You can listen to or download the November 8 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show below. It will also be included in our podcast feed (https://interpreterfoundation.org/feeds/podcast). The hosts were Terry Hutchinson, John Gee and Kevin Christensen. In this episode, our hosts reviewed the recent Temple on Mount Zion conference as well as claims Joseph Smith made up the Book of Mormon and revelations from the Lord. The second portion of the show was a roundtable discussing the upcoming Come Follow Me lesson #49 (Moroni 10). 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 8, 2020. 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.

 

You can listen to or download the November 1 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show below. It will also be included in our podcast feed (https://interpreterfoundation.org/feeds/podcast). The hosts were Neal and Jasmine Rappleye, Spencer Marsh and Hales Swift. In this episode, our hosts reviewed recent Interpreter publications and had a discussion of politics in light of the gospel. The second portion of the show is a roundtable discussing the upcoming Come Follow Me lesson #48 (Moroni 7-9). 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 1, 2020. 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.

 

This is an Interpreter Radio Roundtable for Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon Lesson 46, “By Faith All Things Are Fulfilled,” on Ether chapters 12-15. The panelists for this roundtable were Bruce Webster and Kris Fredrickson. This roundtable was extracted from the October 18, 2020 broadcast of Interpreter Radio. The complete show may be heard at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-radio-show-october-18-2020/. 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.

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.

 

This series is cross-posted with the permission of Book of Mormon Central

from their website at Pearl of Great Price Central

Listen to an audio recording of this Essay:

Download PDF

Download audio recording

 

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Having witnessed the abrupt end of the long-awaited coming of the Son of Man in His unexpected crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension; and having now understood that His presence on earth would not halt the wickedness of the world, Enoch again “wept and cried unto the Lord, saying? … Wilt thou not come again upon the earth?”[2]

In this Essay, we will see Enoch’s anguished hope fulfilled at last when the righteous would be gathered to a Holy City and God would make Zion His abode. As we will see, this prophetic expectation appears elsewhere in the ancient Enoch literature and Jewish tradition.

A provisional proposal for the structuring of Moses 7:60–69 into seven sections is given in the appendix.

 

1. The Lord Will Fulfill His Oath

In answer to Enoch’s question about whether God will come again upon the earth, the Lord declares that He will “fulfill the oath” He made to Enoch “concerning the children of Noah”[3] —namely that He would “call upon”[4] them. “In this light,” explain Draper, Brown, and Rhodes, “it becomes evident that the Second Coming will be the crowning moment among the Lord’s contacts with ‘the children of Noah.’”[5] The Lord’s oath is made doubly sure by the use of His own name: “As I live, even so will I come in the last days, in the days of wickedness and vengeance.”[6]

Having sworn that He would return, the Lord at last addresses Enoch’s repeated, unanswered question with the solemn declaration that, indeed, the day would come when “the earth shall rest.”[7]

 

2. Great Tribulations Among the Children of Men and Preservation of the Lord’s People

Jarringly, the Lord immediately followed His welcome promise with a terrible warning of “great tribulations” that would take place “before that day.”[8] The first and perhaps greatest tribulation is that “a veil of darkness [would] cover the earth.”[9] This seems to indicate that communication between heaven and the “children of men” would be severed due to wickedness.[10]

As to the righteous, Elder Neal A. Maxwell comments:[11]

God preserved and prepared Enoch’s people in the midst of awful and enveloping ...

[Page 1]Review of Terryl Givens with Brian Hauglid, The Pearl of Greatest Price: Mormonism’s Most Controversial Scripture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 285 pages. $34.95 (hardback).

Abstract: In recent years there has been an effort among some scholars to make sense of the historical sources surrounding Joseph Smith’s claims to be a translator of ancient records. Terryl Givens, with some assistance from Brian Hauglid, has explored the evidence surrounding the Book of Abraham and suggests that, in this case, Joseph Smith may not have translated an ancient record of Abraham’s writings into English as typically believed in the Latter-day Saint community. Consequently, Givens provides four alternative ways the work of “translating” may have been understood or practiced by the Prophet and his scribes. This essay highlights some evidence that was overlooked, misunderstood, and glossed by Givens, calling into question his fourfold attempt at redefining what it meant for Joseph Smith to translate this ancient record.

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Somewhat perplexing about Jared’s remark to his brother in the Book of Mormon’s account of the Tower of Babel is his reasoning that if their language is confounded, they might not understand their own words: “Cry unto the Lord, that he will not confound us that we may not understand our words” (Ether 1:34). Traditional interpretation of the Tower of Babel story posits that the confounding of languages was a sudden multiplying of spoken dialects, making it difficult for one person or group [Page 2]to understand the words of another. Jared’s concern that they might not understand their own words, however, suggests something deeper.

Perhaps this story, as others have suggested, is less about a miles-high building and the sudden onset of the world’s spoken dialects and more about a ritual ascent to “heaven” via a false temple and the confounding of God’s word through subtle changes to its terminology and meaning based on the reasonings of mortals.1 Small changes may seem innocuous at first but might lay the foundations for rifts, divisions, and the fragmenting of religious “languages” over time. Joseph Smith lamented about this kind of confounding when he said “the teachers of religion of the different sects understood the same passage of Scripture so differently as destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible.”2 In such multiplicity of religious languages, people may use words such as “baptism” or “priesthood” or “God” in their rhetoric, but they may not understand their unadulterated meaning.

In recent years, there has been an effort among some scholars to make sense of the historical sources surrounding Joseph Smith’s claims to be a “translator.”

This is an Interpreter Radio Roundtable for Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon Lesson 45, “That Evil May Be Done Away,” on Ether chapters 6-11. The panelists for this roundtable were Terry Hutchinson, John Gee and Kevin Christensen. This roundtable was extracted from the October 11, 2020 broadcast of Interpreter Radio. The complete show may be heard at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-radio-show-october-11-2020/. 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.

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.

 

This series is cross-posted with the permission of Book of Mormon Central

from their website at Pearl of Great Price Central

Listen to an audio recording of this Essay:

  Download PDF

  Download audio recording

 

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The tradition of a weeping prophet is perhaps best exemplified by Jeremiah who cried out in sorrow:[2]

Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!

In another place, he wrote:[3]

Let mine eyes run down with tears night and day, and let them not cease: for the virgin daughter of my people is broken with a great breach, with a very grievous blow.

Less well-known is the ancient Jewish tradition of Enoch as a weeping prophet. In the pseudepigraphal book of 1 Enoch, his words are very near to those of Jeremiah:[4]

O that my eyes were a [fountain][5] of water, that I might weep over you; I would pour out my tears as a cloud of water, and I would rest from the grief of my heart.

We find the pseudepigraphal Enoch, like Enoch in the Book of Moses, weeping in response to visions of mankind’s wickedness. Following the second of these visions in 1 Enoch, he is recorded as saying:[6]

And after that I wept bitterly, and my tears did not cease until I could no longer endure it, but they were running down because of what I had seen. … I wept because of it, and I was disturbed because I had seen the vision.

In the Apocalypse of Paul, the apostle meets Enoch, “the scribe of righteousness”[7] “within the gate of Paradise,” and, after having been cheerfully embraced and kissed,[8] sees the prophet weep, and says to him, “‘Brother, why do you weep?’ And again sighing and lamenting he said, ‘We are hurt by men, and they grieve us greatly; for many are the good things which the Lord has prepared, and great is his promise, but many do not perceive them.’”[9] A similar motif of Enoch weeping over the generations of mankind can be found in the pseudepigraphal book of 2 Enoch.[10] “There is, to say the least,” writes Hugh Nibley “no gloating in heaven over the fate of the wicked world. [And it] is Enoch who leads the weeping.”[11]

It is surprising that so little has been done to compare modern revelation with ancient sources bearing on the weeping of Enoch.[12] Mere coincidence is an insufficient explanation for Joseph Smith’s association of weeping with Enoch, as it is a motif that occurs nowhere in scripture or other sources...

[Page vii]Abstract: The early Latter-day Saints viewed the Book of Mormon not only as a symbol of Joseph Smith’s prophetic calling but also as the most powerful evidence for that calling. However, perhaps because they were ardent believers in the Bible who had been formed in a distinctly Bible-drenched culture and perhaps also because many of them had come to the Book of Mormon relatively late in their lives, they tended to quote from the Nephite record only rarely. Surprisingly, this was the case even for Joseph Smith himself — which can be taken as a sign that he didn’t write the book.

In the early 1980s I attended a presentation at the Latter-day Saint Institute of Religion located on Hilgard Avenue, adjacent to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Delivered by Grant Underwood, who was then a doctoral student at UCLA, it made a deep and lasting impression on me. An article setting forth Underwood’s argument that night was eventually published in BYU Studies as “‘Saved or Damned’: Tracing a Persistent Protestantism in Early Mormon Thought.”1

In it, Underwood makes the case that the vision of the three degrees of glory recorded as Doctrine and Covenants 76 — commonly known in the nineteenth century as “the Vision” — had surprisingly little discernible impact on Latter-day Saint thought in general and, most shocking of all, little or no noticeable impact on the thinking of Joseph Smith himself, for several years after its reception. And it was received quite early in the Restoration. Although many tend, and not without reason, to associate Latter-day Saint notions of a plurality of gods and of human deification or exaltation with the Nauvoo period of Joseph Smith’s ministry (roughly 1839–1844), Section 76, which strongly [Page viii]suggests both of those concepts, was given on 16 February 1832, fewer than two years after the formal organization of the Church.

Underwood contends that what he terms “the minimal role of the Vision in early LDS thought”2 was the result of theological backgrounds and assumptions brought into the Church by both Joseph Smith and his early converts. On the basis of numerous biblical passages, he explains,

in the world into which Mormonism was born, it was customary to conceptualize man as either saint or sinner, righteous or wicked, bound for heaven or headed for hell; and this formed an important part of the cultural baggage early converts carried with them into the Church.3

Underwood sketches “the persisting lineaments of traditional salvationist rhetoric” among Latter-day Saints of the 1830s and even 1840s and demonstrates that “the vision of the three degrees of glory did not begin to alter such notions until the end of the Nauvoo period.”4 Surveying the historical sources, he remarks that

it seems clear that a saved-damned duality was deeply entrenched in early Mormon thought. But what about the vision of the three degrees of glory? Did it not immediately uproot all the old “either-or” notions? Did not the Saints quickly discard their former thinking as theologically naive when presented with this vision of a pluralized rather than a polarized afterlife?

You can listen to or download the October 25 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show below. It will also be included in our podcast feed (https://interpreterfoundation.org/feeds/podcast). The hosts were Steve Densley, Matthew Bowen and Mark Johnson. In this episode, our hosts review recent Interpreter articles and publications relating to the Book of Moses. The second portion of the show is a roundtable discussing the upcoming Come Follow Me lesson #47 (Moroni 1-6). 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: October 25, 2020. 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.

 

You can listen to or download the October 18 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show below. It will also be included in our podcast feed (https://interpreterfoundation.org/feeds/podcast). The hosts were Bruce Webster and Kris Frederickson. In this episode, our hosts reviewed the Church’s return to open attendance during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first portion of the show is a roundtable discussing the upcoming Come Follow Me lesson #46 (Ether 12-15). 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: October 18, 2020. 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.

 

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