Since
Cumorah by Hugh Nibley. Reading chapters like this strengthens my
testimony. Chapter 1: ". . . There Can Be No More
Bible."\Clutching at Straws: The Classic Charges against the
Book of Mormon\The first line of defense against the Book of Mormon a
barricade thrown up even before it had come from the printer, was the
charge that since the Bible is the absolute, letter-perfect,
flawless, and final Word of God, to designate any other writing as
holy scripture could only be the height of blasphemy. It was an easy
thing, however, for Orson Pratt and others “to expose this popular,
though fatal error, invented by priestcraft in the early ages of the
apostasy, and transferred to succeeding generations.”1 We need not
repeat here the oft-published evidence that the writers of scripture
have always thought of the setting forth of the word of God for men
as an open-ended affair in which God is free to speak whenever he
chooses, regardless of how reluctant men may be to allow him that
privilege, since the proposition is readily conceded by leading
Christian scholars today.2\The second mortal offense of the Book of
Mormon was the admission on the title page that this record,
translated “by the gift of God,” might possibly contain mistakes.
Mistakes? In a book revealed by the power of God? Another blasphemous
conception. Yet today Bible scholars accept this proposition as
readily as they do the first, and labor day and night to come up with
a more correct text of the Holy Bible than any at present available.
The idea that a book can contain many things that are true and of God
and at the same time many things that are false and of men was one
that Catholics and Protestants alike found perfectly unthinkable in
the days of Joseph Smith, though most students of the Bible accept it
today. And once the possibility of human error is conceded, why
should the idea of corrected editions of the Book of Mormon be
offensive? Revised and improved editions of the Bible are constantly
coming from the press, and the Mormons have never believed in an
infallible book or an infallible anything in which men have had a
hand. God allows fallible humans to be co-workers with him on the
road to a far-distant perfection, but he expects them to make lots of
mistakes along the way.\Why, then, have the critics been scandalized
and delighted to discover that the second edition of the Book of
Mormon corrected many mistakes in the first? For years this writer
used only the first edition in his classes, and it is still by far
the best. It is full of mistakes, but they are obvious ones.
According to the printer, J.H. Gilbert, Joseph Smith told him to
leave the grammar unaltered, since “the Old Testament is
ungrammatical.”3 As we shall see, recent studies of the Old
Testament prophets show that they often mix up their persons,
numbers, and tenses in impassioned discourse, just as Abinadi does in
the first edition of the Book of Mormon pages 182–83. On the other
hand, the Prophet gave Gilbert a free hand with punctuation and
spelling: “The manuscript,” says the printer, “was one solid
paragraph, without a punctuation mark, from beginning to end.”4
Imagine six hundred pages of that! How is it to be explained except
on the assumption that the text was actually dictated word for word
by one uneducated man to another? It was no ruse or trick, since
nobody but the printer ever mentioned it, and he was authorized to
correct the manuscript where he thought necessary. The manuscript
used by the printer is now available, and it shows that Mr. Gilbert
did take liberties with the text. Are we to believe that Joseph Smith
is responsible when we read in the first edition on page 69 five
lines from the bottom, “For my soul deliteth in the Scriptures”
and just two lines below that,”Behold my soul delighteth in the
Scriptures”? Since by his own admission the printer was authorized
to correct the spelling, isn’t he to blame for putting in the fifth
line from the bottom of page 180: “Lamoni rehearst unto him” and
on the bottom line “now when Lamoni had rehearsed unto him.” Or
who is accountable for the “peeple” on page 127, after the word
had been spelled properly a hundred times? If the printer was
correcting Oliver Cowdery’s spelling he should have corrected these
mistakes; if not, Cowdery himself had obviously slipped up and any
editor was not only free to correct the slip but bound to. Whether
the printer chooses to use or omit a hyphen or a comma is a matter of
punctuation and entirely up to him. “There were some printing
errors,” Joseph Smith wrote, and people still throw up their hands
in horror, as if there are not printing errors to be found in almost
any edition of the Bible.\An occasional printing error in a Bible
disturbs no one, both because it is to be expected and is easy to
correct. Changes in wording to clarify the English also cause little
offense. “A-going” and “a-journey” (Book of Mormon first
edition, p. 249) were perfectly accepted usage in Joseph Smith’s
time and place, but not anymore: consequently we change them in
today’s editions lest they confuse the young, though to this writer
“a-going” and “a-journey” have a nice swing and color—his
grandmother always spoke that way. In your English Bible you will
find many words in italics; these are all words not found in the
original, and they vary from edition to edition: they are put there
by the various translators in attempt to convey as clearly as
possible what they thought the original writers had in mind. Thus you
will find in the very second verse of your King James Bible the word
“was” in italics—because in the Hebrew texts the word “was”
is simply not there, but to make good English it has to be put in. If
men can take such liberties with the Bible, while holding it to be an
infallible book, why should we not be allowed the same freedom with
the Book of Mormon which nobody claims to be infallible?\If one
examines the long list of changes in various editions of the Book of
Mormon one will find not a single one that alters the meaning of any
passage. In two places, it is true, Joseph Smith added words in the
second edition: they should be in italics to show that they are there
by way of explaining the text, not changing it. In the first edition
Mary is referred to as “the mother of God, after the manner of the
flesh” (1 Nephi 11:18); the insertion in later editions of “the
Son of God” is simply put in to make it clear that the second
person of the godhead is meant, and thereby avoid confusion, since
during the theological controversies of the early Middle Ages the
expression “mother of God” took on a special connotation which it
still has for many Christians.\Three verses later (1 Nephi 11:21),
the declaration of the angels, “Behold the Lamb of God, yea, even
the Eternal Father!” has been augmented in later editions to “even
the Son of the Eternal Father!” to avoid confusion: in this passage
the Eternal Father is possibly in apposition not to “Lamb” but to
“God”—he is the Lamb of God-the-Eternal-Father. But that might
not be obvious to most readers, and so to avoid trouble, and without
in the least changing the meaning of the text, the Lamb of God is
made equivalent to the Son of the Eternal Father. Both ideas are
quite correct, and there is no conflict between them. In the same
way, the second edition adds the words “or . . . waters of baptism”
to the term “waters of Judah” in the first edition (1 Nephi 20:1)
by way of clarifying—not changing—what the writer had in
mind.5\Sometimes the editors of later editions of the Book of Mormon
have made “corrections” that were better left unmade. Thus one
officious editor in his attempt to visualize and rationalize a
practical system of ventilation for the Jaredite barges omitted a
number of significant words that appear in the first edition which if
carefully analyzed seem to give a far better plan for
air-conditioning than that found in Ether 2:17–20 of our present
editions.6 And was it necessary to change the name of Benjamin (in
the first edition) to Mosiah in later editions of Ether 4:1? Probably
not, for though it is certain that Mosiah kept the records in
question, it is by no means certain that his father, Benjamin, did
not also have a share in keeping them. It was Benjamin who displayed
the zeal of a life-long book lover in the keeping and studying of
records; and after he handed over the throne to his son Mosiah he
lived on and may well have spent many days among his beloved records.
And among these records could have been the Jaredite plates, which
were brought to Zarahemla early in the reign of Mosiah when his
father could still have been living (Mosiah 8:9–15).\The first
edition of the Book of Mormon though the most readable, is not the
standard version today. That is because it is hard to use, with its
long chapters and lack of numbered verses, and the grammar is
sometimes disturbing to us. Disturbing, but never misleading—that
is the point. Much of the New Testament is in barbaric Greek, and the
ancient pagans often jeered at the illiteracy and bad grammar of the
Disciples; yet in our English Bible their grammar is meticulously
correct. Is that an indication of skulduggery? No more than the poor
grammar of the ancient Apostles was proof that they were not
inspired. If anything, Joseph Smith’s poor grammar serves the
purpose of proving, as did theirs, that the inspired words of the
prophets were no product of the schools or the invention of cunning
and clever men.\The Book of Mormon claims to be written in “words
of plainness”: its meaning is always clear. Joseph Smith at the end
of his life proclaimed it the most correct book on earth. Most
correct in what sense? The text of Tom Sawyer is far better attended
than that of the Bible, but does one conclude from that that Tom
Sawyer is a more “correct” book? What is a “correct” book?
One with properly cut margins, appropriate binding, a useful index,
accurately numbered pages? Not at all; these are mere mechanical
details, as are also punctuation, spelling, and even grammar—those
matters about which the critics of the Book of Mormon have made such
a to-do. Perhaps only a book of science can be really correct in the
sense of conveying perfectly accurate information: only here we must
remember Karl Popper’s warning: “Every scientific statement must
remain tentative forever.”7 So what is a correct scientific
statement today may not be correct tomorrow. The most correct book in
the world is the one that will be found to contain the fewest untrue
statements after all the books in the world have been checked and
compared. Of course no one can know today which book that will be,
unless one knows it by revelation. But such a statement made about
the Book of Mormon by its translator invites the most searching
examination. To such an examination we intend to contribute.\To shore
up the weakness of the total-Bible argument, opponents of the Book of
Mormon have always depended heavily on vigorous declamations against
the character of Joseph Smith. The accepted procedure has been to
argue that since Smith was a rascal the Book of Mormon must be a
fraud, while resting the proof of his rascality squarely on the fact
that he produced the Book of Mormon.\Today we can no longer view the
issues from the vantage-point of those friends and enemies of Joseph
Smith, both of whom could claim to have known him personally and
intimately. We can indeed examine the credentials of the various
character witnesses, as we attempt to do in The Myth Makers, but the
whole question of Joseph Smith’s character has become academic. On
the other hand, we now enjoy certain advantages in testing the Book
of Mormon which were denied to earlier generations. The whole
discussion has shifted ground completely, though critics of the Book
of Mormon are still desperately determined to keep it in the old
grooves. How drastically things have changed can be illustrated by
comparing the position taken by the clergy one hundred years ago with
the position they take on the same issues today. At that time they
argued that the Book of Mormon could not be true because its
existence refuted the most basic tenets of the Christian faith.
Today, those particular tenets are all being revised as the churches
begin to teach the very things that so outraged them coming from the
Mormons.\Let us look in on a public discussion which was edifying the
summer crowds at Boulogne-sur-Mer in a warm July of the year 1850.
The ministers of three leading denominations had sent to Elder John
Taylor and his three companions laboring in the city a “respectful
public challenge, to meet us in open and public debate,”8 wherein
they intended to demonstrate (1) that Joseph Smith was a “blasphemous
and daring imposter,” (2) that the Book of Mormon was a “stupid
and ignorant farrago of nonsense,” and (3) that the pretended
divine calling of the Elders themselves was a fraud. Three more
ministers acted as referees. The prosecution rested their case on the
writings of the Reverend Henry Caswall, Professor Turner, and John C.
Bennett. This put Elder Taylor at a peculiar advantage, since he was
not only intimately acquainted with Joseph Smith, but had also known
Caswall and Bennett personally, while his opponents had never set
eyes on any of them.\“Concerning Mr. Caswall,” said Elder Taylor,
“I was at Nauvoo during the time of his visit. He came for the
purpose of looking for evil. . . . I saw Mr. Caswall in the printing
office at Nauvoo.” Here is news indeed; in examining Caswall’s
story some years ago, we were unable to find a witness to his visit,
but here we have one. We even have a report of the Psalter episode:
“He had with him an old manuscript and professed to be anxious to
know what it was. I looked at it and told him that I believed it was
a Greek manuscript. In his book he states that it was a Greek
Psalter; but that none of the Mormons told him what it was. Herein is
falsehood, for I told him.” It is significant that in a later
version of his story, published sometime after this discussion,
Caswall changed his story and had Joseph Smith, who in his first
version said, “That ain’t Greek,” say “some of it is Greek.”
We showed in our study that there was indeed something very
suspicious about Caswall’s Psalter-story in which we detected a
rather obvious trap to catch Joseph Smith, a trap that never worked,
though the Reverend Caswall made devious and toilsome efforts to
prove that it did.9 And now we have interesting confirmation of our
trap theory.\It was the third night of the great discussion. The
ministers, who had put much store by Caswall’s testimony, that
night brought with them a manuscript to test Taylor’s knowledge of
Greek. That was irrelevant, of course, since Elder Taylor’s claim
was not that he had proven the Caswall manuscript to be Greek or that
his identification was correct, but only that he had said he thought
it was Greek. However, the reverend gentlemen put three sentences in
strange writings before Taylor and asked him to tell them which of
the three was Greek:Elder Taylor.—This, I think; (pointing to the
first).\Mr. Cleeve.—There is not a letter of Greek in it; it is a
verse of Japanese (Laughter and confusion).\Elder Taylor.—That
certainly has the appearance of Greek.\Mr. Groves [another minister,
not one of the three].—I declare it is much more like Hebrew. . .
.\A Gentleman in the meeting.—Let me see it. I am a graduate of
Oxford, and I declare that there are Greek characters in it, and that
any person not familiar with the language could easily mistake it for
Greek.—(Cries: “It is all a trick! shame!” and much confusion).
. . .\Second Gentleman.—It is written to imitate Greek, and is
evidently done so with an intention to deceive.\Mr. Cleeve.—There
is not a letter of Greek in it.\First Gentleman.—I declare there
is, sir, and I will not be contradicted.—(Confusion.) 10\To such
desperate measures would men of the cloth resort to discredit the
Book of Mormon. Here we have a plain enough demonstration of the sort
of thing Caswall was up to. If the discussion resulted in nothing
else, it did conclude with clear statements by both sides of the
positions they took. The contrasting viewpoints were thus summed up
by Elder Taylor: Now have they Apostles? No. They ridicule the
idea of them. Have they Prophets? No. They tell us there is to be no
more prophecy. Have they evangelists, pastors, and teachers, inspired
men? No. They don’t believe in inspiration, and tell us that the
cause of inspiration has ceased. Do they speak in tongues? No. You
have heard it turned into ridicule time and again [during the
discussion]. Do they have prophets among them who prophesy? No. This
they call a delusion. If any are sick, do they do as St. James says,
“send for the elders of the church that they may pray for them, and
anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord?” No.11\In their
rebuttals the ministers confirmed all these points, with the referees
joining in on their side. But what would their positions on these
issues be today? Hesitant—if they kept up with the
times.\Aggiornamento—the Churches Give Ground\Aggiornamento is a
word favored by Pope Paul VI, and he translates it as “up-dating.”
A new conception of the church, and especially of its spiritual
gifts, is now running hand in hand with a new concept of the
scriptures, and that in turn throws the door wide open to a new look
at Mormonism and the Book of Mormon. What has brought this strange
state of affairs to pass? It has been the discovery of ancient
records, long forgotten by men, but brought to light in the years
since Cumorah, and especially in our own generation, to make the
Cumorah story appear less and less fantastic and more and more
probable as the years go by and the documents accumulate. The
compelling power of ancient voices speaking anew from the dust since
Cumorah and especially since Qumran is today driving the whole
Christian world along strange paths. “No one can deny,” writes a
Methodist scholar with strong Catholic leanings, “that something
remarkable is going on in the formerly ‘unchanging’ Roman
Catholic Church.”12 Nothing less than a thorough-going revamping of
doctrines and ordinances is indicated. Restoration and revelation,
forbidden words but a decade or so ago, have become the watchwords of
a “renewed” Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant.\What is
responsible for this astonishing revolution? A Protestant and a
Catholic scholar, co-authoring a new book on the liturgical movement,
have shown that the initial impulse and continuing pressure behind
the movement has been the progressive discovery of increasingly
ancient documents opening up step by step new and strange vistas of
an ancient church totally unlike anything that conventional
Christianity had imagined.\R.P. Marshall, the Protestant minister,
begins by noting that the Protestants have been guilty of a
systematic neglect of rites and ordinances; indeed, “only in recent
years has worship been seriously considered by Protestants as a field
for study.”13 On the other hand, the Catholic writer M.J. Taylor,
S.J. notes that the rites of the Roman Church have long since become
all but meaningless for the people: “Men seem unable to leave well
enough alone. They want to add to what tradition has given them;”
such additions “made for a sense of spectacle. . . . In the
liturgies where bishops and the popes were celebrants the chants
became almost symphonic. . . . The people, unable to participate in
the musical supports to these rites, surrendered their role to the
choir.”14 That is, both Catholic and Protestant authorities admit
that their churches are today far removed from the original rites of
the church, a return to which is the purpose of the so-called
liturgical movement, “a practical effort . . . to renew the lives
of all the faithful here and now through a revived liturgy.”15 And
this is where the voices from the dust come in, for the movement
began with those “patristic and liturgical studies” which sought
the true nature of the liturgy in the oldest available
documents.16\Dom Gueranger (1805–1875) of the monastery of Solesmes
started the movement, but though he “thought it necessary to go
back to the past, . . . he lacked the historical documents”17
necessary to take him far enough. Hence, “his renewal went back to
a time when the Roman liturgy was not at its best.”18\The greatest
advance was made in Germany at the Monastery of Maria Laach, which
“made an immeasurable contribution to the liturgical movement in
its scholarly liturgical studies” and “produced . . . ample
historical justification for . . . reform.”19 In short, the
unearthing of old documents or “historical studies (doctrinal,
liturgical, and pastoral) made it quite clear that our present
liturgy was not in the best of health;” without such documents none
would have suspected the need of going “back to the earlier
traditions, . . . a return to tradition to overcome defects of the
present.”20 The same need is now felt by many Protestants, and for
them too, “the liturgical movement has sought the aid of history
and theology in the study of the rites. . . . Catholics and
Protestants,” Marshall concludes, “must recover what they have
lost, and one cannot cast blame on the other.”21\As everyone knows,
the world was mightily offended by the assertion of the Latter-day
Saints that the Christians had lost many of the ancient rites and
ordinances and was scandalized and amused by their preoccupation with
rites and ordinances that they considered essential to
salvation.\Today the Christian world both admits serious losses and
seeks to fill the gap by going back to long-forgotten writings, the
oldest and most important of which have come forth literally from the
dust in our own time. This astonishing turn of things can be
illustrated by utterances, characteristically frank and scholarly, of
Pope Paul VI. “Now everything is new, surprising, changed,” he
writes of the liturgy; “even the ringing of the bells at the
Sanctus has been done away with.”22 Everything new and changed!
That is surprising indeed, but there is a reason: “We are
concerned,” wrote the pope in his First Encyclical, “to restore
to the Church that ideal of perfection and beauty that corresponds to
its original image . . . [and have] the desire of renewing the whole
structure of the church.”23\When Mormons have spoken of a
restoration of the gospel, the Christians have been quick to take
offense and demand in outraged tones, “Restoration? When was it
ever lost?” But now no less a person than the Pope of Rome declares
that there must be restoration affecting “the whole structure of
the Church”! He speaks of “the great spiritual renewal which the
Second Vatican Council hopes to promote” and champions “the
Church’s heroic and impatient struggle for renewal: the struggle to
correct those flaws introduced by its members.”24 The church “today
. . . is examining herself and formulating the things which Christ,
her founder, thought and willed concerning her. . . . The church must
now define her own nature. . . . In this way the church will complete
the doctrinal work which the First Vatican Council intended to
enunciate.”25\To one familiar with the Catholic polemic of bygone
years with its pounding emphasis on the great, monolithic,
unchanging, universal, victorious church, all this sounds very new,
surprising, and changed indeed. Isn’t it rather late in the day to
try to decide what the church is all about? There must be some good
reason for such a drastic and abrupt change of viewpoint, and the
cause is not far to seek—new discoveries of old documents are
confronting the world with an image of the early church that is
totally different from all former imaginings, but an image to which
the present Christian world must somehow manage to adjust. That is
not the whole story, but as in the liturgical movement in general, it
is undoubtedly the prime mover.\The voice of Qumran seems to echo in
the terms by which the present pope and the council choose to
designate the church: “The People of God,” “The New Israel,”
elicit the image of Israel in the desert, the small band of faithful
saints that “sometimes looks like a small flock.” 26 “The
church has turned a corner,” writes the editor of the Catholic
World; “today we belong to a church which has defined itself as the
people of God. . . . We live in an age of renewed attention to the
charismatic gifts of Holy Spirit bestowed on every baptized person
with the ‘right and duty’ to use these gifts for the building up
of the Body of Christ.”27\Eduard Meyer noted long ago that one of
the unique aspects of Mormonism, setting it off completely from all
other religions, was the idea of a continuation of the charismatic
gifts as shared by all members.28 The “right and duty” in our
quotation refers to the new Catholic policy of “every member a
missionary”: “It pleases Us that the test [of the Council schema]
constantly demands that the entire church be missionary, and also
that each member of the faithful, insofar as possible, become in
spirit and in works a missionary.”29\There is much talk now in both
Protestant and Catholic journals of revelation and inspiration—need
we remind the reader that from the beginning its claim to continuing
revelation was considered to be the most obnoxious and dangerous
aspect of Mormonism?30 Father Latourelle notes that the Second
Vatican Council is the very first time a council of the church has
ever methodically considered the basic foundations of revelation,
tradition, and inspiration. 31 And now we are told that “when
either the Roman Pontiff or the body of bishops in conjunction with
him defines a proposition, they propound it in connection with
revelation,” so that “all are bound to abide by, and conform to,
this Revelation.”32 Infallibility, we are told, “is coextensive
with the deposit of divine Revelation,” i.e., the words of the
Bible as “propounded with the assistance of the Holy
Spirit.”\Reversing the argument of Tertullian, the Pope proves the
presence of the Holy Spirit by the existence of the church, instead
of vice versa: “But if the Church is here, then the Holy Spirit is
also here, the Paraclete,” so that “the Church can never fail to
give assent to these definitions because of the activity of the Holy
Spirit.”33 The cornerstone of authority is now revelation and the
Holy Spirit. But it was not always so. Whatever became of Scholastic
Philosophy, the proudest and greatest achievement of the Roman
Church, which up until now has been officially designated as the one
proper key to revelation, i.e., to the deposit of the scriptures?34
Now revelation itself is something more than the word of God in the
Bible, official statements are now to be considered as made somehow
“in connection with revelation.” Today scholasticism is out and
indirect revelation is cautiously taking over. The Pope even refers
to his predecessor, Pius XII, clearly but with careful indirection,
as a prophet, one who spoke in “solemn tones like the voice of the
Prophet of God and the Father of the world.”35\The role of new
documentary discoveries in bringing these strange changes about is
evident from a number of papal utterances. “The Pope recognizes
that recent explorations, methods, diggings, texts, inscriptions,
papyri, codexes, ruins, etc., have entirely changed the problems of
Biblical exegesis in the last fifty years,” and he calls for
intensified search for the original texts, and a new scientific
Catholic method of exegesis.36 Noting that “even such illustrious
commentators as St. Jerome sometimes had relatively little success in
explaining more difficult questions” of scripture, the Pope
suggests “General Guidelines for the Exegete,” requiring
“appropriate use of the new exegetical techniques, particularly
those advocated by the historical method taken as a whole, . . .
relying on the help of textual criticism, literary criticism, and
linguistic knowledge;” he emphasizes the importance of “the sound
findings of recent investigations,” and allows that “the Catholic
exegete can and should be free to exercise his own perspicacity and
intelligence. Only in this way will each person . . . contribute to
the continuing progress of sacred doctrine.”37\Though this apparent
freedom of investigation is actually to be under the strict
surveillance of the “living magisterium” of the church and
“subject to the authority and jurisdiction of the Ordinaries,”38
still it is the scholars with their “diggings, texts,
inscriptions,” etc., who furnish the information necessary to
decide what the teachings and rites of the church should be.\It is
astonishing how many of the changes that are taking place in Catholic
and Protestant doctrines and ordinances are in the direction of those
very things that have always brought persecution and derision on the
heads of the Latter-day Saints in the past. This may be shown by a
glance at the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, published by the
Second Vatican Council on November 25, 1965.39 The first section is
headed “The Father’s Plan” and speaks of the gospel in terms of
a plan going back to the pre-existence. The second chapter is
entitled “The People of God,” and in the section headed “A
Chosen People” presents us with that new image of the church so
startlingly different from the one that has been diligently
cultivated since the Fathers of the fourth century, as it shows us
“the new Israel, journeying in the present world, . . . moving
forward through temptations and trials.”\The next section is headed
“A Priestly People,” and teaches that “the common priesthood of
the faithful” is “in its own distinctive way a participation in
the one priesthood of Christ.” The next section announces that all
must through the sacraments (ordinances) be “reborn as sons of
God.” Next we learn that “the Holy People of God also share in
Christ’s prophetic office by bearing living witness to Him.” This
calls (in the next section) for the gifts of the Spirit, which should
be widely enjoyed in the church. The next section calls upon all to
be missionaries.\Chapter VII has a title that would have shocked any
church historian a few years back,40 when church and eschatology were
held to be diametrically opposed to each other: “The Eschatological
Character of the Wayfaring Church and its Union with the Heavenly
Church.” It was just this sort of talk that St. Augustine and his
contemporaries effectively put an end to; for him and his scholastic
successors (who hardly receive any notice at all in the new order of
things), the church on earth was the eschatological and heavenly
church.41 But now it is a different story as we are whisked off to
Qumran to see a little band of “saints,” scorned and rejected by
the world, living in expectation of the coming Lord at the end of the
times: “The final age of the world has already come upon us,” the
chapter begins, informing us that “until the appearance of new
heavens and a new earth in which justice dwells, the wayfaring church
. . . wears the ephemeral look of this world.”\So now the universal
church, militant and triumphant, established once for all to remain
(according to the formula of the former Vatican Council) “firm and
steadfast until the end of the world,” has taken on “the
ephemeral look of this world”! Nay, for all its resounding claims
“the catholicity of the Church is always enormously
deficient.”42\The Christian world cannot be wholly unaware of
moving in the direction of things that they mocked and derided when
voices first spoke from Cumorah. One indication of this is the
observation of one of the foremost Catholic authorities on the Dead
Sea Scrolls, in one of the first and best books ever to appear on the
subject, that the correct title for the community at Qumran should be
Latter-day Saints, but that the title could not be used because
unfortunately it had been preempted by a “so-called Christian
sect.” 43\While Roman Catholics today concede that changes are
being made and have been made in the past in the rites, customs, and
administration of their church, some of them have taken pains to
point out to this writer that the really important part of the
heritage, the doctrine of the church, has remained unchanged, fixed
in the inalterable formulas of the creeds. But this is a
misunderstanding. The great councils of the church, including all the
early ecumenical councils, were held primarily to discuss and decide
on matters of doctrine; if the words of the creeds have remained
unchanged, the interpretation of those words has been a theme of
endless controversy that still goes on.44 It is understandable that
the Catholic clergy, where they can, take the position of Bousset
that their church has never changed its fundamental doctrines; yet as
Owen Chadwick has shown, the greatest changes in that church in
modern as in ancient times have been doctrinal ones.45\Chapter 2: A
New Age of Discovery\The Book of Mormon Describes the Bible\In three
ways the Book of Mormon by implication rejected the conventional
ideas of what the Bible is supposed to be: (1) by its mere existence
it refuted the idea of a “once-for-all” word of God; (2) by
allowing for the mistakes of men in the pages of scripture it
rejected the idea of an infallible book; (3) and by its free and
flexible quotations from the Bible it rejected the idea of a fixed,
immutable, letter-perfect text.\But beyond that, the Book of Mormon
contains certain explicit statements about the Bible that are most
enlightening. It claims that many precious things are to be restored
in the due time of the Lord by the bringing forth of long-lost
writings, specifically of holy writings that had been anciently
hidden away “to come forth in their purity” in the last days. It
describes the ancient and “original” state of both the Old and
the New Testaments in terms that invite the closest inspection by
biblical students. Fundamentalists and higher critics have been
equally scandalized by the Book of Mormon which on the one hand
neither assumed that the Old Testament was a single book written
without error by the very finger of God, nor on the other allowed the
verdict of the higher critics, that it was only a thing of human
shreds and patches. Today both theories are being modified, with the
students of the past generation of higher critics reluctantly
conceding the essential unity of the Old Testament, while the
fundamentalist sects make a great to-do about searching the
“original” documents as if the true meaning and the true text
were still in doubt. The picture of the original Old Testament that
is beginning to emerge is very much like that which confronts us in
the pages of the Book of Mormon. There Nephi, looking far into the
future, is shown a vision of the Gentiles bringing “a book” to
the remote descendants of his father in the New World, and is told,
“The book that thou beholdest is a record of the Jews, which
contains the covenants of the Lord, which he hath made unto the house
of Israel, . . . also . . . many of the prophecies of the holy
prophets” (1 Nephi 13:23).\Tues7/11/17 Good Evening Brandon,
I
mentioned to you last month that if I could get my kids to read the
first 45 pages of this book I would love it! I sent you the Preface.
Now you have the first Chapter. You have been reading Hugh Nibley!!
He is much easier to read than he is to listen to. Did you detect all
the undercurrents of teasing and making fun? Sometimes they are
blatant exposures and not hidden at all! So fun. He really loved the
gospel of Jesus Christ and he studied meticulously every piece of
revelation and translation from the prophet Joseph Smith. He was
autistic, a democrat, brilliant as a child, transferred to secret
codes and spying in the military and dedicated to the brethren while
he served at BYU no matter the offers from other Universities! He was
a gadfly at BYU and would not allow the faculty to become high and
mighty. No class distinction, live within your means! I attended BYU
before and after my mission: '73-80. It was a curse n challenge and a
blessing and credential to my life. Hard and Good both came to me
while there. As you can imagine I was not a well adjusted student but
I appeared so on the outside. @@ I am reading the last 2 chapters of
his book and they are so rich it reminded me to continue sharing it
with you. How many people do you know who have no ulterior motives
and just want to gain spiritual knowledge and wisdom and build the
kingdom? HN was tempted at times but he stayed serving. So once again
let me congratulate you on reading and mostly comprehending Hugh
Nibley. Remember most of these were published in the Improvement Era-
the SS magazine of the church, so he tried to make them intelligible
and maybe even a little entertaining! @@ Mistelle graduated from Roy
High School in Ogden and she sent me a letter. She could have been in
resource/special ed all her years but her mother, Gayelinn'72, did
not want the stigma. So she took honors courses and got D's and F's
and took summer school to make up lost credits. Now that is
commitment wouldn't you say! I just found that out this year.
Mistelle is the one who was asked to prom by a girl who dressed in a
tux. I couldn't believe G had prayed about it and felt good about it.
What a terrible label and stigma that would cause! stig·ma
ˈstiɡmə/
noun
-
1.a mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance, quality, or person."the stigma of having gone to prison will always be with me"
-
synonyms:
shame, disgrace, dishonor, ignominy, opprobrium, humiliation, (bad) reputation
"the stigma of bankruptcy"
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