Jeff Roundy, Author at Latter-day Saints Q & A

January 21, 2020 By Jeff Roundy Leave a Comment

Blood Atonement?? Modern Day Ruckus

So called ‘blood atonement’ was a theoretical principle never given to the Church as a practice in this dispensation. This video discusses the concept, why it was used in early church rhetoric at times, and why critics are misguided in their attacks on this topic.

Okay. So in this video I want to talk about blood atonement, and what that means in Church history. I wanted to start actually with a Church statement that was issued in 2010, June 16th of 2010. “In the mid-19th century when rhetorical, emotional oratory was common, some Church members and leaders used strong language that included notions of people making restitution for their sins by giving up their own lives. However, so-called “blood atonement” by which individuals would be required to shed their own blood to pay for their sins, is not a doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We believe in and teach the infinite and all encompassing atonement of Jesus Christ, which makes forgiveness of sin and salvation possible for all people.” Now, blood atonement was a theoretical principle. It was never given by the Lord to the Church in this dispensation, and in fact, I’ll elaborate on this towards the end of the video.

It is a theoretical principle that it could only be applied during a period of theocracy where the Church and state were combined like in the day of Moses. So I’ll talk about that very particularly at the end of the video. So why were the leaders, especially Brigham Young, talking like this? Let’s look at this from the Gospel Topics Essay, Peace and Violence Among the 19th Century Latter-day Saints. “In the mid 1850s, a reformation within the Church and tensions between the Latter-day Saints in Utah and the U.S. federal government contributed to a siege mentality and a renewed sense of persecution that led to several episodes of violence committed by Church members. Concerned about spiritual complacency, Brigham Young and other Church leaders delivered a series of sermons in which they called the Saints to repent and renew their spiritual commitments. Many testified that they became better people because of this reformation.”

Now, this is key. “Nineteenth-century Americans were accustomed to violent language, both religious and otherwise. Throughout the century, revivalists had used violent imagery to encourage the unconverted to repent and to urge backsliders to reform. At times during the reformation, President Young, his counselor Jedediah M. Grant, and other leaders preached with fiery rhetoric, warning against the evils of those who dissented from or opposed the Church. Drawing on biblical passages, particularly from the Old Testament, leaders taught some sins were so serious that the perpetrator’s blood would have to be shed in order to receive forgiveness. Such preaching led to increased strain between the Latter-day saints and the relatively few non-Mormons in Utah, including federally appointed officials.” They talked often about the Old Testament, but there’s even this passage from the New Testament. If you look here in 1 John 5, there’s evidence that some crimes were considered worthy of death even in the apostolic age among Christians.

This is the verse. “If any man see his brother sin a sin which is not unto death, he shall ask and he shall give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: I do not say that he shall pray for it. All unrighteousness is sin, and there is a sin not unto death.” So basically in that scripture it says that there is a sin unto death. So they viewed that there were some sins that possibly have some affiliation like in the Law of Moses of death. Okay. Now from the Encyclopedia of Mormonism under “blood atonement”, we read this: “Several early Church leaders, most notably Brigham Young, taught that in a complete theocracy, the Lord could require the voluntary shedding of a murderer’s blood as part of the process of atonement for such grievous sin.”

“This was referred to as ‘blood atonement’. Since such a theocracy has not been operative in modern times, the practical effect of the idea was it’s use as a rhetorical device to heighten the awareness of Latter-day Saints of a seriousness of murder and other major sins. This view is not a doctrine of the Church and has never been practiced by the Church at any time.” Now, let’s look at Brigham Young’s preaching style in particular, especially during this period, a reformation where there was a lot of people that were getting casual in their commitments to the gospel. And so there was this extra focus on trying to bring them back into compliance with their covenants. He said, “I will tell you what the people need with regard to preaching. You need figuratively to have it rain pitchforks, tines downward … instead of the smooth, beautiful, sweet, still, silk velvet lipped preaching. You should have sermons like peals of thunder.”

He goes, “When you wish the people to feel what you say, you have got to use language that they will remember or else the ideas are lost to them. Consequently, in many instances we use language that we would rather not use. When you have the chastening rod in your hands, ask God to give you wisdom to use it, that you may not use it to the destruction of any individual but to his salvation.” And I love what he said here about how the Saints loved him regardless of this. And it was because of the love he had, and they viewed his preaching very differently than we do today. Look at these two quotes. “My heart yearns over the Saints with all the emotions of tenderness so that I can weep like a child, but I am careful to keep my tears to myself. “

“There is not a soul I chasten, but what I feel as though I could take them and put them in my bosom and carry them with me day by day.” And then he said, “Although I may get up here and cuff the people about, chastising them for their forgetfulness, their weakness and follies, yet I have not seen a moment when they did not love me. The reason is because I love them so well.” I love that. Now this was also a crazy period. If you recall, President Buchanan had received reports that there was a rebellion in Utah against the federal government. So he decided to replace Brigham Young as the territorial governor, and he sent Johnson’s army, the one who ended up coming out, the 1500 troops. And this was the Utah War period. At the same time, Parley P. Pratt had been murdered in Arkansas.

And the Saints had even received reports from eastern newspapers celebrating this murder of Parley P. Pratt, one of the 12 apostles. So Brigham declared at this moment in time that you could have martial law on the territory. And brought in all the missionaries and the outlying areas in, and the settlers back and guided preparations to resist the army. There were a lot of defiant sermons with the pending army coming in, had to create an environment of fear and suspicion in Utah during this period. Okay. Another quote from the Encyclopedia of Mormonism under “blood atonement” said, “Early anti-Mormon writers charged that under Brigham Young, the Church practiced ‘blood atonement’, by which they meant Church-instigated violence directed at dissenters, enemies and strangers. This claim distorted the whole idea of blood atonement, which was based on voluntary submission by an offender into a supposed justification of an involuntary punishment. Occasional isolated acts of violence that occurred in areas where Latter-day Saints lived were typical of that period in the history of the American West, but they were not instances of Church-sanctioned blood atonement.”

I will say there was one exception to a … There was a very horrific experience. The Mountain Meadows Massacre. Now this was not related to blood atonement. I did an entire video on that. I would suggest it would be a great one to watch and a critical component of that was the Church did not request this to happen. In fact, Brigham Young, specifically just the opposite. He asked them to let them pass through. So it’d be a great video just to watch on this, but it had nothing to do with blood atonement. Now to combat the anti that was going on at that time, it became so bad that by 1889 the First Presidency actually issued this statement. It says, “Notwithstanding all the stories told about the killing of apostates, no case of this kind has ever occurred and of course has never been established against the Church we represent.”

“Hundreds of seceders from the Church have continuously resided and now live in this territory, many of whom have amassed considerable wealth, though bitterly opposed to the Mormon faith and people. Even those who made it their business to fabricate the vilest falsehoods have remained, until the present day, without receiving the slightest personal injury. We denounce as entirely untrue the allegations which had been made that our Church favors or believes in the killing of persons who leave the Church or apostatize from its doctrines. We would view a punishment of this character for such an act with the utmost horror. It is abhorrent to us and is in direct opposition to our fundamental principles.” And then one more. This is from FairMormon.org. I thought this was very helpful on even looking at broader crimes critics use in their blood atonement claims.

It says here, “Critics have created a long list of crimes for which they claim the 19th-century Church required death through blood atonement. The critics conflate blood atonement with capital punishment in order to promote the idea that the 19th-century Church was willing to kill anyone who disobeyed the law. There is no doubt that Brigham Young had strong words for those who committed crimes. One should note, however, that although Brigham had very distinct and rather harsh opinions on what should be done, he always deferred to God’s opinion. The historical record shows that in reality, people were not being killed for committing the crimes listed by the critics. Critics wish to conflate the concept of blood atonement with a variety of comments mined from various sources in order to portray the 19th-century Church as a blood-thirsty, violent organization.” Now, there’s no doubt people are able to dig up examples of blood being shed by those of the Latter-day Saint faith, but accusations are unsupported, which seek to establish that these activities were promoted or condoned or even concealed by the Church or by the leaders generally.

And in fact, here’s a summary of a research article that was published in Utah Historical Quarterly by the historian Gustave Larson. And here’s the three summary points of the article. He says, “Denials of murder charges, which rode in on the backwash of the reformation gradually resolved into defensible positions that number one, some known killings of the reform period resulted from motives not related to blood atonement. Two, that in spite of extreme statements by some of its leaders, the Church did not officially condone taking life other than through legal processes. And three, responsibility for any reversions to primitive practices of blood shedding must rest upon fanatical individuals. The whole experience continued in memory as a reminder of ill effects growing out of good causes carried to extremes.” Now lastly, I saved the best for last, in my opinion.

This was a phenomenal letter that Bruce R. McConkie wrote. The First Presidency asked him to write to give some detail to blood atonement. This was a request that had come from Thomas McAffee at the Utah Law Review, College of Law at University of Utah, and this is … I pulled together the critical parts from his letter. It says, “Dear Mr. McAffee, this is in reply to your letter of September 20th, 1978, to President Spencer W. Kimball of the Church, which you asked some questions about the so called doctrine of blood atonement. I had been asked by President Kimball and by the First Presidency to respond to your inquiries. You note that I and President Joseph Fielding Smith and some of our early Church leaders have said and written about this doctrine, and you asked if the doctrine of blood atonement is an official doctrine of the Church today. If by blood atonement is meant the atoning sacrifice of Christ, the answer is yes.”

“If by blood atonement is meant the shedding of the blood of men to atone in some way for their own sins, the answer is no. We believe that the blood of Christ, shed in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross of Calvary, cleanses all men from sin on condition of repentance. As expressed by a Book of Mormon scripture: ‘Salvation was, and is, and is to come, in and through the atoning blood of Christ, the Lord Omnipotent’. We do not believe that it is necessary for men in this state to shed their own blood to receive remission of sins. This is said with a full awareness of what I know that’s been written and said on the subject in times past. In order to understand what Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, Charles Penrose and others have said, we must mention that there are some sins for which the blood of Christ alone does not cleanse a person.”

“These include blasphemy against the Holy Ghost as defined by the Church, and that murder, which is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice.” Now this is key. Listen, “However, and this cannot be stressed too strongly, this law has not been given to the Church at any time in this dispensation. It has no application whatever to anyone now living, whether he is a member or a non-member of the Church.” And he goes on to say, “There simply is no such thing among us as a doctrine of blood atonement that grants a remission of sins or confers any other benefit upon a person because his own blood is shed for sins. Let me say categorically and unequivocally that this doctrine can only operate in a day when there is no separation of Church and State and when the power to take life is vested in the ruling theocracy, as was as the case in the day of Moses.”

“From the day of Joseph Smith to the present, there has been no single instance of so-called blood atonement under any pretext. Anything I have written or anything said by anyone else must be understood in the light of the foregoing limitation. Brigham Young and the others were speaking of a theoretical principle that operated in ages past and not in either their or our day. As I recall, Brigham Young’s illustrations were taken from the day of Moses and the history of ancient Israel and could not be applied today. There is no such doctrine as blood atonement in the Church today, nor has there been at any time. Any statements to the contrary are either idle speculation or pure fantasy. It is certainly not the current teaching of the Church, and I have never in over 60 years of regular Church attendance heard a single sermon on the subject or even a discussion in any church class.”

“You asked that the statements of our leaders of the past, including those found in the Journal of Discourses represent the official stand of the Church. The answer, as indicated by the comments above set forth, is that they do not. The statements pertain to a theoretical principle that has been neither revealed to nor practiced by us. If by blood atonement is meant capital punishment, then any proper analysis of the subject would call the matter by the name capital punishment and not by the name blood atonement. To use this latter term is holy misleading and stirs up the idea that we believe in that which we most emphatically do not believe.”.

That was a long letter, but you can see why I thought it was so critical. I thought to share really the bulk of it. And lastly, I’ll just share this quick official Church statement actually on capital punishment today is, “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints regards the question of whether and in what circumstances the state should impose capital punishment as a matter to be decided solely by the prescribed process of civil law. We neither promote nor oppose capital punishment.” Hope you found the video helpful. Subscribe for more. Thanks.

Resources:

Letter:

McConkie letter used in the video: https://www.shields-research.org/Gene…

Articles:

Encyclopedia of Mormonism – Blood Atonement: https://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Blood_A…

Fairmormon coverage of Blood Atonement: https://www.fairmormon.org/answers/Mo…

Church Statements:

2010 Official Church Statement on Blood Atonement: https://www.deseretnews.com/article/7…

Church Gospel Topics Essay – Peace and Violence Among 19th Century Latter-day Saints: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/s…

Latter-day Saints’ Q&A is a video series not produced by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but by me, an ordinary member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, an independent voice, with a passion for studying Church history and defending the faith. In this series, I provide evidences for the restoration, and address tough questions posed by critics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, offering faithful answers based on accurate research and historical references which will be posted at the end of each video.

January 21, 2020 By Jeff Roundy Leave a Comment

Pt 2 : ORIGINAL Christianity Restored – Evidences

This video is part 2 showing how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was a restoration of original Christianity

Okay, so on this video, it’s part two in the Evidences of Restoring Original Christianity. So I would highly suggest please watch part one. It’ll make more sense for this video as well, but I would like to start actually with a quote from Bishop Caussé at the April, 2018 General Conference. I’m going to play it at 1.25X speed. Just a little over two minutes. Here you go.

Bishop Caussé:
While preparing for the construction of the magnificent Paris, France temple, I had an experience I will never forget. In 2010, when property for the temple was found, the city mayor asked to meet with us to know more about our church. This meeting was a critical step in obtaining a building permit. We meticulously prepared the presentation that included several impressive pictures of Latter-day Saint temples. My most fervent hope was that their architectural beauty would persuade the mayor to support our project. To my surprise, the mayor indicated that rather than reviewing our presentation, he and his team preferred to conduct their own investigation to find out what kind of church we were.

Bishop Caussé:
The following months, we were invited back to hear a report given by a city counselor, who also happened to be a professor of religious history. She said, “Above all else, we wanted to understand who the members of your church are. First, we attended one of your sacrament meetings. We sat at the back of the chapel and carefully observed the people in the congregation and what they were doing. Then we met with your neighbors, those who live around your stake center, and we asked them what kind of people you Mormons are.”

Bishop Caussé:
“So, what are your conclusions?” I ask, feeling a little bit of anxiety. She replied, “We discovered that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the closest to Jesus Christ’s original church than any other church we know of.” I almost objected by saying, “That’s not completely accurate. It’s not the church that is closest. It is the Church of Jesus Christ, the same church, the true church,” but I restrained myself and instead offered a silent prayer of gratitude.

Bishop Caussé:
The mayor then advised us that based on their findings, he and his team had no objections to the construction of the temple in their community. Today when I think about that miraculous experience, I feel grateful for the mayor’s wisdom and spirit of discernment. He knew that the key to understanding the church is not to see it through the outward appearance of its buildings or even as a well-organized institution, but through its millions of faithful members who strive each day to follow the example of Jesus Christ.

So “by their fruits, you shall know them,” right? And I love how he talked about the people, and I mentioned this in the last video, but I’ve done some great videos on the people. I’d love to suggest the welfare program, the one on a missionary program, tithing observance, religious health of the people, and then the very recent one on volunteerism that we did. The Saints volunteer nine times the number of hours, if you will, in their service versus the average active volunteer in the United States.

So, again, talking about doctrine, I recommend part one of this video, but also I did one on the preexistence, pre-mortal life teachings, also on baptism for the dead, how that solves the Christian dilemma, who can be saved, and then also on becoming like God. These would really fit in restoring original Christianity as well. I have a couple of others, maybe even some others I haven’t thought of yet, but a heavenly mother, I’m going to do a video on that and then also on the temple and some of the ancient temple parallels as well, that, again, could all fit into this general category.

But let’s get started here. I thought, actually, I decided to add something just from teaching this thing with my gospel doctrine class here on the blood that was shed by Christ in Gethsemane, and if you actually look here, I thought this was a good tie-in to this topic. In Luke 22:43 and 44. This is The New Testament: A Translation for Latter-day Saints, Thomas Wayment. I highly recommend this as a study guide. I love it for his notes, and I want to share the note he has for these two verses in Gethsemane. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought like I have, the Latter-day Saints view Gethsemane in a very different way than a lot of Christians do.

I think part of it is because we’ve been told that Christ did bleed from every pore, Mosiah 3:8, King Benjamin did. The Lord Himself, in first person, in D&C 19 says that He did bleed from every pore, but in the New Testament, we only have one verse that talks about this. Three of the gospels don’t. Luke does, but it also talks about it in a way that it’s very confusing. It says, “And there appeared an angel from heaven strengthening Him, and He was in agony, and He prayed more intently, and His sweat became as if it were large drops of blood falling to the ground.” So almost like maybe it’s not clear if it even was blood. Now, I will say, there was a great piece that Book of Mormon Central just put out on this. It talked about this a condition. It is a rare medical condition, but it is possible to bleed from your pores. It’s called hematohidrosis, and it causes an individual to sweat blood. It’s caused by, among other things, extreme levels of stress and excessive exertion.

Now what does this have to do with restoring ancient Christianity? Well, in the note here, going back to the actual manuscripts, it says here these two verses, so the verse about the angel strengthening Christ and then also about him bleeding as sweat, as though possible blood, “These two verses are greatly disputed, and a number of important ancient manuscripts omit them. Other early important manuscripts include these versus. Given the current evidence, it is unlikely that the question of their omission or inclusion can be resolved. However, the evidence is strong enough to suggest that they may be original to Luke’s gospel but were perhaps omitted over doctrinal concerns.”

Doctoral concerns, what would those be? So, a couple of quick snippets here. The professor down at BYU, Kent Brown, the religious professor, talked about he believed that these doctrinal concerns are why they are not in the other gospels here, and they barely survived in Luke. In fact, scholars suggest it began to be a omitted halfway through the second century, and that’s where we see that this was completely removed, but the earliest ones we do see it there in other translations. In fact, it really would suggest that this may have been the literal blood bleeding from every pore.

So another professor down at BYU in ancient scripture, Lincoln Blummell, he actually has this quote. He says, arguing why early Christians may have removed this, and it goes back to Greek philosophy, which we talked a lot about in the first part, part one, he says, “They seemingly depicted Jesus in a rather feeble light and were the target of a growing anti-Christian polemic. Consequently, some Christians felt it was easier to simply excise this problematic material.”

Here’s a non-Latter-day scholar, A. von Harnack, who argued that, “The texts were removed because it seemed weak for Jesus having to be comforted by an angel.” Remember the Greek gods were powerful, right? They wouldn’t bleed. They wouldn’t need to be strengthened by an angel. They were void of weakness. In fact, the Quran, actually, kind of makes fun of, criticizes Christianity in a sense with this verse in the Quran, 17:11, “Praise to Allah, who has not taken a son and has no partner in his dominion and has no need of a protector out of weakness, and glorify him with great glorification.” That’s quite interesting. I thought this would be a great thing just to share a tidbit there related to that. So now let’s go into creation.

So if you look, creation, there are two ways that creation are looked at. Creation out of preexisting matter, called creatio ex materia, and that’s what the Latter-day Saints believe. We’re taught that from from modern-day scripture, creation of preexisting matter. Mainstream Christianity believes today and creatio ex nihilo. Creation out of nothing.

There are some critical reasons as to why they believe that, but let’s first look at Joseph Smith’s teaching here. He says, “You ask the learned doctors of theology why they say the world was made out of nothing, and they will answer, ‘Doesn’t the Bible say God created the world?’, and they infer from the word ‘create’ that it must have been made out of nothing. Now the word ‘create’ came from the Hebrew word ‘baurau’, which does not mean to create out of nothing; it means to organize; the same as a man would organize materials and build a ship. Hence we infer that God had materials to organize the world out of chaos, chaotic matter, which is element.

Okay? Now let’s look at a couple of quotes here from biblical scholars, Peter Hayman. He said, “Nearly all recent studies on the origin of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo have come to the conclusion that this doctrine is not native to Judaism, is nowhere attested in the Hebrew Bible, and probably arose in Christianity in the second century of the Common Era, in the course of its fierce battle with Gnosticism.” Remember the Gnostics believe that all matter was evil there, so in that battle there.

Now Jonathan Goldstein in his piece, “The Origins of the Doctrine of Creation Ex Nihilo”, he wrote, “We have to wait until the second half of the second century A.D. to find unambiguous Christian statements of creation ex nihilo.” Now, it wasn’t just a battle against the Gnostics, it was also Greek philosophy that came into play. Theophilus of Antioch, he was eager to show that the Christian God was even more superior than the Greek gods because he created everything out of nothing.

But also, a key philosophical concept that came into play in the second and third century with Christian theology is if God created everything out of nothing, then Jesus Christ couldn’t have been a created God and would have had to have always existed with the Father. This helped to lead really into the doctrine of the trinity as well. We talked about it in part one video.

Okay, now let’s look at Joseph’s teachings on this subject. They’re supported by the scriptures, by Jewish documents, and by early Christian texts. So if you look at Colossians 1:16, “By Jesus Christ were all things created that are in heaven and that are in the earth, visible and invisible, all things were created by Him.” The Greek word behind created here is ‘ktizo’, and it means “to fabricate”.

Now look at this here. This Jewish apocryphal document, Wisdom of Solomon, still considered scripture today by the Catholics, says “Your all-powerful hand … created the world out of a formless matter.” Now two early Christian Fathers, Justin Martyr. He said that was the Christian doctrine of his day, that “in the beginning God created all things out of unformed matter.” Then Clement of Alexandria taught, “The universe was created out of a shapeless mass of matter and the ordered sphere of the earth was formed from a confused heap.”

Now let’s talk about grace versus works and I love how James puts it in James 2 about how, “I will show thee my faith by my works,” and I love verse 19 where he talks about the devils. He says, “The devils also believe and tremble.” It’s fascinating to think that devils know. They don’t just believe. They know that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world, but it’s doing nothing for them. And he says, “Faith without works is dead being alone.”

So if you look here at grace versus works, “The doctrine of salvation through faith alone, sometimes called solafidianism is not a biblical doctrine. There are no instances in the New Testament of the phrases ‘grace alone’ or ‘faith alone’. The New Testament records 541 scriptural statements by over 16 different biblical personalities, that pertained directly or indirectly to the way salvation is achieved. The preponderance of evidence is clearly in favor of statements that indicate that man will be held accountable and judged on the basis of his works, deeds, acts, fruits of obedience and so forth. Of the 541 New Testament versus, 418, or 77%, are supportive of works as a criterion for final judgment.”

Then I love the way we have it in the Book of Mormon 2 Nephi 25:23, “It is by grace that we are saved after all we can do.” Grace is how we are saved. There’s no other way, but our works do matter. I just wanted to share this because I just thought of this today to share this, add this in here. I love D&C section 45:3-5. “Listen to Him who is the advocate with the Father, who is pleading your cause before Him saying, ‘Father, behold the sufferings and death of him who did no sin and whom thou wast well-pleased. Behold the blood of Thy Son, which was shed, the blood of Him who gave us Thyself might be glorified. Wherefore Father, spare these my brethren that believe on my name that they may come unto me and have everlasting life,'” and it’s because of His sacrifice that we are spared unto salvation.

Now, how do works fit in then? This leads us actually to this next topic of heaven and hell versus degrees that heaven. Mainstream Christianity today believes there is a heaven and a hell. We know that Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon had this amazing experience, this massive vision that went on for about an hour or so with a dozen witnesses or so in the John Johnson upper room, and they saw the vision of the three degrees of glory, had that experience there together, the dual witness of this experience as D&C 76 now, today.

Now let’s look at the early Christian Fathers and some of the scriptures. So if you look at the early Christian father, Irenaeus, in the late second century wrote “Then those who are deemed worthy of abode in heaven shall go there, others shall enjoy the delights of paradise, and other shall as the splendor of the city … They say moreover, that there is this distinction between the habitation of those who produce an hundred-fold, and those that produce sixty-fold, and of those who produce thirty-fold: for the first will be taken up into the heavens, the second will dwell in paradise, the last will inhabit the city … The Elders, who were the disciples of the apostles, affirm that this is the gradation and arrangement of those who are saved.”

Now look at this one from Clement of Alexandria. It is also from the late second century. “There are various abodes in heaven. These chosen abodes, which are three, are indicated by the numbers in the gospel of Matthew.” Matthew 13:8. “The thirty, the sixty, and the hundred.” It’s fascinating, and I love that Paul in 2 Corinthians chapter 12, he talks about being caught up to the third heaven. How can you be caught up to a third heaven if there’s not a first and a second? I love that.

And then Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15:40-42, he talks about the resurrection, and there are bodies celestial and terrestrial, as he says, and then he says that he compares the resurrection to three degrees of light, essentially. He says there will be a resurrection that will be like the sun and then like the moon and like the stars. So, it’s just a fascinating … so in the scriptures as well there.

Now let’s talk about original sin for a minute. Our Article of Faith number two, “We believe men will be punished for their own sins and not for Adam’s transgression.” Mainstream Christianity today believes that we are born in sin. “The notion of original sin, as it is usually understood today in traditional Christianity, is a distinctly late invention that evolved from the controversies in the fourth and fifth centuries. Tertullian, in second century A.D., who was very concerned with the idea of sin, says nothing of the doctrine of original sin. Indeed, very few of the Church Fathers up to the fourth century show any interest in it at all. It was not clearly enunciated until Augustine, 4th/5th century A.D., needed it in his battle with the Christian Pelagians, who denied the doctrine, and it came to be associated with the Council of Carthage in 418 A.D.

Now let’s talk about infant baptism. So we believe, the Latter-day Saints believe, from modern day revelation that is critical that we have some age and maturity to exercise faith and repentance unto baptism, and that’s been defined as age eight. If you look in Mark, when Christ is brought the little children, He says, “Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for a such is the kingdom of God.” And then verse 16, he says, “And He took them up in His arms, put His hands upon them, and blessed them.” So look at Christ’s example, He’s not baptizing the children. He’s blessing the children.

Okay, now I want to share this from gotquestions.org. It’s a very fascinating website of nondenominational Christians that have come together to answer … they’re biblical experts of various kinds to answer questions from the Bible and with history. On infant baptism, this is what they say. “There is much confusion about baptism in the various Christian denominations. However, this is not a result of the Bible presenting a confusing message on baptism. The Bible is abundantly clear of what baptism is, who it is for, and what it accomplishes. In the Bible, only believers who had placed their faith in Christ were baptized as a public testimony of their faith and identification with Him. Look in Acts 2:38. Romans 6:3-4. Water baptism by immersion is a step of obedience after faith in Christ. It is a proclamation of faith in Christ, a statement of submission to Him, and an identification with His death, burial, and resurrection. With this in view, infant baptism is not a biblical practice. An infant cannot place his or her faith in Christ. An infant cannot make a conscious decision to obey Christ. An infant cannot understand what water baptism symbolizes.”

“The Bible does not record any infants being baptized. Infant baptism is the origin of the sprinkling and pouring methods of baptism …” I’m going to talk about that in a minute … “as it is unwise and unsafe to immerse an infant underwater. Even the method of infant baptism fails to agree with the Bible. How does pouring or sprinkling illustrate the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ? Many Christians who practice infant baptism do so because they understand infant baptism as the New Covenant equivalent of circumcision. In this view, just as circumcision joined a Hebrew to the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenant, so baptism joined a person to the New Covenant of salvation through Jesus Christ. This view is unbiblical. The New Testament nowhere describes baptism as the New Covenant replacement for Old Covenant circumcision.” Thought that was well said.

Okay. Now, lastly, the form of baptism being by immersion. And again, I want to use a non Latter-day Saint to just show this here. As you know, the Latter-day Saints believe in full immersion and believe that this is how it was done in the scriptures.

So here’s the Christian theologian John Piper, using several parts of the New Testament to support full immersion, submersion, as the intended symbol. Number one, “The meaning of the word baptizo in Greek is essentially dip or immerse, not sprinkle. The descriptions of baptism in the New Testament suggest that people went down into the water to be immersed rather than having water brought to them in a container to be poured or sprinkled. Matthew 3:6, ‘in the Jordan’, 3:16, ‘He went up out of the water’, John 3:23, ‘Much water there’, Acts 8:38, ‘went down into the water’. Immersion fits the symbolism of being buried with Christ.” See Romans 6 and Colossians 2 there.

Then he goes on to and continues with … He asserts that, “Baptism refers to the physical lowering into the water and rising in faith in part because of the reflection of this symbol in Colossians 2:12, which says, ‘having been buried with him in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in the newness of life.'”

I hope that these, part one and part two and the other videos I mentioned, help also to just shed light on the Restoration, how it really is Christianity restored, the original Christian doctrine and teachings. Hope you enjoyed the video. Subscribe for more.

Resources:

Articles:

Book of Mormon Central article – Did Jesus Bleed From Every Pore: https://knowhy.bookofmormoncentral.or…

Things As They Really Are blog article – Bleeding From Every Pore: Christ’s Blood Deleted By Early Christianity https://www.thingsastheyreallyare.com…

January 21, 2020 By Jeff Roundy Leave a Comment

ORIGINAL Christianity Restored – Evidences

This video is part 1 of 2 in showing how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints restored original Christianity. Greek philosophy became enmeshed in the development of mainstream Christian understandings of the nature of God and the Godhead. This video talks about how this happened and compares it to the Latter-day Saint understanding, which matches that of the New Testament period and earliest Christians.

Okay, in this video I want to talk about restoring original Christianity. I decided to break this up into two parts. Today, I want us to talk very specifically about the nature of God and the Godhead, and how it was viewed by the original Christians, and comparing that with with how it’s viewed today. And then of course with the Latter-day Saints, the contrast there.

I also want to indicate there’s several videos that I’ve done already. If you go check these out, if you haven’t already, the Pre-Mortal Life Teachings Restored is a great video on this topic as well. And then I did, Who Can Be Saved? Solving the Christian Dilemma, talking about about baptisms for the dead, back at the time of Christ. And Becoming like God – History and Meaning. Those three would be great videos that would be part of this topic in general as well.

And then also there’s some great books written on this topic, a good half dozen that have been in the last 10 to 15 years. I’ll put those in the show notes. Some excellent resources if you want to go deeper on this topic. So also in part two, I’m going to actually show a clip of this from Bishop Causse at the, it was at the April 2018 general conference that he talked about building the Paris temple and how they needed to get permission from the city. And how the mayor there, so they were going to conduct an investigation on the Church. And after a month they reported that it was the closest to Christ’s original church of any that they could find out there. But they had focused a lot on the people of the Church.

This video’s going to talk heavily on the some doctrine things, but the people, I want to also reference some great videos I’ve done on this. The welfare program, especially the self-reliant services initiative of the last six years, unlike anything in the world. The missionary program, tithing observance, religious health, which I did a focus on the Pew research data. And then this big study that the University of Pennsylvania had just done on service. I call it volunteerism. The average active Latter Day Saint spending nine times the average active volunteer in the United States in serving.

So if we go on, let’s start with, I wanted to share this quote from this Yale Professor, Harold Bloom. He’s considered by many as America’s most distinguished literary critic. He said, “I do not find it possible to doubt that Joseph Smith was an authentic prophet. Where in all of American history can we find his match? I can only attribute his genius or daemon his uncanny recovery of elements in ancient Jewish theurgy that had ceased to be available either to normative Judaism or to Christianity, and that survived only in esoteric traditions unlikely have touched Smith directly. As an unbeliever, I marvel at his intuitive understanding of the permanent religious dilemmas of our country.”

This will be a theme from those other videos I talked about, but also theme going forward. This video and part two in particular. W.D. Davies’s Professor of Theology at Duke University, he’s also a Congregational minister. He said “Mormonism is the Jewish-Christian tradition in American key. What it did was to re-Judaize a Christianity that had been too much Hellenized.” Now some people get thrown off by that word hellenized. Hellen was the way in Greek language to say Greece. So it was a way to basically to infuse Greek, to become Greekized. And it was really the culture of the philosophy and the philosophers that dominated that culture. But it was the language of the whole Mediterranean area there that was really affected as Christianity grew throughout that area.

So in the beginning there were three kind of groups of Christians that then really became one main focus group, but the Jewish Christians essentially, that’s where it all started. And they also had struggles there with the Law of Moses and following, how much to follow that still, and so those challenges. You had the Gnostic Christians, which believed in Gnosis, which was knowledge, which is how you’re saved. And they thought all material or matter was evil. And so they even thought of Christ was a hologram essentially there. And then the group that really ended up dominating all and became all of Christianity was the hellenized Christians and especially the the Gentiles. And as the gospel grew throughout the Mediterranean. And then like as I mentioned that it was the culture of the language. And then the critical thing was the Greek philosophy.

In fact, let’s look at these two quotes. Adolf Harnack, in his book, What is Christianity?, says, “We cannot say that the earliest Christian writings, let alone the gospel, show to any considerable extent the presence of a Greek element.” For instance, Paul warned, and this is in Colossians 2:8, “Beware, lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.”

Referring to this passage. James Shields of the University of Sussex writes, “Saint Paul’s letters contain a severe warning against Greek philosophy as a dangerous deception. A few generations after the apostles, one comes upon a reversed situation. The religious message is now framed in philosopher’s language, reminiscent at every turn of Heraclitus or Plato or Aristotle. Indeed, the Christian religion is now occasionally called a philosophy and its founder described as a philosopher.”

So take a look at this quote from Edwin Hatch in The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church. He writes, “A large part of what are sometimes called Christian doctrines and many usages which have prevailed and continue to prevail in the Christian Church, are in reality Greek theories and Greek usages changed in form and color by the influence of primitive Christianity, but in their essence Greek still.”

Okay, let’s talk about the view of the Godhead that came really out of the council of Nicea, and I’ll talk about that in a minute, but if you look at the nature of God and the Godhead, the Latter-day Saints versus mainstream Christianity today. So mainstream Christian view of the Godhead: Father, Son and Holy Ghost are one, spiritual, indivisible essence called the trinity. Now this is not one person manifested in three different entities. That’s known as modalism and is a considered a heresy. No body, parts or passions because there’s no separation, they’re one substance. None of the three are subordinate to any of the others. This was a critical point I’ll mention in a minute. We are only children of God metaphorically because we are a different species. And so as this is not comprehensible, it’s considered to be a mystery to man, the mystery of the trinity as they call it.

Okay. Latter-day Saint view of God and the Godhead: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are all separate individuals but one in purpose and will. Father and Son have tangible bodies of flesh and bone. The Son is subordinate to the Father, and the Holy Ghost is the testator of the other two. Not only does God have body and parts, but has passion. Enoch saw God weeping over His children. God is the Father of our spirits. We are literally children of God. And I would say which is easier to pray to when you think of those descriptions? And I love, this is one of my favorite books, the God Who Weeps by Terryl and Fiona Givens. Just the concept of a God who loves us to the point He’s weeping with us. There’s great compassion and love that infuses your spirit as you contemplate that versus something that’s hard to even comprehend or grasp in any way, shape or form.

So I put on the bottom of that slide, which view ties closest with the Bible and earliest documented Christianity? How important is this? Well, think of John 17:3. The great intercessory prayer. Christ prays and he says, “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou has sent.” That’s how important it is there. And you think about Christ appeared to the apostles in the upper room after being resurrected and even ate. Had them feel His body and ate with them.

So let’s talk about one of the scriptures that is often used to defend the trinity. 1 John 5:7. Isn’t that proof that early Christians believe that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are one substance with three different manifestations? Here’s the quote. “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one.” And that could still mean one in purpose there, but here’s the key thing. Some modern Bible translations do not even include this verse anymore because it is not found in the earliest Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Interesting.

There is only one place in the New Testament where the oneness meaning is explained, and it’s in the intercessory prayer. So back to John 17 verses 20 through 22, and I think this is crystal clear my mind. “Neither pray I for these alone.” He’s praying for His disciples there, “but for them also which shall believe on me through their word, that they all may be one as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they also may be one in us, that the world may believe that thou has sent me, and the glory which thou gavest me, I have given them, that they may be one even as we are one.”

So he’s obviously not praying for all of his apostles there to be one person. So this is the best way that I’ve ever seen it. It seems very crystal clear of what the oneness means when it says the word one throughout the scriptures.

Okay, here’s an early Christian Father agreeing with this, Justin Martyr. “I shall endeavor to persuade you that he who is said to have appeared to Abraham, and to Jacob, and to Moses, and who is called God, is distinct from Him who made all things–numerically, I mean, not distinct in will.” Okay.

Origen in 200 A.D., another early Christian Father. “And if any should from these words be afraid of our going over to the side of those who deny that the Father and the Son are two personages, let him weigh the passage, ‘And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and one soul,’ that he may understand the meaning of the saying, ‘I and my father are one.’ While they are two, considered as persons or substances, are one in unity of thought, in harmony and in identity of will.”

Okay, JND Kelly at Oxford University said, “Even at the Council of Nicea the majority party,” and I’ll explain this in a minute, “believed that there are three divine persons separate in rank and glory, but united in harmony of will.” Okay.

The Trinity. The Harper Collins Bible Dictionary says, “The word trinity does not occur in the Bible. It is generally acknowledged that the church father Tertullian either coined the term or was the first to use it with reference to God.

John Whalen, New Catholic Encyclopedia, says, “Among the apostolic fathers, there had been nothing even remotely approaching such a mentality or perspective as one God in three persons.”

Edwin Hatch, The Influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity, “The Nicene Creed, which forcefully promoted the metaphysical dogma of the trinity, would probably have been unintelligible to the first disciples of Jesus Christ in the meridian of time.”

Okay. Now let’s take a minute to, I’m just going to mention a few things about the Council of Nicea. How did it come about? Well, Constantine, Emperor Constantine, had converted to Christianity in 312 A.D. after this amazing visionary experience that he had. He lifted the imperial ban on Christians. About, over a decade later, there had been a huge uproar that was happening in the region.

It was specifically in Alexandria, but it was between two people: Arias and Alexander. And they were essentially battling over the doctrine of Jesus Christ, what it means to be begotten essentially. And so Arias, they viewed God, that Jesus had been at one point created by God, and that was a problem. They viewed Him essentially as not being God or man because He was created by God. He hadn’t existed from the beginning in a sense. So Alexander thought and his protege, Athanasius, but they were thinking this was heresy essentially, and this would not allow Him to be God and to be able to redeem His people.

So they were basically using a Greek philosophy of that they were all in one substance essentially. And that, this is what really led to … so Constantine was fearful that this was going to split the empire in a sense that he had recently combined together. He had them all come, he invited them to come to his imperial palace in Nicea. In May of, it was mid-May of 325 A.D. He invited about 1800 bishops. There were between, there’s three accounts that were given somewhere between 250 and 320. The best estimates that people said subsequent were 318 bishops came. Well there were 22 plus areas that had the Arian view essentially, and if you ever heard this talk, it’s called the Arian Controversy that led up to all this, but, and then Alexander had a small group, too. The main group there were persuaded essentially by the risks that Alexander was proposing and that is what gave birth, essentially, to the trinity. The doctrine of the trinity.

Arias would, by the end they were threatened with exile and still there were 2 that held out of the 20 there with Arias there. But it did not solve the, there was lots of battles afterwards. There were different emperors that accepted Arias afterwards and so it became a battle for quite a period of time, many, many decades. And in some ways, even centuries, this went on. There were seven different councils by 787 A.D. to try to solve the theological arguments here.

So this was the first general council of the Church and it led to this, the doctrine of the trinity. It was steeped in Greek philosophy, and I’ll talk about that in a minute, but it did eliminate subordination of Christ to the Father in that sense, and I’ll mention that critically at the end.

So the mystery of Trinity. Barry Bickmore said they called it a mystery because you could not comprehend what they had put together there. Some of the words were not, had anything to do with anything in the Bible. “With the rejection of subordinationism, Christianity finally had resolved the issue of how the three persons of the Godhead could all be fully God, and the son and the Spirit had been melded into the one. But consider the irony of the situation. The Church had gotten itself into this mess by adopting the one as their God in the first place in order to make Christianity philosophically acceptable. But since the God of the philosophers was in many ways antithetical or directly opposed to the God of Israel, the Church ended up having to adopt a solution that was beyond human reason to maintain the full deity of Christ. What we have is the concept of combining the three persons into one God in a way that is wholly incomprehensible to the human mind. Hence the mystery of the Trinity.”

“Mainstream Christianity has been placed in the unenviable position of requiring belief in a doctrine that no one can understand.” And remember John 17:3. This is life eternal that they might know thee. Thinking about the First Vision, what Joseph learned at that moment– that God had a body and that God and Jesus Christ were two separate individuals.

Do we see that somewhere else? Let’s look at this picture here. The stoning of Stephen. Acts 7:55 and 56. “But he being full of the Holy Ghost looked up steadfast into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God. And said, behold, I see the heavens open, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God.”

So I say, which sounds like the most original to Christianity, the Latter-day Saint view or the mainstream Christian view from the Nicene creed. Now let’s talk about God having a body. If you look at Genesis 1:26. “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image.'” The Hebrew word there, tselem, after our likeness, the Hebrew word, demuth. And then now compare that to Genesis 5:3. “And Adam lived an hundred thirty years and begat a son in his own likeness,” the Hebrew demuth, “after his image,” Hebrew tselem, “and called his name Seth.” Exact same words. Adam was created in God’s image and likeness and the exact same Hebrew words for image and likeness were used to describe Adam and his son, Seth. So the same exact words, God to Adam as Adam to Seth, image and likeness.

Okay. One of the early Church Fathers agreed, Clementine Homilies, early Jewish Christian work from the second or third century A.D. A conversation between Peter and Simon Magus is reported. “And Simon said, ‘I should like to know, Peter, if you really believe that the shape of man had been molded after the shape of God.’ And Peter said, ‘I am really quite certain, Simon, that this is the case. It is the shape of the just God.”

Okay, so now for some confusion. Tertullian wrote, “Whatever attributes therefore you require as worthy of God, must be found in the Father, who is invisible and unapproachable, and placid and, so to speak, the God of the philosophers.” Even sort of acknowledging this Greek influence on their view of God. The early Christian Father, Origen. He was interjecting confusion into this. Not drawing a perfect distinction of what way to go, but here it is. “For it is also to be a subject of an investigation how God himself is to be understood, whether as corporeal, and formed according to some shape, or of a different nature from bodies, a point which is not clearly indicated in our teaching.”

Okay. This is a long quote and it’s critical for understanding the Hellenization of Christianity, but it’s, I’m just going to give you some snippets from it and if you want to pause the screen, you can read the whole thing, but Barry Bickmore, which this book is really great, Restoring the Ancient Church: Joseph Smith and Early Christianity. He starts by referring to Origen’s comment, admitted that there was considerable confusion among Christians of that era about this very question about God having a body. But why? He gave a clue in his book, his sermon on the Book of Genesis that “Jews indeed, but also some of our people, suppose that God should be understood as a man that is adorned with human members and human appearance, but the philosophers despise these stories as fabulous, informed in the likeness of poetic fictions.”

“The Jews and Christians who followed the standard Jewish interpretations believed that God had a body in human form. Why did Origen reject this? Simply because the philosophers thought it was silly.” And then he goes, and then on the screen there you can see lots of different quotes from different philosophers that sound very much like the trinity doctrine. Greek, and then he says, “Greek converts to Christianity wanted to make their faith more appealing to people in their own culture and so they adopted a definition of God from the Greek philosophers whose thought was widely respected at the time. The temptation is always there to make one’s faith more popular by modernizing it.” And then he shares that quote from Paul to warning against that philosophy, which was at that time the Greek philosophy. And then at the end here he talks about this Catholic historian who became a cardinal who said the thought and philosophical systems of the current time of Christianity, they were not ready to assimilate this Christian conception. “On the contrary, they were wholly antagonistic there too. However, within a few generations that had all changed, and philosophy ruled Christian theology.”

That’s a very long quote, but it’s one of the most critical slides here in this video. So let’s talk about actually seeing God. Here’s a quote from a Ohio State professor that wrote Theophany, the Oxford Companion to the Bible. He says, “A deity’s physical manifestation is seen by human beings. The appearance of gods and their involvement with humans are common motifs in ancient Near Eastern and classical mythology. That similar phenomena are found in the Bible seems problematic at first, for a persistent tradition in the Hebrew Bible affirm that death comes to any human who sees God. In most of these contacts, however, the narration undermines the sentiment by depicting the pleasant surprise of those who survive. The text presents this perspective as a misperception to which human being subscribed, for no humans in the Bible ever die simply because they have seen God. On the contrary. Throughout the Bible, God wants to communicate intimately with humans. The problem of how God can adequately show himself to humankind without harm is a conundrum that is never really resolved in the Bible.’

In fact, if you look at John 1:18, doesn’t it say there no man has seen God at any time? There are countless or not countless. There are many times when God has been seen there. So it is a conundrum. In fact in Joseph Smith’s inspired version of that verse says, “No man has seen God at any time except he hath born record of the Son.”

So here’s some examples of that conundrum of people seeing God and then how this may be, how we understand it through transfiguration, but people seeing God here. Isaiah, “The year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple.” Now this in Exodus. “So the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend.” “And Jacob called the place, the name of the place Peniel; for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” And of course the famous one from Stephen where he saw both the Father and the Son there and recorded that.

Now Latter-day Saints were able to reconcile this and understand it because of our understanding of transfiguration. Moses Chapter one, verses 2 and 14. “And he saw God face to face and he talked with him and the glory of God was upon Moses; therefore Moses could endure his presence. Moses said, ‘For behold, I could not look upon God, except his glory should come upon me, and I were transfigured before him.'”

And look at this. This is an early Christian Father mentioning the same thing. Clementine Homilies, “For I maintain that the eyes of the mortals cannot see the incorporeal form of the Father or Son because it is illumined by exceeding great light. For he who sees God cannot live. For the excess of light dissolves the flesh of him who sees; unless by the secret power of God the flesh can be changed into the nature of light, so that it can see light.” Just love that.

Okay, last thing here, subordination. Subordination of the Son to the father. This was the huge thing. Part of the Nicene Creed. Now listen to this from a book, The Achievement of Orthodoxy in the fourth century. “Until Athanasias,” now remember, he was, it was his group that really led out in the Nicene Creed, “until he began writing, every single theologian, East and West, had postulated some form of subordinationism. It could, about the year 300, have even been described as a fixed theology.”

And then I wanted to put on the screen here all of the tremendous number of scriptures where the subordination of the Son to the Father, I think, is crystal clear. Jesus Christ is the Father’s Son. The Father is Jesus Christ’s God. The Father is greater than the Son. The Son teaches the Father’s doctrine not His own. Jesus Christ did not perform His own work, but His Father’s work. Jesus Christ prayed unto the Father. Jesus Christ commanded others to pray unto the Father. The Father spoke to His Son from heaven before witnesses. The Nicene Creed essentially abolishes all of this as the Son is equal to the Father and always has been. That’s the mystery of the Trinity. So I hope you enjoyed this. Part two is going to be exciting to get in a lot of different other details on restoring the original Christian Church. Thanks.

Resources:

Books:

Restoring the Ancient Church: Joseph Smith and Early Christianity by Barry Robert Bickmore

Turning from Truth: A New Look at the Great Apostasy by Alexander Morrison

Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy by Noel Reynolds

The Blueprint of Christ’s Church by Tad R. Callister

All Things Restored: Confirming the Authenticity of LDS Beliefs by Matthew B. Brown

Mormonism and Early Christianity by Hugh Nibley

The Great Apostasy by James E. Talmage

Websites:

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/s…

https://www.fairmormon.org/conference…

https://www.fairmormon.org/answers/Mo…

https://www.fairmormon.org/wp-content…

Videos:

2017 Fairmormon Conf: Scott Peterson – Jesus Christ, the Same Yesterday, Today, and Forever https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLxNq…

2014 Fairmormon Conf: Barry Bickmore – Joseph Smith Among the Early Christians https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv20n…

* Also see the resources for the video Not Christians?! WHY?

January 21, 2020 By Jeff Roundy Leave a Comment

Not Christians?! WHY?

This video discusses the various reasons some claim members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are not Christians and why these claims are erroneous and many are even ironic.

Okay. On this Evidences video, I want to talk about why critics will sometimes call the Latter-day Saints non-Christian, which seems bizarre when Jesus Christ is in our actual name. Why do they even do this? By the way, I just did a video on restoring original Christianity, there. I would suggest, as a companion video to this, to please, please watch that. I’m going to bring it up in a minute too as a reference for something in this video.

So first of all, let’s talk about why they say it. So first thing critics say Latter-day Saints are not Christian because they don’t match the definition of the word. Okay. They are subjectively defining the word. Let’s look at the original use of the Christian word. Jesus Christ never used the term. The term is not used anywhere in the four gospels, only appears three times in the new testament.

The time when the term is used, it appears to be from outsiders. The term was probably modeled on such words, as Herodian and Caesarian, already in circulation at the time. It meant simply Christ’s people or possibly followers of Christ. The three New Testament passages of the word Christian, where they show up, Acts 11:26, “the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.” The passive phrase ‘were called Christians’ suggests that the term was first used by non-Christians. Similar to the name ‘Yankee’ and ‘Mormon’ being first used by outsiders.

Okay. Acts 26:28, King Agippa tells Paul “almost though persuadeth me to be a Christian.” The person speaking here is a non-Christian. 1 Peter 4:16, “Yet, if any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed.” Possibly indicating the term may have been one outsiders were using to persecute church members, possibly even derived from Roman legal usage.

Now, let’s say, today, the Webster’s Dictionary definition of Christian, “one who professes believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ.” That’s the definition of a Christian. I would like to qualify the teachings in a sense of just saying critical to acknowledge Jesus Christ as the Savior and Redeemer of the world. The example of that would be the Muslims do believe that Jesus Christ was a great prophet, but they don’t view Him as the Son of God who redeemed the world. There. So, I think it’s critical to distinguish what that means to believe Jesus Christ’s teachings. Now, C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity says, “It is not for us to say who, in the deepest sense, is or is not close to the spirit of Christ. We do not see into men’s hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge. It would be wicked arrogance for us to say that any man is, or is not, a Christian in this refined sense… When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say that he is not Christian.

Okay. The next example critics will say the Latter-day Saints are not Christians because they believe Satan and Jesus are brothers, or they believe X Y Z, which isn’t how I interpret the gospel. Again, this is about a subjective view of how you define what that is. This example I gave was because it became a big deal back in the 2008 presidential election. Mike Huckabee being the Republican primary pointed this out about Mitt Romney’s religion and said, “Oh, I don’t know much about the Mormons, but don’t they believe Jesus and Satan are brothers?” You knew exactly what was was happening there. Trying to get that stirrup happening there.

We have a different understanding because of our understanding of the preexistence that allows us to see things very clearly there, but I will share this. The Church issued the following press release on this issue, “Like other…” And this was in 2007, “Like other Christians, we believe Jesus is the divine Son of God. Satan is a fallen angel. As the Apostle Paul wrote, God is the father of all. That means that all beings were created by God and are His spirit children. Christ, however, was the Only Begotten in the flesh and we worship Him as the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.”

That’s how we could, essentially, understand that, there. Maybe, even in the language we use. This was a great example. Elder Ballard said, cautioned members of the Church, this was in June of 1998, Building Bridges of Understanding in the Ensign. He said, “We, occasionally, hear some members refer to Jesus as our elder brother, which is a true concept based on our understanding of the premortal life with our Father in Heaven, but, like many points of gospel doctrine, that simple truth doesn’t go far enough in terms of describing the Savior’s role in our present lives and His great position as a member of the godhead. Thus, some non-LDS Christians are uncomfortable with what they perceive as a secondary role for Christ in our theology. They feel that we view Jesus as a spiritual peer. They believe that we view Christ as an implementer for God, if you will, but that we don’t view him as God to us and to all mankind, which of course is counter to biblical testimony about Christ’s divinity.”

Now, I kind of went off on that topic, but just as an example of something. There’ll be the things they’ll do quote mining, especially from the Journal of Discourses. A favorite is the Adam-God theory, which is not in any way, shape, or form the doctrine of the Church. I did a video on Adam-God theory, but also a video on what is doctrine of the Church. The Church has tried to make statements about this recently, as well, to clarify that not everything said by a leader is considered to be doctrine.

Critics say the Latter-day Saints are not Christian because they are cult. Well, what is the definition of a cult? If you actually looked at the Webster’s Dictionary definition of a cult, “A religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious,” which is totally subjective in a sense. “Great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work; a system of religious beliefs; or formal religious veneration of worship.”

A system of religious beliefs, that could pick up just about all religions, right? Let me share this introduction or this book, Are Mormons Christian, Steven Robinson, fantastic book. He actually talked about Walter Martin, who wrote Kingdom of the Cults in 1965 that really stirred things up and called lots of these newer religions cults. He went through 10 points of how he defined cults.

At the beginning he says, “Nevertheless, there have been many attempts to define cult in an objective way without losing the terms negative connotations. So far, all these attempts have failed. Let us take for example, the last and most ambitious definition proposed by the late Walter Martin. I single out this one only because from a non-Mormon view, Martin is certainly the consensus expert on this subject, and in his latest and longest definition of cult, he renders his most complete explanation of the term. In his proposed objective definition, Martin lists 10 characteristics common to cults, which he believes distinguish them from legitimate religions. At the conclusion of his list, the author assures the reader that we have presented here all of the essential marks, which distinguish many of the new cults from the rest of society and from the biblical Christian Church. The flaw, however, in the proposed definition, and the Achilles’ heel for all such definitions of cult, is that any objective definition of cult that can be applied to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can also be applied to the Christian Church of the New Testament and to most of today’s mainline denominations when they were in their infancy.”

Let’s examine Martin’s 10 points, one at a time, and then he goes through and illustrates and shows that point by point. Here’s his summary. I put this on the screen, here. “To summarize, cult is a subjective word meaning, to the particular person using it, ‘a religion I don’t like.’ When someone refers to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a ‘cult,’ that simply tells us that the speaker doesn’t like the Church. Christianity, itself, was once a new religion with dynamic leadership, strong in-group bonding, high moral expectations and additional scriptures, all of which greatly offended the main-trained clergy, but they did attempt to convert the world to a truth no one else had. By most of the objective definitions that have been proposed for the term cult, early Christianity was one, and so far any general definition of a cult that would fit the Latter-Day Saints will also fit New Testament Christianity.

Okay. Critics will say the Latter-day Saints are not Christian because they don’t accept the traditional Christianity. They don’t fit into the traditional Christian tree, the pedigree. You can see here, this chart right here. Here’s the tree. This one’s a little busy, so let’s look at this one.

Now, if you look at this chart, see if you can find the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on here. It is not part of this pedigree, here. It’s not on the tree, here. It would be a side one with a direct link to the early Christian Church, if you were to draw it. Not linked to any of the others. Here is the one with dates, and this one you can see, and again, of course, the Church would need to be a separate branch on here, back to the original. When I think about this tree, a quote came to mind from the book A Marvelous Work and a Wonder, where Elder Orson F. Whitney, he had recorded the following story in his autobiography. This was a Catholic theologian, John Reiner, who had come to Salt Lake.

Now, note that this occurred about a hundred years ago and the stance predates the Vatican to counter-reformation that happens 1962 to 65, and it might not reflect Catholic sentiment today. It’s a fascinating quote, thinking of the of the tree, there. “Many years ago, there came to Salt Lake City a learned a doctorate of divinity, a member of the Roman Catholic Church. I became well acquainted with him, and we conversed freely and frankly. A great scholar with, perhaps, a dozen languages at his tongue’s end. He seemed to know all about theology, law, literature, science, and philosophy, and was never weary of displaying his vast erudition. One day, he said to me, ‘You Mormons are all ignoramuses. You don’t even know the strength of your own position. It is so strong, that there is only one other tenable in the whole Christian world, and that is the position of the Catholic Church. The issue is between Catholicism and Mormonism.’

‘If we are right, you are wrong. If you are right, we are wrong, and that’s all there is to it. The Protestants haven’t a leg to stand on. If we are wrong, they are wrong with us. For they were part of us, and went out from us. Well, if we are right, they are apostates, whom we cut off long ago. If we really have, as we claimed, the apostolic succession from Saint Peter, there was no need for Joseph Smith and Mormonism, but if we have not that succession, then such a man as Joseph Smith was necessary and Mormonism’s attitude is the only consistent one. It is either the perpetuation of the gospel from ancient times, or the restoration of the gospel in the latter days.'”

I love that and I recommend watching the video I just did on the restoring original Christianity, with that in mind. Okay. The next one. Critics say Latter-day Saints are not Christian because they don’t believe in the Christian creeds.

Okay. This one, I gotta just say, I’m not going to go deep because that was the bulk of the other video that I just did, which is fantastic. I will share this quote from Elder Holland in the October, 2007 General Conference, in which he says, “In the year A.D. 325, the Roman Emperor, Constantine, convened the council of Nicea to address, among other things, the growing issue of God’s alleged trinity in unity. What emerged from the heated contentions of churchman, philosophers, and ecclesiastical dignitaries came to be known, after another 125 years and three more major councils, as the Nicean Creed, with later reformations, such as the Athanasian Creed. These various evolutions and iterations of creeds and others to come over the centuries, declared the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost to be abstract, absolute, transcendent, imminent, consubstantial, co-eternal, and unknowable without body parts or passions and dwelling outside space and time.”

In such creeds, all three members are separate persons, but they are a single being, the oft-noted mystery of the trinity. They are three distinct persons, yet not three gods but one. All three persons are incomprehensible, yet it is one God who is incomprehensible.” Now, note this. This is the part that is critical. “It is not our purpose to demean any person’s belief, nor the doctrine of any religion. We extend to all the same respect for their doctrine that we are asking for ours. That, too, is an article of our faith, but if one says we are not Christians because we do not hold a fourth or fifth century view of the Godhead, then what of those first Christian saints, many of whom were eyewitnesses of living Christ, who did not hold such a view, either?”

Makes a lot of sense. Okay. Latter-day Saints. Critics say Latter-day Saints aren’t Christians because they believe in an open canon.

There’s more than just the Bible. Now, you know the famous quote at the end of the Book of Revelations. It says, “If any man shall add to this book, God shall add to him the plagues that are written in this book.” Any return mission probably had to deal with this on their mission about the Book of Mormon, in a sense. When John wrote that, there was no Bible, it did not exist. In fact, tradition holds that John had this vision on the Isle of Patmos with Revelations when he was released in 95, 96 A.D. He quickly dictated this. That’s the tradition. Then, later, wrote the gospel of John. Three epistles came after the Book of Revelations. Most scholars believe that it is tradition there. He, himself, even wrote afterwards. But, think about it. We often read this as the last verse of the New Testament, there, in this book. There was no book, there was no New Testament at that time.

Let me show you this, here. If you look at the screen on here. The earliest spot where we can see a group of books combined into something that could be viewed as a canon, was 130 to 140 Marionite Canon. If you look at it on the screen on the left, there was about a half dozen books, there. That’s it. The Muratorian Fragment in 170 A.D. had many more. You’d actually have to go out. If you want to see today’s New Testament, it would have been the the Codex Sinaiticus in 330 to 336 A.D. It wasn’t until the Council of Hippo in 393 A.D., that it was the first time it was determined the books that made up the canon. That, actually, wasn’t even formally canonized, per se, until the Council of Trent in 1546. There’s confusion, even, which books. Martin Luther rejected the seven books that they called the Apocrypha and put it in the index.

That’s why the Protestant and Catholic Bibles are different by about seven books, there. Now, let’s go to the Gospel Topics Essay, here. This is on the essay, Are Mormons Christians. “A justification argued to label Latter-day Saints as non-Christian has to do with their belief in an open scriptural canon. For those making this argument, to be a Christian means to ascend to the principle of Sola Scriptura, or the self sufficiency of the Bible, but the claim that the Bible is the sole and final word of God, more specifically, the final written word of God, is to claim more for the Bible than it claims for itself. Nowhere does the Bible proclaim that all revelations from God would be gathered into a single volume to be forever closed, and that no further scriptural revelation could be received. Moreover, not all Christian churches are certain that Christianity must be defined by a commitment to a closed canon.”

In truth, the argument for exclusion by closed canon appears to be used selectively to exclude the Latter-day Saints from being called Christian. No brands of Christianity limits itself entirely to the biblical texts, and making doctrinal decisions and then applying biblical principles. Roman Catholics, for example, turn to church tradition and the magisterium, meaning teachers, including popes and councils, for answers. Protestants particularly evangelicals, turn to linguists and scriptural scholars for their answers, as well as to post-New Testament church councils and creeds. For many Christians, these councils and creeds are every bit as canonical as the Bible itself. To establish doctrine and understand the biblical texts, Latter-day Saints turned to living prophets and to additional books of scripture, the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price.” But wait, didn’t Paul say in Galatians 1:8, “But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.”

Well, look at this last quote, here. “Together with the Old and New Testaments, The Book of Mormon supports an unequivocal testimony of Jesus Christ. One passage says, the Book of Mormon shall establish the truth of the Bible and shall make known to all kindreds, tongues, and people that the Lamb of God is the Son of the eternal Father and the Savior of the world, and that all men must come into Him, or they cannot be saved.” It’s more than 6,000 verses. The Book of Mormon refers to Jesus Christ almost 4,000 times. I say, personally, this is how I know the Bible is true. It’s because of the miracle of the Book of Mormon coming forth. It is a second witness. Remember John 10:16? Jesus Christ said, “Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold, them, also, I must bring.” He did go and visit others. It’s powerful to have a second witness of Jesus Christ.

For me, it makes all the difference in having complete faith in the Bible, having the Book of Mormon. Okay. I would love to share just a couple of quick quotes from Lee McDonald who is not a member of the Church in his book, The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon.

He wrote, “The early Christian years did not have a fixed canon, nor did it restrict itself to the canon use by most modern Christian churches.” He said, “If the term Christian is defined by the examples and beliefs passed on by earliest followers of Jesus, then we must at least ponder the question of whether the notion of a biblical canon is, necessarily, Christian. They did not have such canons as the church possesses today, nor did they indicate that their successors should draw them up. Even in regard to the Old Testament canon, it has been shown that the early church’s collections of scriptures were considerably broader in scope than those presently found in either the Catholic or Protestant canons, that they demonstrated much more flexibility than our present collections allow. In regard to the Old Testament, should the church be limited to an Old Testament canon to which Jesus and his first disciples were clearly not limited?”

He went on to say this, and I just love this. “In the first question, the most important one is whether the church was right in perceiving the need for a closed canon of scriptures. Did such a move toward a closed canon of scriptures ultimately and unconsciously limit the presence and power of the Holy Spirit in the church? Does God act in the church today, and by the same spirit? On what biblical or historical grounds has the inspiration of God been limited to the written documents that the church now calls its Bible? One must surely ask about the appropriateness of tying the church of the 20th century to a canon that emerged out of the historical circumstances in the second to the fifth century C.E. How are we supposed to make the experience of that church absolute for all time? Was the church in the Nicene and and post-Nicene eras infallible in its decisions or not? Finally, if the spirit inspired only the written documents of the first century, does that mean that the same spirit does not speak today in the church about matters that are of significant concern?”

“For example, the use of contraceptives, abortion, liberation, ecological irresponsibility, equal rights, euthanasia, nuclear proliferation, global genocide, economic and social justice, and so on.”

I think that’s a very interesting thought and that’s why we believe in modern, that God has always spoken through prophets throughout time. That is part of our doctrine and our understanding. It makes sense. It’s just fun to see that from a non-Latter-day Saint talking about that, and how that makes sense. To close, I wanted to share this from the Church Newsroom Q&A Essay with Robert Millet, who was the Emeritus Dean of Religion at BYU. He wrote this in February, 2012. Question was, “Then, why do you want to be called Christian when you are not really a part of historical Christianity?”

The tree, right? He says, “I’m not bothered very much when I am speaking with religious scholars and ministers and they suggest that Mormons are not Christians. They are generally speaking theologically or historically because Mormons do not hold to or accept as spiritually binding, the decisions and formulations of the Post-New Testament church councils, Nicaea, Constantinople, and Ephesus, and because we believe in an expanded canon scripture, they do not consider us to be a part of Orthodox Christianity. They are correct. On the other hand, this is the concern. When the man on the street or the woman in the pew hears the words, ‘Mormons are not Christian’, what do they make of it? Do they think it means that Mormons do not accept the divinity of Jesus? Do not accept the message and witness of the New Testament? Do not believe that Jesus suffered and died for our sins? Do not believe that He rose from the dead into glorious immortality? If they were to draw any of those conclusions, they would be incorrect and thereby misunderstand, misperceive, and thereafter misinterpret the faith and beliefs held by Latter-day Saint friends.”

I love that. I want to close with this phenomenal comment that he shared of his discussion with a Catholic. He said, “A few years ago, I was in New York City. I met with the late Father Richard John Neuhaus, a respected conservative voice among Roman Catholics. We conversed cordially for almost an hour, and he spoke fondly of the Mormon/Evangelical dialogue that had been underway for a decade. He indicated that a similar dialogue between Catholics and Mormons was long overdue and then said, quote, ‘There is a great need for more conversation between Latter-day Saint Christians and Nicene Christians.’ Now, that’s a recognition and a distinction which most Latter-day Saints would be quite comfortable.”

I would certainly be very comfortable and love the idea of not being considered a Nicene Christian, but being part of the Latter-day Saint Christians. So, hope you enjoyed the video, subscribe for more and make sure to go watch the other video related to this topic, Restoring Original Christianity. Thanks.

Resources:

Restored Book: Are Mormons Christians? by Stephen E. Robinson Articles from

Websites:

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/s…

https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist….

https://www.thechurchnews.com/archive…

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/s…

https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist….

https://www.pbs.org/mormons/themes/ch…

https://www.fairmormon.org/answers/Je…

https://www.fairmormon.org/answers/Mo…

https://www.fairmormon.org/answers/Je…

Video:

Debate – Are Mormons Christians? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnKVn…

Podcast:

LDS Perspectives Podcast #39 Mere Christians? with Robert Millet https://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/…

*Also see the resources for the video Original Christianity Restored

January 21, 2020 By Jeff Roundy 2 Comments

Book of Abraham – Assumptions Matter

This video discusses how the Book of Abraham was produced and how critics use assumptions to attack the record which are not applicable.

So in this video I want to talk about the Book of Abraham. This has a been a tough issue for many decades, really, since 1967 in particular. We’ll talk about that. Critics attacking the Church for this specific topic. And so I want to spend some time, but it is a Cliff’s Notes version so I can’t go into great detail, but I want to hit the kind of the key issues and highlights. And there’s some critical pieces in this video towards the end. So I hope you’ll watch the whole thing.

I’ve got about a five minute clip. So the Joseph Smith Papers just released volume four of the Revelations and Translations series, which is on the Book of Abraham. And the editors spoke down at BYU at the Maxwell Institute, and there’s a five minute clip I think it’s critical to hear right now on this topic.

So first of all, how do we get the Book of Abraham? It’s kind of strange to think of Joseph coming across this in 1835 in almost frontier America essentially. But it started with Napoleon invading Egypt in 1798, and so lots of discoveries were happening throughout this period. There was a man named Antonio Lebolo who discovered these mummies, 11 mummies, and the handful of papyri scrolls that in 1817 to 1822 shipped them back to Italy. There was an Egyptomania that was going on in Europe through all these discoveries.

But eventually that really got saturated. He shipped them to New York, and they were going around the Eastern Seaboard in a sense for a while. They ended up in 1835 with Michael Chandler, who was a traveling antiques dealer. And that’s where he ended up coming into Kirtland. By that point, he was down to four mummies. He had sold others, and several scrolls, two scrolls, and some some scraps of other things.

So this was purchased by Joseph. He wanted to just purchase the papyri, but it was a combined deal. It was sold to him for $2,400. The saints raised the money. It was about 60,000 in today’s dollars. Then after Joesph died, this was an income source for his mother Lucy. Would show them to people for 25 cents. And after she died, Emma got rid of them immediately, and sold them to a man named Arthur Combs.

So there were some fragments that had been mounted and put on glass. And the Joseph Smith Papers, they talk about a little bit of this, these maybe be privileged parts of the Book of Abraham. I’ll mention that in a minute. But those he kept. He sold to the St. Louis Museum the rest essentially, and that ended up at the Wood’s Museum is this, long trail, but through the Chicago Museum, which became the Wood’s Museum, which burned down in 1871. The great Chicago fire of 1871 burned down two thirds of the structures. The only thing left of this museum was a revolver somebody found. So completely gone. Adds a crazy dimension to this whole story of maybe we lost the book of Abraham possibly.

Well, those fragments were then passed down to his caretaker. In his will, he gave them to his caretaker, Charlotte Weaver. That was in 1892 Philadelphia. Her son-in-law sold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1946. It was then discovered by a University of Utah professor actually in 1966 there. And he helped to get those actually back to the Church in 1967.

Now that’s where things got crazy. Because now we actually had the Egyptian hieroglyphics and the characters that we now understood how to translate Egyptian. In Joseph’s day, they didn’t. Champollion had discovered the Rosetta Stone, was cracking the code, but it didn’t reach over here until after Joseph had had died.

But now we have that. So they could say, okay, now we can sit down and figure out if Joseph Smith was a prophet. Because we can now prove if his translation matched these characters here. So it turned out that these characters were just simply what they call funerary text, a book of breathings, a book of the dead. They would put these with the mummies essentially as a way to help you get through the afterlife. Ways that you can handle the afterlife and breathe again, the breathings, those kinds of things.

So that’s part of the challenge. How do you understand this or interpret it? Well, we have this lost scroll possibility. That’s where the Book of Abraham was essentially. Or you have what saying revelation, that the papyri acted as a catalyst for Joseph Smith to receive the Book of Abraham similar to how the Book of Mormon happened with the golden plates. Talk about that more in a minute.

But I want to stop for a second and have you think about this. Think about how does God work? Would God have set this up so that this would have been proved that Joseph Smith was a prophet? No, he doesn’t work that way. Think about the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. How critical that is for everyone that ever lives on this earth. God could create a way to absolutely prove that that happened, to remove it from the realm of faith. He doesn’t. The golden plates were taken back . If you look at the way that God has worked throughout time, it’s to create and require faith. So that’s one interesting aspect of it.

And then think about this, if you read the book of breathings, it’s yawnarama for us. I’m glad he didn’t translate what was actually on those characters there. So it is interesting. Now, over time, this has really been an interesting dynamic. Hugh Nibley, as an example, he had the feeling that this was the catalyst approach when he put out his book, The Egyptian Endowment, about the papyri in 1975. He really did a 180, and went with the missing scroll. That that’s where the Book of Abraham took place.

The Joseph Smith Papers, the editors here, it’s interesting. Brian Hauglid, one of the editors, he did a 180 through this project. He actually believed in the missing scroll, and now he’s much more in the catalyst camp. So it’s just it’s really interesting and fascinating to see how this has developed over time there.

Now let’s talk about some of these key points. So first of all, I’ll tell you, if you look here the way the Joseph Smith Papers, they really want to emphasize what the word translation means. They define it right at the beginning. “Joseph Smith used the term translation to describe this work on the Book of Abraham. His usage, however, did not correspond to the conventional meaning of the word. The decipherment of the Egyptian language was newly underway when Smith began to study the papyri, and there is no evidence that he was acquainted with the progress that had been made. He was certainly unequipped to translate the scrolls as a scholar would. The translation of the Book of Abraham is perhaps best understood by examining the way in which Smith produced other scriptural works, namely the Book of Mormon, the Bible revision, and his revelations.”

Now let me show you a couple of quick quotes on catalyst and the missing scroll. So catalyst, as an example, I love this from Henry Eyring. “Modern scholars looking at the scrolls found nothing they considered to be similar to the Book of Abraham. I remarked at the time that such a finding didn’t bother me in the least. God doesn’t need a crib sheet in the form of a papyrus scroll to reveal Abraham’s thoughts and words to Joseph Smith with any degree of precision he considers necessary for His purposes. If the only function of the scrolls was to awaken the prophet to the idea of receiving such inspiration, they would have fulfilled their purpose.”

And then on the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham, “Joseph’s study of the papyri may have led to a revelation about key events and teachings and the life of Abraham, much as he had earlier received a revelation about the life of Moses while studying the Bible.” Which is twice as long as the book of Abraham. “This view assumes a broader definition of the words translator and translation. According to this view, Joseph’s translation was not a literal rendering of the papyri as a conventional translation would be. Rather the physical artifacts provided an occasion for meditation, reflection, and revelation. They catalyzed the process whereby God gave to Joseph Smith a revelation about the life of Abraham, even if that revelation did not directly correlate to the characters on the papyri.”

Okay, on the Church website, here’s something on the missing scroll, as an example. So this was a article Michael Rhodes, the title “Why doesn’t the translation of the Egyptian papyri found in 1967 match the text of the Book of Abraham?” “One explanation is that it may have been taken from a different portion of the papyrus rolls in Joseph Smith’s possession. In other words, we don’t have all of the papyri Joseph Smith had, and what we do have is obviously not the text in the Book of Abraham. The prophet described the papyri he used in translation in these words, ‘The record found with the mummies is beautifully written on papyrus, with black, and a small part red, ink or paint in perfect preservation.'”

“The Book of Breathings papyrus has no writing in red ink and is extremely poor state of preservation. It must’ve been in the same condition in Joseph Smith’s day when fragments of it were glued haphazardly to other totally unrelated papyri. In fact, part of the outer border effects of Facsimile Two in the Book of Abraham has some of these unrelated fragments inserted on it.”

But this is very subjective. What does this mean? Did the red fade, or was it a different part that we don’t have? What does perfect preservation mean as a subjective term? So it again, kind of can be confusing and hard to know for sure on there.

So, let’s talk about translation though. How it was done. So with the Book of Abraham and the Joseph Smith Papers, there are a couple of great quotes that I wanted to share. So. “Little is known concerning the process Joseph Smith employed in bringing forth the Book of Abraham, and only a few ambiguous observations are available. For instance, John Whitmer, an early church historian, recorded in July 1835 that Joseph Smith, by the revelation of Jesus Christ, could translate these records, which gave an account of our forefathers.”

“In a critical account published in the Painesville Republican in 1838, Joseph Smith’s former scribe Warren Parrish, noted that he had, ‘Set by Joseph’s side and pinned down the translation of the Egyptian hieroglyphs as he claimed to receive it by direct inspiration of heaven.’ In February 1842, as he was assisting in setting the type for printing the first page of the Book of Abraham to be presented to the world, Wilford Woodruff spoke of the power of Joseph the seer to reveal the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, to translate through the Urim and Thummim ancient records and hieroglyphs as old as Abraham or Adam.”

And then listen to this. This is kind of crazy from Lucy. This was reported from the Quakers who visited. “After Joseph’s death, Joseph’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith, retained the mummies and papyri and showed them to visitors. According to the published 1846 account of a group of visiting Quakers, she described a process similar to that of Parrish, one that paralleled some accounts regarding how the Book of Mormon was dictated. She said that when Joseph was reading the papyrus, he closed his eyes and held a hat over his face, and that the revelation came to him. And where the papyrus was torn, he could read the parts that were destroyed equally as well as those that were there, and that the scribe sat by him writing as he expounded.”

And then lastly here, “A few sources state that Joseph used Urim and Thummim, apparently his seer stone, during his Nauvoo-era work on the Book of Abraham. Apostle Wilford Woodruff wrote in his journal in 1842 that Joseph was translating the Book of Abraham through the Urim and Thummim. Parley P. Pratt, another member of the Quorum of the Twelve published an article in England a few months later reporting to the saints that the book of Abraham was in course of translation by the means of the Urim and Thummim.”

And then, “In reminiscence several years later, a fellow apostle Orson Pratt seemed to imply that Joseph’s method for translating the Book of Abraham was similar to the process for creating Bible revisions and delivering his later revelations, inspiration without the use of a seer stone. Orson Pratt stated that he saw Smith’s countenance lighted up as the inspiration of the Holy Ghost rested upon him dictating the great and most precious revelations now printed for our guide. ‘I saw him translating by inspiration the Old and New Testaments and the inspired Book of Abraham from Egyptian papyri.’ Differences in these accounts suggests that if Smith used the seer stone during the translation of the Book of Abraham, he did not use it at all times.”

I want you to look at this picture right now. I want you to think about the translation of the Book of Mormon. Notice a couple things here. First of all, where are the plates in this picture? They are wrapped up there. You might even say why did Joseph need the plates, in a sense, if he’s getting it through the seer stone there? They are tangible evidence for us, and the papyri may have shared this case too, for us to have even greater faith in the record in a sense of it’s the ancient nature of it there, that physical aspect of it.

But I also want you to think about this process of Joseph Smith translating the Book of Mormon, and the length of time that it took. So they did about eight pages a day, which is miraculous from any other comparison to anything you could make. But think about how long does it take you to read eight pages of the Book of Mormon. Think about it. Maybe 30 minutes. Took them all day to do that.

So what was happening? It’s not like Joseph Smith is a fax machine, and he’s just getting this text. We don’t know how… he says the gift and power of God. The way it happened, we don’t know the details, but there was clearly this process that Joseph went through, and happened with the Book of Abraham as well. Think about how long it would take you to read the Book of Abraham. Maybe 40 minutes. It’s about 11 pages. So probably just over half an hour. But look how long it took them to to do the Book of Abraham. So it really is interesting to think about the process now that they went through in trying to to do this.

There’s also a lot of other examples if you look here, this is in the Joseph Smith Papers. “According to contemporary accounts, Joseph Smith also accessed the divine in a variety of ways. When he dictated revelations, he and his followers recorded that he used seer stones, experienced heavenly visions, and received revelations by direct inspiration without use of any physical tool or artifact. When revising the Bible, Joseph Smith worked with a copy of the King James version apparently with no other instrument at hand.”

“Some revisions like minor grammatical changes may well have been considered to be the result of human revision rather than divine revelation. A subset of the changes appears to be the results of an attempt to harmonize differences among the gospels or other scriptures, and evidence also suggests that Smith and his scribes consulted Adam Clarke’s biblical commentary as they consider the text. All these processes, both intellectual and inspired, provided precedence that Joseph Smith could have drawn upon while he was producing the Book of Abraham.”

D&C 73:4 talks about how the revision of the Bible is called the translation. D&C 7, were Joseph sees the translation of the parchment of John, that he sees in a vision. It’s revealed translation of a lost record by John on there. So studying it out in your mind that process. Here’s another piece from the Joseph Smith papers. I’ll just put it on the screen. You can pause it if you’d like to to read that there. But just that process of studying out in your mind.

And then I wanna just pause the video for a second just to show you, or give you a clip that we had from Terryl Givens at a conference, the Mormon Translation Conference in 2017 up in Logan. And this is talking about the Egyptian characters, and it’s a glimpse into some of the deeper background issues that I think are helpful about how Joseph may have experienced this culturally. So listen for a sec.

Terryl Givens:
The third point I want to make is about the hieroglyph at the end of the early modern period. We’ve had a few references today to 19th Century Egyptomania. The point I want to make is that the kind of Egyptomania that I think might have been most relevant to Joseph Smith’s religious fashioning predates the Napoleonic engagement with Egypt. It goes back to the early modern period. And I’m going to just summarize this very quickly for you by saying this. The notion of hieroglyphs in particular in the Enlightenment and Romantic circles carried echoes of priestly powers of expression and discernment, but the term was also taken to imply an almost mystical concision and economy of expression unknown to modern languages. Many language theorists working in the 19th Century to try to trace language to its Adamic form were convinced that the further back you go, the more compressed and concise language becomes.

Terryl Givens:
By the time you get to the hieroglyph, which even somebody like Hegel referred to as a form of or consciousness, you have the linguistic equivalent of a kind of neutron bomb. So that the notion being that here’s this priestly emblem that has magically and mystically, oracularly condensed within itself worlds of meaning which only a priestly power can unlock and allow to blossom into fullness. And when I think of Joseph Smith laboring over the Egyptian papyri, and the whole Abrahamic cosmology that emerges out of this, it seems to me that we get a perfect understanding of how the hieroglyph was understood. If we step in back of Joseph Smith and try to look toward the future through lens rather than has been the norm, standing at a point of modernity and looking back at him and evaluating him through the prism of Egyptology and modern linguistics.

Terryl Givens:
And so I just had a number of these, and we don’t need to read through them, but in each of these cases you have major figures starting in the 18th century moving forward, poets, philosophers of history, and philosophers and others who fastened on this idea of the hieroglyph as this powerful, powerful mechanism of communication that is more powerful than any normal linguistic form of utterance. And I can’t imagine Joseph Smith not being kind of immersed in that cultural language of the hieroglyph.

So I think that’s fascinating what Terryl has to say about that. And it’s interesting when you look at the Joseph Smith Papers project, you can really see how they were developing the grammar and alphabet of the Egyptian languages. They were trying to understand and interpret it. But they had this thing, it’s called five degrees. So they really tried to… each degree up in interpreting the characters, to get deeper and deeper understanding they could apply to that. It’s fascinating there as part of this, maybe studying it out in your mind, and how long it took them to do this. It’s really fascinating.

Joesph Smith Papers, “The Egyptian language manuscript created by Smith and his associates while they worked with the papyri from July through about November 1835, gave the only firsthand contemporaneous evidence of how they understood the Egyptian language. Textual evidence in the manuscript indicates Smith and his clerks closely scrutinized the papyri copying characters from the papyri into notebooks or other loose sheets by adding little or no commentary.”

“Other characters were copied into the Egyptian alphabet documents, and then into the grammar and alphabet volume. But like many similar efforts at the time to unravel the mysteries of the Egyptian language, these attempts are considered by modern Egyptologists, both Latter-day Saints and others, to be of no actual value in understanding Egyptian.”

In the end, Joseph did not understand Egyptian the way we do now. Now Hugh Nibley said, “I can tell you what it says, but not what it means,” on this. So there may have been deeper meaning. And remember this is also could have been reinterpreted from 200 B.C. in the way they saw… they had a great fascination with ancient Egypt and Hebrew influence, and could have been reinterpreting some of these things. So Joseph may have been even a two step process possibly with some of that. We don’t know for sure. Okay.

Then these go on to say, “It’s unclear when in 1835 Joseph Smith began creating the existing Book of Abraham manuscripts, or what relationship the Book of Abraham manuscripts have to the Egyptian language documents. While some of the documents are clearly textually dependent upon each other, there’s also evidence of overlapping creation, false starts, and building upon previous work. The sequence of the creation of the Kirtland era Book of Abraham Manuscript, and the various manuscripts of the Egyptian language project is unknown.”

“Considerable overlap of themes exist between the Book of Abraham and the Egyptian language documents. Both have information concerning Abraham, Egypt, the Creation, Adam and Eve, Eden, astronomy and Kolob, and other stars, among other topics. Some evidence indicates that material from the grammar and alphabet volume was incorporated into at least one portion of the Book of Abraham text in Kirtland. But most of the Book of Abraham is not textually dependent on any of the extant Egyptian language documents. The inverse is also true. Most of the content in the Egyptian language documents is independent of the Book of Abraham.”

So it’s still a ton of confusion about how this was all happening. But I will tell you this, the Joseph Smith Paper editors do a great job showing this at the Maxwell Institute at BYU, that if you look at this Facsimile One, when it was obtained, the characters that were shown on the side of it, they essentially looked at the Book of Abraham transcript, and it looked like they were going right in order with how the hieroglyphs were right next to this Facsimile One here. So they really felt that this was an attempt, that they were really trying to use these characters in this.

And that what we have, these were privileged pieces here, that the Book of Abraham wasn’t on this missing scroll that did… there was a missing scroll. It did get burned up. But that what we have was actually the catalyst for Joseph to really receive these revelations and they were trying to understand it. Even though it doesn’t make sense to modern Egyptologists, it was a catalyst for them to understand these things.

Now on the flip side, the others will say, well now maybe this came after the fact, and they were trying to reverse engineer and try and figure this all out after Joseph had received it. From all this documentation, there’s no way you can conclusively decide which way it was per se there. And then I’ll let you pause this if you want. This also just talks about how even a text next to a facsimile didn’t mean that it had to go with the text per se. On there. a lot of good evidence for that. And then love to finish up with a few other key things.

So some key insightful quotes from Joseph Smith showing how involved he really was. Some say, well maybe this Egyptian paper project, Joseph wasn’t involved as much. But in 1835, in July, he says, “The remainder of this month, I was continuously engaged in translating an alphabet to the Book of Abraham, and arranging a grammar of the Egyptian language as practiced by the ancients.”

Then in October 1835, “This afternoon I labored on the Egyptian alphabet in company with brothers, Oliver Cowdery and W.W Phelps, and during the research, the principles of astronomy as understood by Father Abraham and the ancients unfolded to our understanding the particulars of which will appear here after.” And then in March 1842 in a letter, Joseph said, “I am now very busily engaged in translating, and therefore cannot give as much time to public matters as I could wish.”

So historically, a lot of times that people thought it all happened in 1835. This is pretty clear he was translating also in 1842. This was well after the Kirtland Egyptian papers project had been done. And some of the Hebrew that they had studied in 1836 showed up in these later chapters three, four, and five from the Nauvoo period. Okay.

Last couple of things here. So the Book of Abraham was actually published in the Times and Seasons over a couple of different volumes. There was more promised to come. It never actually came. And if you look at the end of the Book of Abraham, it seems very cut off at the end. So we never received that further information. Also last line here, “Smith and others also had conversations about finishing and printing the grammar and alphabet volume, but it was never published.”

Now I want to pause for a second and show you this video clip of Robin Jensen, one of the editors on the Joseph Smith Papers, and how we can maybe understand some of this in a way that we can really relate to. And I think it really resonated with me when I heard this. So I’m going to share this with you.

Robin Jensen:
But I think the principle is true. Let’s say for instance that parents have a sick child. They want to receive a revelation on how to make their child better. They are not going to only pray the illness away. They of course, they’re going to consult medical professionals. They’re going to do research. They’re going to talk to friends, talk to others that may have had similar issues. In other words, they’re confronted this problem, they’re going to approach it both on an intellectual basis and a revelatory basis. The parents do all of that. They study, they pray, they receive a revelation. There’s something that the Lord gives them that they do, and it heals the child. It’s a miracle.

Robin Jensen:
This I hope isn’t too far afield of what we’ve experienced in our own personal revelation. What happens to those parents when, after the fact they found out that the doctors that they consulted were actually not doctors. They were charlatans. What if they found out that the WebMD address that they looked at was full of baloney? In other words, what if the basis upon which they base their revelatory process was not accurate? Does that invalidate the revelation itself?

Robin Jensen:
In other words, how much of our cultural assumptions are tied up in the revelations that we receive? We’ve talked a little bit about seer stones. I think if you’ve been paying attention the last couple of years, you’re aware that seer stones have been in the news recently. Joseph Smith used seer stones to translate the Book of Mormon. When I talk about seer stones, I as a historian, I’m deeply interested in those things. They capture a worldview, a culture that is so deeply interesting, fascinating.

Robin Jensen:
But on a personal level, seer stones are weird. I hope that’s okay to say. Growing up in the Church, when I turned eight I was baptized. My parents did not say, “Congratulations, you’re baptized. Here’s your seer stone. This is how you approach deity.” It’s not how I was raised. When I was confronted with a problem, I didn’t put a rock in a hat and look at it. Maybe some of you have that experience. That’s foreign to me.

Robin Jensen:
What I was taught was I should kneel down, fold my arms, bow my head, and close my eyes. Potentially an equally strange thing to someone not of that culture, right? We’re all taught to approach the divine, and we have different ways of doing that. Even amongst us, largely Wasatch Front members of the Church. We think that we’re kind of uniform, but we’re actually not. We all have differing ways to approach deity, and I find that, as a member of the church, rich and rewarding. To me, that shows that we have a loving Heavenly Father who is willing to talk to us based upon our cultural assumptions.

Robin Jensen:
If we have certain thoughts or ideas about how God works in our lives, God might actually work that way. My mom has a testimony of dreams. She believes that God talks to her through dreams. That is not my experience. Dreams for me, mean that I have had weird food the night before. I don’t believe that God talks to me through dreams. I’m not, however, going to tell my mom that you need to not talk like that because that’s weird. God talks to me through scholarly articles. I don’t know how many of you have that experience. Maybe I’m a little weird.

Robin Jensen:
When Joseph Smith first received visions, the angels didn’t come and say, “Hey Joseph, you’ve got a great work in store, but you got to ditch the rock.” God was willing to work through Joseph Smith’s understanding, his worldview to bring about important messages. Okay, we have a scripture for this, right? 2 Nephi. “For the Lord God, giveth light unto the understanding, for he speaketh unto men according to their language, unto their understanding.” I believe that that is not just English. God is not a native English speaker, right? But I think that God also not just knows different languages, he knows different cultures. He knows how we can approach him. Okay.

Okay. I hope you enjoyed that. Last couple of issues real quick that people will bring up. One is that it says that this came from the hand of Abraham. And so a quote here from Hugh Nibley, “Two important and peculiar aspects of ancient authorship must be considered when we are told that a writing is by the hand of Abraham or anybody else. One is that according to Egyptian Hebrew thinking in a copy of a book originally written by Abraham would be regarded and designated as the very work of his hand forever after, no matter how many reproductions had been made and handed down throughout the years. The other is that no matter who did the writing originally, it was Abraham who commissioned or directed the work. He would take the credit for the actual writing of the document, whether he penned it or not.”

So I think if the scroll was a missing a scroll issue, this may have been from 200 B.C. copy, copy, copy, and they viewed it as from Abraham. That’s who essentially wrote it. If it was the catalyst theory and Joseph received it, that’s how Joseph felt. This was directly from Abraham. So either way, no issue there in my mind.

The last one is anachronisms, or things that are out of place in the text. As an example, the word pharaoh. We view that fine today, but that was not the way it was said. It was more the Egyptian king back in Abraham’s day. The word pharaoh came about in 1200 BC. So that would be an example. Critics would pound on that saying, this is an anachronism. So again, if you think about this, how Joseph goes, he recontextualized for our day. The Lord speaks to us in our day, adapts to our language. That’s our language. That’s how we would receive it. Also, if it comes back to the missing scroll, and it was 200 B.C., that’s how they received it as well. So again, there’s very good ways to be able to understand these things in I think a powerful way thinking these through.

So last thing I want to say is stay flexible. See the big picture even how some of these scholars will turn and change maybe the way they view this. At the end of the day, we have to still step back and say, we have to really look at the big picture, and see that the test of Joseph being a prophet, the test of the Restoration is the Book of Mormon. Not the Book of Abraham, it’s the Book of Mormon. And Moroni 10 says it’s up to us to find this out.

I love this quote here from President Benson. “We do not have to prove the Book of Mormon is true. The book is its own proof. All we need to do is read it and declare it. The Book of Mormon is not on trial. The people of the world, including the members of the Church, are on trial as to what they will do with the second witness for Christ.” And then Hugh Nibley. “The evidence that will prove or disprove the Book of Mormon does not exist.”

But again, we can find out through that spiritual witness. And I loved the talk Elder Lawrence Corbett just gave down at BYU in a devotional where he talked about primary questions and secondary questions. And I view the Book of Mormon as our witness of the Restoration. And that primary question, he says, “If you answer the secondary questions, they don’t necessarily answer the primary questions, but if you answer the primary questions, your lens of the way you look at the secondary questions can really change.”

And that’s how I view especially this issue with the Book of Abraham in particular. And I have to close with this wonderful quote from Elder Maxwell. Elder Maxwell wrote in his book Plain and Precious Things, “It is the author’s opinion that all the scriptures, including the Book of Mormon, will remain in the realm of faith. Science will not be able to prove or disprove holy writ. However enough plausible evidence will come forth to prevent scoffers from having a field day, but not enough to remove the requirements of faith. Believers must be patient during such unfolding.”

And that’s why I did an Evidences video on the Book of Abraham. Please watch it right now. It is fantastic in my mind, and it shows a lot of the evidences, like how could Joseph have gotten so many of these things right? He got a lot of things that were very confusing, but God’s also going to give us some of those witnesses as well. Hope you enjoyed the video. Subscribe for more.

Resources:

Books:

The Pearl of Greatest Price: Mormonism’s Most Controversial Scripture by Terryl Givens

The Story of the Book of Abraham by H Donl Peterson

An Introduction to the Book of Abraham by John Gee

The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Eqyptian Endowment by Hugh Nibley

An Approach to the Book of Abraham by Hugh Nibley

Traditions About the Early Life of Abraham – John Tvedtnes, Brian Hauglid & John Gee

Chapters in the following books – No Weapon Shall Prosper, A Reason for Fatih, Shaken Faith Syndrome, Bamboozled by the CES Letter, The Threshing Floor of Faith

“Lets Talk About The Book of Abraham” by Kerry Muhlestein

BYU Studies Quarterly Volume 61, Number 4 (2022) was entirely dedicated to the Book of Abraham (authors: Stephen Smoot John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein and John Thompson) – it is 300+ pages and is a serious deep dive on the topic. Here is a direct link to the pdf of that publication (physical copy is available for order online): https://byustudies.byu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/61-4final.pdf

Podcasts:

LDS Perspectives Episode 97: The Book of Abraham with Robin Scott Jensen (co-editer of Joseph Smith Papers) https://www.ldsperspectives.com/2018/…

LDS Perspectives Episode 51: Joseph’s Study of Hebrew and the Book of Abraham – Matthew Grey https://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/…

LDS Perspectives Episode 13: Jospeh Smith’s Papyri – John Gee https://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/…

Videos:

BYU Maxwell Instituted presentation by Robin Jensen & Brian Hauglid (JSP Editors) – ‘A Window in to Joseph Smith’s Translation’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tznpR…

Jensen & Hauglid at Benchmark Books when the JSP Rev & Translations Vol 4 was published: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3-SK…

Terryl Givens – Translation in the 19th Century: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYkEP…

LDS Church History – Book of Abraham Translation (with Robin Jensen): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F19d5…

LDS Truth Claims – Episode 20 – Book of Abraham Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8KRa…

LDS Truth Claims – Episode 21 – Book of Abraham Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPPH2…

Fairmormon produced video on the Book of Abraham (‘A Most Remarkable Book – Evidence for the Book of Abraham’): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jGad…

Many Fairmormon conference videos available upon search

Ensign articles:

https://www.lds.org/study/ensign/2018…

https://www.lds.org/study/ensign/1988…

https://www.lds.org/study/ensign/1997…

Websites:

Church Website:

https://www.lds.org/topics/translatio…

https://www.lds.org/study/history/top…

https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/int…

Other Websites:

https://www.fairmormon.org/blog/2020/…

https://www.pearlofgreatpricecentral….

https://bookofmormoncentral.org/blog/…

https://interpreterfoundation.org/blo…

https://journal.interpreterfoundation…

Joseph Smith Papers – Revelations & Translations – Vol 4, Book of Abraham: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/int…

Book of Abraham Project: http://www.atik.com.mx

Jeff Lindsay’s Mormonity Website: https://mormanity.blogspot.com

January 21, 2020 By Jeff Roundy Leave a Comment

Volunteerism: Independent Study – Evidences

This video discusses, among other things, a recent study (the largest of its kind) by the University of Pennsylvania regarding giving and serving behaviors of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Comparisons are made to other active volunteers and the conclusions drawn by the researchers are another compelling evidence of the restoration.

On this Evidences video, I want to talk about volunteering, volunteerism. And if you think about when Christ was on the earth, he talked about service, service, service constantly. The two great commandments, if you remember, love God and love your neighbor. How are we to love our neighbor? He gave the Good Samaritan as the symbol and example of that.

How do we love God? Well in Matthew 25, Christ talks about at the judgment bar, essentially having those inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. And then he says, “For I was hungered and ye gave me meat. I was thirsty and ye gave me drink. I was a stranger and ye took me in, naked and ye clothed me. I was sick and ye visited me. I was in prison and ye came unto me.” And the person says, “When did we do any of that to you?” And he says, “In as much as ye have done it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” So service and volunteerism would be a key thing to look at as one of the evidences of the Restoration.

So first of all, a study done in 2010. The Corporation for National and Community Service if you look on the screen here. They did a study of volunteering by state, and they did this by population so a per capita study.

Number one in the nation was Utah. Sixty percent of Utah are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The average was 89.2 volunteer hours per person. Number two was Alaska at only 55 hours. Relative to Utah, quite a drop down. A very significant difference there. Now we want to get a study though that is much more focused on just members of the Church, not as a state of Utah, but a focus study on Latter-Day Saints particularly and focus on a goal of …

There was a very large study that was done by the University of Pennsylvania. I’ll link this in the video, but it was called Called to Serve: The Prosocial Behavior of Active Latter-day Saints. And this was a very significant study, the largest of its kind that’s been done. And the scope and nature of this was on giving and volunteering of members of the Church. It was different from other studies in the size, 2,664 people. They were permitted to collect data during the church services so they were ensured to get mostly active members, and it had a very narrow focus, focused on, again, just volunteering and giving and really wanted to focus in on giving above even tithing and what kind of volunteering was being done in all different types of categories.

Also the method. They did 30 qualitative interviews, one to three hours, to help develop a questionnaire that was then used for these nearly 2,700 people. They went across four different time zones to try and get a representative sample. They did other statistical controlling that I’ll get into in just a minute, and then they did a baseline. There was a study done, you’ll see it in the show notes, of active volunteers in the United States on average had served for four hours a month. The average American, it was two hours if you’re an active volunteer, including even religious service, four hours.

So let’s take a look at the first slide here on this study. Now this is actually an infographic that was done here, and this was done by the Church actually. If you look here, the total number of hours are broken out into four categories. So for average active Latter-day Saints, 242 hours in religious volunteering for the Church, 96.2 hours volunteering for congregational social care efforts sponsored by the Church, 55.7 hours, volunteering for community social care efforts sponsored by the Church, and 34 hours volunteering for non-church affiliated charitable causes. So the total, about 428 hours a year.

Now remember the active volunteer in the US, the baseline there was 48 volunteer hours per year. So just putting it side by side. I did this slide just so you can see visually, it’s basically a nine-fold increase in the volunteerism amongst Active Latter-day Saints versus active volunteers in the United States. I thought that was extremely compelling data there.

Then if you were to look at … They had a statistic here combining all four categories of volunteering, shows that the average respondent gave 428 hours annually. “The Independent Sector 2011 study assessed the value an hour of volunteer labor to be $21.36. Based on this hourly rate, an active Latter-day Saint provides, through volunteering and annual social contribution valued at $9,140.”

Now they also wanted to look at charitable donations, and they did notice that they had some parts on tithing, but that wasn’t their big focus, but they did point out that 88% fully tithed, which the statistics showed, and there’s a link again in the program and I did a whole video on tithing, but this kind of validated some of the data from the tithing video, but only 4% of Americans tithe fully today. 88% in the study tithed fully. So it was fascinating.

But they went on to say, “Well how much do you give outside of tithing?” So these were charitable donations. So if you look on the slide here, $650 went to welfare donations, to the church for welfare distribution of various kinds, fast offerings or humanitarian as an example. And then non church-related charitable donations, $1,171 a year average donations there.

So the conclusion, a couple of points I wanted to pull out from the conclusion of their report. In the summary section it says, “This is the first study that focuses on giving and volunteering practices of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that has been carried out within LDS wards by a non-church-affiliated university. This unique combination allowed a researcher from the University of Pennsylvania who was not Mormon to reach 2,664 church-going Latter-day Saints. The LDS church permitted the study to be carried out, but all funding came from the University of Pennsylvania. We analyzed levels of giving and volunteering by statistically controlling for four variables: region of the country, level of education, income, and gender.”

“Active members of the LDS church volunteer and donate significantly more than the average American and are even more generous in time and money than the upper quintile or top 20% of religious people in America. Overall, we found that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are the most prosocial members of American society. Regardless of where they live, they are very generous with their time and money. Through a theology of obedience and sacrifice and a strong commitment to tithing and service, Latter-day Saints are model citizens.” Love that.

All right now, excited about a couple of other things. JustServe, a phenomenal new website and app that’s a few years old, that is just doing a phenomenal job. The Church created this and now it’s being used all over. It was the United States and Canada. Now it’s expanding worldwide and it’s bringing together people that want to volunteer and nonprofit organizations that need help. It’s a place where they can both meet for free essentially to merge together. Just a fantastic, fantastic operation. If you could only volunteer on Thursday nights for one hour, you can put that in and find a radius within 10 miles of where you live and find a service opportunity. It’s fantastic.

Now look at this quote from President Ballard. “We believe that there is a power behind JustServe,” said President M. Russell Ballard, acting President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. “The power comes as a result of doing what Jesus Christ would do if He was here. We have felt the inspiration of Heavenly Father during the development of JustServe, and we are thrilled with the opportunity of doing this noble work alongside our dear friends in the community who represent all people and organizations who share the desire to serve and bless the lives of those in need.”

So JustServe was started in San Jose in 2011, and then expanded as a pilot effort in Denver, Colorado, and Dallas, Texas in 2013. By 2015, it had been approved for all the Church’s administrative areas in the United States and Canada, except Utah. And in late 2016 it was approved for three areas in Utah. As of March, 2018, JustServe has 355,000 registered volunteers, 11,455 current projects, and more than 54,000 projects completed, and now the Church has began to train JustServe specialists in the United Kingdom, Australia, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. And people using this are not of our faith as well. It’s just combining people, it’s just a way to bring people together to serve.

Now you may have heard of the Helping Hands or the Yellow Angels, many have referred them as, in helping humanitarian efforts when there’s a crisis out there and the deployment of this. I’m going to show you a quick little video clip on this. First of all.

Speaker 2:
Hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and fires are all examples of challenges that are very difficult for people to deal with alone. When a disaster happens, Church leaders who live near the disaster area call Church headquarters to let them know what help they need. Workers load trucks with whatever supplies they need, tools, water, clothes, food and more.

Speaker 2:
Members of the Church from near the disaster area come together to volunteer with time and muscle power to clean up messes, feed the hungry, and help where needed.

Speaker 2:
Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints join forces with other groups to help people no matter who they are, where they come from, or what they believe in.

So exciting to see all of those service efforts where it’s really needed. I’m going to actually show you a two video screens of the Church Newsroom website of all just headlines regarding Helping Hand projects of different stories on here.

So if you look on this first page here, a handful of different things. Amazing, this line. “Mormon volunteers gave more than 140,000 hours of service to Hurricane Sandy victims.” “Mormons donating 400,000 trees to help Haiti.” Just some examples.

And now here’s another screen. You can see on there. It’s just exciting to see all the different work that’s going on in the Helping Hands program as well.

Hope you enjoyed that Evidences video. Subscribe for more.

Resources:

Studies:

Summary of the University of Pennsylvania Study http://planphilly.com/uploads/media_i…

Articles:

https://www.lds.org/church/news/justs…

https://www.mormonnewsroompg.org/arti…

Videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ9TI…

Websites:

https://www.justserve.org

Jeff Roundy

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