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BoM Gospel Doctrine Lesson 39: 3Ne 17-19

October 26, 2016 /

These chapters constitute the end of Day 1 of Jesus’ visit (ends in 19:3) and the beginning of Day 2 (19:4-26:15)

Outline

17- Jesus, moved by the people, stays longer than planned (or so the text appears to say). He addresses the multitude, heals people, prays.

18- Bread and wine for sacrament, various instructions and teachings, then Jesus ascends into heaven.

  • 18:5-7, 10-16 to disciples (“administrative” instructions)
  • 18:18-25 to multitude
  • 18:27-35 back to disciples

19- Everyone goes home, tells their neighbors, gather again, but into 12 groups, each taught by a disciple. People baptized. Each group prays, and Jesus prays, somewhat like John 17, the “great intercessory prayer.”

3Ne 17:3 “Prepare your minds for the morrow.” Get ready to receive. Cf. Alm 16:16, Alm 48:7 (Ready to endure.)
This or the next or the next General Conference something may change. It may be something minor, a policy or practice. Maybe something major, akin to polygamy being given or rescinded, or the revocation of the priesthood ban. Are we ready to receive something that potentially goes against our presuppositions, whatever they are?

We have some tight places to go before the Lord is through with this church and the world in this dispensation…. There will be some things that take patience and faith. You may not like what comes from the authority of the Church. It may contradict your political views. It may contradict your social views. It may interfere with some of your social life. But if you listen to these things, as if from the mouth of the Lord himself, with patience and faith, the promise is that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against you; yea, and the Lord God will disperse the powers of darkness from before you, and cause the heavens to shake for your good, and his name’s glory.” (D&C 21:6.) Harold B. Lee. Conference Reports, 1 October, 1970, p. 152.

3Ne 17:6- “Bowels filled with compassion” two notes here, one on meaning, one on translation. In the KJV OT, “bowels” translates a few words that refer to your internal (Num 5:22) and reproductive organs (Gen 15:4, Gen 25:23). Israelites localized strong feelings there, both positive and negative (Jer 4:19), “a feeling of love, loving sensation, mercy (originally designated the seat of this feeling, meaning bowels, inner parts of the body, the inner person).”- HALOT  When feelings are intended, modern translations often go with “heart” (Lam 1:20), since that often captures the modern pseudo-physiological “location” of strong feelings.I doubt they are speaking Hebrew at this point in time, but to the extent that the Book of Mormon echoes (often literalistic) KJV idiom, to have his “bowels filled with compassion” is an expression of very strong feeling.

Modern translations of the Old Testament read differently. They’re translating the sense across cultures.

“There is, it is important to note, no movement among conservative Christians to argue against the modern viewpoint that our thinking and emotions are not centered in either the heart or the bowels but the brain. Indeed, I think it is worth pointing out that many Christians find themselves able to believe that they are “Biblical literalists”, and that the Bible is in all things scientifically accurate, precisely because they read the Bible in translations that have translated ancient Israel’s literal understanding into modern metaphors, replacing bowels with compassion and heart with mind where necessary.And thus we have the Catch-22 that the better the job that translators do, the more likely it is that Christians reading the Bible may be unaware that they are thinking in ways that may be similar to ancient Israelites in crucial ways, but are also vastly different from them in terms of understanding of anatomy and other matters of science.”- From this review of John Walton’s book on Genesis 1, which I review here.

3Ne 17:7 According to the New Testament, what kind of miracle did Jesus perform in Israel that he does not do here? Like with the missing altar, read the text for what it doesn’t say that we might expect it to. The New Testament has Jesus casting out demons/devils/evil spirits (e.g. Matt 9:32-35). Jesus himself doesn’t do that in the record here, although others do (3Ne 7:19, 22). “Demons” make brief appearances in Mosiah 3:6 and Helaman 13:37, both apparently figurative passages. None of these seem to imply what the New Testament does, i.e. some kind of spiritual or demonic possession. What does this mean for the beliefs of the Book of Mormon people about the supernatural? Or is the lack of “demons” a function of Mormon’s editing or Joseph’s translating?

“Halt” apparently means unable to walk whereas “lame” means an appendage that is obviously less or non-functional due to withering or injury or birth defect, e.g. clubfoot.
“leprous” = skin disease, not leprosy or Hansen’s Disease. In OT never actually refers to leprosy. “NT lepra, if it refers at all to leprosy, does so only as one among many skin conditions.”-Anchor Bible Dictionary (must be out of print, the price has doubled!)

3Ne 17:14 If Jesus groans “within himself,” how do the people or Mormon, four-hundred years later know about it? Cf. John 11:38 “Jesus therefore again groaning in himself cometh to the grave. It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it.” There the Greek means “to be greatly disturbed, deeply moved.”

3Ne 18:7-11 Sacrament symbolism begins. Bread = body= physical resurrection/rebirth. Wine=blood=atonement/spiritual rebirth/salvation.

3Ne 18:27-35 Administrative instructions given to disciples about who can and can’t attend and partake of the sacrament.

What was the status of the disciples?
They’re given power to give the Holy Ghost by laying on of hand in 3Ne 18:37.
They don’t have the Holy Ghost “given to them” until 3Ne 19:9. Is this the gift of the spirit or just a manifestation thereof?
They are then baptized in 3Ne 19:12 (or rebaptized?)
Then the Hoy Ghost falls upon them. 3Ne 19:13

3Ne 19:23 Cf. John 17:21. Oneness of God.

As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through this Amazon link. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader. I tend not to accept friend requests from people I’m not acquainted with.

Wrestling with ideas, writing, organization. Gustav Doré, public domain.

An update and book preview

October 16, 2016 /
Wrestling with ideas, writing, organization. Gustav Doré, public domain.

Wrestling with ideas, writing, organization.
Gustav Doré, public domain.

I wrote four draft posts on Saturday, two for Gospel Doctrine lessons, and two on other topics (reading the Bible with children, and one on Chaim Potok, Isaac Asimov, and reading scripture). I meant to get up early and post the next Gospel Doctrine lesson before anyone on the east coast got to Church, but things happen. Now that it’s too late for anyone English speaking today, I’ll finish it later. I still am uncertain what I’ll be doing next year for D&C, but I’m committed to doing something, and I thank you for your comments I solicited a few weeks back.

In the meantime, I was looking at a section of my book I worked on several months ago. It’s always pleasing to return to something you’ve written long enough ago to have forgotten your words, read it, and not hate it entirely. Heck, I was pretty happy with it.

What I quote below is the current introduction and (short) conclusion to section two of my book, which is all about the LDS-specific creation accounts and making sense of them. Some of this language will certainly be tweaked; I don’t like, for example, “solving the problem” or “resolving the problem” because it seems too mathematic and precise, not capturing well the adaptive or creative nature of revelation.

Introduction- <<For Latter-day Saints, any discussion of the early chapters of Genesis is complicated by the existence of the parallel creation accounts found in the Book of Moses, the Book of Abraham, and the Temple. A full exploration of these accounts is further complicated by temple covenants of narrow non-disclosure, which is expanded by most LDS into a culture of near-silence. Close attention to these creation accounts raises a number of related questions: if they are all revelatory, why don’t they all agree? Why are they different? What is the relationship between them? Don’t Moses, Abraham, and the Temple supersede Genesis? If so, why focus on Genesis?

In this second part of the book, I examine these three accounts. Although much scholarship exists on Abraham and Moses individually, examining them together with (vaguely and respectfully) the Temple account and how they are different will prove fruitful in explaining why they are different. Moreover, understanding the nature of the Book of Moses and Joseph Smith Translation are the key in unlocking most of these questions.

In producing the JST, Joseph Smith was highly attuned to problems in the biblical text— contradictions, inconsistencies, seams, “bumps,” as well as italicized text in the KJV. Many of the changes he made modified such passages. The very first chapters of the Bible offered a massive bump, which I term the Double Creation Problem. That is, Genesis 1-2:4 offers one creation account, but then Genesis 2:4 seems to start over and create everything again. They are back-to-back creation stories.

Joseph Smith went at this problem in what would become a stereotypically Mormon way, one which also echoes ancient prophetic, interpretive patterns. The JST was “not a simple, mechanical recording of divine dictum, but rather a study-and-thought process accompanied and prompted by revelation from the Lord” (per Robert J. Matthews).  Joseph provided one solution to the Double Creation Problem by embedding new prophetic knowledge (premortal existence) into a reworked text of Genesis, the Book of Moses, which is formally the JST to Genesis. After several more years of revelation as well as studying Hebrew, he provided a slightly different solution in the Book of Abraham, again embedding new prophetic knowledge and reworking the text in a JST-like process. Still apparently wrestling with this problem through study and thought accompanied by revelation, the Temple account resolved the Double Creation Problem in a way distinctly different from, but based on his previous work in Moses and Abraham. The trajectory of Moses and Abraham point to the Temple.

To be clear, I am examining merely one facet of the creation portion of Moses, Abraham, and the temple. I do not think Joseph’s wrestling with the Double-Creation Problem fully accounts for these texts and rituals, but is an important and unrecognized aspect of them. Moreover, framing the Moses, Abraham, and Temple creation accounts as outgrowth of Joseph’s JST mindset and prophetic problem solving greatly reduces the problems that come from assuming they are merely English translations of fully independent ancient revelations to Moses and Abraham. Framing it this way shows what he was doing, namely, solving a textual problem by applying new doctrinal knowledge, not serving as prophetic typewriter for three identical copies of the same ancient revelation.

I begin by examining more fully the Double-Creation Problem, the nature and process of the JST, the nature of Moses, Abraham, and the Temple accounts, and their potential solutions to the Double Creation problem.>>

Conclusion-<< Likely prompted by the command to translate the Bible, and confronted with the Double-Creation Problem found at its beginning, Joseph Smith progressively transformed Genesis 1. From a narrowly-focused, non-scientific ancient Near Eastern account (see Part 3), it became Moses, then Abraham, in the process revealing truths about premortal existence, the council in heaven, and others. The culmination of this progressive transformation was the temple. Therein, Joseph definitively solved the problem of double-creation, simultaneously rendering Genesis into its most modern and scientifically-compatible form while providing the structure and narrative for a ritual of covenant making, priestly initiation, and royal coronation. Such is the modern Mormon interpretive life of Genesis 1, but its ancient Near Eastern biography remains to be told, in the next section.>>

As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through this Amazon link. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader. I tend not to accept friend requests from people I’m not acquainted with.

The Backstory to Elder Eyring’s Age of the Earth Comment and Creationism

October 8, 2016 /

genesis-hebrew2Elder Eyring told a story in this recent General Conference.

My father… was a seasoned and wise holder of the Melchizedek Priesthood. Once he was asked by an Apostle to write a short note about the scientific evidence for the age of the earth. He wrote it carefully, knowing that some who might read it had strong feelings that the earth was much younger than the scientific evidence suggested. I still remember my father handing me what he had written and saying to me, “Hal, you have the spiritual wisdom to know if I should send this to the apostles and prophets.” I can’t remember much of what the paper said, but I will carry with me forever the gratitude I felt for a great Melchizedek Priesthood holder who saw in me spiritual wisdom that I could not see.

A few of my friends thought this put a nail in the coffin of the anti-evolutionists, but it doesn’t really. See, we need to talk about the different kinds of creationism and define some terms, before we do the backstory to Elder Eyring’s comment. Continue reading

My old bookshelf

Books, Homes, and Al-Jahiz

September 9, 2016 /
My bookshelf

My scripture bookshelf

Living in New York for six years, I developed the habit of looking for new housing. New Yorkers are constantly on the hunt for a deal on a bigger place, a cheaper place, a better place. For comparison, we lived in a 700-ft2 apartment in Brooklyn for $1500/month and considered ourselves lucky. Now when visiting Utah, my wife and I and her family sometimes do the Parade of Homes in Salt Lake City, or St. George. Now, “Utah” is not always a good proxy for “Mormons,” and the Parade of Homes even less so, but every time we go, I have the same gripe at virtually every house— “There are massive TVs in every room, but no bookshelves anywhere! They’ve got a Home Theater room, but no library. They’ve got built-ins, but no built-in bookshelves! Do these people not read?! Is there really a market for wealthy illiterates?!”

I thought of this recently while reading Darwin’s Ghost’s: The Secret History of Evolution. It details Al-Jahiz, a 9th-century Muslim scholar living in Basra, who had some ideas like Darwin, though less developed. But it was the world Jahiz lived in that struck me.

“Wealthy patrons built elaborate palaces, libraries, and gardens in Baghdad and lavishly endowed hospitals, but they displayed their wealth most ostentatiously in competing to commission translations as a demonstration of their sophistication and their pious dedication to the expansion of knowledge” 

“compelled by the desire to rediscover and translate lost knowledge, [they] sent out emissaries to hunt for ancient Syriac and Greek manuscripts in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq. Scholar-explorers knocked on the doors of monasteries and sent requests to patriarchs in Alexandria, Antioch, Edessa, and Gundeshapur in the hope of discovering more Greek manuscripts, many of which, like Aristotle’s, had been banished to basements or cellars or left to rot in derelict and crumbling libraries.”

So, wealthy people showed off their wealth with… books and translations of books, and a dedication to knowledge? Huh.  This Muslim collection, preservation, and translation of ancient philosophy and science is what eventually kick-started the Renaissance, btw. What motivated Jahiz and these others? “It was the scientific curiosity of the world Jahiz lived in, a curiosity enjoined by the Qur’an…”

I’m not familiar with those Qur’an references, but I thought of various D&C passages.

 seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith. (D&C 88:118; 109:7)t

study and learn, and become acquainted with all good books, and with languages, tongues, and people. (D&C 90:15)

grant, Holy Father, that all those who shall worship in this house may be taught words of wisdom out of the best books, and that they may seek learning even by study, and also by faith (D&C 109:14)

obtain a knowledge of history, and of countries, and of kingdoms, of laws of God and man (D&C 93:53)

American society in general is turning away from reading, for pleasure or otherwise. Do we Mormons take these injunctions seriously? Do we seek books, knowledge, learning, languages, history, etc.?

As for Jahiz, what was his fate? A noble and learned death.

“According to popular lore, he was crushed to death when a wall of books fell on him.”

As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through this Amazon link. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader. I tend not to accept friend requests from people I’m not acquainted with.

Wrestling with ideas, writing, organization. Gustav Doré, public domain.

Critical Scholarship and Faith at BYU, Brief Partial Summary and Thoughts

August 19, 2016 /
Jacob wrestles with critical scholarship. Gustav Doré, public domain.

Jacob wrestles with critical scholarship.
Gustav Doré, public domain.

Several weeks ago, the Maxwell Institute’s Studies in the Bible and Antiquity journal sponsored a small non-public conference  at BYU on the topic of “Critical Scholarship and Faith.” If you’re unsure why this is an issue for LDS, read Julie Smith’s post “the next generation’s faith crisis.” I largely agree with her, and was thus quite excited to see this conference happen.

“Critical scholarship,” of course, does not mean scholarship that finds fault or is nit-picky. Its use of “critical” is more along the lines of “critical thinking.” (See my post on critical thinking and BYU here.) The term is shorthand for a vague collection of modern issues, ideas, methods, and conclusions that can seem to (or actually do) undermine faith in scripture and/or God. They are largely things most LDS have never heard about, and that’s a problem.  While scholars talk about “critical scholarship” as shorthand for a variety of issues and methods, it might be better to say, “modern biblical scholarship” which is a) often strongly persuasive, b)based on close readings of the texts themselves, and c) doesn’t always cohere well with some elements of either the broader Judeo-christian tradition or narrower LDS tradition. And we haven’t dealt with it very well yet, if at all, as Mormons.

The afternoon session consisted of three LDS scholars David Seely (BYU), J. Kirby (Phd Catholic University of America), and Phillip Barlow (PhD Harvard, now at Utah State).

The morning session, which I’m focusing on, consisted of three non-LDS scholars talking personally about their own religious traditions conflict and interaction with critical scholarship and faith. Peter Enns (PhD from Harvard, now at Eastern University) represented a Protestant view, Candida Moss (Notre Dame) Catholic, and James Kugel (Harvard) Jewish.

This collection of people and speakers was fantastic. Readers may know that I’ve greatly appreciated the work of Enns and Kugel, so it was fantastic to interact with them in person. I knew Moss’s name, but as she has not written as directly on topics pertaining to Biblical interpretation or related issues of interest to me, I hadn’t read any of her books. Since my wife and I are about to celebrate 17 surprisingly childless years, I have now added Moss’ Reconceiving Infertility: Biblical Perspectives on Procreation and Childlessness to my reading list.

Each talk (morning and afternoon sessions) will be published in the MI’s journal in the coming months, so I won’t rehash too much.

Kugel recounted some of the history found in his books, especially the excellent intro material in How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now. He’s a little bit of a Jewish Richard Bushman, as I describe here. Someone asked him a question about his faith community (he’s an Orthodox Jew), and he replied that “I often feel that,with my views, my faith community consists solely of James Kugel.” 🙂

Moss talked about her experiences teaching at Notre Dame. This was eye-opening; many of my academic LDS friends have “Vatican II” holy envy, wherein the Vatican essentially gave a blessing to critical scholarship and approved translating the Bible into modern vernacular. Moss showed us that Catholicism has still not fully dealt with the ramifications of critical scholarship, Vatican II notwithstanding.

Enns recounted some of the American Protestant history of critical scholarship from the turn of the century, and referred to his own experiences as an Evangelical scholar who was “let go” from a prominent Seminary for publishing a book that was deemed not orthodox enough.

All of these, in some ways, evoked the BYU student and professor experience. In other ways, they differ sharply. One thing was clear. A full confrontation of critical scholarship yet awaits Mormonism. While we may have our own variations to confront, other faith traditions have walked this path before, and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We can learn from the experiences of others in other faith traditions.  Indeed, one of the reasons I’ve pushed Enns and Kugel is because they offer a model of faithful interaction with critical scholarship. Their answers are not necessarily ours, but they can certainly help. This conference felt like a great first step, and I look forward to further discussions.

 

If the names above aren’t familiar to you from reading me, let me rehash. These are good scholars to read on the Bible.

As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through this Amazon link. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader. I tend not to accept friend requests from people I’m not acquainted with.

Pierre Lecomte du Noüy, from Wikipedia.

David O. McKay, Genesis, and Evolution: Part 2.

August 3, 2016 /

In a previous post, I detailed President McKay’s explicit, published, written approval of a very pro-evolution LDS magazine article. This served as evidence that President McKay did not understand Genesis 1 to prohibit an old earth, evolution, etc.

Shortly after the 1954 publication of Joseph Fielding Smith’s Man, His Origin and Destiny, BYU History professor Richard D. Poll and his wife were invited to discuss the book with the author. Knowing that President McKay disagreed strongly with the book, they managed to arrange a meeting with him on the same day. According to the Polls’ combined notes, made immediately afterwards, President McKay, “striking the desk for emphasis… repeated that [Man, His Origin and Destiny] is not the authoritative position of the Church.” He went on to recommend two books on “the problem of man, nature, and God” which considered “two of the outstanding books of the century”:⁠ A. Cressy Morrison’s Man Does Not Stand Alone and Pierre Lecomte du Noüy, Human Destiny.  Continue reading

A Note on Pioneer Day Talks, Sweetwater, and Tradition

July 23, 2016 /

I didn’t grow up in Utah, and never heard of Pioneer Day until I was on my mission in France/Belgium. There, a PR event was organized for the Sesquicentennial that included a large parade with handcarts, historical garb, dancing, etc. It wasn’t actually held on Pioneer Day, but a few weeks later in August. It had some Church News coverage, and a local member filmed and edited over an hour of video, all in French.

-Related reading: Eric Eliason, “The Cultural Dynamics of Historical Self-Fashioning: LDS Pioneer Nostalgia, American Culture, and the International Church” Journal of Mormon History 28:2 (2002)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA2X0XrdJXI&sns=em

BYUI historian Andrea RM offers some great tips on Pioneer Day talks here, and briefly mentions the famous Sweetwater River Rescue. I heard this retold recently in a missionary farewell, so it was on my mind. Sweetwater plays a role in my book where I discuss the influence of tradition upon knowledge and scriptural interpretation (see  my post here as well). In essence, the story as often told is, well, inaccurate for the main reasons we tell it. The traditional information comes from one late source, and looking at contemporary sources undermines it.

The evidence indicates that more than three rescuers braved the icy water that day. Of those positively identified as being involved in the Sweetwater crossing, none were exactly eighteen. Although these rescuers helped a great many of the handcart pioneers across the river, they carried only a portion of the company across. While some of these rescuers complained of health problems that resulted from the experience, most lived long and active lives that terminated in deaths that cannot be de nitively attributed to their exposure to the icy water that day.

Consequently, Brigham Young never eulogized three youths (since there were more) who died (because they didn’t), promising them the celestial kingdom for that act alone.

How do we know? Chad Orton published an article in BYU Studies examining it. A fantastic follow-up article in BYU’s Religious Educator summarizes Orton’s conclusions and looks at the problem of teaching the actual history to LDS students when the traditional version has been told in General Conference by such as Presidents Hinckley and Monson.

I asked my students something like, “What’s right and what’s wrong with that account?” The first hands went up on the back row, where three or four male students sat (all returned missionaries). Soon after the first student started talking, I felt heat rising on the back of my neck. He said that “he only ‘felt the Spirit’ when reading the traditional account.” Then a nearby student weighed in: “I don’t see what’s so wrong with that version anyway,” he said, questioning the value of revisiting the story. And one of them raised another issue: Why would President Hinckley use this story if there’s something wrong with it? In retrospect, these seem like predictable concerns, but they caught me by surprise that day…

The author goes to on to talk about framing the history, lowering emotional barriers to learning, and other bits. Perhaps most importantly, he concludes by pointing out that Sweetwater was told again in General Conference by Elder Cook in 2008… who cites the BYU Studies article in footnote 5.

The takeaway? Be careful about uncritically repeating traditional stories, even if you heard them in General Conference.

As always, you can help me pay my tuition here via GoFundMe. *I am an Amazon Affiliate, and may receive a small percentage of purchases made through Amazon links on this page. You can get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box below) and can also follow Benjamin the Scribe on Facebook.

A Testimony Meeting Experiment

July 17, 2016 /

tabooOne of the things I’ve written about before is the problem of common, broad terminology, that allows us to speak, without expressing what we mean (if we even know ourselves). For example, what does “true” mean in an LDS context, e.g. “the church is true” or “the scriptures are true”? It can be a problem. See my old post here, for example.

I’ve encountered two professors in the last year who make students think by requiring them to avoid certain words. In one non-BYU course on comparative religion, the students were barred for the first month from saying “religion”; in another (at BYU), students were barred from saying “atonement.” This means the students have to slow down and think about what they actually mean, since they can’t use those words. (Imagine if we struck the words “nourish and strengthen” from food blessings.)

If I were a Bishop (and I thank the heavens I am not), I might try having a sacrament meeting wherein all testimonies had to be expressed without using the words “atonement,” “true,” “church,” “gospel,” “testimony,” or “know.”  I think it would be really interesting and edifying. And yes, it’s a bit like the game Taboo, but the purpose here would be to induce more thought, sincerity, and clarity into our Fast and Testimony Offering Personal Witness Meeting.

As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through this Amazon link. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader. I tend not to accept friend requests from people I’m not acquainted with.