You can listen to or download the September 13 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 discussed academic integrity and the story told in the book Veritas, by Ariel Sabar. The first portion of the show is a roundtable discussing the upcoming Come Follow Me lesson #41 (3 Nephi 27-4 Nephi). 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: September 13, 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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You can listen to or download the September 6 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show below. It will also be included in our podcast feed (https://interpreterfoundation.org/feeds/podcast). The hosts were Martin Tanner and Dan Peterson. In this episode, Dan discusses upcoming and ongoing Interpreter Foundation projects and publications. Due to technical difficulties, the first hour Come, Follow Me roundtable was not fully recorded and has been deleted from this recording. 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: September 6, 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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from their website at Pearl of Great Price Central

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Significantly, the last verse of Moses 6 includes the words “and thus may all become my sons.”[3] This statement relating to the exaltation of Adam and Eve and all their posterity provides the doctrinal foundation for the account in the Book of Moses of Enoch’s adoption as a son of God, with a right to God’s throne.[4] At the end of Moses 7:3 we read: “and as I stood upon the mount, I beheld the heavens open, and I was clothed upon with glory.”

In the next set of Essays, we will discuss Enoch’s transformation in more detail, including parallels with Jewish Enoch traditions. In this article, we will discuss how the “sonship” described in Moses 6:60 relates to the spiritual rebirth that is represented in ancient and modern temple ordinances.

 

Spiritual Rebirth within the Succession of Ordinances

Joseph Smith taught that “being born again comes by the Spirit of God through ordinances.”[5] Indeed, as we progress through the prescribed series of saving ordinances we are repeatedly “reborn,” our nature transformed over and over, as we experience the cleansing justification of “the Spirit of Christ,”[6] the symbolism of death and resurrection through baptism of water,[7] the new life granted us when we receive the Gift of the Holy Ghost,[8] the spiritual and physical “renew[al]”[9] of the initiatory ordinances, and the unfolding stages of the drama of our existence in the endowment.

Indeed, the endowment itself enacts our individual progress through multiple “rebirths”—from the spirit world to mortal life, and from thence to becoming the sons and daughters of Christ—and ultimately of the Father Himself, receiving all the blessings of the Firstborn[10] as sons and daughters of God.[11] According to the OT1 manuscript of Moses 6:59, the ordinances that prepare one for these blessings constitute “the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven.”[12]

Similarly, by the end of Moses 6, Adam had been not only born of water and of the Spirit, but also “born of God,” having entered His presence in the same manner described by Alma:[13]

For because of the word which he has imparted unto me, behold, many have been born of God, and have tasted as I have tasted, and have seen eye to eye as I have seen; therefore they do know of these things of which I have spoken, as I do know; and the knowledge which I have is of God.

Elder Theodore M. Burton’s explanation offers a possible insight into the nature of the occurrence described in verse 68:[14]

[Page 321]Review of Samuel Morris Brown, Joseph Smith’s Translation: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 314 pages. $34.95 (hardback).

Abstract: Samuel M. Brown opens up a new and expansive view of Joseph Smith as a religious thinker. Written for an academic audience, Brown is intentionally dealing with what can be seen and understood about Joseph Smith’s various translations, a term that Brown uses not only for texts, but for concepts of bringing the world of the divine into contact with the human domain. This is a history of the interaction of a person and the world of his thought, from the first text (the Book of Mormon) to the last, which Brown considers to be the temple rites.

Some will read the main title of Samuel Brown’s book without continuing to the subtitle. That will lead to an unfortunate misunderstanding of Brown’s sympathetic investigation into early Latter-day Saint thought. This book never intends to venture into the questions of how or whether Joseph Smith translated a text from one human language to another. His use of the word translation is a more expansive concept; thus, the subtitle: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism.

Easily overlooked also would be the last two words: early Mormonism. Those are essential because an important distinction in Brown’s work transcends the common notion that early Mormonism simply means its historical beginnings. In Brown’s description of the Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism, it is a qualitative rather than a temporal difference.

In 1994, Armand L. Mauss published The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation. Mauss selected two symbols [Page 322]to represent the tensions he felt the young Church developed. For the maturing Latter-day Saint church, the beehive symbolized “all aspects of Mormon involvement with the world, cultural as well as economic.”1 The angel (specifically the angel Moroni on the temple) signified “the charismatic element in Mormonism.”2 That tension between early charisma and later assimilation is part of the developmental process that moves an early sect into a recognized church.3

That division between charismatic beginnings and eventual assimilation is important when approaching Brown’s book because it was written in the assimilation phase, and it will be read either by an audience that has no Latter-day Saint history or by those whose Church history consists of perceptions developed as part of the assimilation phase. Samuel Brown is pushing his description into the past and discussing the early charisma with reverence, understanding, and a view to present the impact of that charisma to an audience increasingly distant from the intellectual world in which the early Latter-day Saint converts lived. Brown is as close to an insider’s view as we can get while still presenting the overarching perspective of a longer history that allows a vision of how the puzzle pieces finally fit together.

Brown is painting a picture of the development of ideas and therefore begins not with a typical history of Latter-day Saint origins but with one of swirling concepts that will eventually coalesce into an impression of Joseph’s mental world that so enthralled his early converts. It is a verbal painting more akin to Van Gogh’s Starry Night than to the more photorealistic paintings of, say,

This is an Interpreter Radio Roundtable for Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon Lesson 38, “I Am the Law, and the Light,” on 3 Nephi 12-16. The panelists for this roundtable were Steve Densley, Matthew Bowen, Mark Johnson, and Jeff Lindsay. This roundtable was extracted from the August 23, 2020 broadcast of Interpreter Radio. The complete show may be heard at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-radio-show-august-23-2020/. 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.

 

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Blood as a Symbol of Justification

Because blood is a symbol of death and life,[4] it was used in Israelite temples for “the altar [of sacrifice] to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul”[5] — thus symbolizing the process of repentance that culminates in justification.

The first explicit mention of “blood” in the Bible is Genesis 4:10–11, when Abel’s blood cried to God from the ground as a plea of redress for Cain’s murder, and the earth in turn from thenceforth refused to yield its strength to the perpetrator of the crime.[6]

The deliberate consumption of blood has been practiced in many cultures because “popular thought had it that one could renew or reinforce one’s vitality through … absorption of blood.”[7] Intriguingly, an alternate reading of Moses 6:29 given in the OT1 manuscript, describes a wicked Cain-like people who, “by their oaths, … have eat[en] unto themselves death.”[8] If this variant is not a scribal error, it may indicate a corrupt practice where participation in ordinances by those who were ritually unclean was condemned,[9] or perhaps even the “eating” of blood itself. Note that this language further echoes and extends the symbolism of the “eating of death” in the act that precipitated the Fall.[10] Later, God said to Noah: “the blood of all flesh which I have given you for meat shall be shed upon the ground which taketh the life thereof and the blood ye shall not eat.”[11]

 

Blood as a Symbol of Sanctification

As part of the entry on “Sacrifices,” the Latter-day Saint Bible Dictionary makes the following observation about the order of the offerings in Israelite temples:[14]

It is noteworthy that when the three offerings were offered together, the sin always preceded the burnt, and the burnt the peace offerings. Thus the order of the symbolizing sacrifices was the order of atonement [i.e., justification], sanctification, and fellowship with the Lord [i.e., exaltation].

The symbolism of this order of offerings in ancient temples will be meaningful to Latter-day Saints who serve in modern temples. While the initial blessing of justification comes exclusively by means of a substitutionary offering on the altar of sacrifice in the temple courtyard—“relying wholly upon the merits of him who is mighty to save”[15]—the culminating step of the process of sanctification is a joint effort,[16] symbolized by a “second sacrifice”[17] made on the altar of incense that s...

[Page 261]Abstract: Paronomasia in the Hebrew text of Exodus creates narrative links between the name Miriam (Mary) and the “waters” (mayim) of the Re[e]d Sea from which Israel is “pulled” and the nearby “bitter” waters of Marah. Nephi sees Mary (Mariam), the mother of Jesus, associated with the “love of God,” and thus to both “the tree of life” and “the fountain of living waters” (1 Nephi 11:25) vis-à-vis “the fountain of filthy water” (1 Nephi 12:16). Mormon was named after “the land of Mormon” (3 Nephi 5:12). He associates his given name with “waters,” which he describes as a “fountain of pure water” (Mosiah 18:5), and with the good “desires” and “love” that Alma the Elder’s converts manifest at the time of their baptism (Mosiah 18:8, 10‒11, 21, 28). Mormon’s accounts of the baptisms of Alma the Elder’s people, Limhi’s people, the people at Sidom (Alma 15:13), and a few repentant Nephites at Zarahemla who responded to Samuel the Lamanite’s preaching (Helaman 16:1), anticipate Jesus’s eventual reestablishment of the church originally founded by Alma, the baptism of his disciples, and their reception of the Holy Ghost — “that which they most desired” (see 3 Nephi 19:9‒14, 24). Desire serves as a key term that links all of these baptismal scenes. Mormon’s analogy of “the bitter fountain” and its “bitter water” vis-à-vis the “the good fount” and its “good water” — which helps set up his discussion of “the pure love of Christ,” which “endureth forever” (Moroni 7:47‒48) — should be understood against the backdrop of Lehi’s dream as Nephite “cultural narrative” and the history of Alma the Elder’s people at the waters of Mormon. As Mormon’s people lose the “love [which] endureth by faith unto prayer” (Moroni 8:26; see also Moroni 8:14‒17; 9:5) they become like the “bitter fountain” (Moroni 7:11) and do not endure to the end in faith, hope, and charity on the covenant path (cf. 2 Nephi 31:20; Moroni 7:40‒88; 8:24‒26). The name Mormon [Page 262](“desire is enduring” or “love is enduring”), as borne by the prophet-editor of the Book of Mormon, embraces the whole cloud of these associations.

A previous study1 examined the names Miriam/Mary and Mormon as derivations from the common Egyptian lexeme and onomastic element mr(i), “love, wish, desire.”2 As such, Mary (Hebrew miryām [mrym] < Egyptian mry.t) most plausibly denotes “beloved [of a deity].”

A response to Thomas A. Wayment. "Intertextuality and the purpose of Joseph Smith’s new translation of the Bible." In Foundational Texts of Mormonism: Examining Major Early Sources, edited by Mark Ashurst-McGee, Robin Scott Jensen and Sharalyn Howcroft, 74-100. New York City, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018.

In Thomas Wayment’s chapter discussing how “Joseph Smith initiated a new and ambitious … project” to translate the Bible, he motivates his analysis by asserting that “the reasons he began the undertaking have never been fully understood.”[1] He concludes that the impetus for Joseph Smith’s translation of the Bible (JST) came, in essence, as an unplanned afterthought to his having received a revelation of the visions of Moses (Moses 1), which, it is argued, came in response to questions about Moses and the Creation that had arisen over the course of the preceding year.

I have great respect for Wayment’s well-attested scholarship, and I would not want to minimize the great service he has rendered to Latter-day Saints in his edition of the JST and his New Testament writings, among others. But in this chapter, he is not at this best. While the underlying arguments are not completely without merit, they are at times overstated, and some of the counterevidence is ignored.

In this brief essay we give a four-part response to the lines of reasoning presented in the chapter. Although it discusses the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible more broadly, the present remarks will be confined to its explanation of the early origins of the JST and the portions of the JST that eventually became known as the Book of Moses:

Omission of the Prehistory of the Joseph Smith Translation. Although it is true that there is currently no direct evidence that Joseph Smith was expressly commanded by the Lord to begin a translation of the Bible, as Wayment rightly observes, multiple lines of evidence suggest that the restoration of lost truths from the Bible had been previously anticipated and possibly even specifically planned for in advance by Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery. Regrettably, none of these elements of the well-known prehistory of the JST is mentioned in the chapter.

Questionable Claims. Section 2 provides a short discussion on some questionable claims about concurrence with the Joseph Smith Papers project that are first mentioned early on in the chapter.

Was the OT1 Moses 1 Manuscript an Original Dictation or a Copy? To further flesh out his thesis, Wayment asserts that the earliest extant manuscript of Moses 1 was a copy, not an original dictation. In section 3, we show that the received view that Moses 1 is an original dictation of the revelation is a better fit for the evidence.

How does all this relate to the bigger picture? Section 4 concludes this essay. The chapter’s argument that the OT1 Moses 1 manuscript is a copy is part of a larger effort to show that that “the Bible revision was, in its infancy, a kind of editing project to bring existing canonical texts into harmony”[2] with the revelations Joseph Smith had received prior to June 1830. I will briefly describe the primary weakness of this argument. Notwithstanding some areas of disagreement with Wayment, I believe he is correct in concluding that Joseph Smith viewed ancient and modern scripture “as consistent manifestations of the eternal and divine gospel of Jesus Christ.”[3] The Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants are joint witnesses that the restoration of lost truths of the Bible, rather than being an unplanned afterthought, is the realization of prophecies given thousands of years ago.

 

1. The Prehistory of the Joseph Smith Translation

This is an Interpreter Radio Roundtable for Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon Lesson 37, “Arise and Come Forth unto Me,” on 3 Nephi 8-11. The panelists for this roundtable were Bruce Webster, Kris Frederickson and Mike Parker. This roundtable was extracted from the August 16, 2020 broadcast of Interpreter Radio. The complete show may be heard at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-radio-show-august-16-2020/. 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.

 

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In this article, we turn our attention to the second phrase in Moses 6:60: “by the Spirit ye are justified.” Simply put, individuals become “just”—in other words, innocent before God and ready for a covenant relationship with Him—when they demonstrate sufficient repentance to qualify for an “initial cleansing from sin”[3] “by the Spirit,”[4] thus having had the demands of justice satisfied on their behalf through the Savior’s atoning blood.[5] The Book of Moses records that after Adam was baptized, having fulfilled the commandment, “the Spirit of God descended upon him, and thus he was born of the Spirit, and became quickened [i.e., made alive] in the inner man.”[6]

 

Divinely Prescribed Symbolic Gestures in the Ordinances

Specific symbolic gestures have been divinely prescribed for the ordinance of confirmation as well as for subsequent ordinances of anointing. While the form of baptism recalls the symbolism of death and resurrection, the laying of hands on the head[8] that is used in confirmation suggests a retrospective regard toward the scriptural account of the creation of Adam wherein God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.”[9] In this respect, recall also the account in John 20:22, when Jesus “breathed on [His disciples], and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost.”

As Joseph Smith highlighted the importance of the manner in which baptism is performed, describing it as a “sign,” so did he refer to the symbolic evocation of the breath of life in “the laying on of hands,” by which the Holy Ghost is given, ordinations are performed, and the sick are healed, as a “sign.” He said pointedly that if such ordinances were not performed in the way God had appointed they “would fail.”[10] In this context, we might recall what Jesus said when Peter wanted him to wash his head and hands in addition to his feet: “He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit.”[11] The Lord’s reply to Peter suggests why, in similar fashion, the laying of hands on the head within various ordinances equates to a blessing for the entire body.

 

The Receiving of “Divine Breath” Is Associated with Royal Status

With regard to ordinances of anointing that are associated with the sanctifying influence of the Holy Ghost, biblical and Egyptian sources associate the receiving of “divine breath” not merely with an infusion of life, but also with royal status.[13] For example, Isaiah attributes the presence of the Spirit of the Lord to a prior messianic anointing—the anointing oil, like divine breath, being a symbol of new life: “The Spirit of...