Historian of Religion, Science, and Biblical Interpretation
Joseph Spencer’s book on typology and the Book of Mormon appears to be back in print (and free, here). Good stuff, and relevant to today’s material as well as Nephi’s interpretive Isaiah material.
In this section, Jacob is speaking by assignment on a topic from Nephi, (2Ne 6:4), and the topic is Isaiah.
When Bishop Nephi asked me to speak on Isaiah…
First, if you haven’t read my post on 2Ne 1-2, you need to; it establishes that the implicit background of these chapters is covenantal and Mosaic, which is key to understanding what happens in these chapters. Continue reading
Today we enter into 2 Nephi, which immediately raises the question, why is there a second Nephi? Continue reading
As many of my readers may know, President Joseph Fielding Smith (1876-1972) considered evolution not just incorrect, but devilish; he believed scripture taught a young earth, with no death of any kind anywhere before the fall of Adam c. 4000 BC. His key scriptural evidence was 2 Nephi 2:22-25, which he cited dozens of times in books, articles, and private letters. I want to explore and document a few related questions here.
For those of you who are new to the blog (and the stats suggest there are a few), check out my suggested reading list on the Book of Mormon.
Nephi’s vision seems at times to border on the genre called apocalyptic [link to all my posts and podcasts talking about genre]. Apocalypses came up recently in my first post on Revelation. The genre is important to recognize, because understanding the genre determines how we understand the information presented. Continue reading
Two more! These also will be added to my media page, when I have time.
To understand why some of us see these new guidelines as so significant, we need to cover some intellectual and religious history which will allow you to “read between the lines” more. And please note, I’m under time constraints and very much in stark “historian mode” here; I have not taken the time to render this more devotional; suffice to say, one can— as I do— believe fully in biblical and LDS prophets while rejecting the fundamentalist constructs often attached to them.
Almost from the beginning, Latter-day Saints have operated on two loose competing paradigms of knowledge and “the world.” (I wrote a well-received paper on this for a conference in 2017; see here for more details, including the unrevised draft.)
On Dec 18, the Church announced a new section, “Guiding Principles to Help Answer Gospel Questions.” This goes along with the updated “Topics and Questions” which include both the longer and older “Gospel Topics Essays” and the much shorter “Gospel Topics.” This is quite interesting.
I haven’t added these to the Media page yet, but will soon. And more is coming!
These are the most familiar chapters to any Latter-day Saint, and I’ve literally spent weeks on them in Institute classes, going slowly and thoroughly. I’d wager many of us could recite 1 Nephi 1:1 from memory, and a good number of us in our mission language; not from trying to memorize it, just from having read it so much. Familiarity does not necessarily mean understanding, though. The following questions appear unrelated, but are clues to what’s going in in the initial chapters and indeed, all of 1-2 Nephi. And it’s quite different than what people assume.
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