts in those languages. This information gets published initially in technical monographs and journals and commentaries, where it’s read by specialists like BYU professors with relevant degrees to understand the technicalities… but also trickles down into Bible translations and Study Bibles and things like Scripture Helps— Old Testament.

In part 2, I demonstrate via  why this all matters to doctrine and discipleship as well as Bible translations.