What’s Wrong with the Topical Guide?

March 11, 2013 By 10 Comments

Last year I suggested some changes that I would make to the LDS Scriptures, which included getting rid of the Topical Guide.  There was some resistance to this recommendation in the comments. With the recent announced changes to the LDS scriptures, I thought now would be a good time to revisit this topic.  The new edition of the LDS scriptures makes no substantive changes to the Topical Guide, only corrected reference errors, formatting changes, and a few other typos.  (The list of changes appears on page 11-12 of this document.)

[Read more...]

Filed Under: 2013 Scriptures 10 Comments

The 2013 Adjustments to the Book of Mormon: Accuracy Delayed

March 6, 2013 By 10 Comments

This post is written by guest contributor, Grant Hardy.

It is a weighty responsibility to decide how God’s word should be presented to the world, and the Church takes this charge very, very seriously. The recent adjustments to the official standard works include many welcome corrections to the headings of the Doctrine and Covenants, but otherwise the revisions are quite minimal. As Elder Neil L. Andersen explained, “members should not feel that they need to purchase a new set of scriptures . . .  Changes to the scriptural text include spelling, minor typographical, and punctuation corrections” (my emphasis). This perhaps makes sense in the case of the King James Version, which continues to be what it has been for the last 400 years, and for the Doctrine and Covenants, where the textual scholarship of the Joseph Smith Papers is ongoing. Yet it represents a lost opportunity for the Book of Mormon in light of Royal Skousen’s completed analysis of textual variants (in six books) and the publication of his reconstruction of the earliest text.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: 2013 Scriptures, Book of Mormon 10 Comments

Approaching Antiquity: BYU Church History Symposium 2013

March 5, 2013 By 4 Comments

In case you haven’t seen it, take a break from Wheat and Tares Apologizing and attend the BYU Church History Symposium on Joseph Smith’s Study of the ancient world. Richard Bushman, Sam Brown, Matt Bowman, and many more! Looks to be, um, historic!

Filed Under: Bible, Book of Mormon, BYU, Extra-Biblical Literature, History, LDS Church History, Mormon Studies, Scripture, Uncategorized 4 Comments

Masculinity and Mormon Apologetics

March 5, 2013 By 51 Comments

We are pleased to have this guest entry by Mrs. Silence Dogood, a friend of the blog.

Have y’all heard about the latest squabble amongst apologists and academics?

Anyways, the main lesson that has seemed to come out from the most recent spat is the vast and increasing divide between the two fields. Though someone can certainly use scholarly tools in making apologetic arguments, and someone can certainly become too apologetic in their scholarship, the works of the current generation of Mormon scholarship and Mormon apologetics are leading in drastically different directions; the former is focused on integration within broader fields, collaborations with competing ideas, and relevancy to areas outside of Mormonism proper, the latter is trenchant in resuscitating old debates, responding to dated critiques, and fighting tired battles. Perhaps the major source of division is the outlook toward outside critics and collaboration with those who don’t share the Mormon worldview. As Richard Bushman put it in a 2007 Journal of Mormon History article, “The apologists want to war with the critics; the historians ask them out to lunch.”

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Uncategorized 51 Comments

adjustment to the book of abraham in the new edition of the scriptures

March 4, 2013 By 5 Comments

So you noticed the change regarding the Book of Abraham in the introduction to the Pearl of Great Price, and you want to situate it a little. Well here is a rundown of some pertinent information.

The heading to the William W. Phelps and Warren Parrish Copy of Abraham Manuscript (Summer—Fall, 1835):

Translation of the Book of Abraham written by his own hand upon papyrus and found in the CataCombs of Egypts

The heading to the Willard Richards Copy of Abraham Manuscript (early 1842):

A. Translation of Some ancient Records that have fallen into our hands, from the Catacombs of Egypt, purporting to be the writings of abraham, while he was in Egypt, called the Book ofAbraham, written by his own hand upon papyrus,

THE. BOOK. of A,BR,A,HAM.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: 2013 Scriptures 5 Comments

Updated LDS Scriptures: An Occasional Series

March 4, 2013 By 1 Comment

As a group of people that is generally pretty interested in the scriptures, we were pleased to learn of the new edition (2013) of the LDS scriptures announced on Friday.  The link provides a wealth of information about the new edition, including a discussion of the history of the LDS editions, and detailed documents noting every change made to the text and headers.  The transparency of this new change is extremely useful.  New maps and study aids are provided as well.  In early commentary, LDS audiences have welcomed the new edition, even if most of the changes are extremely minor.

One of the primary areas of attention so far is the addition of explanatory headers for the two Official Declarations in the Doctrine and Covenants.  These have largely been received enthusiastically, though there has been some critical assessment on their depiction of the past.  Other important changes to the headers in the Doctrine and Covenants reflect the historical work of the Joseph Smith Papers Project.

Here at FPR, we plan to look more broadly at what was changed, as well as what was kept in the standard works and study aids.  Obviously, they didn’t take all of my advice on this issue!   Stay tuned for some analysis of these changes in the coming weeks!

UPDATE: Posts in this series will be under the category: 2013 Scriptures.

Filed Under: 2013 Scriptures, Uncategorized 1 Comment

Wheat and Tares Apologetics

March 1, 2013 By 65 Comments

Apologetics has obviously been on my mind recently. In previous posts I discussed how certain kinds of apologetics might be pursued at places such as BYU. Indeed, I believe that religious institutions such as BYU should produce apologetics in the sense of scholarship that explains, explores, and defends the truth claims of Mormonism. I also believe that this scholarship should be fit for a university, meaning that it should largely meet the criteria of scholarship within the broader academic community.

In this post, I’d like to discuss one kind of apologetics. An apologetics represented in pieces such as Greg Smith’s review of Mormon Stories. This kind of apologetics is one part of the classic FARMS approach to apologetics. And unlike other parts of the classic FARMS approach, this approach is inappropriate for places such as BYU. I might even go so far as to venture that a determination to pursue this approach, despite its shortcomings, is largely responsible for the desire to replace some of the leadership at the Maxwell Institute.

The kind of apologetics I want to discuss is what I call Wheat and Tares Apologetics. Wheat and Tares Apologetics is aimed at sifting the good guys from the bad guys. It aims to answer the basic question–is This Person/Organization a trusted source for learning about Mormonism? Or, more broadly, should LDSs trust This Person/Organization? Since apologetics tends to be done in defense of a perceived threat, most of Wheat and Tares Apologetics is geared toward showing why some individual or organization is a “tare” rather than a “wheat.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Apologetics, Mormon Studies 65 Comments

Israel’s Past Without the Bible

February 25, 2013 By 8 Comments

It may come as a surprise to some that there are texts from ancient Israel, Judah, and its environs that are not found in the Bible. There are also a number of texts from (especially) ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia that make reference to Biblical persons, places, and events. Such epigraphic texts are important for many reasons. I want to discuss some aspects of why these texts are important in what follows, and to give some basic information with respect to some of the more prominent epigraphic discoveries that date to the period before Judah’s fall in 586/7 B.C.E. This latter task will be spread out over several posts, and I will proceed in roughly chronological order in my presentation of the material. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Bible, Doctrine, Extra-Biblical Literature, History, Scripture, Speculation, Theology, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

Apologists at War: Religious Studies is Not the Enemy

February 21, 2013 By 17 Comments

The Maxwell Institute’s removal of Daniel Peterson as editor of the Mormon Studies Review continues to raise the issue of the appropriateness of apologetics at institutions such as BYU (for a more recent discussion, see here)–on the one hand BYU has a mission to “build the kingdom” so to speak, and on the other hand BYU is working to establish a legitimate academic presence in fields such as religious studies. There are some that see these two goals as largely exclusive of each other. This comment left on William Hamblin’s blog is a prime example: [Read more...]

Filed Under: BYU, Uncategorized 17 Comments

Peter, James, and … Lazarus?

February 18, 2013 By 17 Comments

I recently ran across a hypothesis promulgated anew by Ben Witherington III that attempts to deal with the main issues about the authorship and uniqueness of the fourth gospel.[1] There is much of interest in the problem and proposed solution. First, an overview of the problem and proposed solution, then, its implications for Latter-day Saints.

The problem:

Of crucial interest is the mention of a “beloved disciple” in this highly unique gospel. Since antiquity the author of this gospel, who according to ch. 21 is the Beloved Disciple, has been a matter of some debate. By the late second century Irenaeus made the winning case for John son of Zebedee, apparently against questions raised as to this gospel’s apostolic authorship because of its affinities to and popularity in Gnosticism. John is never mentioned in the fourth gospel, though in the epilogue (Jn 21) the “sons of Zebedee” are mentioned once. Apparently the only thing this identification has going for it is the fact that it never mentions John son of Zebedee by name and that Peter and John are often described together in the other gospels and in Acts, similar to the connection to Peter and the Beloved Disciple in the fourth gospel.

The huge problem with this identification is that John (son of Zebedee), a Galilean fisherman present in the other gospels at key events such as the transfiguration and the agony in the garden, doesn’t mention these events, nor does he mention the bulk of Jesus’ Galilean ministry! The author focuses instead on Jerusalem and its environs. And the author is clearly (at least clear to those who read Greek) not the same as the author of the book of Revelation. And the presence of Peter and John together seems in this gospel to be more of a rivalry than in the other gospels: the Beloved Disciple beats Peter to the tomb, and Peter seems to be hung up on the rumor that the BD would not die in Jn 21. It also seems that there is evidence from Papias, a church father who wrote around AD 100, that John was martyred earlier than the gospel of John was written in the 90s (see discussion in BW3’s post). [Read more...]

Filed Under: Bible 17 Comments