Bill Hamblin and I published the column below in the Deseret News for 26 December 2014.  It seems appropriate to repost it now:   In the Bible, the term “new testament” or “new covenant” first appears in Jeremiah 31:31-34. “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that... Read more

    I was cut off from the internet for a few days while on the Nile River between Luxor and Aswan in Upper Egypt, so I need to catch up on calling new items to your notice from the Interpreter Foundation.  Here are some things that have been made available online over the past few days:   ***   For the 30 December 2018 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show, the final one of the year, Martin Tanner and... Read more

    We were up early again this morning (Wednesday morning), for a return flight from Aswan to Cairo.   From the airport, we went directly to the great fourteenth-century Mosque of Sultan Hasan, just below Salah al-Din’s twelfth-century citadel and virtually in the shadow of Muhammad Ali’s nineteenth-century Ottoman-style mosque, which sits atop the citadel.   Sultan Hasan was a favorite place of ours when we lived here for four years immediately after our marriage, and I thoroughly enjoyed... Read more

    Having just returned to Cairo from Aswan, where our boat was docked opposite Elephantine Island, the subject of this article (which I published in the Deseret News on 26 June 2018) has been in my thoughts:   During the fifth century before Christ, Jewish military colonies served at various locations in Persian-occupied Egypt as mercenary garrisons. The most famous of them was located on Elephantine Island, directly opposite the ancient city of Syene (modern Aswan), where it guarded... Read more

    I published the column below in the Deseret News on 26 October 2017.  Having spent the past couple of days in and around Aswan, its subject is on my mind:   Many years ago, I was accompanying a group of tourists who were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint in Egypt. At one point, our local guide took us to a restaurant on an island in the Nile River near Aswan. Suddenly realizing where... Read more

    After several days of little or no access to the internet, I’m going to try to catch up a bit.   We began 2019 by rising very, very early to fly down to Abu Simbel, on the shore of Lake Nasser and roughly forty miles from Egypt’s border with the Sudan.  This is the famous boundary-marking temple of Ramses II that was moved when the waters building up behind the new Aswan High Dam threatened to submerge it... Read more

    Last week, I published a response to remarks that Elder Jeffrey R. Holland delivered on the evening of 10 November 2018 on the campus of Brigham Young University:   “The Interpreter Foundation and an Apostolic Charge”   In its turn, my own little essay has now begun to attract replies — some of which, I’m afraid, require comment.   First of all, my essay is being portrayed by certain folks as part of a continuing war on the Maxwell... Read more

    We were up very early on Saturday morning, well before dawn, for a flight from Cairo southward down to Luxor – in other words, from the vicinity of the Old Kingdom capital of Memphis in Lower Egypt down to the New Kingdom capital (sometimes known as Thebes) in Upper Egypt. We went directly from the Luxor International Airport past the so-called Colossi of Memnon (actually, the two massive statues of Amenhotep III that stood by the entrance to... Read more

    This article of mine appeared in the print edition of the Deseret News on Thursday, 27 December 2018, as well as in the online edition of LDS Living:   “Why Does the Book of Mormon Reference an Ominous “East Wind”?”   ***   My latest “Editor’s Introduction” to a volume of Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture has just appeared:   “The Interpreter Foundation and an Apostolic Charge”   ***   I published this article back in the Deseret... Read more

    The 23 December 2018 installment of the Interpreter Radio Show is now archived on the Interpreter Foundation website for your listening convenience.  Steve Densley, Craig Foster, Matt Bowen and Don Bradley joined together for discussion of such topics as the history of Joseph Smith and the advent of Christ:   https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-radio-show-december-23-2018/   ***   In the first issue of Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture, which appeared in 2012, Professor Louis C. Midgley published an article entitled “Atheist... Read more