Kevin Christensen on Margaret Barker's Research

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned in a post on ancient Israelite religious reforms that Kevin Christensen had written a lot on that subject, but that the site that I was used to going to for links to his articles seemed to have some broken links. I was just recently made aware that all the links to Kevin Christensen’s many articles and papers covering this topic, including, especially, Old Testament scholar Margaret Barker’s research are now up and running — and all at one convenient, accessible location over at Howard Hopkins’ website, www.thinlyveiled.com.  Christensen is an LDS author who is well known for his pioneering efforts to (successfully) introduce Margaret Barker’s writings to the LDS community and for demonstrating how her research is of great value to Mormon studies.  For anyone who likes Margaret Barker, or for anyone who has any interest at all in the ancient temple, the place of Jesus Christ in the Old Testament, how the prophecies of Joseph Smith fit in with biblical studies, and how this all relates to Mormon apologetics, I highly recommend you take a look at Kevin Christensen’s enlightening works (indeed, most probably have already, but they are always worth another look).

Plain and Precious Things Restored: Why Margaret Barker Matters

Plain and Precious Things Restored: Spiritual Blindness

Plain and Precious Things Restored: Margaret Barker and Josiah’s Reform

Plain and Precious Things Restored: Margaret Barker and Wisdom

Plain and Precious Things Restored: Margaret Barker and the Queen of Heaven

Plain and Precious Things Restored: Jesus and the Temple Tradition

Margaret Barker’s Understanding of Jesus Christ

Margaret Barker on Christmas: The Original Story

The Temple, the Monarchy, and Wisdom: Lehi’s World and the Scholarship of Margaret Barker

Nephi, Wisdom, and the Deuteronomist Reform

Jacob’s Connections to First Temple Traditions

The Deuteronomist De-Christianizing of the Old Testament

A Response to Paul Owen’s Comments on Margaret Barker

The complete text of Paradigms Regained: A Survey of Margaret Barker’s Scholarship and Its Significance for Mormon Studies

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For a complete set of links to Kevin Christensen’s articles on Margaret Barker as well as related papers from other LDS authors, plus links to .PDF files, please see http://www.thinlyveiled.com/kchristensen.htm.

Temple Themes in the Book of Moses: Jeffrey M. Bradshaw Answers Questions About His New Book

Almost nine months ago I had the great opportunity of interviewing author Jeffrey M. Bradshaw about his outstanding (and very large) book, In God’s Image and Likeness (you can read that multi-post interview starting here). It is now my great pleasure to present to you my brief interview with Dr. (Bishop) Bradshaw regarding a new book of his that has just been released, entitled Temple Themes in the Book of Moses. I have had the privilege of having a look at this new book and I can tell you that it is exciting, inspiring, and contains many new and fresh insights that will greatly enhance your understanding of the temple and its purpose, as well as give you a richer appreciation for how much the Book of Moses really has to offer us.

What motivated you to write “Temple Themes in the Book of Moses”?

Jeff Bradshaw: My hope in writing this new book was that readers would gain a greater appreciation for the depth and sophistication of temple teachings—and the implications of those teachings for our daily lives. We are naturally drawn to the temple because it is a place apart where we can feel the peace and joy of God’s presence as we participate in sacred ordinances for ourselves and others. We take our problems to the temple and pray for help and guidance, and we also engage in group prayer for others with particular needs. These things alone are great blessings.

Often less appreciated, however, is the fact that the temple is intended to be a place of profound and very personal learning, not only with respect to the answers we seek to prayers about our immediate concerns, but also about our place in the overall economy of our divine Father’s Creation. Noting the magnitude of our opportunities in this respect, Elder Neal A. Maxwell once remarked: “God is giving away the spiritual secrets of the universe,” and then asked: “but are we listening?”^[i]

To help prepare our minds and hearts to receive this divine instruction, we have been counseled to study the scriptures and the words of latter-day prophets. Allusions to temple themes can be found throughout these writings, but it is not always easy to recognize them. Efforts have been made to bridge this gap through books that explain the meaning of specific symbols used in scripture and temple worship. However, most of us not only struggle with the meaning of individual concepts and symbols, but also—and perhaps more crucially—in understanding how these concepts and symbols fit together as a whole system. The symbols and concepts of the temple are best understood, not in isolation, but within the full context of temple teachings to which they belong.

Chesterton has compared our position to that of a “sailor who awakens from a deep sleep and discovers treasure strewn about, relics from a civilization he can barely remember. One by one he picks up the relics—gold coins, a compass, fine clothing—and tries to discern their meaning.”[ii] The point is that the essential meaning is to be found not so much in the individual relics as in a true grasps of the milieu that produced them.

As Latter-day Saints, we have access to more knowledge about the temple than has been available generally in any other dispensation. As a result, we are in a privileged position to have “the scriptures laid open to our understandings, and the true meaning and intention of their more mysterious passages revealed unto us.”^[iii]

Because its stories form such an important part of the LDS temple endowment, the book of Moses is an ideal starting point for a scripture-based study of temple themes. It is well known, for example, that the endowment, like the book of Moses, includes “a recital of the most prominent events of the creative period, the condition of our first parents in the Garden of Eden, their disobedience and consequent expulsion from that blissful abode, their condition in the lone and dreary world when doomed to live by labor and sweat, the plan of redemption by which the great transgression may be atoned.”^[iv] What is more rarely appreciated, however, is that the relationship between scripture and temple teachings goes two ways. Not only have many of the stories of the book of Moses been included in the endowment, but also, in striking abundance, themes echoing temple architecture, furnishings, ordinances, and covenants have been deeply woven into the text of the book of Moses itself.

In short, this book, though neither authoritative nor definitive, attempts to highlight a few of the temple themes that once seem to have been part of a widely-shared background of understanding for scriptural interpretation and to apply these themes as latent interpretive possibilities for the book of Moses. Though many of the arguments made will, no doubt, someday prove to have been ill-founded, my hope is that bringing such perspectives into discussion will, at the very least, help in some small way to spur deeper study and appreciation of the book of Moses and the temple.

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Ancient Israelite Religious Reformation (OT Lesson 30)

2 Chronicles 29-30; 32; 34 (2 Kgs 18-19; 22-23)

The Sunday School curriculum calls this lesson “Come to the House of the Lord.” This is an appropriate title for this block of scripture, as the narrative here relates how kings Hezekiah and Josiah of Judah cleansed the Temple of Jerusalem of all the alleged idolatrous paraphernalia and doctrines that were introduced to it during the reigns of previous kings.  As a result, these are celebrated (while most kings are routinely condemned) in the biblical histories as two of the great and “godly” kings, being compared to King David in righteousness (2 Kgs. 22:2; 2 Chr. 29:2; note that 2 Chr. 28:1 has a more negative opinion of David, comparing him to the wicked King Ahaz).

As these stories are presented, there is much of value that can be gleaned from them. These are tales of rulers who had the strength, courage, and faith to reject the errors of their fathers and foreign influences in order to return to the correct worship of the God of Israel. Most importantly, they recognized the importance of temple worship and the Law and turned the tide against generations of idolatry and false indoctrination.  It is no wonder, in light of how they are presented, that these kings are held up as heroes of the history of pre-exilic Judaism.

We are told that Hezekiah and his great-grandson Josiah carried out reforms that changed the religious practices of the people of Judah, especially in regards to the temple(s). The sweeping “cleansing” done by Hezekiah was repeated and apparently greatly magnified by Josiah.  Hezekiah left his mark when he “removed the high places, and brake the images (Heb. “pillars”), and cut down the groves (Heb. “asherah”), and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made” (2 Kings 18:4).  The religion of Judah was centralized — apparently all places of worship were destroyed, or at least condemned, outside of the Temple of Jerusalem.

If we take a look at what Hezekiah allegedly destroyed, we see that it was some important stuff!  The “high places” (bamot) were sanctuaries, or places of worship, where altars could be found for sacrifice.  They were generally set in high places, such as hilltops or were artificial mounds meant to represent the same idea.  There were many traditional “high places” that apparently were originally very legitimate places of worship (e.g. Bethel, Dan, Gilgal, etc.) but were, with the reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah, condemned as idolatrous, pagan centers.  It is likely that each village had its own high place where the residents conducted their routine worship.  However, the reformers attempted to enforce the idea that the only place worthy of the performance of holy rites was Jerusalem.  In this centralization of worship to Jerusalem, Hezekiah and Josiah are understood to be following the instructions given in Deut. 12 which prohibits the offering of sacrifice anywhere but in the holy city of Jerusalem.  We should question the reliability of this scripture, however, as we read that sacrifices were legitimately offered outside of Jerusalem both before and after the time of Moses.  We read in the Book of Mormon in several places that Lehi and his family, who lived in Jerusalem during and just after the reign of Josiah, have no qualms about offering sacrifice at many points along their great journey (obviously outside of Jerusalem).

The Tree of Life as Mother, Son, and Love of God in 1 Nephi

As I was pondering over the book of 1 Nephi, chapter 11, just recently, so much of the ancient Near Eastern symbolism regarding the Tree of Life motif came flooding back into my mind. I’m grateful for the time I’ve been able to spend studying these ideas, especially since I’ve gone back to reread the entire Book of Mormon from the beginning (as part of my Stake’s current challenge leading up to our Stake Conference in November). But as I’ve been reading about Lehi’s dream and Nephi’s vision of the same, I have noticed more fully the ancient symbolism that is abundantly found there. For this post I just wanted to share some of those points that I picked up on while reading — so this won’t be an in-depth treatment of the topic, nor will I necessarily have anything to share that others haven’t picked up on before. In fact, I myself have written on some of these ideas before (see here and here), but hope to present perhaps some different insights and perspectives this time.

The first thing I wanted to point out is that Nephi’s vision in chapter 11 is given only after a few pre-requisite conditions are met. These are:

1. He had a desire to know the things that his father had seen in vision.
2. He believed the words of his father and that the Lord was able to make them known to him as well.
3. He was pondering those things in his heart.

It seems to me that these are some of the basic requirements, in both ancient and modern accounts, for receiving inspiration or revelation from God.  I have read quite a lot lately about revelatory experiences in the ancient world, and there is a lot of literature that describes how visionary episodes were supposed to be brought on by some “artificial” (I say artificial for “man-made” inducers of visionary experiences, as opposed to divinely-induced) means, including sensory deprivation, consumption of hallucinatory agents such as psychoactive plants, narcotics, breathing in hydrocarbon or other gases in caves, and so on. While I have little doubt that such methods have been used throughout human history to bring individuals into a psychedelic trance that they felt allowed communication with the Beyond, it is interesting to note that there is no mention of anything of this sort here with Nephi.  All we get is that he was pondering in his heart, and suddenly he was “caught away  in the Spirit of the Lord.”

Like so many ancient accounts of visionary experiences, Nephi is caught up into a high mountain, the ideal place for a meeting between God and man.  The Spirit here (and I’m assuming that this is the Holy Spirit, the third member of the Godhead), serves as Nephi’s angelus interpres, the “interpreting angel” that usually accompanies the visionary in similar accounts, explaining to him what he is seeing.  In verse 11, we are told that this Spirit, who is the Spirit of the Lord, “was in the form of a man.” If, as it would seem, this figure is the Holy Ghost, then, according to Nephi, although He is a spiritual being, He is “anthropomorphic.”  There are a good number of ancient texts that support this view, as a number of recent studies have pointed out (see my early posts on this topic here and here). Following on ancient Jewish traditions, many early Christians believed that the Holy Spirit was an angel that stood by the throne of God. Of course, being “angelomorphic” is essentially the same as being anthropomorphic.

The Spirit explains to Nephi (verse 7) that after he sees the object of his desire, the Tree of Life which his father saw, he would be given a “sign” — he would see a man descending out of heaven, who the Spirit identifies as the Son of God.  Apparently, the Spirit means for Nephi to see the Son of God as parallel to the Tree of Life.

However, when Nephi actually asks for an interpretation of the Tree (v. 11), he is shown a virgin who was “exceedingly fair and white” and “most beautiful and fair above all other virgins” (vv. 13, 15).  The virgin, then, is another parallel for the Tree. Note how Nephi’s description of the virgin compares to his description of the Tree: “the beauty thereof was fare beyond, yea, exceeding of all beauty; and the whiteness thereof did exceed the whiteness of the driven snow” (v. 8). Nephi is told that this virgin that he saw “is the mother of the Son of God, after the manner of the flesh.” In verse 20, Nephi sees this virgin mother carrying the holy child, the Lamb of God, in her arms.

The Temple: Part 2 — Three Degrees of Glory (section a)

It seems that I’ve been posting more videos than anything else lately (apologies to those who read this blog mainly by email or mobile device), but this latest video is definitely worth it (IMHO)!

“The Temple: Part 2 — Three Degrees of Glory”, produced by David Tayman ( http://www.visionsofthekingdom.com) and I, continues the series of videos discussing the ancient symbolism, doctrine, and rituals of the ancient temples, especially designed for those with a knowledge of, or interest in, the modern temples of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This video actually comprises just the first section of Part 2, and addresses the topic of the differing levels of holiness set apart in the structure of the ancient temple, focusing here on the objects found in the court surrounding the temple, specifically, in this section, the bronze laver, or “sea”, and its symbolism.  Videos covering the great hall of the temple and the Holy of Holies will follow. LDS viewers will recognize parallels between the information presented about ancient temples and the restored doctrine of the “three degrees of glory.”

My great thanks to David Tayman for all his work in putting this presentation together!

Without further ado, here is The Temple: Part 2 — Three Degrees of Glory (section a, the Bronze Laver):

If you haven’t yet seen Part 1 of this series, I’ll post it as well:

Check back here or at my YouTube channel regularly for further updates to this series!

BAR Article on How Errors Crept into the Bible

The following article is from Biblical Archaeology Review and was brought to my attention by Professor Jim Davila’s post at PaleoJudaica.com. The article addresses the significant issue of errors that have been found in the biblical text and how this affects the versions we read today.  The study is based on comparisons between the biblical texts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls and later examples of the biblical manuscripts. To see the full text of this article, please go here.

Searching for the Better Text

How errors crept into the Bible and what can be done to correct them

by Harvey Minkoff

Isaiah’s vision of universal peace is one of the best-known passages in the Hebrew Bible: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them” (Isaiah 11:6).

But does this beloved image of the Peaceable Kingdom contain a mistranslation?

For years many scholars suspected that it did. Given the parallelism of the phrases, one would expect a verb instead of “the fatling.” With the discovery of the Isaiah Scroll among the Dead Sea Scrolls, those scholars were given persuasive new support. The Isaiah Scroll contains a slight change in the Hebrew letters at this point in the text, yielding “will feed”: “the calf and the young lion will feed together.”

This is just one of numerous variations from the traditional text of the Hebrew Bible contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls. In some cases the traditional text is clearly superior, but in others the version in the scrolls is better.

Thanks to the scrolls, more and more textual problems in the Hebrew Bible are being resolved. The notes in newer Bible translations list variant readings from the scrolls, and in some cases, the translations incorporate these readings in the text as the preferred reading. No one has ever seriously suggested that the Dead Sea Scrolls contain anything like an eleventh commandment; but the scrolls do help clarify numerous difficult phrases in the Hebrew Bible, and for textual scholars that is more than enough.

Before we list other examples of how the Dead Sea Scrolls influenced—or altered—Bible translations, we need to understand how ambiguities crept into the text of the Hebrew Bible in the first place. And we must also familiarize ourselves with the ancient versions of the Hebrew Bible on which modern translations rely (for good reason scholars call these ancient versions “witnesses” to the biblical text).

[…]

Book Review: Canon and Canonicity. The Formation and Use of Scripture

Via PaleoJudaica.com

BOOK REVIEW (BMCR):

Einar Thomassen (ed.), Canon and Canonicity. The Formation and Use of Scripture. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010. Pp. 232. ISBN 9788763530279. $48.00. 

Reviewed by David J. DeVore, University of California, Berkeley

Table of Contents

As editor Thomassen’s preface states (p. 7), the volume under review is the fruit of “Highways and Byways,” a project based in Norway’s Bergen University; the stated aim of the project is to explore early Christian discourses distinguishing “orthodoxy” from “heresy.” The volume contains ten essays by seven scholars based in Scandinavia, two from Greece, and one in the United States. Seven essays focus at least partially on canons in the Roman world; the last three study biblical canons in northern Europe since the Renaissance and will not be considered here.

Interesting associations and questions surround the formation of the Christian (and Jewish) Biblical canons as they became fixed by the middle of the fifth century. During the twentieth century and into the current decade the field concentrated on gathering relevant evidence, and then reading that evidence closely to see which authors/communities accepted which texts as sacred and when, and how firm the boundaries were between sacred, acceptable, and condemned texts.1 While these works eradicated the previous teleological assumption that somehow the eventual New Testament texts were intrinsically more central to Christianity, their agenda also narrowed the scholarship to repeatedly addressing questions of dating and community. But scholars of canonization have begun to address two wider clusters of questions, approaches, and explanations for the canons.

First, discussion of the formation of the Christian canon had until very recently remained “internalist”: the diachronic formation and sanction of community’s collective norms were described and explained almost solely from evidence generated by that community, so that works on the biblical canons focused almost exclusively on testimonia from elite insiders. An “externalist” account, by contrast, will show how its subject relates to adjacent contemporary events, debates, and power structures, but is not likely to present the internal evidence for canonization exhaustively.2 Some scholars working on Jewish and Christian canonicity, notably Jan Assmann, Jed Wyrick, and collectively the 2004 collection edited by Enrico Norelli, have recently adduced evidence from outside the Jewish and Christian ambits for probing Jewish and Christian canonicity.3

The second domain into which canonization studies have recently ventured is theory: for exploring the establishment of a canon of authoritative texts, social and literary theory offer numerous concepts and questions, as well as comparable contexts from other times and places. For example, literary critics have been debating the significance of canonicity in reading and educational practices for decades, while students of historical memory have illuminated processes by which societies select particular memories and canonize mementos of them.4 The works of Assmann and Wyrick noted above, as well as the deconstructionist monograph of Giuseppe Veltri, have pushed canonization studies into this realm.5

To the credit of all contributors, the volume under review continues to theorize and externalize the methodologies for biblical canon studies. The results, though not of uniform quality, will nonetheless provoke plenty of new directions for research.

[…]

The Location of the Nail-Prints in Jesus Hands? A Discussion at Cambridge University

The question and its answer were posted by Rob Bradshaw on his blog biblicalstudiesorguk.blogspot.com. My thanks to Jeff Bradshaw (no relation, as far as I know) for bringing this post to my attention.

Where were the nail-prints in Jesus’ hands – in his wrists or his palms?

This question was raised last Saturday during a day conference on biblical archaeology at Tyndale House in Cambridge. Put simply the problem was stated as follows:

Crucifixion normally involved nailing the victim to a horizontal beam through the wrist between the radius and the ulna (the two bones of the forearm). The nail was then firmly trapped by the carpals from ripping out of the hand between the fingers. If the victim were nailed through the palm of the hand the weight of the suspended body would simply cause the nail to pull through the flesh between the metacarpals (see here for an illustration of the bones involved). That much seems clear. However, in John 20:27 Jesus commands Thomas to:

“…See my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” [Italics mine]

Surely, the argument goes, if the nail marks where in Jesus’ wrists then he would have told Thomas to look there for them and not in his hands?

Solution

I think the answer to the problem is fairly straightforward, once we look at the Greek text. The Greek word for hand – χειρ – which is used twice in the passage cited above means “A hand or any relevant portion of the hands, including, for example, the fingers.” (Nida & Louw, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, Vol. 1, p. 98.). The question is whether the word “hand” in Greek also included the wrist. The word “wrist” or “wrists” appears only in Acts 12:7 in the NIV New Testament. In the Old Testament it appears twice in the Genesis 38:27 & 30, in Jeremiah 40:4 and Ezekiel 13:18. In Acts 12:7 and in the Septuagint of the OT verses the “wrist” is a translation of χειρ. So, it would seem that “wrist” was included within the semantic range of χειρ and so the problem seems to be solved. John 20:27 could quite accurately be translated: “…See my wrists. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

Nida & Louw note that there is a precedent for using a specific body part in place of the general term “hand”. Luke 15:22 reads “…Put a ring on his χειρ…” χειρ here is to be translated finger, not hand.

(by Rob Bradshaw)

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Note: Frederick Huchel expressed the following in an email:

In this connection, some might wish to revisit the article with which most if not all of us once read, from the Journal of the American Medical Association, by three physicians, “On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ” (www.stpaulsirvine.org/html/deathjesus.pdf).  There are also the works cited in the footnotes of the Meridian Magazine article “The Search for the Physical Cause of Jesus’ Death” (http://www.meridianmagazine.com/byustudies/050325cause.html)

John Tvedtnes, also in an email, made the following important point:

In biblical Hebrew, the word zeroa’ (usually rendered “arm’) referred to the upper arm (shoulder to elbow), while the word yad (usually rendered “hand”) referred to the lower arm (elbow to fingertip). To specify what we call the hand, one would have to use kaph (most often thought of as the “palm” of the hand). I suspect that the problem lies in the translation from Aramaic to Greek.

Notes on Early Jewish Belief in a Messiah

The following is from some notes that I took in Professor Jim Davila’s class on the Dead Sea Scrolls this week. I sit in on this undergraduate class of his just to get more exposure to his great knowledge and expertise on this topic. The way the class is set up, at least at this stage in the semester, all the students have prepared essays on a certain topic concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls, Qumran, etc. This week, a student (I won’t give his name as I didn’t ask for his permission) presented on Messianism and the Dead Sea Scrolls. His paper was great and covered the major instances where the texts from Qumran seem to be referring to a messianic figure.

I won’t quote from or go into the content of his paper, but I wanted to present some of the notes I took from Professor Davila’s remarks after the presentation. He said some interesting things that are helpful for understanding how some Jews, in the couple of centuries leading up to the life of Jesus Christ, thought about the role of the Messiah. My notes are far from a complete and accurate rendering of what Professor Davila said, so please bear with me.

Professor Davila:

Messianism in Second Temple Judaism is a very messy problem because the problem of Jesus is bigger than the problem of messianism when you define Messiah simply as “anointed one” — for the case of Jesus, we also need to look at the early Jewish ideas surrounding divine mediator figures, principal angels, charismatic spiritual leaders, etc.

(See Davila’s article “Of Methodology, Monotheism and Metatron: Introductory Reflections on Divine Mediators and the Origins of the Worship of Jesus” in The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism (Leiden: Brill,1999) and also his online outline Methodology for Studying Divine Mediators)

New Margaret Barker Temple Themes Video

Check out my latest video, “Jesus, Yahweh and the Temple, Part II”, continuing my analysis of Margaret Barker’s book, Temple Themes in Christian Worship. This video analyzes Barker’s views on the early Christian identification of Jesus as Yahweh (Jehovah), the God of the Old Testament. The early Christians worshiped God Most High, or God the Father, as well as Yahweh, his Son. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — the figure who had appeared to the Old Testament prophets–was the pre-mortal Jesus.  In ancient Israel, Yahweh was not understood to be the Father, but the Son, and was the Chief of the angels, the “Angel of Great Counsel”. The Jews knew this great angelic figure would be the Messiah.

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To see the previous videos in this series, along with other great videos that I have collected, please see my YouTube channel at: http://www.youtube.com/user/davidjlarsen01