In this episode of The Interpreter Radio Show, our hosts are Bruce Webster, Kris Frederickson, and Robert Boylan. They discuss Come, Follow Me New Testament lesson 33, James Strang and the Voree Plates and the recent article by John Gee. You can listen to or download the July 16th broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show below. These audio tracks are also included in our podcast feed (https://interpreterfoundation.org/feeds/podcast).

The “New Testament in Context” portion of this show, for the Come, Follow Me New Testament lesson 33, “The Power of God unto Salvation,” covering Romans 1–6, was posted separately this morning.

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.

Original air date: July 16, 2023. These recording have been edited to remove commercial breaks.

The New Testament in Context Lesson 33: “The Power of God unto Salvation” covering Romans 1–6

Restoration Advocacy: James Strang and the Voree Plates

Podcast: Download

Discussion: John Gee’s July 7th Interpreter article and other topics.

Podcast: Download

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.

 

 

In the July 16 Come, Follow Me segment of the Interpreter Radio Show, our hosts Bruce Webster, Kris Frederickson, and Robert Boylan discuss New Testament lesson 33, “The Power of God unto Salvation” covering Romans 1–6.

You can listen to or download the New Testament in Context segment of the July 16 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show below. It will also be included in our podcast feed (https://interpreterfoundation.org/feeds/podcast). The other segments of the July 16 radio show can be accessed at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-radio-show-july-16-2023.

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.

 

Original air date: July 16, 2023. 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: A traditional reading of Nephi’s chronicle of the trek through Arabia relies heavily on two verses in 1 Nephi 17. In verse 4, Nephi states that they “did sojourn for the space of many years, yea, even eight years in the wilderness.” In verse 5, he reports that “we did come to the land which we called Bountiful.” The almost universal interpretation of these verses is that of sequential events: eight years traversing the arid desert of Western Arabia following which the Lehites entered the lush Bountiful for an unspecified time to build the ship. A question with the traditional reading is why a trip that could have taken eight months ostensibly took eight years. It may be that Nephi gave us that information. His “eight years” could be read as a general statement about one large context: the “wilderness” of all of Arabia. In other words, the “eight years in the wilderness” may have included both the time in the desert and the time in Bountiful. In this paper I examine the basis for such an alternative reading.

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Recent discoveries have provided remarkable plausibility for many of the Book of Mormon’s locations and events.1 As more discoveries are made, it becomes increasingly apparent that Nephi wrote his account of the family’s trek through Arabia with a high level of accuracy and detail. However, in spite of Nephi’s carefully composed text, a variety [Page 282]of questions remain. With an aim to seeking helpful clarifications, this article will explore three questions about the journey through Arabia:

* What did Nephi mean by the word wilderness?

* Why did the trek ostensibly take eight years, and why do all current speculations designed to account for those “missing” years fall short?

* How much time did the Lehites spend in Bountiful, and how much of that total time was spent constructing Nephi’s ship?

Nephi tells us that he wrote the Small Plate account of the trek through Arabia in First Nephi some 30 years after his departure from Jerusalem (2 Nephi 5:27–31). Twenty years earlier, in what are usually referred to as the Large Plates,2 Nephi had been similarly commanded to “make plates of ore that [he] might engraven upon them the record of [his] people” (1 Nephi 19:1). Note that Nephi’s father, Lehi, had been recording events of their exodus even earlier than that (v. 1). All of that latter material was dictated by Joseph Smith a...

Science and Mormonism have nearly always been on very friendly terms, with Church members sharing the deep conviction that, as expressed by former scientist and apostle Elder James E. Talmage, “within the gospel of Jesus Christ there is room and place for every truth thus far learned by man, or yet to be made known.” Subsequent Presidents and General Authorities of the Church have advanced similar views about the ultimate compatibility of religious and scientific truths and, with notably few exceptions, have maintained markedly positive attitudes toward both the methods and conclusions of mainstream science and the advance of modern technology.

Presented at:

2016 Second Interpreter Science & Mormonism Symposium: Body, Brain, Mind, and SpiritSaturday, March 12, 2016https://interpreterfoundation.org/conferences/2016-second-interpreter-science-mormonism-symposium-body-brain-mind-and-spirit/

Listen to an audio recording of this talk:

  Download audio recording

 

 

In the July 9 Come, Follow Me segment of the Interpreter Radio Show, our hosts Martin Tanner, John Gee, and Kevin Christensen discuss New Testament lesson 32, “A Minister and a Witness,” covering Acts 22–28.

You can listen to or download the New Testament in Context segment of the July 9 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show below. It will also be included in our podcast feed (https://interpreterfoundation.org/feeds/podcast). The other segments of the July 9 radio show can be accessed at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-radio-show-july-9-2023.

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.

 

Original air date: July 9, 2023. 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.

 

Science and Mormonism have nearly always been on very friendly terms, with Church members sharing the deep conviction that, as expressed by former scientist and apostle Elder James E. Talmage, “within the gospel of Jesus Christ there is room and place for every truth thus far learned by man, or yet to be made known.” Subsequent Presidents and General Authorities of the Church have advanced similar views about the ultimate compatibility of religious and scientific truths and, with notably few exceptions, have maintained markedly positive attitudes toward both the methods and conclusions of mainstream science and the advance of modern technology.

Presented at:

2016 Second Interpreter Science & Mormonism Symposium: Body, Brain, Mind, and SpiritSaturday, March 12, 2016https://interpreterfoundation.org/conferences/2016-second-interpreter-science-mormonism-symposium-body-brain-mind-and-spirit/

Listen to an audio recording of this talk:

  Download audio recording

 

 

In the July 2 Come, Follow Me segment of the Interpreter Radio Show, our hosts Steve Densley, Mark Johnson, and John Thompson discuss New Testament lesson 31, “The Lord Had Called Us for to Preach the Gospel,” covering Acts 16–21.

You can listen to or download the New Testament in Context segment of the July 2 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show below. It will also be included in our podcast feed (https://interpreterfoundation.org/feeds/podcast). The other segments of the June 25 radio show can be accessed at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-radio-show-july-2-2023.

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.

 

Original air date: July 2, 2023. 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.

 

Review of Spencer W. McBride, Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). 269 pages, $29.95 (hardcover).

Abstract: Spencer McBride’s book is the deepest look yet into Joseph Smith’s 1844 campaign for president of the United States. In smooth-paced and readable detail, McBride’s work expertly demonstrates the unique Latter-day Saint genesis for the campaign and how it fit into the wider American social-political environment. Its message regarding religious liberty is as applicable today as it was nearly two centuries ago.

[Editor’s Note: This review first appeared in The Civil War Book Review 24, no. 1 (2022). It is reprinted here with permission. Slight editorial changes have been made.]

On July 4, 1844, Americans celebrated sixty-eight years of independence with feasts, parades, and fireworks. Over three million enslaved Black people, however, were not celebrating. As Frederick Douglass would declare eight years later, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” Amongst other mechanisms, the southern Slave Power continued to enthrone states’ rights as a “political strategy … to maintain a carefully constructed — and deeply unjust — economic and social hierarchy” (209).

In the North, Independence Day passed with an uneasy calm in Philadelphia. Tragically, however, the next three days saw nativist mobs reignite anti-Catholic violence begun two months earlier. One thousand miles west in Nauvoo, Illinois, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were mourning. A week earlier their prophet and presidential candidate Joseph Smith had been assassinated while in Illinois State custody. Hundreds of electioneer missionaries canvassing [Page 220]the nation for Smith were just learning of his murder and would dejectedly begin returning to Nauvoo. Sustained anti-Mormon violence would expel them from the nation only eighteen months later.

This treatment of Catholics and Latter-day Saints demonstrated that in antebellum America, religious freedom was not universal. But why? Spencer W. McBride, an associate managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers, argues in his book Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom1 “that the states’ rights strategy was as effective at impeding efforts to establish full citizenship rights of religious minorities as it was at blocking efforts to establish the personhood of men and women of African descent enslaved in the American South” (209). In this important work, McBride employs the causes and outcomes of Smith’s sincere but quixotic campaign as a lens to effectively evaluate antebellum religious inequality and the systems that perpetuated it.

Joseph Smith’s new religion, with its community building and its anti-slavery and pro-American-Indian beliefs, engendered staunch opposition from Missourians who feared Latter-day Saints’ growing economic and political power. When tension turned to conflict, the governor of Missouri ordered the infamous “Extermination Order.” While Smith languished in jail, militia-mobs forced his people into Illinois — victims of theft, violence, and even rape.

After gaining his freedom, Smith traveled to Washington, DC, seeking federal assistance for protection and redress. Here McBride excels, meticulously immersing Smith and the reader in the larger context of American political life and realities. When the president and Congress offer no assistance behind the guise of states’ rights and electoral politics, Smith lost confidence in the American political system and even democracy itself.

No longer politically naive,

Science and Mormonism have nearly always been on very friendly terms, with Church members sharing the deep conviction that, as expressed by former scientist and apostle Elder James E. Talmage, “within the gospel of Jesus Christ there is room and place for every truth thus far learned by man, or yet to be made known.” Subsequent Presidents and General Authorities of the Church have advanced similar views about the ultimate compatibility of religious and scientific truths and, with notably few exceptions, have maintained markedly positive attitudes toward both the methods and conclusions of mainstream science and the advance of modern technology.

Presented at:

2016 Second Interpreter Science & Mormonism Symposium: Body, Brain, Mind, and SpiritSaturday, March 12, 2016https://interpreterfoundation.org/conferences/2016-second-interpreter-science-mormonism-symposium-body-brain-mind-and-spirit/

Listen to an audio recording of this talk:

  Download audio recording