Episode 168: D&C 68 – Sections 91 and 92
Live show on July 29, 7p doors, 8p start at Squatters in Salt Lake City
The apocrypha totes doesn’t matter, and Marie can’t pronounce anything in Wikipedia. Frederick G Williams joins the United Firm, so basically he get’s initiated into the super-inner-circle.
Read along with us at http://joelakuhn.com/dc-compare/
Drink count – 3 (don’t even bother, it’s not enough to even crack open the beer)
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Podcastriarchal Blessing: Alice
Podcastriarchal Music: Our Happy Life, by Maps and Transit (edited for length)
My Book of Mormon 
July 22, 2017 at 5:02 pm
Like most Mormons, I’ve never read the Apocrypha. The way D&C 91 was taught to me in seminary was like cold water being poured on my hot and bothered curiosity. Essentially, reading the Apocrypha was not off the table (if anyone even knew where to find one in the 90s), but the impression I was left with of the usefulness of such study was, “Hey, sure, you MIGHT get something out of reading it if you’ve got the Spirit, but Joseph Smith had the Spirit more than you’ll ever have, and God told him not to bother with it. What do you think YOU are going to get out of it?” Well, I no longer have the religious inclination to try to get anything from the Apocrypha, but maybe it’s still worth a read, one of these days, just for the scholarly value it has. I don’t know.
But I am aware of an interesting Mormon connection with a story in 2 Maccabees, chapter 1, if you’ll indulge me. The author recounts how centuries earlier, the pious temple priests hid away the “fire of the altar” in a dry cistern (however hiding fire was supposed to work), and when the Persian king allowed the descendants of the priests to come back, Nehemiah sent them to go fetch the fire. They found the cistern, but said there was no fire in there (shocking, I know), just a thick liquid.
Nehemiah had the liquid sprinkled on the wood for their burnt offering, and when the sun came out from behind a cloud, the wood burst into flames. Then the remaining liquid was poured out on large stones, and they too caught fire in the sunlight. Says verse 36: “Nehemiah and his associates called this ‘nephthar,’ which means purification, but by most people it is called naphtha.”
What’s the Mormon connection, you ask? Well, I was quoting the New Revised Standard Version of the Apocrypha, from 1989. The Douay Version, from 1609, renders the verse: “And Nehemias called this place Nephthar, which is interpreted purification. But many called it Nephi.”
So that’s interesting. Just as the name Lehi was the name of a place in the Old Testament (specifically, the area where Samson slew a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass), Nephi was also a scriptural place name. Some people may say Joseph Smith was pulling all the obscure, cool names he could find from ancient sources he was familiar with in order to give his Book of Mormon names a sense of verisimilitude, but others (cough, cough, Fairmormon.org, cough, cough) say no, that’s ridiculous, Lehi and Nephi were legitimately ancient names that legitimately ancient dudes would be expected to have, and Joseph wasn’t just making up names, because how could he possibly know Nephi was a thing, when we have no proof that he was even aware of the Apocrypha prior to 1833, so if anything, the fact that the word Nephi is in there only proves the Book of Mormon is true, so stop hating on it!
July 22, 2017 at 8:02 pm
That’s fascinating… so cool.