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The names Joshua and Jesus are the same name (Hebrew and Aramaic respectively). Either spelling in English, it was common male name in Ancient Israel. But it is highly unlikely that the name "Jesus" would have been written in an ancient HEBREW text. I'll even posit an idea that will throw you all for a loop: It may even be possible that Jesus was not literally His mortal given name. The name literally means "Jehovah Saves". So, it could have been a name-title, as so many individuals of special mission had in the OT times AFTER they became adults. Of course, this becomes a moot point since this is the name by which we know Him today. But it is an interesting quirk. Beyond that, the first time the name Jesus appears in the BoM is Notice that he specifically says that an ANGEL TOLD HIM THE NAME. He received it through revelation. And it appears that until that moment, Nephi was unfamiliar with the actual name of the Savior that would be used. Christ is not a Greek word. It is the Anglicized version of the Greek Christos (Χριστός) which simply means Annointed One. The Hebrew word is Mashiach (Anglicized: Messiah). So, both Christ and Messiah are correctly considered English words which are loan words from Greek and Hebrew respectively. And in accordance with my point of interest, it may very well be that Nephi was given the Hebrew TITLE by which He would be known, which would have been translated as "The Lord's Annointed Savior, the Son of God." Jeshua-Mashiach, Ben-El (or Bene-Elohim). Even if there were truly no mention of the Son of God in the Old Testament. When TRANSLATED the name/title could have easily taken on many forms. And Jesus Christ would have been a perfectly acceptable ENGLISH translation. People make a big deal about it because they have no idea how translations work, especially when working with an ancient language translated nearly 200 years ago with a style of English that we would find understandable, but rather awkward. And many words have expeienced semantic shift since the early 1800s. Bottom line: None of this surprises me.

There are some obvious things missing in the translation. The term Christ is from the Greek. The Hebrew term translated into English is Messiah. Both are in reference to “the anointed one”. There is still some confusion that has arisen from the Dead Sea Scriptures that there may be more than one “the anointed one”. There are so many ways that the ancient scripture text cause confusion, but one thing we can understand through the restoration (especially temple revelation) is that all of G-d’s covenant saints are anointed. The ordinance of anointing is a precursor on the covenant path to a “oneness” with the Christ – who is also one with the Father, thus resulting in the Saints becoming one with G-d. Of course, the traditional and creedal Christians are lost in a labyrinth of teachings that amount to the philosophies of men mingled with scripture. The Biblical Book of Isaiah speaks clearly to the concept of apostasy and restoration. The history of apostasy and restoration from Jesus to today clearly follows the type and shadow of Isaiah but is lost to most modern Christians. Why? Because as the apostasy took place, the Christians of the apostasy forgot Isaiah and thought that apostasy was a heresy or a change of doctrine. Isaiah clearly taught that man becomes separated from G-d through transgression of the law, changing the ordinances and breaking the everlasting covenant. If one uses the internet to investigate why LDS are excluded from those “Traditional” and “Creedal” Christians, you will find that it is always because of a doctrine that they claim is heresy. And because of what they claim is heresy, the claim is, that LDS worship a “different” Jesus. As LDS we ought to be careful and mindful not to fall into the trap of apologetics of doctrine and instead hold to the Gospel of Christ. Which is to love one another, have faith in Jesus Christ (which is the foundation of the law), be baptized by one authorized by Christ (which prevents changing the ordinances) and keeping the everlasting covenant (which is solemnized in the temple of G-d). The Traveler

I need to brush up on my book of mormon everything to be honest lol.

No one actually does research. They watch YouTube videos or the like and consider themselves having researched.

I highly doubt my parents were skeptical about vaccinations (nothing later in life suggests it). I suspect it was just considered "normal" for children to catch certain diseases (like chicken pox) rather than to vaccinate them beforehand. And now that I say that, I'm certain we had chicken pox, so maybe we were vaccinated against measles, cuz I don't remember us having two childhood diseases (and I know we didn't have mumps). Next time I see them, I'll ask my aunts if they remember (both of my parents are dead, so I can't ask them).

Gotta take issue with that. I mean yes, our central focus must be on the Gospel of Christ. That comes with loving our neighbor and a focus on missionary work. So we owe it to our neighbors to do good missionary work. My favorite quote on the relevance of apologetics: "Though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish." The least impressive, least impactful people on my spiritual journey have been the ones who stick their fingers in their ears and refuse to interact with criticisms of my faith. Most of the most impactful ones have boldly interacted with the criticism, restating it in the best most powerful way possible, and then refuting it with truth and reason. I'm still a fan of 1 Peter 3:15: But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear There are an awful lot of people asking me my reasons for the hope that is in me, even though [polygamy/archaeology/dna/kirtland banking/etc ad nauseum]. So if it's ok with y'all, I'll both hold to the Gospel of Christ, AND engage in apologetics on occasion.

Jesus Christ has many names and titles so we don't actually know what the Nephites were calling Him. So you may be right that Joseph Smith used the name he was most familiar with. Also, it was the prophet Mormon who compiled the gold plated. He lived post Jesus' appearance so he may have simply used the name he was most familiar with. Another thought, some of the information pertaining to Jesus' identity may have been hidden to prevent false Messiah's. Once the Nephites separated that was no longer an issue.

I don't think lone wolf attacks are related directly to the activities of secret combinations.

I did get a PM from an individual which feels suspiciously bot like to be honest. Something about connecting because we share the same super cool religion. Because of this I might just change the avatar again at some point.

I think most of those are just me, hitting refresh endlessly to see what glorious new avatar you'll choose next. Honestly though, I believe the high count is an aspect of the billions of bots out there. Nearly half of all internet traffic is generated by bots, with bad bots accounting for about one-third of that traffic. This trend has been increasing, with bad bot traffic rising significantly in recent years. In 10 years if we don't find a way to halt the nefarious bots, probably most of the online folks out interacting with each other will be bots. We absolutely see bot traffic here. It started with accounts signing up, changing their avatar, then trying to start a post full of russian text, or links to free viagra, or what have you. The mods catch all those. But now I'm guessing half or more of our new people showing up and posting on existing threads, sometimes years old threads, with relevant things to say, are bots. The technology is certainly there, and it's not like thirdhour has two factor cell phone authentication. All you need is a fake Google/Facebook/X account or valid email address, and the ability to find the "I agree to the terms" button. So yeah, don't buy viagra from anyone who contacts you via the thirdhour PM function.

Those are probably just the UK Thought Police bots logging your activities.

Let’s reference scripture to see how Jesus avoided apologetics and at the same time used logic and reason to give witness to the Gospel of Christ. This method of dealing with criticism seems to me to a major factor in the Gospel of John. Take a look at John 10 starting with verse 22. A little side note here. In the King James version, there is a ¶ symbol at the beginning of verse 22. This is to designate a literary structure within the chapter that then extends to the end of that chapter. Verses 32 and 33 show the stark difference in how Jesus logically defends himself and how his “enemies” accuse him. One being Jesus’s reference to his obedience to the law (works) and the Jews accusation of false or blasphemous doctrine. Explicit to this accusation is a doctrine of a man becoming a G-d. One reason I use this scripture reference is because this is perhaps one of the main doctrines that accusers argue against the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Note that Jesus did not convert his distractors but that he used that moment to draw others listening to his teachings. I believe it was the reason that John was inspired to include this event the way he did in scripture. And yet in 2,000 years the argument from distractors have not changed. Let us live according to our laws, ordinances and covenants and let that witness be the prime answer to our critics. The Traveler

Child of the '70's here. Chicken Pox vaccine didn't exist until 1995, so yeah, absolutely the parents all did their best to manage it made the rounds with their kiddos. MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) showed up in the '60's. In the '70's, we actually stopped smallpox vaccinations because the eradication effort had been so successful. We humans have a long history of medical advancement, and also medical "advancement" that turned out to be not so medical or advanced. There have always been physicians willing to prescribe treatments at all stages of human civilization. And there have always been willing folks, and skeptical folks, and hopeless folks, and hopeful folks receiving or refusing the treatments. Sometimes the healers claim the power of the supernatural or divine. The ruling class will often urge this or that treatment, and sometimes use their power to force a treatment (like the Biden administration did during covid). Undeniable miracles of modern medicine exist. Germ theory and antibiotics helped us move away from the good old days of only 6 out of 10 children living to adulthood, and people dying of small cuts in their skin. Stuff gets sketchy when advancements in medicine gets tied to politics. Everyone swiftly forgot Trump's "operation warp speed", designed to get the vaccine hastened through the trials and released in time to help Trump win the next election. You can still find the videos of the leftie politicians like Pelosi throwing shade on Trump's poison from the early days of the pandemic. Then Biden took over, and everyone did a politically-biased 180 so quickly I literally watched people do the Covid version of tearing down the posters that said we were at war with Eurasia and replacing them with Oceania war posters and then immediately forgetting Eurasia ever happened. Honestly, kudos to the people who just picked the best opinion they could muster and stuck with it for the past 5 years. At this point in my life, I value stubborn people who might be wrong, than wishy washy people who get led around and just have stress when things are hard to think about. The picture of President Nelson baring his old man arm for the needle was a traumatizing event for some members, and more than a few testimonies were lost when they just looked at the image and didn't pay attention to the actual message. Everyone hoped the covid vax would be more effective than it turned out to be. Lots of people and organizations and folks with influence got behind it in various ways, and then reality showed up, that it was just sort of effective, not a miracle cure. It didn't stop covid, just sort of slowed it down. It didn't stop deaths, just make them a bit more rare. It didn't stop serious problems that came from covid, it just made them a tad less serious for many. And there will always be people who can't tell the difference between an anecdote and data if you paid them a million bucks for each correct answer and gave them the answer book, and the rule of "I knew someone personally who had something happen, therefore:" remains with us forever.

Keep in mind that anything prior to the Words of Mormon wouldn't have been influenced by Mormon. 1 Nephi through Omni were taken directly from the small plates - Mormon didn't abridge these, he just added the plates. And "Jesus Christ" is definitely used in the small plates. Now, that might be the English translation of what was used in the small plates, but one can't say Mormon inserted anything into this part of the record.

Not in this case. I told chatGPT I wanted to get better at debating flat-earthers so I wanted to practice with it. It agreed but would not defend the flat earth side. It said it understood the what we were doing, but it could not provide a single flat earth argument. Based on when it was developed and released I would wager it’s also programmed against any anti-vax stances.

The dusting of the feet is neither an ordinance nor a priesthood curse. It’s much simpler than that. The truth is it comes from the Hebrew and is an idiom or figure of speech. We have, through misunderstanding and folklore, taken it to mean something that it was never intended to. It’s just another way to say “pick up your feet” or “ let’s get out of here”.

Probably more likely to be chatGPT.

I hadn't considered Mormon's involvement thank you and I think you're right, Mormons abridgement likely got rid of alot of symbolism for brevity, and then Josephs translation got rid of even more of it to make the text understandable for modern readers. We can read into Isaiah and Jeremiah etc, because we are able to study Hebrew culture, allowing us to make sense of the symbolism, structure and poetry. We aren't really able to study the Nephites in the same way, and so peotic and symbolic texts, probably would make little to no sense.

I agree that sometimes people can get too apologetics focused but I think it's rare. Nobody in my Ward had any interest in apologetics at all. This isn't helpful in my opinion, because for those who have an interest in studying beyond the surface level, I think the restored Gospel contains lots of beautiful doctrine, and very difficult to process information. Normally, I think fresh converts tend to be very keen to begin with, and so it doesn't take very long at all for a new convert to find something that stumps them. Or to have negative information foisted on them by a well meaning family member, or jealous pastor, and if nobody has any interest in apologetics the answer they will get to their issues is "pray about it" as has happened several times in my ward. (Bye bye convert!) I know many of the anti-arguments have been circulating for years now and are thoroughly tired out, but for somebody who has been in the Church for 5 minutes, they don't know these are tired arguments, and at the end of the day, they can go and worship Jesus in any church they want. The articles of faith demonstrate that we don't have a monopoly on worship. So it's important to defend what sets apart the restored gospel.

This is actually where I worry we have the opposite danger. I don't trust the people who discourage trusting science and doctors. And it starts with planting that seed of doubt in parents. If all the "do your own research!" folk would just share their research, I might feel differently, but it's always a weird psychological game. "Oh, you trust the government? You don't think for yourself? You don't think you can find the info I have? You actually believe the research you found?" Lots of smoke, no fire. And the results are pretty bad and creating a lot of anxiety, which I think makes people more susceptible to manipulation. Telling people to not trust good data and research without giving them a solid alternative is evil.

Interestingly, notwithstanding Nephi’s remarkable clarity on the issue, the Nephites themselves struggled to retain a clear Christology at various points in their history. Sherem, Nehor, Zeezrom, and Korihor deviated wildly from Nephi’s Christology and amassed significant Nephite followings. When Benjamin and Mosiah and Abinadi and Alma I and Alma II preach Christ, you often get little textual hints that the connections they were making were absolute novelties to most of their audiences.

I’m not against vaccinations in general, but I think people should be cautious about what type of vaccinations they are having injected into their children. Some vaccinations are necessary, some are not. And some should be avoided. But if COVID taught us anything, it’s that the medical community cannot be trusted.

As I've noted before, the controversy and fallout over the Covid vaccines was so extreme that even a lot of people who are otherwise in favor of vaccines wound up cynical and skeptical. When that much trust gets lost in something, it doesn't return overnight. I hate to say it, but we're likely going to be looking at a few more epidemics before society as a whole remembers why we began vaccinations in the first place.

When I think Brady Bunch, I think their Hawaiian vacation with that tiki head thing, and whenever we saw the head the music went "boodaadiidaaLOOOO". Oddly enough, people refusing to get their kids vaccinated against stuff like measles makes me hear the same music. I grabbed this meme in 2017-ish, as it was all getting started.

This is most likely what I would back. Joseph Smith fell back onto what he was familiar with during the translation in many instances. It most likely is not a word for word translation, but one that also was done in accordance with what Joseph was familiar with. This happens with some translations today as well, especially in texts where it is more poetic. There is a choice in these texts on whether to go with a word by word translation, which will be a literal translation of what the document actually says, or go with a more substantial translation which confers what the document actually means. For example, if we had a phrase in the United States in English that says...Go break a leg...or...beating a dead horse...and translated it to another language people may be confused why we were wishing someone who was about to do something big to go break a leg, or why people who were rehashing old arguments were beating a dead horse instead of talking. Poetic texts are even tougher than that to confer what the author actually means. In addition, there is the question on whether to try to keep the poetry of the writing, or whether to go more towards what is a standard language. Take Virgil's Aeneid. In it, you have all these choices regarding translation. If you go for a pure translation a lot of the symbolism and other areas of the work could be lost. If you go only for one that tries to stay as true to the words, but also convey the feelings and experiences of it, you may lose some of the actual wording utilized, and may not convey the feeling of the poetic verse (dactylic hexameter). If you try to go and convey the feeling of the poetry in motion by replicating the meter of the poetry, you may lose both some of the actual meaning while not staying true to the words. It is a tricky thing translating many of the ancient works. At times, it is left to the translator's best understanding of the matter. Some times they already have exposure to a particular type of translation of the work (for example, many translators of the Aeneid choose to go for a more literal word on word that remains close to the actual meter of the epic poem, but that means that the casual reader will miss quite a bit of some of why things are done or the symbology and meaning of some of the work). It is what they are familiar with and so they go with that tried and true form of translation. Joseph Smith did not have the exposure to a lot of various translations of the Bible during his time period (or at least most likely did not, and/or utilized one version of the bible for most of his actual reading and studying). Hence, just like other translators he probably fell back on that familiarity during his translations. This is why much of the Book of Mormon, especially when it repeats a portion found in the Bible, replicates those portions of the Bible. It was what he was familiar with. The same could go for certain terms in the Book of Mormon. He was familiar with the name of the Lord in the New Testament and when a descriptor of that name came up during translation, he fell back on what he was familiar with. So, the actual term could have been another term or word, but as Joseph was more familiar with the term Christ (which one could view as an actual title rather than a name, Joseph and Mary did not have that as a last name, or at least most Scholars agree they didn't), when a term meaning the anointed one popped up, that's the term he utilized.

Two thoughts: 1. Deuteronomists removed clearer references to Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and the Messiah from the O.T. - whether His name was there or not, all clearer references were removed, especially if they indicated He was the Son of God. 2. If the Nephites knew the name Jesus Christ (or the Hebrew form of it), it would not and could not impact their faith. Christ did not come to them until He was resurrected, when both the Father and Christ Himself declared who and what He was. But if the people in the old world knew His would-be name ahead of time, then: That could have lead to a zillion people with that very common Hebrew name, some of whom could have falsely claimed they were the Messiah That could have impacted their need to have faith and choose whether to believe that Jesus was the Christ, because He worked quite a while before announcing who and what He was.

"Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!" (I have an annoying report for you: When I was a child (in Utah), it was common to just let kids get the measles and develop natural immunity. That's how me and my brothers got ours. <gdrvvf> )

The end to the war between the Islamic world and Israel occurs when the Savior appears on the Mount of Olives during the Battle of Armageddon.

Haha. Maybe true now. I'm an old man out of touch with modern tech apparently. YouTube?! Come on man! What a boomer! Get off my lawn!

It's true, kier Starmer fears me.