Category: Scriptures

Scripture Unchained: A New York Institute Announcement

by Ben S. • January 7, 2012 • 13 Comments

After taking off 18 months or so, I’m returning to teaching Institute in my free time. Beginning January 12, 8 PM in the Union Square chapel of Manhattan, I’ll be teaching a class called “Genesis, with an Introduction to Studying the Bible in Hebrew.” The Institute Director added the last part, but I don’t mind one bit. I’m quite looking forward to it. Institute can really be a breath of fresh air, especially for those who are looking for a deeper exploration of the scriptures than Sunday School allows. After all, there’s no schedule to follow, no manual to adhere to, none of the constraints that people argue over. Instead of 45 minutes with ambivalent mostly non-readers, I get 75 minutes with a self-selecting group of slightly less ambivalent reading-a-bit-more. This is not to say there are no constraints; in a lesser implementation of Helaman 10:4-5, teachers generally get vetted one way or another, and then are simply trusted to teach. I have reviews/recommendations from teaching for eight years under three different Institute Directors plus my three summers teaching at BYU, and they contact my Bishop and Stake President as well. After that… well, I teach the scriptures and the Gospel, and love it. And that’s all the local Powers That Be really care about. Are the students edified? Growing and learning? Reading their scriptures more? If so, they’re supportive. This class will be selective. I anticipate spending several weeks…

Which Book of Mormon?

by Dave Banack • January 5, 2012 • 18 Comments

The flurry of posts at T&S and elsewhere around the Bloggernacle is a reminder that 2012 is Book of Mormon year in Gospel Doctrine class. Which Book of Mormon are you going to read?

Finally, Family Scripture Study that Works for Us

by Ben S. • November 17, 2011 • 24 Comments

My family is not very large (C and, uh, me. Not even a cat), so schedules aren’t hard to coordinate. We’re both active in the Church, and bibliophiles who regularly read and study our own scriptures, and yet we’ve never been able to have productive scripture study together. I am largely to blame for that, since our questions and interests tend to not overlap very much and mine are too arcane and rabbit-hole-ish to be productive for her. In spite of trying several times, it’s never lasted long. I have memories of my teens, bleary-eyed hot breakfast at 5:15, slogging through Alma, taking turns reading in between bites of Hutterite pancake with cream and bananas. We read every day, but I never felt conscious enough to really pay attention, especially since I was competing with three brothers for pancakes. (My older sister wasn’t very competitive in the pancake horking department.) Somehow between hearing it at breakfast and sleeping through four years of Seminary (6:00-6:45), I learned enough through osmosis that my MTC group designated me the “scriptorian” of the group, thoroughly dismaying me as to how little one needed to know to be thus branded. Regardless, I was convinced at that point that group scripture study had value. If I with so little grey matter devoted to paying attention, could learn simply by being there, what could you accomplish if you actively engaged with the text and co-reader? This week, with…

Beyond Translation: Job and Isaiah at Ugarit? Part 2

by Ben S. • October 12, 2011 • 17 Comments

In Part 1, I promised some Biblical examples of where translation alone fails to convey all the meaning an Israelite would have grasped. I’ve broken these examples into three fuzzy categories. 1) Israel is often described in the Torah as a “land flowing with milk and honey.” We probably all have milk and honey in our kitchen, yet not quite what is described here. In the Old Testament, milk doesn’t usually come from cows, and honey doesn’t come from bees. Cattle were primarily used for beef, while milk came primarily from goats, only rarely from cattle. Israelites didn’t raise bees, so honey was likely difficult to acquire. “Honey” was a boiled-down thick sweet syrup, usually made from dates or some other fruit, though on rare occasion “honey” does seem to clearly indicate bee-honey. Israel, we might say then, was “a land oozing with chèvre and fruit-honey.” 2) Several times in Genesis 1, curious circumlocutions appear. There’s no mention of the sun or moon, but “greater light” and “lesser light.” Even though the account culminates in the seventh day, the Sabbath, there’s no mention of “sabbath.” And lastly, though we have the world bifurcated into water and dry land, the seas are mysteriously plural. All of these are explainable via polemical context. First, both the sun (shemesh) and moon (yareach) were also the names of those deities outside Israel, just as Ra designated both sun and sun-god in Egypt. We can…

12 Questions with Grant Hardy – part II

by James Olsen • September 8, 2011 • 10 Comments

Here is the conclusion of Times & Seasons look at Grant Hardy’s new book Understanding the Book of Mormon, and the second half of our 12 Questions interview:

12 Questions with Grant Hardy – part I

by James Olsen • September 7, 2011 • 30 Comments

To cap off our roundtable review of Grant Hardy’s new book Understanding the Book of Mormon we’re fortunate to feature an interview with the book’s author. The interview will be posted in two parts. Our thanks to all who have participated, and especially Bro. Hardy.

YSA and the Bible: Observations from a KJV Conference

by Ben S. • August 26, 2011 • 51 Comments

On Saturday June 11, nearly 200 YSA gathered at the Lincoln Center chapel, the same as houses the Manhattan Temple, for a YSA conference that centered on the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. Saturday from 1-4, three one-hour workshops were held on the Bible. Three Bible Nerds were on hand to teach: Jon H (MA, Biblical Studies, Yale) covered the writing and transmission of the books of the Bible; Jon R (MA, New Testament, Duke) spoke on using modern translations and other study aids, with extensive slides and books on display. We each submitted a brief teaser description. Mine read, How to Read the Bible and Love It– Many LDS are less familiar with the Bible than our other scriptures, and feel more uncomfortable with it when they do read it; the Bible is “weird,” and Bible-reading can seem like a more Protestant kind of thing. However, the Old and New Testaments were central for Joseph Smith and the Restoration and may be even more important to us today. I’ll be talking about becoming a “competent reader” and coming to own and love the Bible in the process. Students rotated through all three workshops, which were, from all accounts, well received. I received an email from one attendee who declared it (with apparently no Simpsons reference intended) “the best YSA conference ever!!” I didn’t hear any negative or less-enthusiastic feedback from anyone, and several people emailed to ask…

Grant Hardy and Personal Scripture Study

by Sam Brunson • August 19, 2011 • 11 Comments

Every semester, one of my principal goals in my tax classes is to get my students to engage with the Internal Revenue Code. And it’s harder than you might think: often they don’t read the Code itself, focusing instead on the explanations in their casebook.[fn1] And their aversion to reading the Code is completely understandable: unlike court decisions, the mainstay of law school, there is no narrative flow, no character, no imagery, nothing that we traditionally latch onto in order to immerse ourselves in a text. And frankly, using the casebook isn’t a bad short-term decision. The casebook explains what the Code provisions mean and how they’re applied, at least in simple situations.But in the longer term, relying on the casebook’s explanation does my students a disservice. While it helps them be able to answer my questions in class, and while it likely helps them do decently on my exams, if they rely on the casebook at the expense of reading through and struggling with the Code, they don’t develop their skills in reading and understanding the Internal Revenue Code. Ultimately, while their casebook helps them understand the tax law on a surface level (and, for that matter, provides a necessary starting point), if they’ve read the casebook at the expense of reading the Code, they’re going to be in trouble when my final asks them to read and apply a Code section that we never read in class.[fn2] In…

Grant Hardy’s Subject Problem

by Rosalynde Welch • August 16, 2011 • 27 Comments

Criticisms of the Book of Mormon generally fall into one of two categories: objections to its historical claims on the one hand, and on the other critiques of its literary style. The two prongs are often combined in a single attack, for instance in the suggestion that the awkward style of the book reflects the naïve voice of an unlettered youngster. For their part, the book’s defenders also tend to elide the two categories, arguing that passages of inelegant prose are better understood as latent Hebraisms laboring under English syntax. Most of the time, of course, devout readers of the Book of Mormon simply ignore the book’s style altogether. Grant Hardy, in his new book Understanding the Book of Mormon, wants to uncouple the problems of historicity and literary merit. He brackets the first, setting aside the apologetic debates that have dominated Book of Mormon studies over the past four decades. Instead, he turns his attention to the content of the book, and in particular to its peculiar stylistic qualities—and on this matter if he is no apologist he is nevertheless a bit apologetic, conceding the book’s literary deficiencies but pleading on its behalf that, to borrow a Twainism, the Book of Mormon is “better than it sounds” (273). Hardy seeks to rehabilitate the literary reputation of the Book of Mormon by drawing attention to what he calls its “organizing principle”: “the fact that it presents itself as the work…

Who Wrote the Gospels?

by Dave Banack • August 5, 2011 • 41 Comments

It always helps to know who wrote what you are reading, and Bible books are no exception. The four gospels, in particular, present interesting questions of how the narratives were composed and who did the composing.

Reading Scripture in the 21st Century

by Dave Banack • April 16, 2011 • 18 Comments

I recently read Thinking Through Our Faith: Theology for Twenty-first-Century Christians (Abingdon Press, 1998) by C. David Grant, a professor of religion at TCU. The book might be described as a short prologue to a 21st-century approach to theology, one that takes full account of science, historical criticism, and pluralism — in short, the sort of book you probably would not encounter in a BYU undergraduate religion class.

Peace

by Kent Larsen • February 20, 2011 • 20 Comments

Sometimes unintentional mistakes lead to interesting lines of thought. A few weeks ago I misheard a speaker in an LDS meeting. The speaker was quoting John 14:27, and either because of the speaker’s mispronunciation or my imperfect hearing, I heard the word “live” instead of the word “leave.” This lead me to think about what it means to live in peace.

Notable Race-Related Changes to Footnotes and Chapter Headings in the Standard Works

by Marc Bohn • February 2, 2011 • 145 Comments

Marvin Perkins is a Latter-day Saint music producer who is currently the Public Affairs Co-chair for the Genesis Group and who has worked to nurture understanding between African Americans and Latter-day Saints and attack misconceptions (see our 12 Questions series with Brother Perkins from 2009). This morning, Brother Perkins circulated the following email to his “Blacks in the Scriptures” listserve (which is re-posted here with his permission): ______________________________ Friends, Many of you have recognized the new LDS.org website. Some of you have recognized that with the new site also came changes to chapter headings and footnotes in the scriptures. Not nearly as significant in number as the changes that were made in the 1981 edition of the LDS scriptures, but equally confirming on the messages being conveyed. Here are a list of the changes that I’m aware of, along with some thoughts and two very compelling short videos below. I’d love to hear your thoughts as you prayerfully review the changes asking “what would the Lord have me understand about these recent changes?” 1. 1 Nephi 12:23– The footnotes for “dark” have been removed (Jacob 3:3 and Alma 3:7 (6-19)) and replaced with 2 Nephi 26:33 2. 2 Nephi 5– the words in the chapter heading “the Lamanites are cursed, receive a skin of blackness” were changed to “the Lamanites are cut off from the presence of the Lord, are cursed…” 3. 2 Nephi 5:21– The footnotes for “curse” (2…

What we talk about when we talk about God

by Rosalynde Welch • October 25, 2010 • 25 Comments

Bruce Feiler’s daughter was just five when she pitched him a question right to the gut of religious experience: “Daddy, if I speak to God, will he listen?” Feiler writes books on the Bible and God for a living, so he’d presumably given the question some thought. Nevertheless he had no good answer ready for his daughter. So he did what any loving parent would do: answered the question with an inartful dodge, and then wrote about it in the New York Times style section. How do we answer our children’s questions about God, he asked, when we are ourselves doubtful, confused, or otherwise conflicted? Feiler solicited comments on the matter from a formerly-Catholic agnostic playwright, a formerly-Episcopalian agnostic New Testament scholar, and a popular Conservative rabbi in Los Angeles. It’s not hard to guess the direction their responses took. Among the educated elite readership of the NYT, a kind of ritualistic doubt partners with a set of tolerant gestures as the yin and yang of the new virtue, and self-disclosure at all times and in all things and in all places is the great personal imperative. No surprise, then, that Feiler’s panel urged conflicted parents to share their uncertainty with their children, even to validate their children’s own budding doubt. To project an air of certainty when one harbors internal ambiguity is hypocritical, dishonest, and worst of all inauthentic. “I believe deeply in the power of paradox and contradiction,”…

Correlation is Killing Sunday School

by Dave Banack • September 13, 2010 • 147 Comments

Once upon a time, there was Sunday School, an independent auxiliary whose officers were appointed by senior LDS leaders and whose primary task was to develop a Sunday School curriculum, and commission and supervise the writing of lesson manuals. They did a nice job. Then came Correlation.

Myth and Ritual

by Dave Banack • August 16, 2010 • 2 Comments

Like some of you, I’ve been reading a book or two on the Old Testament, this year’s Sunday School course of study. Most recently I read Susan Niditch’s Ancient Israelite Religion (OUP, 1997), described in the jacket blurb as “a perceptive, accessible account of the religious beliefs and practices of the ancient Israelites.” Too often our approach to the Old Testament is essentially cherrypicking — highlighting passages that affirm our own beliefs and understanding while skimming over or simply ignoring everything else. We can do better. Niditch takes a worldview approach, suggesting we ought to strive to see how the Israelites saw the world as a way to understand Israelite religion. Myth and ritual are two aspects of this “worldview analysis,” which, along with experience and ethics, form the template Niditch uses to examine the Israelite worldview revealed by the texts of the Hebrew Bible and by surviving archeological artifacts. I’ll touch on a few of the points Niditch makes under each category, then do a quick comparison with LDS religion. The Experiential. “The experiential dimension has to do with direct experiences of the numinous — visions, trances, messages from God, and more subtle indications of a divine presence” (p. 5). Examples are many and varied, such as Abraham’s vision in Genesis 15: As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. … When the sun had set and…

How to write a revelation

by Nate Oman • July 1, 2010 • 31 Comments

I have been working on a paper looking at the Doctrine and Covenants, and my research has me thinking about how the texts of modern revelation were produced. I think that there are a lot of Mormons who assume that the words of the revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants were dictated word for word to Joseph. On this model, the Doctrine and Covenants is rather like the Qua’ran, which also consists of a series of revelations given to a prophet over a period of years in response to concrete historial circumstances. Pious Muslims affirm that the Qua’ran was dictated word for word in classical Arabic to the Prophet Muhammed and transmitted without error to the present. Some Islamic theologians have gone farther, declaring that the Qua’ran is uncreated in time. Rather, it is an eternal emanation of the Divine mind, the Word that was in the beginning with God incarnate in the world. (There are problems with this story of the Qua’ran’s text of course. The verses inscribed in the Dome of the Rock, for example, which represent one of the earliest extant Islamic texts vary slightly from the current version of the Qua’ran.) Despite flirting with it in a couple of places in our scriptures, Mormon metaphysics isn’t especially congenial to such a super-charged version of textual inerrancy, but I don’t think that it is a stretch for many Mormons to see the texts of the Doctrine and Covenants as…

An Unexpected Gift

by Marc Bohn • June 17, 2010 • 10 Comments

At 3:28 this morning we welcomed a new son into the world. As one would expect, congratulations and well-wishes have come flooding in from friends and family all day. And for all of these we have been moved and grateful. First thing this morning, however, we received a congratulatory gift we hadn’t anticipated. Women housed in the Alexandria Detention Center had sent us a hand-crocheted blanket, cap and set of booties. (In Packer yellow-and-green for my Cheese-head wife no less). Both modern and ancient scripture admonish us to serve the “least” of those among us, noting that doing so is akin to serving Christ himself. My wife and I found ourselves touched that, at such a sacred and spiritual time for our family as the birth of our new son, we had been remembered by some gracious women who, by some standard, might consider to be the “least” of those in our society today. Humbled by the act, we resolved to reach back out in some way to those women at the Alexandria Detention Center. Small acts of love are truly contagious.

Genesis and Genre

by Dave Banack • February 25, 2010 • 49 Comments

When we read Genesis, what exactly are we reading? The distinctions and categories we modern readers bring to books and narratives (fiction or nonfiction; science or folk tale; history or literature; poetry or prose; author’s original text or quoted source) may not serve us well when we read the Old Testament, a collection of ancient literature. Its writers used different conventions. What were they? What exactly are we reading when we read Genesis?

Reviving the Hebraic

by James Olsen • January 25, 2010 • 15 Comments

Every four years we have a celebrated ritual during the second hour of church: it is the discussion by all members present on the topic of being uncomfortable studying the Old Testament.

Lucan Infancy Narrative

by Eric Huntsman • December 24, 2009 • 4 Comments

[Once again, these are just notes, and they do not even begin to do the subject justice, but yesterday’s Matthew notes were able to spark some good discussion. I will response and comment as I can today, but, hey, it is Christmas Eve Day!] While Matthew’s is largely from Joseph’s perspective, Luke’s from Mary’s This does not mean, however, that Joseph and Mary were necessarily the sources—rather that the evangelists focused on them and what they represented Luke included poetic passages or songs to personalize the characters of his infancy narrative (canticles, more below) Luke adds the stories about John the Baptist as literary foils to compare and contrast with the story of Jesus While Matthew and Luke differ, and even conflict, on some details, the important facts are all confirmed by the Book of Mormon Mary was a virgin from Nazareth, where she divinely conceived Jesus (1 Nephi 11:13–20) Jesus was the son of God and his mother was named “Mary” (Mosiah 3:8) Jesus was born near Jerusalem (Alma 7:10; Bethlehem is 9 km south of Jerusalem, hence “at,” or in the region, of Jerusalem) Mary was a precious and chosen vessel, who conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost (Alma 7:10; not of the Holy Ghost as in Matt 1:18, 21) Luke’s Infancy Narrative. Doublets: John the Baptist and Jesus [Luke’s prologue to his gospel (1:1–4)] Birth of John the Baptist Foretold (1:5–25) Birth of Jesus Foretold…

The Matthean Infancy Narrative

by Eric Huntsman • December 23, 2009 • 8 Comments

[Christmas realities have hit, making me admit that full length blogs the last two days of Christmas week are just not feasible! So forgive me as I just post here some “notes” on Matt and later Luke, consisting of largely recycled material from my class lectures!] Matthew’s is largely from Joseph’s perspective, Luke’s from Mary’s This does not mean, however, that Joseph and Mary were necessarily the sources—rather that the evangelists focused on them and what they represented For Matt, Joseph’s proposed status as a Davidid makes Jesus David’s true heir, although admittedly through “adoption” or legal recognition by Joseph, not literal descent Matthew does not mention Nazareth until the end of his account, presenting the possibility that Joseph was from Bethlehem and Mary was from Nazareth Was it an arranged marriage and Joseph went to Nazareth to retrieve his new bride? The problem of the “census” is will be treated in the next blog on the Lucan infancy narrative Joseph and Mary had a “house” in Bethlehem and intended to return to there from Egypt (Matt 2:11, 22) Structure of Matthew’s Infancy Narrative Formula quotations cite Jewish scriptures (usually from the LXX or Greek translation); they give authority to Matthew’s account and demonstrate that Jesus is fulfilling prophecy Genealogy (1:1–17) Conception and birth (1:18–25) first formula quotation, 1:23 = Isaiah 7:14 LXX Visit of the Wise Men (Epiphany; 2:1–12) second formula quotation, 2:6 = Micah 5:2, 2 Samuel 5:2…

Studying the Infancy Narratives

by Eric Huntsman • December 21, 2009 • 20 Comments

This Christmas Eve, most of us will at least read the “Christmas Story,” as found in Luke 2:1-20. As we approach the holiday, a few more diligent souls will read all of the Infancy Narratives, as found in Matt 1-2 AND Luke 1-2. Yet even when reading (as opposed to just remembering or “thinking” about) these familiar texts, the tendency will be to harmonize the two accounts, resulting in a hybrid vision of the birth of Jesus that accords nicely with the Christmas pageants that we will watch and the Nativity scenes that we have set up. But our Christmas creches—which confidently put three kings (as opposed to two or more magi or wise men) at the stable (not mentioned in Luke, although he does record a manger) along with shepherds and various animals under a star—are the result not only of jarring harmonization, but even some creative fabrication. This harmonizing tendency is alive and well in the LDS community, perhaps as a result of Elder Talmages well-known and familiar Jesus the Christ, Elder McConkie’s The Mortal Messiah, and our Gospel Doctrine’s curriculum, each of which draws from all four gospels to produce and fill in a rough chronological account of our Lord’s mortal life and final salvific acts. This impulse is natural enough: after all Jesus’ ministry, death, and resurrection were historical events, so the four surviving, canonical accounts should represent those events accurately. Yet the four gospels were…

Priesthood Session in a Nutshell

by Marc Bohn • October 4, 2009 • 13 Comments

President Uchtdorf conducted the Priesthood session, featuring talks by Elder Ballard, Elder Gonzalez, Elder Choi, Elder Uchtdorf, Elder Eyring and President Monson. Direct quotations (based on my notes) are given in quotes; phrases without quotes are my summary of the remarks given.

Royal Skousen’s 12 questions — The Critical Text Version

by Frank McIntyre • October 3, 2009 • 1 Comment

Last month we posted Royal Skousen’s discussion of his work on recovering the earliest version of the Book of Mormon, along with some updates. Unfortunately, that post garnered some annoying formatting problems — mostly due to the new format T&S adopted this year. We’re happy to now present to you mark III of Royal Skousen’s 12 questions interview. Royal Skousen’s book, The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, was published last month by Yale University Press and yes, you can order it at Amazon.

Divine Comedy, Divine Tragedy

by Ben Huff • September 24, 2009 • 12 Comments

The Bible, as we have received it, sets out the drama of salvation with its wrenching fall and crucifixion, but joyous resurrection and exaltation. Though its compilation is in many ways ad hoc, there is a satisfyingly comedic structure to the whole. As Terryl Givens puts it in his The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction, just out from Oxford University Press, “There is a neat symmetry . . . Primordial creation is balanced by apocalypse and heavenly postscript . . . All tears are wiped away, and the primal fall and alienation are remedied by reunion under the beneficent reign of God the Father” (p61). The Book of Mormon is very different.

Some Notes on the New Spanish LDS Bible

by Kent Larsen • September 18, 2009 • 24 Comments

My copy of the new LDS edition of the Bible in Spanish arrived yesterday, one of the 750,000 copies printed recently (according to a contact I have in the Church department that prints these materials). So I thought I would pass on my impressions.

12 Questions and a Book by Royal Skousen

by Frank McIntyre • September 6, 2009 • 68 Comments

5 years ago we published one of my favorite “12 Questions” posts, in which Royal Skousen discussed in some depth what he has learned from his extensive work on the earliest editions of the Book of Mormon. His book, The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, is being published in September by Yale University Press (and yes, you can order it at Amazon right now). To mark this milestone, Royal was kind enough to update his “12 questions” discussion, which we have posted below, for the benefit of those who did not catch it the first time. Enjoy!

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