Abstract: Early American campaigns against Christmas illustrate both the irrepressibility of the impulse to celebrate Christ and what is lost when we reject the good that comes from suspect sources. Both lessons point us toward the Savior’s gracious acceptance of our own imperfect offerings.

Christmas in rural New England is a mood. Snow falls softly on colonial-era farmhouses. Candles sit in the gabled windows that line little village streets. Townsfolk gather on the common to trim and light a tree. As the song suggests, it is nearly “like a picture print by Currier and Ives” — a land of pumpkin pies and Longfellow poems and Alcott’s literary visions of the March girls taking their Christmas feast to the needy.1 When we suggested to our college-student children that, instead of bringing them home, we might travel to them for the holidays this year, there was near rebellion. New England, we were told, is Christmas.

Now, I enjoy all this yuletide sentimentality and its carefully curated aesthetic as much as anyone. I am a sucker for the spice-scented ambiance that settles upon our communities as Christmas approaches. It is indeed lovely. But I am also a historian who knows something about the religious values of New England’s past, and I cannot help but be somewhat amused by the fact that this effusion of holiday nostalgia would make the region’s Puritan progenitors sick. Maybe furious. Definitely disappointed. They had actually done their darndest to kill Christmas.

As early modern Britons, Puritans knew Christmas to be an annual excuse for too much drinking, too much ribaldry, too much irreverence and unrest. Worse still, as radical Protestants, they saw Christmas as [Page 190]a reflection of Catholicism’s paganizing influence in Christendom. Just as they rejected the Catholic mass as a jumble of sensory rituals that benumbed the soul with alluring sights, smells, and sounds, they suppressed “Christ mass” as a celebration unfit for their Savior. The observance of Christmas was not something that — by their reading — the scriptures sanctioned, and its extravagant imposition could only lead the gullible away from the spiritual demands of discipleship.2

They were serious about this. Boston made celebration of the holiday a finable offense for decades. Even after the lifting of such official punishments, stalwart Puritans sought to suppress the practice. In a December 25th diary entry, the prominent Boston judge Samuel Sewall exulted in the fact that most of the town’s inhabitants still refused to acknowledge the day, going about their business as usual. Sewall spent a typical morning reading Psalms with his family and then took occasion “to ‘dehort [them] from Christmas-keeping, and charged them to forbear.’”3 Puritans like Sewall carefully observed their community to make sure it did not observe the holiday.

The story of how New England went from a region radically dedicated to the eradication of Christmas to a region identified by its iconic observance of the holiday is long and complicated. It has to do with demographic change, and economic development,

Abstract: Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have a unique perspective on truth. Our knowledge that Salvation likely involves participation in complex eternal activities requiring significantly more understanding than we currently possess naturally leads us to seek truth and, in addition, to seek an understanding of that truth. Under these circumstances, our inability to fully understand many truths, both revealed and discovered, can lead to confusion. A lack of complete understanding of accepted scientific truth generally leads the serious truth-seeker to enhanced investigative and educational efforts without doubting the ultimate veracity of the concept under investigation; we all believe in gravity, but no one completely understands it. In a similar manner, the fact that an individual is bothered by such an incompletely understood truth is rarely seen as reason to reject it; gravity bothers me a lot — were it not for gravity, I could fly. Unfortunately, an inability to fully understand some revealed truths all too often leads to rejection of that truth rather than an acceptance of one’s conceptual limitations and an enhanced effort at understanding the concept in question. Such an approach can be as disastrous (although often not as immediately disastrous) as disregard of the reality of gravity. Consideration of examples of both scientific and spiritual experience may lead to a more rational reaction to truths that we do not, and sometimes at our present level of understanding, simply cannot, completely comprehend.

My professional responsibilities include conducting seminars with young physicians undergoing specialty and subspecialty training. Among other things, we commonly discuss twins. I often conclude these discussions by recounting a dilemma faced by medical scientists in the early twentieth century, namely, why is it that like-gendered [Page 178]twins (boy/ boy or girl/girl) may be born in one amniotic sac or separate amniotic sacs, but twins of different genders are always in separate sacs? For scientists today, the answer is straightforward and follows from basic principles of embryology and genetics. However, these principles were completely foreign to investigators of that time. A quote from the first edition of what was, in 1903, and remains today the most widely respected textbook in obstetrics recounts the author’s consideration of various explanations of these puzzling observations. He then concludes that this phenomenon appears to demonstrate the intervention of “Providence,” which “took this means of guarding their morals in-utero” by ensuring that the female fetus would never be in the same sac as her twin brother.1

At this point I pause, waiting for the inevitable smiles and polite snickers that follow. Having given these young doctors just enough time to dig themselves a hole, I then gently push them in with the reminder that the author of this text was at least as smart as any of us, and more widely published than most serious scientists ever hope to be. I suggest that 100 years from now, perhaps in this very room, a group of young physicians may be discussing some aspect of modern medicine that we today consider to represent absolute, unequivocally demonstrated truth, which will, in their eyes, seem as hopelessly simplistic, incorrect and downright silly as this early twentieth-century “truth” regarding twin pregnancy appears to us today. I remind them of the importance of humility in science and propose that in terms of ultimate truth, the lessons of history tell us that while our knowledge of the natural world may be highly advanced relative to those who came be...

Review of Meir Bar-Ilan, Words of Gad the Seer (Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace Publishing, 2016); Christian Israel, The Words of Gad the Seer: Bible Cross-Reference Edition (self-published, 2020); and Ken Johnson, Ancient Book of Gad the Seer: Referenced in 1 Chronicles 29:29 and Alluded to in 1 Corinthians 12:12 and Galatians 4:26 (self-published, 2016).

Abstract: A long-overlooked Hebrew document from an ancient Jewish colony in Cochin, India, purports to contain the words of Gad the Seer. Professor Meir Bar-Ilan has translated the text into English and has stirred interest in the fascinating document. At least two other English translations are also now available. Here we examine the story of the coming forth of the text and some issues of possible interest to Latter-day Saints, including some of Bar-Ilan’s insights in evaluating the antiquity of disputed texts. Bar-Ilan’s translation of this intriguing document and his related publications may be valuable for anyone with an interest in the Hebrew scriptures and ancient Judaism.

Meir Bar-Ilan, a prominent Jewish scholar at Israel’s Meir Bar-Ilan University, named after his grandfather,1 has published a translation of an ancient Hebrew manuscript found in India purporting to contain the words of Gad the Seer. Bar-Ilan’s Words of Gad the Seer, [Page 148]his translation of the document called “The Words of Gad the Seer,”2 is a work that might be of interest to many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Bar-Ilan believes the Hebrew document contains an authentic ancient text, but not one dating to the days of Gad the Seer as mentioned in the Old Testament. Rather, he believes it was composed around 2,000 years ago.

Gad was a prophet living at the time of David who seemed to have special status, based on 2 Samuel 24:11, which speaks of “Gad, David’s seer.” But like many prophets, Gad was not afraid to speak unpleasant things to his king (e.g., see 2 Samuel 12:1–13). One of the very few mentions of Gad occurs in 1 Chronicles 29:29, where we read that the acts of David the king were written “in the book of Gad the seer.” I have occasionally cited that verse in discussing the scriptures with others who accept the Bible to illustrate that the Bible we have might not contain all the scripture that has been written in the past. A common rejoinder is, “There may have been such a book, but if God didn’t preserve it for us in the Bible, it’s not scripture.” It would seem that there can be no such thing as lost scripture with that definition, and if it can’t be lost, it presumably can’t be found. In reply, I have asked others what they would do if a book that ancient Jews or Christians regarded and preserved as Biblical scripture became lost and then was found again?

My theoretical question perhaps became a little less theoretical with the fairly recent discovery, translation, and publication in 2016 of a long-lost manuscript that might have connections to the ancient lost book of Gad the Seer. The Hebrew document that Bar-Ilan translated has been through many human hands and may have some of the corruption common to non-canonical works such as the Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, but Bar-Ilan, the scholar who has explored this text in the most detail and provided an important translation into English, believes it has ancient roots and is worthy of our attention.

The story of this unusual text may be relevant to our own and much more miraculous story of the finding, translation,

Abstract: The seeming appearance of a lineal or generational curse in the Book of Abraham has been used erroneously to marginalize people and justify racist ideas in Latter-day Saint history. To avoid any further misinterpretation of scripture in ways that are hurtful to others, the following attempts to elucidate the meaning of lineal curses within the Book of Abraham’s claimed ancient provenance. “Cursed” often reflected a simple legalistic concept, applicable to any person regardless of race, that meant one was currently in a state of disinheritance. An individual might be in a state of disinheritance if they violated any requirement necessary to receive their inheritance, and any descendant who remained an heir of a person who no longer had an inheritance to give was also considered disinherited or “cursed,” even though they may have personally done nothing wrong. This ancient understanding of cursing as disinheritance provides better context and clarity to many of Joseph Smith’s revelations and translations, including the Book of Abraham. Arguably, the scriptures and revelations of the Latter-day Saint tradition, including the Bible, indicate that the eternal blessings of a kingdom (land) and priestly kingship/queenship (priesthood) originate from God but must be inherited through an unbroken ancestral chain forged via covenant. Indeed, the express purpose of sealing children to parents in modern Latter-day Saint temples is to make them “heirs.” Consequently, moving towards a better understanding of the roles inheritance and disinheritance play in receiving the divine blessings of the covenant might be beneficial generally and help readers avoid racist interpretations of the Book of Abraham and other scripture. This is especially the case when it is understood that being disinherited, in a gospel context, does not need to be a permanent status when one relies on the grace of the Holy Messiah and [Page 98]submits to those divine laws and covenant rites whereby one can literally inherit the promised blessings.

The Book of Abraham, which Joseph Smith started publishing in 1842 as a divinely revealed translation of a text “purporting to be the writings of Abraham … upon papyri,” gives a first-person account of two major events from the patriarch’s life: 1) his initial calling by God at an altar where he nearly experienced capital punishment at the hands of a “priest of Elkenah,” who “was also the priest of Pharaoh” (see Abraham 1:1–31) and 2) his later covenant with God that included divine temple-like instruction concerning pre-mortal spirits (whose organization and relationships are compared to various heavenly bodies) as well as the creation of the earth and mankind (see Abraham 2:1–5:21).1 Passages within the first event appear to suggest that some kind of generational curse prohibited the king of Egypt from having the right to priesthood. The reader is told that from the biblical Ham “sprang that race which preserved the curse in the land” and that Pharaoh, as a descendant of Ham, was “of that lineage by which he could not have the right of Priesthood,” though the pharaohs generally would “fain claim it from Noah, through Ham” (Abraham 1:21, 24, 27).

Abstract: The Book of Mormon story of Jacob and Sherem has been evaluated and interpreted from many different viewpoints over the years. In his retelling of the story, Jacob crafted a cautionary tale of religious hubris and self-importance that can serve as an important lesson for members of the church today. In this paper I use various methodologies to examine the interaction between Jacob and Sherem — including comparative scriptural analysis, semantics, and Hebraic syntax and structural elements — in an attempt to increase our understanding of the relationship between Jacob and Sherem.

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In this paper I endeavor to interpret the interaction between Jacob and Sherem in novel ways. I explore various elements of the story through comparative scriptural study, semantic analysis, and examination of Hebraic semantics and parallel structures. I demonstrate that Sherem was probably a resident of Jacob’s Nephite community, that likely the two rivals knew each other well and engaged in repeated conversations with other, and that Jacob employed the use of Hebrew word repetition and parallel structures in his retelling of the story. While Sherem rebuked Jacob by accusing him of leading the people away from “the right way,” we can observe that Sherem was the guilty party and not Jacob. Although Sherem demanded a sign from God, an act that culminated in his own death, I demonstrate that it was Sherem himself who became “a sign and a proverb” to the Nephites (see Ezekiel 14:8).

There Came a Man

The final chapter of the book of Jacob describes an encounter between Jacob and a man named Sherem, who came “among the people of Nephi:”

[Page 66]And now it came to pass that some years had passed away and there came a man among the people of Nephi whose name was Sherem. And it came to pass that he began to preach among the people and to declare unto them that there should be no Christ. (Jacob 7:1–2)1

Keith Thompson asked: “Who was Sherem, and where did he come from? Was he a Nephite, a Lamanite, or someone else, perhaps a wandering Jaredite or a Mulekite?”2 Some Latter-day Saint scholars have proposed that the wording of this passage — “there came a man among the people of Nephi” —indicates that Sherem possibly came from outside the local Nephite community.

 

In this episode, our hosts Terry Hutchinson, John Gee and Kevin Christensen discussed Kevin’s article in the Interpreter Journal on Margaret Barker. You can listen to or download the November 13th broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show below. It will also be included in our podcast feed (https://interpreterfoundation.org/feeds/podcast). The second portion of the show is a roundtable discussing the upcoming Come Follow Me lesson #52 (Christmas). The Interpreter Radio Show can be heard Sunday evenings from 7 to 9 PM (MDT), on K-TALK, AM 1640, or you can listen live on the Internet at ktalkmedia.com. Call in to 801-254-1640 with your questions and comments during the live show.

 

Original air date: November 13, 2022. This recording has been edited to remove commercial breaks.

The Interpreter Radio Show is a weekly discussion of matters of interest to the hosts, guests, and callers of the show. The views expressed on the Interpreter Radio Show are those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Interpreter Foundation, nor should statements made on the show be construed as official doctrinal statements of the Church.

 

Abstract: Twenty years ago, the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies published “Paradigms Regained: A Survey of Margaret Barker’s Scholarship and Its Significance for Mormon Studies” as its second FARMS Occasional Paper. The first part of this essay provides an overview of Doctor Barker’s scholarship and its wider reception through early 2022, and then includes a broad survey of Latter-day Saint interaction with her work to the present. Part 2 of this essay (forthcoming) will address specific criticisms and appreciations of Barker’s work.

Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. Even more important, during revolutions scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before.1

The new paradigm is that the Enoch tradition is ancient, as it claims, and that it was the original myth of the Jerusalem temple, long before Moses became the key figure and the Exodus the defining history. The world of the first temple was the taproot of Christianity, and that is why the young Church treated Enoch as Scripture. Those who preserved the Enoch traditions were a formative influence on Christianity and its key concepts: the Kingdom and the resurrected Messiah. [Page 2]Since Enoch was a high priest figure, and Jesus was declared to be “a great high priest” (Heb. 4:14), we should also concern ourselves with the high priesthood.2

Over twenty years ago, the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (which became the Maxwell Institute) published my essay “Paradigms Regained: A Survey of Margaret Barker’s Scholarship and Its Significance for Mormon Studies.”3 Doctor Barker is an English biblical scholar and Methodist preacher who had, up to 2001, published seven books, many papers in a range of scholarly journals, and in 1998 had been elected as the President of the Society for Old Testament Study in England. In the wake of “Paradigms Regained,” Barker accepted an invitation to come to BYU for a week-long seminar in 2003, and that led to many interactions and collaborative ventures with Latter-day Saint scholars, including a notable 2005 talk on the Book of Mormon at the Joseph Smith Conference in Washington D.C., the organization of successful Temple Studies groups in London and Logan, and an appearance in the 2020 video Temples Through Time,4 produced by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.5 To date, she has increased the number of her published books to 17,

Abstract: Miracles occur relatively often in scripture, as do people who, for various reasons, want or even need to deny their occurrence. The arguments that are deployed to justify such denial haven’t changed all that much over the centuries. In fact, they’re still around today.

Most if not all present or former missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are quite familiar with the first three verses of the ninth chapter of the gospel of John:

And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth.

And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?

Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. (John 9:1–3)

We know these verses because they seem to presuppose at least the possibility of premortal human existence. Thus, and importantly, they are congruent with the Latter-day Saint belief that we all lived in the presence of our Heavenly Parents before we were born. The notion that undergirds the disciples’ question, that the “man which was blind from his birth” might have been born blind because he had sinned, presupposes the idea that the man could have sinned prior to his birth. Obviously, though, that makes no sense if he hadn’t existed before his birth.

To pursue the typical missionary argument a bit further: Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the disciples’ implicit belief in an antemortal human existence was misguided, the Savior could easily [Page viii]have corrected them. He could simply have informed them that the blind man couldn’t have sinned before his birth because he hadn’t yet existed. That he didn’t do so suggests rather strongly that he didn’t regard belief in human premortal human existence as misguided. He didn’t reject the concept, and the text may even imply that he shared it.

This is, as I say, all quite familiar and unexceptional. I expect that very few Latter-day Saint missionaries, at least among those who have served in predominantly Christian areas of the world, have never used John 9:1–3 in order to ground the restored doctrine of human existence before mortality. What I would like to do here, though, is to look briefly at some of the rest of the account, which takes up almost the entirety of John 9.

So, we return to the account of the healing of the blind man. Of course, a life of genuine Christian discipleship isn’t merely one of subscribing to a set of theological propositions — it entails action. The apostle James is unmistakably clear on this point:

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves …

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. (James 1:22, 27)

Accordingly, it’s significant that Jesus doesn’t simply pass on after using the unfortunate blind man as a teaching tool for a doctrinal lesson on the problem of evil. He cures him. Or, anyway, he initiates the process of curing the man:

When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay,

And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam, (which is by interpretation, Sent.) He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing. (John 9:6–7)

It may be significant, though it’s quite beyond the scope of this little essay to consider possible explanations or implications, that the Savior doesn’t instantly cure the blind man in this story — as he seems to have done in other cases. Instead, the anointing seems to represent the first stage of a two-stage cure. The man is told that he needs to proceed to the pool of Siloam and wash himself there. Clearly, action on his part,

Abstract: The usage of the exclamation mark has changed over time but continues to serve as an important textual interpretation aid. Punctuation itself has not been a permanent fixture in English, rather it was slowly introduced to English documents with changing standard usages after the invention of the printing press. Here we highlight the use of the exclamation mark across major editions of the Book of Mormon and document the presence of the exclamation mark in a reference table.

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When the Book of Mormon was first translated and dictated by Joseph Smith to his scribe Oliver Cowdery, it was done without punctuation. The original manuscript was thus a stream of unbroken text. Though Cowdery and another scribe added scattered punctuation to the printer’s manuscript, a compositor for the Grandin Press, John Gilbert, largely disregarded it.1 Instead, Gilbert primarily employed his own punctuation and paragraphing — even with no affiliation to the new Church. John Gilbert commented on the 1830 manuscript some sixty-three years later:

Every chapter, if I remember correctly, was one solid paragraph, without a punctuation mark, from beginning to end. … I punctuated it to make it read as I supposed the [Page 266]Author intended, and but very little punctuation was altered in proof-reading.2

From these remarks, it is unclear whether Gilbert was referring to Smith or the ancient authors of various books within the Book of Mormon. Even still, the overwhelming majority of John Gilbert’s edits were deemed acceptable by early Church leaders for the first publication of the Book of Mormon. According to Royal Skousen, compiler of The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, it is estimated “that over 90 percent of Gilbert’s punctuation marks in the printer’s and original manuscripts were carried over without change into the 1830 edition.”3

Since the first edition in 1830, there have been twenty English editions of the Book of Mormon recognized by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or the Community of Christ (formerly Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter...

Abstract: The significance of the ongoing studies into the potential location of the Old World “Bountiful,” which Nephi reminds us was “prepared of the Lord” (1 Nephi 17:5), and is documented in great detail by him, can hardly be overstated. Bountiful’s resources had to be truly substantial and unique to enable the Lehites to recover from years of land travel from Jerusalem and to build a ship capable of reaching the New World. Exploration and scientific studies of the Dhofar region of southern Oman, the only section of the Arabian coast containing the feature Nephi describes, continue to the present. Here I briefly discuss, chronologically, recent developments of special significance to Book of Mormon studies.

My introduction to the subject of identifying Nephi’s Bountiful came in October 1987 when I made my first visit to Oman. This came at a time when I had just begun exploring neighboring Yemen in connection with historical references to Nahom, the burial place of Ishmael (1 Nephi 16:34). The only known previous visit of Latter-day Saint researchers to southern Oman was in 1976 when Lynn and Hope Hilton spent 24 hours in Dhofar, their movements severely restricted by an ongoing civil war. They had only enough time to establish that many of the features required by Nephi’s text were present.

With peace restored and after years of applying for a visa, I was eager to simply see the place for myself and began visiting all areas that were open to visitors, including the fascinating site of Khor Rori. However, it rapidly became obvious to me that the Salalah area in Dhofar failed, in significant ways, to match the description of the Old World Bountiful preserved in 1 Nephi. The basic elements reported by the Hiltons were not found in any single area, as the text seemed to require, but were widely scattered. More significantly, several of them were altogether absent, [Page 256]such as timber trees, natural vegetation, the oft-mentioned “fruit” for which Bountiful was named, and a nearby mountain.

While still in Oman I began a closer re-examination of Nephi’s text to extract the details about Bountiful. A total of twelve descriptors, both logical and textual requirements, emerged1 and it became obvious that further exploration was needed before conclusions could be drawn.

The following year, 1988, I returned to Oman, this time pushing my exploring further west of Salalah. Almost immediately, I determined that the Qamar mountain range in the west had pockets of greater fertility than the Qara hills inland of the Salalah bay, demolishing the prevailing belief (among Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint scholars alike back then) that the Qara hills were the only place where trees grew in all of Arabia. This discovery reinforced the need to continue exploration further west along the Dhofar coast and into Yemen.

Thus began a four-year series of visits exploring the hundreds of miles of coast of both Oman and Yemen. By the conclusion of the visits in 1992, the entire eastern coast of Arabia from Aden northwards had been explored and documented, on the ground — the only time this has been done.

It is difficult to overstate the significance of this exploration and the various studies made into the potential location of the Old World Bountiful, described with some tantalizing details in Nephi’s text as a truly special place “prepared of the Lord” (1 Nephi 17:5). Initially, the resources of this special place had to provide water, food, and shelter for the group to enable them to recover from years of overland travel. Then, following the direction of the Lord to build a ship, it needed to provide other resources such as ore and timber, plus a physical setting allowing [Page 257]a ship capable of reaching the New World to be built and launched into the ocean.

With the coastal exploration completed,