The Larger Issue (Discussion of Book of Abraham)

A blogger http://www.lifeongoldplates.com/2009/08/john-gee-larger-issue.html @ event said the following question was asked, but wasn't included in the official transcript:

Q: How can we defend JS as a prophet or his abilities if we can;t defend BoA?

A: Who says we can't? We can defend it. I am saying we must look at entire spectrum of issues, what is important must be considered. It is about determining relative importance. It is an appendage, not central point. We can certainly defend it, but keep it in perspective.

IOW, yes, the Lds will try to defend it -- but quite weakly...You can already recognize the ground they give when they start to describe the Book of Abraham as some weak appendage:

From the article: Where is the Book of Abraham in this? It isn't. The Book of Abraham is not central to the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. The Church survived for the first fifty years of its existence without the Book of Abraham as part of the scriptural canon. So the first thing to remember about the role of the Book of Abraham in apologetics is that the Church does not rise and fall on the veracity of the Book of Abraham

That's like saying: "Our 'prophet/seer' 'translated' 49 things. The 50th thing he 'translated' might not be true. But you know the other 49 things he said were from God doesn't 'rise and fall' on the 50th. Why, that's just an appendage that we might as well whack off."

They neglect that not only does it bring into question Joseph Smith's overall lack of trustworthiness, but it also makes him a false prophet. Deuteronomy 18 is quite clear that it only takes one false prophecy to make one a false prophet. An "honest robber" who was honest 49 out of 50 times in his "financial transactions" is still a thief deserving of jailtime.

...not every argument or point is worth defending. We do not need to defend every rumor about, every action of, or every offhand opinion of every Church leader, apologist, or member. One needs to know what is most important and that should be defended, but the lesser points are often unimportant. We also do not need to defend mistakes. Even widely held opinions do not need to be defended if they are mistaken. The Book of Mormon does not require a hemispheric geography and even if hemispheric readings have been popular among a certain segment of members, they do not have to be defended.

No book of scripture is "perfect"

Latter-day Saints do not subscribe to the conservative Protestant belief in scriptural inerrancy. We do not believe that any book of scripture is perfect or infallible. Brigham Young explained:

When God speaks to the people, he does it in a manner to suit their circumstances and capacities.... Should the Lord Almighty send an angel to re-write the Bible, it would in many places be very different from what it now is. And I will even venture to say that if the Book of Mormon were now to be re-written, in many instances it would materially differ from the present translation. According as people are willing to receive the things of God, so the heavens send forth their blessings.^[2]

So while the Book of Mormon has come down to us with fewer doctrinal errors and corruptions than the Bible, even it could be improved if we were ready to receive further light and knowledge.

Perfectly Translated

Another perfection of the book is its translation. Edward Stevenson related Martin Harris' description of the necessity for the translation to be perfect before the Lord would allow progression to the next character:

By aid of the seer stone, sentences would appear and were read by the Prophet and written by Martin, and when finished he would say, “Written,” and if correctly written, that sentence would disappear, and another appear in its place, but if not written correctly, it remained until corrected, so that the translation was just as it was engraved on the plates, precisely in the language then used.^[3]

Conclusion

The Book of Mormon is the "most correct of any book" in that it contains the fulness of the gospel and presents it in a manner that is "plain and precious

Anyone else feeling the coming attacks on Mitt Romney? I mean they did tell us for months, they hope it’s him that runs, so they can attack. A guaranteed thing, if it’s Romney...

This is the rationale for thinking that the last real prophet died somewhere around 2600 years ago.

Anyone else feeling the coming attacks on Mitt Romney? I mean they did tell us for months, they hope it’s him that runs, so they can attack. A guaranteed thing, if it’s Romney...

Were Romney ever to make it past the primaries, the MSM would pull out their full barrage: Since Mitt was a tithing member of a church at age 30 which at that point still denied blacks the ability to be priestholders in their church, the MSM would make a Mitt-Barack match-up into a referendum on racism.

Beyond the MSM, imagine pictures of Mitt at age 30 in ads describing his "membership" in an organization the MSM would describe as tantamount to a "whites only club."

Just ONE ad with Mitt in his temple regalia would make the Republican party a laughingstock!

My how the times do change.....

From the article above: "Where is the Book of Abraham in this? It isn't. The Book of Abraham is not central to the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. The Church survived for the first fifty years of its existence without the Book of Abraham as part of the scriptural canon. So the first thing to remember about the role of the Book of Abraham in apologetics is that the Church does not rise and fall on the veracity of the Book of Abraham"

So, which is supposed to be the "official" word on the BOA? From Meridian Magazine, and LDS publication, circa 2006

HERE

M E R I D I A N M A G A Z I N E

The Abraham Story: An Introduction
By E. Douglas Clark

-SNIP-

Even so, the Genesis account of Abraham and Sarah is at times so terse as to be, as Erich Auerbach describes, “fraught with background.”^[3]Some passages can be downright perplexing, seemingly incongruent or nearly incomprehensible. For example, how is it that the steadfastly faithful Abraham, who had been willing to leave home and kindred at God’s command, suddenly seems to lapse into dismal faithlessness in Egypt by passing his wife off as his sister? Scholars note that he appears to be “acting completely out of character”^[4]in this “puzzling”^[5]and “incongruous scene”^[6]that stands out as “a mélange of the credible and the unexplained.”^[7]

Such incongruence in the Genesis text arises from the troubled transmission of the Hebrew bible over thousands of years, during which it “suffered from the shortcomings of man,”^[8]including not only all kinds of scribal errors [9] but also, as respected scholar Michael Fishbane has shown, deliberate alterations and omissions.^[10]In short, despite the wealth of information it preserves about Abraham, the book of Genesis can at times be unreliable and misleading.

But with the restoration of the Gospel came the hope that Latter-Day Saints would receive further information about their illustrious forefather. The Book of Mormon, published in 1830, foretold that the latter-day work among a branch of Abraham’s posterity would bring them “to the knowledge of their fathers” and the covenants God had made to them. [11]

The most dramatic fulfillment of that promise came in the stunning restoration of an autobiographical Abraham account that fills in key gaps left by Genesis, including the fact that God commanded Abraham to ask Sarah to say she was Abraham’s sister. In March 1842 when Wilford Woodruff helped set the type for the publication of the first installment of the Book of Abraham, his journal entry that night marveled at the book’s “great and glorious” truths, “which are among the rich treasures that are revealed unto us in the last days.”^[12]

The Book of Abraham remains one of our most important, if sadly underused, scriptural treasures, revealing precious truths about Abraham’s story and his deeds that remain a beacon for his descendants.

The genius of the book of Abraham is that interwoven through the description of… momentous events is a panorama of mankind’s divine origin and potential. As literal spirit offspring of God, we are sent into mortality to be “prove[n]… to see if [we] will do all things whatsoever the Lord [our] God shall command [us]” so that we can “have glory added upon [our] heads for ever and ever.” Parley Pratt noted that in Abraham’s record “we see… unfolded our eternal being — our existence before the world was — our high and responsible station in the councils of the Holy One, and our eternal destiny.” The book of Abraham even describes the road to that highest destiny: strictly obeying all God’s commandments; diligently seeking righteousness and peace; making and keeping sacred covenants; receiving the priesthood and sacred ordinances; building a family unit; searching the scriptures; keeping journals and records; sharing the gospel; and proving faithful in the face of opposition — all works of Abraham, who is as much a model for Latter-day Saints as he was in ages past for those aspiring to be the people of God. [13]

With the appearance of the Book of Abraham and the sure knowledge that authentic Abrahamic traditions had survived outside of the Bible, Church leaders were eager to learn more of Abraham from other emerging sources like the Book of Jasher. The Prophet Joseph briefly referred to in an article he wrote for Times and Seasons, [14] and other leaders like Brigham Young, John Taylor, and Wilford Woodruff, speaking in public, quoted the Jasher story of Abraham smashing the idols.^[15]

When Franklin D. Richards, the compiler of the Pearl of Great Price, spoke in General Conference in 1892, he summarized several legends from Jasher and further mentioned the Qur’an as a source of Abrahamic material.^[16]By then the Church in Salt Lake City had even reprinted the book of Jasher, making it widely available to the saints. And in the 1898 maiden volume of the Improvement Era, the Church published the first English translation of an extra-biblical account called the Apocalypse of Abraham, a text that purports to be an autobiographical writing of the patriarch and contains striking parallels to portions of the Book of Abraham.

Since then, additional ancient texts continued to emerge, slowly at first. A few were published by R. H. Charles at the beginning of the twentieth century.^[17]But the pace began to accelerate with the 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, including the Genesis Apocryphon — yet another autobiographical account of Abraham. In the following decades the emergence of yet other ancient biblical-related texts grew rapidly. Many of these claimed to have been composed originally by early biblical figures like Abraham and Enoch and even Adam, and although once used as authentic texts in early Jewish and Christianity communities, they had long since been set aside, lost, or otherwise forgotten.

Their sudden recovery from oblivion after many centuries is hailed as something of a miracle even by secular scholars. “By the strangest quirk of fate respecting literature that I know of,” wrote Samuel Sandmel in 1983, “large numbers of writings by Jews were completely lost from the transmitted Jewish heritage... Now... a door is being opened anew to treasures that are very old.”^[18]

Hugh Nibley’s assessment is similar, referring to that “astonishing outpouring of ancient writings that is the peculiar blessing of our generation.”^[19]Part of the blessing is the remarkable corroboration that these newly emerged writings offer to the prior latter-day revelations and texts, a phenomenon noted by no less a figure than Harold Bloom. In one of his widely read books, the prominent Bloom, not a Latter-day Saint, called attention to Joseph Smith’s “uncanny recovery of elements in ancient Jewish theurgy that had ceased to be available either to normative Judaism or to Christianity, and that had survived only in esoteric traditions unlikely to have touched Smith directly.”^[20]Such vindication of the Prophet Joseph’s work was prophesied by himself: “The world will prove Joseph Smith a true prophet by circumstantial evidence,”^[21]he foretold.

But these long-lost and recently recovered ancient texts do more than corroborate. They also offer additional detail, consistent with the restored knowledge already provided through latter-day scripture, about our illustrious forefather Abraham. Of all the saints since Abraham’s day, we are uniquely blessed to have at our disposal an expanded wealth of knowledge about him and his life.

All of which seems to me more than coincidental, for the more we learn of Abraham’s day, the more it seems a distant mirror of our own age of increasing spiritual darkness. The remedy for today’s ills is the preaching of the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and the establishment of Zion, which we can accomplish only by doing the works of Abraham and thereby fulfilling his covenant to bless ourselves and all nations.

But when Joseph Smith said the Book of Mormon was the "most correct of any book," he was referring to more than just wording, a fact made clear by the remainder of his statement: He said "a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book." When read in context, the Prophet's statement refers to the correctness of the principles it teaches.

Hmmm, lets peel this back a little. If this is true why doesn't the bom touch these essential doctrines for exultation?

Church organization
Plurality of Gods
Plurality of wives doctrine
Word of Wisdom
God is an exalted man
Celestial marriage
Men may become Gods
Three degrees of glory
Baptism for the dead
Eternal progression
The Aaronic Priesthood
Temple works of washings, anointing, endowments, sealing.

Since the bom was given under the 'power of god', it is totally reasonable to ask why it is so imperfect, since the testimony of the scribes is nearly unanimous that the 'translation' was provided on a word for word (and in some instances letter for letter) basiss.