I want to plug Book of Mormon Central for collating published scholarship on lessons- See here for today’s links and summaries. (What they have is partly based on my own old work.) Most of today’s chapters involve Abinadi, his preaching, his words. We tend to read our scriptures without regard for where they came from, or how we got them, but that kind of context is often important. We tend to read direct speech (e.g. “And Abinadi said…”) as verbatim records, but should we? And what difference does it make? Continue reading
Category: Gospel Doctrine
Come Follow Me: Notes on Mosiah 7-11
First, a summary. Continue reading
Come Follow Me: Mosiah 4-6
I’d remind you of the book on King Benjamin’s speech (paper here), and the verse-by-verse commentary in it.
I’ll add my own bits which don’t overlap, and happen to be, well, on quasi-controversial topics. Continue reading
Come Follow Me: Mosiah 1-3
To open, we need some big picture structural discussion.
Mosiah 1 is not Mosiah 1. In fact, it is Mosiah 3, and the first two chapters are missing. How do we know this? Continue reading
Come Follow Me: 2 Nephi 6-10
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…
Come Follow Me: 2 Nephi 3-5
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
Come Follow Me: 2 Nephi 1-2
Today we enter into 2 Nephi, which immediately raises the question, why is there a second Nephi? Continue reading
Come Follow Me: 1 Nephi 13-14
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
Come Follow Me: 1 Nephi 1-7
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.
Come Follow Me: 1-2 Thessalonians
We’re moving into some dense historical, textual, and doctrinal territory today, as there is lots of background to cover. I lean pretty heavily on some of my tools. Continue reading
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