By René Krywult
This week’s Come, Follow Me lesson starts with the following words:
The afternoon of June 27, 1844, found Joseph and Hyrum Smith in jail once again, accompanied by John Taylor and Willard Richards. They believed they were innocent of any crime, but they submitted to arrest, hoping to prevent violence against the Saints in Nauvoo.
There were several reasons for this arrest: [Read more…] about Come, Follow Me Week 48 – Doctrine and Covenants 135-136
The Book of Abraham is an incredible book that contains many truths about the gospel. But there are often questions about the Book of Abraham that can be difficult to understand or answer. There is a feeling among some critics that the Book of Abraham is evidence that the Church is not true.
With this in mind, we are pleased to announce a video streaming fireside “Ask the Egyptologist” with Dr. John Gee. Dr. Gee has a Ph.D. in Egyptology from Yale University and has been prolific in academic publication. The fireside will take place on December 1st at 7 pm Mountain Time. For those in other time zones where it’s not convenient to watch it live, it will be recorded for later viewing.
Please submit your questions to him now, and then he will do his best to answer as many of the questions as possible.
This is, however, an exclusive event that is only available to our sustaining members and to our larger donors. To become a sustaining member you can sign up here for an annual membership, or here for a monthly subscription.
We hope to see you there!
About John Gee:
John Gee is the William (Bill) Gay Research Professor in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University. He has authored over one-hundred and fifty publications including three books and editor of eight books and has edited a peer-reviewed international professional journal. He has served on the board of trustees of national and international organizations.
The FAIR Bookstore is currently carrying two of John’s books: An Introduction to the Book of Abraham and Saving Faith: How Families Protect, Sustain, and Encourage Faith
Podcast: Download (11.0MB)
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This podcast series features past FAIR Conference presentations. This presentation is from our 2021 conference held in August. If you would like to watch the presentations from the conference, you can still purchase the video streaming.
Mike Ash, Rethinking Revelation and the Human Element in Scripture: The Prophet’s Role as Creative Co-Author
Mike’s book is available from the FAIR bookstore.
Michael R. Ash, a FairMormon member for more than twenty years, has been featured in nearly 90 podcasts and 30 videos. In more than two decades of writing LDS-themed material, and as a former weekly columnist for Mormon Times (owned by the Deseret News), his works include over 160 on-line articles, as well as articles in periodicals such as the Ensign, Sunstone, Neal A. Maxwell Institute’s FARMS Review, and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.
Michael is also the author of four LDS books. In 2008 FAIR published his book Shaken Faith Syndrome: Strengthening One’s Testimony in the Face of Criticism and Doubt (which is available in English, German, and Italian). Mike quickly followed this publication with his second book, Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting the Prophet Joseph Smith. In 2015 Michael published Bamboozled by the CES Letter: An honest response to the .pdf pamphlet entitled “Letter to a CES Director”, and this year he has introduced his newest book, Rethinking Revelation and the Human Element in Scripture: The Prophet’s Role as Creative Co-Author.
As I read Doctrine and Covenants 134 today I was reminded of a Swedish debate article I encountered back in 2012. It was written by Björn Ulvaeus, band member of the pop group Abba. On a personal note, I have greatly admired Ulvaeus’ talents throughout the years, especially his lyrical compositions. This time however, his words were less uplifting, at least from a Latter-day Saint perspective.
Ulvaeus, who is also a representative of the Humanist Association in Sweden, commented on the presidential race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. In essence, the musician presented a rather gloomy picture of the world should Mitt Romney be elected president. It would be a ”doomsday” indeed. Ulvaeus compared the ”fundamentalist” Romney with Iran’s past president, the fundamentalist Ahmadinejad, and claimed that the Mormons, like the Islamists, wanted their religion to govern the laws of the land. And if that happened, good riddance to the rights and liberties of the people. [Read more…] about Come, Follow Me Week 47 – Doctrine and Covenants 133-134
By Brian C. Hales
Doctrine and Covenants section 132 is undoubtedly the most controversial of all of Joseph Smith’s revelations because it mentions the practice of plural marriage. Ironically, it is also one of the least discussed of all of Joseph’s official teachings for the same reason.
The 2014 Gospel Topics Essay discussing plural marriage encourages a new transparency on this subject and the historical and doctrinal references within the revelation. Yet, talking about polygamy more frequently does not necessarily make it any easier to understand or accept. Why? Because it favors men and is impossible to defend it as being fair.
Not only is polygamy here in mortality very difficult to practice, an associated fear involves the possibility of eternal plural marriage, which from our current view might be considered eternal unfairness. I have a daughter who has harbored the anxiety that if she dies before her husband (to whom she is sealed) passes away, he might remarry in the temple and she would become an eternal polygamist without her choosing. Here’s a few thoughts on the subject: [Read more…] about Come, Follow Me Week 46 – Doctrine and Covenants 129-132 (additional post)
by V.H. Cassler
If you were not reading carefully, you may have missed an extraordinary bit of commentary by Elder Quentin L. Cook in the July 2020 Ensign. Speaking about how Church history can be a source of strength and inspiration, Elder Cook stated [I’ve added some highlights]: [Read more…] about Come, Follow Me Week 46 – Doctrine and Covenants 129-132
By Cassandra Hedelius
It’s difficult to write this post, because the subject is baptism for the dead, and my grandpa is dying, and I love him, and he’s never accepted the gospel. His death from old age isn’t tragic, but it would be if we didn’t have so much revelation from God about His plan. For this, I thank God for prophets.
When Joseph’s older brother Alvin died, a minister preached at his funeral and “intimated very strongly that [Alvin] had gone to hell, for Alvin was not a church member.”[1] This was obviously a tactless thing to say to a grieving family, but based on the knowledge that minister had, he wasn’t really wrong! The Bible is pretty clear that baptism is an eternal necessity. What that minister needed wasn’t sensitivity training, but more revealed truth. Let’s take the charitable view that he would have been ecstatic to learn that Alvin was not in fact damned, and that God is perfectly able to overcome paltry obstacles like people dying before having a chance to accept the truth. [Read more…] about Come, Follow Me Week 45 – Doctrine and Covenants 125-128
By Cassandra Hedelius
In 1840, John C. Bennett was baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ. His wife and children didn’t come with him to Nauvoo, and it’s not clear what his original motive was for posing as a bachelor instead of being truthful about his family status. His eventual motive was extremely clear: as Bennett ingratiated himself to Joseph and other leaders, and gained high religious and civic positions, he lied to women in order to take advantage of them sexually. Bennett is one of the earliest and most egregious cases of a conundrum we’re each likely to sometime face: if the church is guided by revelation, how do bad people fool its leaders? [Read more…] about Come, Follow Me Week 44 – Doctrine and Covenants 124
By Cassandra Hedelius
It was the first time in my life I felt real terror.
On a lovely spring day in 1999, I was a high school sophomore eating lunch. My school was about twenty miles from Columbine. I vaguely overheard some snippets of conversation about something frightening. We finished lunch and went to class, and the vague murmurs coalesced into rumors–murder. Shooting. We were locked down in our classrooms. The teacher told us there was an attack at another school and a possible threat at ours. Finally they said to go straight outside, do not stop at your locker, get on your bus and go home. I watched the news, horrified, all evening. I didn’t sleep well, and imagined armed killers in the hallway.
The next morning in Seminary, it was my turn to choose a scripture for the devotional. I hadn’t prepared ahead of time, and I was still upset and afraid. I aimlessly opened the Doctrine and Covenants and read: [Read more…] about Come, Follow Me Week 43 – Doctrine and Covenants 121-123
Facsimile 3, like Facsimile 1, is difficult to classify because it doesn’t have the standard features that it should if it was a “common” scene “discovered elsewhere in Egypt.” Once again, also just like Facsimile 1, there are accusations of the facsimile being “altered” and “wrong”. As Quentin Barney explains:
The assumption that parts of Facsimile No. 3 had been “changed” or “badly drawn” was held by the majority of individuals quoted in [Franklin] Spalding’s work. Archibald Henry Sayce, for example, argued that “the hieroglyphics, again, have been transformed into unintelligible lines,” and “hardly one of them is copied correctly.” William Flinders Petrie appeared to have trouble with both the text and the figures, stating that the figures were “badly drawn” and the text was “too badly copied.” Another claimed that “Cuts 1 and 3 are inaccurate copies of well-known scenes on funeral papyri.”
I haven’t mentioned Franklin Spalding yet, but his work will come up in a later post, so I wanted to take a quick moment to elaborate on that. Franklin Spalding was an Episcopalian Bishop who wrote to a bunch of Egyptologists about the Book of Abraham and then, in 1912, published the findings of those who responded that were critical of Joseph in a book titled Joseph Smith, Jr., as Translator: An Inquiry Conducted. B.H. Roberts, Joseph F. Smith, Hugh Nibley, and others rebutted this work, most notably in the February 1913 edition of The Improvement Era and in Nibley’s Abraham in Egypt. Jeremy Runnells quotes from several of these Egyptologists later, though, so we’ll discuss it all more than.
So, was the facsimile altered by Joseph or anyone else? We don’t know. We don’t have the original and there are no mentions of it being damaged or altered, but that’s yet another unanswerable question about the Book of Abraham. Anyway, these criticisms that the scene has been changed contribute to the fact that Facsimile 3 doesn’t fall neatly into categorization. Sometimes referred to as “the most neglected of the facsimiles,” much of what has been said about it has been incorrect.
