Is The God Of The Bom More Merciful That The God Of The Bible?

[Questing Beast]

Questing Beast has obviously not really studied the Book of Mormon. The BoM ties in extremely closely to the ancient First temple rites. As Kevin noted, Margaret Barker spoke of this at the 2005 Joseph Smith Symposium at the Library of Congress, comparing Lehi's Vision of the Tree of Life to First Temple concepts. As she noted, Joseph Smith was spot on regarding concepts of 600 BC.

The ancient and modern temple are all about theophany: entering into the presence of God/Shekinah. This was lost in the Second Temple by the Deuteronomists. Jesus and his apostles sought to restore it, and it was again lost by the Christians as they Hellenized the religion and rejected continuing revelation and authority of God.

The Book of Mormon has many concepts, teachings and events that show theophanies. From 1 Nephi 1 to the end of the Book of Mormon, we continually see and learn of the concept of entering into God's presence. This is the greatest "plain and precious" truth lost.

But it isn't visible to the unbeliever. All they see are simple stories and wars. It takes study and research to find the ties. Yet, when described, they are easy to find throughout the Book of Mormon.

That non-LDS scholars such as Margaret Barker, Raphael Patai, Larry Hurtado, and others are now discovering and writing about such concepts should not surprise Latter-day Saints, who have held such secrets for almost 200 years.

You are right: In all my more than two-dozen comprehensive readings of the BoM I never once studied it outside of the "faith-promoting" paradigm of the Church. Silly me!

Do you really want to go this direction? The BoM will not hold up as anything more than a brilliant composite of religious influences, which can be traced back as far as we have any record of religious "evolution". What could be more natural or expected? Joseph Smith's original inspiration for the Tree of Life "vision" was his own father's fanciful dream of the same, shared with his family when Joseph Smith was a little boy. The little boy's imagination was HUGE, and he entertained his family often with his stories about the original inhabitants of the land in which they lived, etc. It is obvious to me that the BoM is most easily explained in this way, requiring no additions like metaphysical "plates" and "angels", etc....

[Questing Beast]

... But think seriously... would it be better to be an intellectual drug addicted syphlitic, or simple dutiful yeoman disciple of Christ, trying to do the best they saw, according to their lights and opportunity?

Why do you put these as "either or" choices? Can't an intellectual also be a mystic devoted to a clean life because it makes wise sense? I don't see a deficiency of "light" in an intellectual, devoid of interest in dogmatic, organized religion.

Don't you suppose that someone who has good behaviors, and is able to observe the differences in life quality, might also be learning from their behaviors. That is, having an actual enlightening learning experience, just as important and powerful and meaningful, if not more, than might be gotten from a book or lecture?

Again, it's up to the individual, not the media resorted to. Learning is separate from behavior. Good behavior will facilitate efficient learning, of course. But most students learn to control their inclinations, their addictive propensities. If this were not so, most of society would be consuming itself in hedonism.

Walking a path leads to a very real kind of knowing, whereas knowing without walking inevitably falls short. As Jesus put it, "If you continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed, and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

Habits of behavior aren't necessarily mindless. Strong interior commitment accompanied by contrary practice demonstrates what?

From the first paragraph of Gee's review:

In 2005 the evangelical sociologist Christian Smith made a small stir when he published the findings of the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR).1 One of the surprises in his study was how well Latter-day Saint youth came off. "In general comparisons among major U.S. religious traditions using a variety of sociological measures of religious vitality and salience—which, to give a standard sociological disclaimer, may or may not have anything to do with the truth content of religious traditions or their adherents' actual subjective spiritual life and health—it is Mormon teenagers who are sociologically faring the best." 2

Kevin Christensen

Pittsburgh, PA

You will recall that you had been wondering what, if anything, Mormonism does for its members that is qualitatively any better than other faiths.

Yes, I read that. And the differences are not dramatic, only a matter of degree. In ADULTS, the differences are almost negligible: this is the demographic which has learned from their youthful experiences and chosen, for the main part, to control themselves. This demographic includes believers, unbelievers, converts, apostates, you name it. Their lifestyles have far more in common than not. Their behavior in public and as members of their communities is largely one of integrity and a measure of self-sacrifice for the common good. I saw two young men dash from the passenger seats of their respective vehicles yesterday, to help a stalled motorist push his truck off to a parking lot during a red light. That kind of thing I see all the time. Religion or the lack of it has nothing to do with it....

[Kevin Christensen]

Barker: "Nor, least we forget the crisis which has now engulfed biblical scholarship—archeology simple does not give supporting evidence for a great deal of the history in the Old Testament—and scholars are asking themselves, “What are we reading? Whose Bible is this? When was it written?”"

Do you really believe that the LDS Church is going in this direction? She is obviously an ecumenical and fascinating speaker. But this single quote is a fine example of where she's going: far off, away from Mormon dogmatic, "faith-promoting" history.

I know several dogmatic Mormons, but I can take this in stride because Mormonism itself not dogmatic. As Joseph Smith says, "Mormons have no creed" and can accept new information and new revelation. What you put in ironic quotes, I see as a distinct subset of what goes on in the larger LDS scholarly community.

Moses is ESSENTIAL to Mormon canonical scripture. He can't be some conflicting, "Deuteronomistic" insertion by king Josiah's "purge".

What makes you think that the existence of Moses is irreconcilable with the existence of Deuteronomists hundreds of years later? It's no different that acknowledging the existence of Jesus, New Testament writings about Jesus, and the existence of later inconsistent Gnostic teachings about Jesus. You're all up in arms about modern "faith-promoting" history. You think that sort of thing is modern invention? Read Nibley's essay on "Controlling the Past."

And for that matter, I notice that Margaret Barker says that a key element of Josiah's purge was to change the role of the High Priest so that he was no longer the anointed (that is, the Messiah) and to remove the Day of Atonement from the sacred calendar (see Deut 16, and notice the absence of the Day of Atonement). It happens that Lehi's first public discourse involved his prophesy of the coming Messiah and the of the redemption of the world, which, it happens was ritually enacted by the anointed high priest (i.e., the Messiah) on the Day of Atonement. Since Lehi's discourse on these two points got him in trouble, the existence of the Reformers at that very time explains why that specific message got Lehi in trouble.

Josiah destroyed the tree of life. Lehi saw it in vision. The Deuteronomists claimed that they needed no more revelation, that they had all they needed, written down as the Law. Jacob 4 talks about the blindness of the Jews who "looked beyond the mark." The mark would be the same make that Jacob's contemporary Ezekiel mentioned, the anointing with tau, the cross that signified the sacred name, the very anointing that made the anointed First Temple high priests what they were, living symbols of the Messiah. Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Zechariah, and 1 Enoch all agree with Jacob about the blindness that came just before the destruction of Jerusalem. And they all contrast blindness with the experience of vision. I think that the Book of Mormon fits remarkably well with Barker's new reconstruction. So does she. It's not just a few random parallels, but the same place, time, and themes converging together using sources of information that fits the prophecy in 1 Nephi 13.

If the archeological record speaks truth "whispering out of the ground" as it were, then there is zip evidence for any of that ESSENTIAL Mosaic content in our religion.

I think Moses is fairly important, more so than Noah, far less so than the resurrection of Jesus, and far less and the translation of the Book of Mormon. I'm not an all or nothing thinker. I do understand that brittle thinkers have problems with expanding their thought to accommodate further light and knowledge.

And regarding "zip" evidence for Moses, John Gee (who attended the Barker seminar at BYU in 2003) points to Kenneth A. Kitchen. On the Reliability of the Old Testament, which sounds like a worth while read for helpful perspectives.

http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/review/?vol=18&num=1&id=615

This doesn't bother Barker in the least, since she has no dog in this fight or axe to grind. She's just in it for the fascination of discovery. She'll use Mormonism like she does everything else; to get more insight. But what she's offering the Church isn't "faith-promoting" in the least....

Not "faith promoting" to your way of thinking, perhaps. My experience is very different. And I am far from alone. I see a lot of excitement among some very bright people. Noel Reynolds told me that the Dean of Religion at BYU gave copies of my book on Barker to his faculty.

And Barker's motives are not just those of detached fascination. She's a committed, believing, living, and inspired Christian.

Kevin Christensen

Pittsburgh, PA

Edited June 18, 2011 by Kevin Christensen

[cksalmon]

That is not very specific, Pa Pa. And in fact the first link that comes up has nothing to say about Dobson speaking at LDS meetings. Do you have some pointers to more specific dates or places?

To be clear, I don't identify with Dobson or keep tabs on his activities, but the claim that he had been raked over the coals for speaking at LDS functions struck me as interesting. I mean, how did I miss that?

And, of course, "James Dobson speaks to Mormons" was the exact phrase I typed into Google when I first saw Pa Pa's claim. There was nothing relevant there. Now, on the other hand, if you search for that term via Google, scroll down to the bottom of the page and find--

Tip: These results do not include the word "speaks". Show results that include "speaks".

--and click the amended search phrase, your post above, Calmoriah, is the first result!

After searching as best I could think to do, I'm not at all convinced that Dobson has ever spoken at a single LDS function, let alone multiple LDS functions, only to have been been raked over the coals for having done so.

I don't know why Pa Pa would resolutely claim such a thing, but, at this point, I don't think his claim has any basis in reality. I could certainly be wrong about that.

I suppose I could issue an official, board-certified CFR, but I'm really not even all that interested. Sometimes (and I emphasize sometimes), I think, Pa Pa gets swept up in the heat of the moment and writes things that further his point whether or not they happen to be true.

c

[Questing Beast]

...

Not "faith promoting" to your way of thinking, perhaps. My experience is very different. And I am far from alone. I see a lot of excitement among some very bright people. Noel Reynolds told me that the Dean of Religion at BYU gave copies of my book on Barker to his faculty.

And Barker's motives are not just those of detached fascination. She's a committed, believing, living, and inspired Christian.

Kevin Christensen

Pittsburgh, PA

No, not "faith promoting" to the Church's official curriculum kind of thinking; the Church's massaged historical view kind of thinking.

When I see evidence that the 1st presidency is offering a wider historical view, then I will adjust what "faith-promoting" history means as it applies to the Church's teachings.

I am sure that Barker is a committed Christian scholar of faith. But she's a non Mormon. And the intellectuals in the Church have always fought upstream battles against anti intellectualism. For example, in 1856, Jedediah Grant and Heber C. Kimball “repressed” the Polysophical Society, “a meeting for gospel and cultural refinement,” started by Lorenzo Snow and William Eddington....

[rameumptom]

You're saying that Nephi did not comprehend the details of his own vision? "A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible, and there cannot be any more Bible..."

The Brass Plates were STOLEN from the Jews, ergo their sacred writings would not be anytime soon going to the Gentiles.

I am talking about the Bible in Joseph Smith's possession; the one that he said Nephi saw in vision. It is remarkable that the DSS OT books match up. They are the oldest extant texts we have and they translate essentially into the KJV or any other faithful translation of modern times (which all agree in the high 90th percentile). The Bible of the RCC canon. Minus the apocryphal books, of course, because the Protestants, Joseph Smith's predecessors, dropped them as being "too Catholic".

The Book of Enoch: which ONE would you suggest? We have so many. Until the DDS fragments the oldest was from the 6th century. The DDS fragments are old even for then, and were apparently not of current interest to the later community. This might be obvious, since the Book of Enoch talks about "fallen angels" being to blame for evil in the world, and more or less ignores the Mosaic law, and refers to the renewed sacrifices at the restored temple as "polluted", etc.

In other words, all of the books left out of our Bible were left out for good reasons: they taught conflicting history, covenants and even ethics. The books of the Bible were retained for a reason: they were deemed the most valuable and consistent. So what "plain and precious parts of the gospel of the Lamb" were "taken away" again?...

You still do not get it. The Nephites obtained the plates, but they were not the only holy writings, or copies of holy writings available to the Jews. Otherwise, we would have no Bible at all today. The Brass Plates were likely the source of E, the author from the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Scholars believe that writings from J and E, among others, were redacted together into a set of scriptures by Ezra, and later by Hillel. That our Bible includes Isaiah and other writings included in the Brass Plates suggest that the Jews either had their own version of the writings, or had a copy of the Brass Plates. If the latter, then they took out the prophesies of Zenock and Zenos, among others.

That the OT writings correlate well from the DSS to our Bible today simply means that the versions of those books from the 2nd century to modern times has not changed much. The problem is that many and perhaps most of the changes occurred BEFORE the DSS scrolls were written. The Deuteronomists changed the temple and scriptures. So did the Priestly writers. As Barker notes, the temple and many other things were changed. Key things taken out of the culture, such as God being anthropomorphic, angels and miracles attending the believers, and that men can see the face of God. The Deuteronomists did away with all of these things, including in the writings of the holy scriptures. In comparing the Brass Plates with the Holy Bible, we see major differences. Nephi could see plain and precious things taken away even in his day, as the Jewish temple at that time denied the earlier beliefs of Solomon's temple.

Second, the DSS show that the Bible is incomplete. There are hundreds of books that they used as scripture, which are not in our Bible today. I mentioned this before, but it seems to have sped right past you. Why aren't the Community Rule, Habakkuk Pesher, Book of Enoch, or the Temple Scroll in our Bible today? It is because someone chose not to include them. These hold some marvelous words regarding God's work. The Community Rule includes concepts of baptism and the communion/Sacrament two centuries before Christ. It explains why the Jews did not question John the Baptist why he was baptizing. Instead, it explains baptism and the communion as earlier sacraments that Jesus updated and continued. But Christians did not begin to understand this until the discovery of these scrolls. Plain and precious things long lost because someone did not include them in the official modern Bible.

The Book of Enoch was used by 1st century AD Jews and Christians. Given the quotations in the Bible that connect to Enoch, it was at least what we now call the Ethiopic Enoch. Of course, the DSS' Enoch could also be included. Given that some OT prophets have more than one book (Jeremiah for instance), why must we limit ourselves to just one. The real issue is why St Jerome rejected the Books of Enoch for inclusion in the Bible, when St Jude and others quoted it, and at least the Qumran Jews accepted it. Another evidence of plain and precious things being lost from the Bible.

There was no "good reason" to leave out prophetic books such as Enoch. St Jerome saw the writing as conflicting with his beliefs. What beliefs? That people could ascend to heaven and speak with God. That there were fallen angels, etc. Who made St Jerome king of the prophets? As it is, St Jerome allowed politics to sway his choices, at least in the case of Hebrews and Revelation - because the western Church would not have accepted his list of books unless he included them. So, you tell me, should holy writing be decided by politics and personal agendas?

[rameumptom]

No, not "faith promoting" to the Church's official curriculum kind of thinking; the Church's massaged historical view kind of thinking.

When I see evidence that the 1st presidency is offering a wider historical view, then I will adjust what "faith-promoting" history means as it applies to the Church's teachings.

I am sure that Barker is a committed Christian scholar of faith. But she's a non Mormon. And the intellectuals in the Church have always fought upstream battles against anti intellectualism. For example, in 1856, Jedediah Grant and Heber C. Kimball “repressed” the Polysophical Society, “a meeting for gospel and cultural refinement,” started by Lorenzo Snow and William Eddington....

That is a straw man. The Church's official curriculum focuses solely on the very basics. Yet the Church also officially recognizes and funds the Maxwell Institute (formerly known as FARMS). This official arm of the Church officially publishes things of this sort all the time. And they helped sponsor the 2005 Joseph Smith Symposium that Margaret Barker was invited to speak at. So, while we will not see it in Sunday School class, it is more accepted than you imply. That Barker is a non-Mormon who wrote her book on The Great Angel prior to knowing any LDS or knowing our doctrine regarding these things (LDS scholars contacted her after it was published), shows that it isn't just LDS scholars teaching these things. That you can quote something from 1856 is meaningless today, when we have Bushman writing Rough Stone Rolling, Nibley writing all of his books (and being republished by the Maxwell Institute), and the cadre of scholars we have today.

I am writing regarding many concepts like these in my blog for last year's Old Testament, and this year's New Testament. Guess what? I haven't had any Church official censor me. Rather, I've had tens of thousands of views of my blog over the last 1 1/2 years, with only 2 people making a criticism - both non-LDS and were just being rude.

[Questing Beast]

... So, you tell me, should holy writing be decided by politics and personal agendas?

What other method do we have for making such dogmatic decisions? It is always politics.

So I guess St Jerome is the bad guy then?

What about the contending Jewish sects centuries before Christ? They all modified "the scriptures" to suit their own contentious agendas. And "we" (Christians) are the inheritors of ancient wrangling amongst Semites. Bully, just bully.

Your "prophet" is another man's heretic. The result is thousands of fragmented religious sects and denominations - just like the splitting of genetic codes via evolution - and here we are today, just as locked into religious bickering as we always were. Business as usual....

[Questing Beast]

That is a straw man. ... That you can quote something from 1856 is meaningless today, when we have Bushman writing Rough Stone Rolling, Nibley writing all of his books (and being republished by the Maxwell Institute), and the cadre of scholars we have today.

I am writing regarding many concepts like these in my blog for last year's Old Testament, and this year's New Testament. Guess what? I haven't had any Church official censor me. Rather, I've had tens of thousands of views of my blog over the last 1 1/2 years, with only 2 people making a criticism - both non-LDS and were just being rude.

A straw man in this regard would be me asserting that the Church squelches all intellectualism. But what I was showing is that the 1st presidency has a point beyond which they will not go. That the point of intellectualism has shifted to being more liberal, as the members of the 1st presidency have become more educated, only shows that knowledge of facts must per force alter that "line in the sand" which delineates apostate thinking.

If you take your blog into gospel doctrine class; if you set yourself up as an "authority" before congregations, such that news of your conflicting opinions are being heralded as facts that the Church must address; then you'll discover where that "line in the sand" really is.

As long as "we" blather on anonymously, attract no attention to ourselves personally, and always preface our commentary with "in my opinion" or similar, we are free to exercise our egos as much as we wish....

[rameumptom]

BTW, here's a recent article from BAR showing that the DSS does show that changes occurred between the DSS and the Masoretic text:

http://www.bib-arch.org/bar/article.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=37&Issue=4&ArticleID=13