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Come, Follow Me Week 44 – Doctrine and Covenants 124

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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

The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 19

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Part 19: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section J]

 

by Sarah Allen

 

This has been a long section of “questions” and we’re not quite done yet, but I think we’ll be able to wrap up the Book of Abraham section this week and move on to the next set of questions next week. I’m sure everyone’s getting ready for a change in topic by now, so it’ll be good to dive into something new.

This entire post may as well be about source bias as anything else. To start the ball rolling on this week’s group of accusations (they are less actual questions this week and more biased statements masquerading as facts), Jeremy Runnells links to a commentary video about an interview Elder Holland did for a BBC documentary (which aired in the US on PBS) on our church during Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential run.

As some quick background, John Sweeney, a reporter for the BBC, put together a documentary titled The Mormon Candidate that was…well, to put it bluntly, it was insane. It was like something out of the National Enquirer. I remember watching it and thinking, “Wait, isn’t the BBC supposed to be reputable?” You can watch the full documentary here, but I couldn’t find any clips of just Elder Holland’s interview without slanted commentary insinuating that he was lying.

The documentary was full of errors like repeatedly confusing chapels and temples, interviews with polygamists (whom we are apparently “afraid of”) and crazy ex-members who made claims about the Church having them followed, “Mormon spies” who are trained by the CIA to keep tabs on the members who are “considered dangerous,” and a very heavily edited interview with Elder Holland. Sweeney repeated the claim from The Godmakers that we believe we each get our own planet when we die, as well as that we believe we are the only chosen people of God. He claimed that the Church is in charge of the Utah state school system. He highlighted the re-drawing of Facsimile 1 by Charles Larson that a noted, non-Latter-day Saint Egyptologist called “seriously flawed.” He claimed that Joseph Smith was convicted of being a fraud in New York, which there is no evidence of. Joseph was charged, yes, but the supposed victim of his fraud, Josiah Stowell, testified in Joseph’s defense (as did several of his family members) and Stowell later joined the Church, in which he remained a faithful member until his death.

[Read more…] about The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 19

The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 18

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Part 18: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section I]

 

by Sarah Allen

 

I’m going to plow through as many of these questions as I can today, and hopefully, we can get finished this week or next week and move on to the next set of questions. Jeremy spends a lot of time going through all of the supposed Book of Abraham controversies he’s managed to find, and he insinuates in places that the Church hid them from the public or only acknowledged them recently. FAIR has compiled a list of the many different responses to these supposed controversies by the Church and by its members, which you can find here. Many of the things described in this portion are refuted in these publications (and thank you to Spencer Marsh for sending me that resource!). If you want to do further reading on any of these topics, that bibliography is a great place to start researching. With that, let’s jump into the next comment.

86% of Book of Abraham chapters 2, 4, and 5 are King James Version Genesis chapters 1, 2, 11, and 12. Sixty-six out of seventy-seven verses are quotations or close paraphrases of King James Version wording. (See An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins, p.19)

It’s actually 83% and 64/77 verses that correspond, which just seems like a silly mistake to make in my opinion. It took a little time to compare them but not any real effort, so it’s surprising that neither Jeremy Runnells nor Grant Palmer checked that basic math before making that claim. As an example of one of the verses that doesn’t have a match but is one of my favorite verses in all of the Pearl of Great Price, look at Abraham 2:16, which says, “Therefore, eternity was our covering and our rock and our salvation, as we journeyed….” I think that’s such a beautiful thought, and we don’t find anything like it in Genesis. [Read more…] about The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 18

Come, Follow Me Week 43 – Doctrine and Covenants 121-123

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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

The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 17

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Part 17: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section H]

 

by Sarah Allen

 

Since we finished Facsimile 3 last week, you might be thinking that we’re done with the facsimiles, but we’re not. Jeremy Runnells gives a slanted and mocking—but useful—recap of all three facsimiles in his next question/concern. This will give us a chance to review everything we’ve gone over so far. After that, we’ll move on to other facets of the Book of Abraham, and then I want to culminate this section with an overview of the evidence in favor of its historicity, because there is a decent amount of it and I think it’s important to learn its strengths as much as, if not more than, the criticisms against it. The Book of Abraham contains some of our most beautiful, unique doctrines, and throwing it out because you don’t know the research would be tragic.

To begin, Jeremy states the following:

Respected non-LDS Egyptologists state that Joseph Smith’s translation of the papyri and facsimiles are gibberish and have absolutely nothing to do with the papyri and facsimiles and what they actually say.

As I hope I’ve shown over the last few weeks, this is not an accurate assessment of either the papyri or the facsimiles. While it’s true that some Egyptologists make those claims, modern Egyptologists are very often wrong when guessing what ancient Egyptians believed their figures to represent, and moreover, they rarely have any of the proper training in the correct time period and in the Demotic script being used that would be necessary to make those professional assessments. We also don’t know whether we should even be looking at the Egyptological explanations for the facsimiles, or whether they should be Jewish interpretations or something else entirely. Even if we should be looking for Egyptian interpretations, Egyptians were famous for having multiple meanings for their artwork and often encouraged different interpretations.

Beyond all of that, both the 1859 St Louis Museum catalog description  and its reprint from 1863 were taken from the work of Gustavus Seyffarth, the only Egyptologist ever to study the long roll of papyrus that was named by eyewitnesses as the source of the Book of Abraham. The catalogs stated definitively that there was another text on the roll after the Book of Breathings. That text was titled “The Beginning of the Book of …”, but then the description cuts off and doesn’t say what that book actually was, and unfortunately, the long roll was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The eyewitnesses clearly separated the roll from the fragments in their descriptions. When they talked about the source of the Book of Abraham, they were talking about the roll, and when they talked about the glazed slides, they were talking about the fragments. Because of all of this, we can’t say that the Book of Abraham translation has nothing to do with the papyri, because the bulk of the papyri doesn’t exist anymore. All we can say definitively is that the translation has nothing to do with the fragments, beyond the fragment of the image from Facsimile 1.

[Read more…] about The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 17

The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 16

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Part 16: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section G]

 

by Sarah Allen

 

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.

[Read more…] about The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 16

Come, Follow Me Week 42 – Doctrine and Covenants 115-120

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A Defense and a Refuge

By DeeAnn Cheatham

There are two significant examples in the scriptures where a people of Zion existed. One occurred when Christ came to the Americas and taught his gospel to the Nephites and the Lamanites. He then selected twelve apostles, who organized his church and continued to teach the people.  After a few years, every person had converted to the Lord, creating a community where there was no contention because “the love of God did dwell in the hearts of all the people and every man dealt justly with each other” (4 Ne 1:2).  “Surely there could not be a happier people” (4 Ne 1:16). This state of Zion lasted for almost two hundred years.

The city of Enoch is another example of a Zion community. Enoch was instructed by the Lord to preach repentance to the people. He did this for many years and eventually gathered the righteous and established a City of Holiness. They were surrounded by people who were described by the Lord as the most wicked of his creations (Moses 7:36). And yet, in the midst of all this sin, they were able to create a refuge and attain such a level of righteousness that eventually the entire city was taken up to heaven.

A refuge is a place of shelter, protection, or safety We are similarly surrounded by chaos and sin and need a refuge, a place of safety. Within our homes, wards, stakes, and communities, we can work to creates “pockets of refuge”. In D & C 115:5-6, the Lord stated: [Read more…] about Come, Follow Me Week 42 – Doctrine and Covenants 115-120

Come, Follow Me Week 41 – Doctrine and Covenants 111-114

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Finances and Faith in the Kirtland Crisis of 1837

by Elizabeth Kuehn

(This is from a presentation given at the 2017 FairMormon Conference)

While I will cover nineteenth-century economics and the Kirtland bank briefly in my presentation today, I also want to focus on the period of spiritual crisis in Kirtland in 1837 and ways I hope we can learn from the Kirtland experience for our current moment of spiritual crisis.

The crisis within the Mormon community of Kirtland has been inseparably connected to the founding and subsequent failure of the church’s Kirtland bank. However, there is too often a direct causal connection assumed between the bank and the 1837 crisis. The focus of my presentation today is to demonstrate the complexity of this period of history, contextualize both the bank and the crisis, and address several prevailing assumptions about each.

Although most Kirtland narratives place the bank amid the financial devastation of 1837, the Kirtland Safety Society Bank was organized in November 1836. As such, understanding developments in Kirtland in 1836 is key. [Read more…] about Come, Follow Me Week 41 – Doctrine and Covenants 111-114

Three Important FAIR Conference Presentations to Help Parents, Leaders, and Other Teachers of Children and Youth

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These three presentations are important to families and Church leaders of all faiths. We hope you will watch them and share them with your Latter-day Saint, and non-Latter-day Saint, friends.

Jeffrey Thayne – “Worldview Apologetics: Revealing the Waters in Which We Swim” (transcript)

Carl Trueman – “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution”

Ed Gantt – “Agentic Sexuality: How a Latter-day Saint Perspective Can Rescue Humanity from the Tyranny of the Abstract”

Jeffrey Thayne is from BYUI, Carl Trueman is with Grove City College and is an Orthodox Presbyterian, and Ed Gantt is from BYU.

This is a reposting from a previous blog to highlight the conference presentations.

The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 15

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Part 15: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section F]

 

by Sarah Allen

 

I’m going to dive in and start discussing what Joseph’s interpretations of what the figures on Facsimile 2 mean compared to what “modern Egyptologists say,” but first, I do want to point out that on this facsimile, there are a lot of numbered entries where Joseph says he’s not allowed to translate those figures yet while the Egyptologists have a description. Jeremy Runnells stacks them up in such a way as to imply that Joseph was incompetent by comparison, but Joseph could not read Egyptian. His translations and explanations were given to him by revelation.

The scriptures are full of verses comparing the wisdom of God to the wisdom of men. It’s not surprising these interpretations don’t match in every case, particularly when, as we’ve pointed out, those figures could be “read” multiple different ways by multiple different groups of people. As Hugh Nibley said, “In viewing them today, we must bear in mind the principle [of] … the ‘plurality of approaches,’ which states that the Egyptian, far from being adverse to giving more than one interpretation to a character, rejoices in putting as many meanings and associations as possible into every situation. Any one figure could stand for more than one idea, deity, force or principle, so that one may not say ‘this figure cannot be Re because it is Atum.’ On the hypocephalus, to make things more interesting, all the symbols, each with its multiple meanings, are drawn together into a circle where they are closely interrelated, suggesting a great wealth of possible interpretations.” It’s also not surprising that, if those figures were interpreted as having to do with temple worship and covenants the way we discussed last week, God would not allow Joseph to reveal them to a worldwide audience. But even with those caveats, there is a surprising amount of information that aligns between the various explanations. Regardless of what Runnells is trying to imply, Joseph was not incompetent, and his interpretations of these figures do hold up against ancient Egyptian and Jewish thought.

[Read more…] about The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 15