8th article of faith

[bluebell]

18 hours ago, snowflake said:

 

I do not believe that infant baptism is found in the KJV.  I did find a key verse in the BOM on baptism by immersion. Most Christian churches perform baptism by immersion.

2 Nephi 31:13

13 Wherefore, my beloved brethren, I know that if ye shall follow the Son, with full purpose of heart, acting no hypocrisy and no deception before God, but with real intent, repenting of your sins, witnessing unto the Father that ye are willing to take upon you the name of Christ, by baptism—yea, by following your Lord and your Savior down into the water, according to his word, behold, then shall ye receive the Holy Ghost; yea, then cometh the baptism of fire and of the Holy Ghost; and then can ye speak with the tongue of angels, and shout praises unto the Holy One of Israel.

Baptism isn't very clear at all in the bible (who should be baptized, how it should be done, when it should be done, etc.).  There are verses that teach that you must be baptized to be saved and verses that teach that you only have to believe, for example.  That's probably why we have so many "bible-only" Christian denominations that don't even agree on that seemingly simple issue and teach contradictory things concerning baptism.  When you take the verses in the BOM along with what is taught in the Bible, the issue becomes much more clear.  What is missing from the Bible on the subject can be found in the BOM.

[bluebell]

1 hour ago, snowflake said:

Joseph "translated" the Bible himself to remove all the so called errors, why doesn't the LDS church use the JST instead of the KJV?

He never translated the entire bible, only parts of it.  LDS do use parts of his bible translations but not the whole thing because the Reorganized LDS (Community of Christ) holds the copyright.

[maklelan]

2 hours ago, snowflake said:

Joseph "translated" the Bible himself to remove all the so called errors, why doesn't the LDS church use the JST instead of the KJV?

The JST doesn't "remove all the so called errors." It's performing a number of different functions. Joseph Smith even translated one chapter twice, and they're completely different. Thinking of the JST as a restoration of the pure original text is problematic and naive.

[maklelan]

2 hours ago, snowflake said:

To claim that something is missing from the Bible is nothing new, however, to prove something is missing from the Bible now that takes some evidence.  Manuscripts would have to be shown that something was there first and then it was removed or corrupted. This claim that the Bible has been corrupted and is missing parts has been claimed by the Muslims for over a thousand years. Is there evidence to prove  your claims above that there was something in the Bible and then it was removed or corrupted? How can you prove such a thing?

Sure can. For instance, Deut 32:8 says that the nations were divided up according to the "sons of Israel," but in the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, which is about 1,000 older than the Hebrew manuscript on which modern Bible translations are based, it says "angels of God." We know that the Greek translators usually changed the phrase "sons of God" to "angels of God" because they didn't like the notion of God having offspring, so scholars have long postulated that Deut 32:8 originally had the nations being divided up according to the number of the sons of God. It wasn't until we discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls that we discovered a fragment of a manuscript of Deuteronomy that read precisely that, proving the scholarly reconstruction of Deut 32:8 was exactly right. We have a similar issue in v. 43 of the same chapter, where references to other gods were deleted by later editors. You can read more about this in a paper I published a few years ago on deity in the Septuagint translation of Deuteronomy (here). I could point to hundreds and hundreds of additional things that we can prove were changed in the Bible.

[ksfisher]

2 hours ago, snowflake said:

why doesn't the LDS church use the JST instead of the KJV?

I believe the Community of Christ holds the copyright on this.  Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

[thesometimesaint]

21 hours ago, cinepro said:

It's quite possible that if the gospel had been restored in a different country (and language), then English-speaking members would use updated translations much like other parts of the LDS world get to use updated translations.

Entirely possible. Was it God's design that Moroni would deposit the plates in what was to become the US, or some other factor?

[CV75]

5 hours ago, snowflake said:

To claim that something is missing from the Bible is nothing new, however, to prove something is missing from the Bible now that takes some evidence.  Manuscripts would have to be shown that something was there first and then it was removed or corrupted. This claim that the Bible has been corrupted and is missing parts has been claimed by the Muslims for over a thousand years. Is there evidence to prove  your claims above that there was something in the Bible and then it was removed or corrupted? How can you prove such a thing?

I can claim that Abraham Lincoln was in the Bible too but evil men removed it, and the corruption happened before the earliest manuscripts we have. And we don't have the original documents so my claim is true.

As I said, the claim that something is missing from the Bible is difficult to ascertain because we don’t know specifically what the angel was referring to when he explained it to Nephi. But we have that much. We take it as a matter of faith that things were lost because the Book of Mormon says they were, and it contains so much that isn't in the Bible. Hence my list (and also the various old world prophets and their teachings that are mentioned in the Book of Mormon not the Bible).

Article of Faith 8 establishes a relationship between the two books, that each expresses the word of God but one has more limitations than the other. When you look at the self-proclaimed purpose and role of the Book of Mormon, and how it is to come forth in the latter days, and see that the Bible has no stated purpose (because it never had a prophet compile it from reliable, well-preserved hard-copy records of his people), you can see why a correct translation is in question.

“And he surely did show unto the prophets of old all things concerning them; and also he did show unto many concerning us; wherefore, it must needs be that we know concerning them for they are written upon the plates of brass.” (1 Nephi 19:21). Did the prophets of old not write the many things concerning the Lehites that were shown to them, or were their writings lost from the Bible?

The plates of brass, a corrupted version or excerpts of which seemingly ended up in our modern Bible*, had many things concerning those in Jerusalem and those concerning the Lehites**. But our modern Bible makes no clear mention of these other people. They were probably lost before the time of Jesus, which is why His disciples did not know who the “other sheep” referred to. The disciples, and Jesus as a mortal, used the Jewish scriptural canon as it stood in their day, and the disciples did not discern what He meant by means of personal revelation.

* “And he said: Behold it proceedeth out of the mouth of a Jew. And I, Nephi, beheld it; and he said unto me: The book that thou beholdest is a record of the Jews, which contains the covenants of the Lord, which he hath made unto the house of Israel; and it also containeth many of the prophecies of the holy prophets; and it is a record like unto the engravings which are upon the plates of brass, save there are not so many; nevertheless, they contain the covenants of the Lord, which he hath made unto the house of Israel; wherefore, they are of great worth unto the Gentiles.” (1 Nephi 13:23)

** “Behold, our father Jacob also testified concerning a remnant of the seed of Joseph. And behold, are not we a remnant of the seed of Joseph? And these things which testify of us, are they not written upon the plates of brass which our father Lehi brought out of Jerusalem?” (3 Nephi 10:17)

We have yet other evidences and specifics in the Book of Mormon tying the brass plates to the Bible.

Can you see how a study of the Book of Mormon can get you nearer to God than any translation of the Bible? These things may be found in the books of the other lost tribes, and may be discovered by science someday, but why wait?

Edited October 26, 2016 by CV75

[cinepro]

2 hours ago, thesometimesaint said:

Entirely possible. Was it God's design that Moroni would deposit the plates in what was to become the US, or some other factor?

I don't think God wanting the Church to be anchored to the KJV was an impetus for the burial location of the plates to be in the future USA.  

I think the KJV is probably one of history's best examples of people mistakenly equating popularity with quality.  It's great for what it is, but when you're anchoring religious belief and claims of salvation on a book, I think a little consideration and analysis would be appropriate as time goes on.

[Calm]

5 hours ago, bluebell said:

He never translated the entire bible, only parts of it.  LDS do use parts of his bible translations but not the whole thing because the Reorganized LDS (Community of Christ) holds the copyright.

Copyright has expired.  There was a certain level of distrust in early times of the JST once it was published by the RLDS/CoC because there was concern there may have been alterations made (back then the faiths were not particularly friendly with each other); but back in the 70s? access was granted and it was confirmed to be faithful to the original.  Mostly I think it is traditional, especially with converts being more comfortable with the KJV or whatever is used in their own language.

http://en.fairmormon.org/Mormonism_and_the_Bible/Joseph_Smith_Translation/As_the_Church's_official_Bible

Edited October 26, 2016 by Calm

[ksfisher]

24 minutes ago, Calm said:

There was a certain level of distrust in early times of the JST once it was published by the RLDS/CoC because there was concern there may have been alterations made (back then the faiths were not particularly friendly with each other);

I believe there was good reason for this.  There were alterations made to the Book of Moses by Joseph Smith III that have become part of our in our current text.  I have a book at home which compares the current text with the original.  I don't recall the name of the book or the author at the moment.

 

edit: found it

https://smile.amazon.com/Moses-Joseph-Smith-Translation-Manuscripts/dp/0842525890/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Edited October 26, 2016 by ksfisher

[thesometimesaint]

9 hours ago, cinepro said:

I don't think God wanting the Church to be anchored to the KJV was an impetus for the burial location of the plates to be in the future USA.  

I think the KJV is probably one of history's best examples of people mistakenly equating popularity with quality.  It's great for what it is, but when you're anchoring religious belief and claims of salvation on a book, I think a little consideration and analysis would be appropriate as time goes on.

I don't believe we should anchor our faith in any book or collections of books. But by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

[RevTestament]

On ‎10‎/‎25‎/‎2016 at 8:29 AM, snowflake said:

Why does the LDS church use the KJV as opposed to other versions? It seems they would want the one that has been "translated correctly" no?

As I recall JS prayed about it and was told that the KJV is accurate enough to use, but no, it is not translated perfectly correctly. I ran across an example just today in Jeremiah 38: 6 which reads: "Malchiah the son of Hammelech" as if Hammelech is a proper name. The ha there is "the" and Melech or Melek is Hebrew for King. So this "Malchiah" is the son of the King, who at the time was Zedekiah who was appointed by Nebuchadnezzar and like a fool was rebelling against him with a tenth of the people left. After examining it closely, it appears that this "Malchiah" could indeed have been Mulek as a very young man probably no more than 15 who had been put in charge of the palace prison by his father. So by realizing the error in the KJV, I found a point which can support the BoM...  For personal study, the best I have run across is the Oxford Annotated Bible, but I don't know that there is the "perfect" translation. After learning more tho, I certainly see a lot of things in the KJV I would like to change. So much to do... so little time.

[RevTestament]

12 hours ago, maklelan said:

The JST doesn't "remove all the so called errors." It's performing a number of different functions. Joseph Smith even translated one chapter twice, and they're completely different.

May I ask which chapter you are referring to?

[RevTestament]

12 hours ago, maklelan said:

Sure can. For instance, Deut 32:8 says that the nations were divided up according to the "sons of Israel," but in the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, which is about 1,000 older than the Hebrew manuscript on which modern Bible translations are based, it says "angels of God." We know that the Greek translators usually changed the phrase "sons of God" to "angels of God" because they didn't like the notion of God having offspring, so scholars have long postulated that Deut 32:8 originally had the nations being divided up according to the number of the sons of God. It wasn't until we discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls that we discovered a fragment of a manuscript of Deuteronomy that read precisely that, proving the scholarly reconstruction of Deut 32:8 was exactly right. We have a similar issue in v. 43 of the same chapter, where references to other gods were deleted by later editors. You can read more about this in a paper I published a few years ago on deity in the Septuagint translation of Deuteronomy (here). I could point to hundreds and hundreds of additional things that we can prove were changed in the Bible.

As I recall that Qumran fragment is partial and broken on the critical word, but yes does support the sons of "Elohim" translation. I believe what is significant about that is with the change back, the text now supports that YHWH is one of the inheriting sons of El Elyon, the Most High, and inherits the nation of Israel. Am I missing something or isn't that a plausible reading? Thus, apparently with the advent of Christ, the Masoretes did a little edit to hide that reading. I believe this to be a very important fact to support the nature and title of Yeshua.

[maklelan]

6 hours ago, RevTestament said:

May I ask which chapter you are referring to?

Matthew 26. Here's a paper about it.

[maklelan]

6 hours ago, RevTestament said:

As I recall that Qumran fragment is partial and broken on the critical word, but yes does support the sons of "Elohim" translation. I believe what is significant about that is with the change back, the text now supports that YHWH is one of the inheriting sons of El Elyon, the Most High, and inherits the nation of Israel. Am I missing something or isn't that a plausible reading? Thus, apparently with the advent of Christ, the Masoretes did a little edit to hide that reading. I believe this to be a very important fact to support the nature and title of Yeshua.

Yeah, that's the correct reading. I discuss it briefly in the third chapter of one of my master's degrees (here). The fragment when it was originally released to the public was missing everything after the lamed, but we've since discovered more of the fragment:

 

[mfbukowski]

20 hours ago, Calm said:

Copyright has expired.  There was a certain level of distrust in early times of the JST once it was published by the RLDS/CoC because there was concern there may have been alterations made (back then the faiths were not particularly friendly with each other); but back in the 70s? access was granted and it was confirmed to be faithful to the original.  Mostly I think it is traditional, especially with converts being more comfortable with the KJV or whatever is used in their own language.

http://en.fairmormon.org/Mormonism_and_the_Bible/Joseph_Smith_Translation/As_the_Church's_official_Bible

I have a copy and it just appears to me they have just inserted the JST into the places where we have the JST in footnote. Ours is better because we can compare the two.

[RevTestament]

7 hours ago, maklelan said:

Yeah, that's the correct reading. I discuss it briefly in the third chapter of one of my master's degrees (here). The fragment when it was originally released to the public was missing everything after the lamed, but we've since discovered more of the fragment:

 

So is that word ’ĕ·lō·w·ha    ( אֱל֣וֹהַ )?  If so there are 3 extra letters starting with a yod, but I don't see בני אלהים there. I'm sure it would be clear to me if I knew Hebrew better or was more familiar with the Qumran script. Thanks

edit: actually, to me it seems to read אֱל֫וֹהָ֥י or Elohay with two additional consonants, the first of which I am not quite sure.

Edited October 27, 2016 by RevTestament

[maklelan]

1 hour ago, RevTestament said:

So is that word ’ĕ·lō·w·ha    ( אֱל֣וֹהַ )?  If so there are 3 extra letters starting with a yod, but I don't see בני אלהים there. I'm sure it would be clear to me if I knew Hebrew better or was more familiar with the Qumran script. Thanks

It's elohim (אלוהים). You can see other examples of the final mem in this scribe's hand here:

[RevTestament]

Yeah, I can assume the last letter, the mem. I was misreading his yod and he. Thanks again.

[PeterPear]

No. Mark 1:5 doesn't help at all.

Edited October 28, 2016 by PeterPear

[PeterPear]

On 10/26/2016 at 8:01 AM, bluebell said:

Baptism isn't very clear at all in the bible (who should be baptized, how it should be done, when it should be done, etc.).  There are verses that teach that you must be baptized to be saved and verses that teach that you only have to believe, for example.  That's probably why we have so many "bible-only" Christian denominations that don't even agree on that seemingly simple issue and teach contradictory things concerning baptism.  When you take the verses in the BOM along with what is taught in the Bible, the issue becomes much more clear.  What is missing from the Bible on the subject can be found in the BOM.

No. Mark 1:5 doesn't help at all.

And Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery went to the shore of the Susquehanna River merely by happenstance when they prayed about the necessity of baptism because the shore of a river is nice and cool and they just wanted to be comfortable by kneeling in sand while praying and enjoy the sounds of chirping frogs and jumping fish and enjoy the nice cool and the shadows of leaves and sunlight as it played on the sparkling water and they took along with them their fly rods and fishing nets and fishing waders.

[bluebell]

43 minutes ago, PeterPear said:

No. Mark 1:5 doesn't help at all.

And Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery went to the shore of the Susquehanna River merely by happenstance when they prayed about the necessity of baptism because the shore of a river is nice and cool and they just wanted to be comfortable by kneeling in sand while praying and enjoy the sounds of chirping frogs and jumping fish and enjoy the nice cool and the shadows of leaves and sunlight as it played on the sparkling water and they took along with them their fly rods and fishing nets and fishing waders.

I'm sorry, I'm really not sure what you are trying to say. 

[snowflake]

1 hour ago, PeterPear said:

No. Mark 1:5 doesn't help at all.

And Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery went to the shore of the Susquehanna River merely by happenstance when they prayed about the necessity of baptism because the shore of a river is nice and cool and they just wanted to be comfortable by kneeling in sand while praying and enjoy the sounds of chirping frogs and jumping fish and enjoy the nice cool and the shadows of leaves and sunlight as it played on the sparkling water and they took along with them their fly rods and fishing nets and fishing waders.

That must be from the JST, I knew those mean scribes back in the day had it out for the Mormons and removed Joseph.

[snowflake]

1 hour ago, PeterPear said:

No. Mark 1:5 doesn't help at all.

Didn't Joseph write himself into Genesis as well somewhere in his JST?

Unfortunately, again some corrupt man (probably a Priest from the church of Satan) removed Joseph from the text before the earliest existing manuscripts that we have were penned. (can you believe it? no manuscripts to support the JST)?