Enlil-An

What are you talking about? Chapter and verse, please? Historians rely on all kinds of specialists to help them with things like the mathematical knowledge of the ancients. Can you please provide a link or the name of a book that supports what you're saying? This sounds much like Da Vinci Code sensationalism. Where are you getting this stuff? What are your sources?

If you would have read my post more carefully, you would know that I never said that the classical Greeks or Romans sailed to India. They traded with India via caravan trading-routes (land routes) after the domestication of camels circa 1000 B.C. The Egyptians didn't trade much with India until after this time as well.Nevertheless, the Egyptians would have easily known about India through their contact with the civilizations of Mesopotamia who had long established trade with the Indians by sailing south along the coast of Asia through the Persian Gulf. A quick look at the map shows you that India is directly south-east of Mesopotamia along the coast. They didn't need to sail out of sight of land to find it. No I don't but as I've stated above, sailing on the open ocean wasn't necessary or understanding the circumferance of the earth wasn't necessary for Egypt, Greece, or Rome to receive goods from India. All of this was accomplished through the extensive trading network of the Ancient Near East. Well, if the trading guilds kept this knowledge so secret (something for which there is no historical evidence of) then everybody else in society, including the scribes, would have believed the earth was flat and would have recorded these veiws in there writings like the Bible which were then transmitted into the Pearl of Great Price which is the entire point of this discussion.

Thanks. Those do look good (though one is $60). I would be interested in reading about that. Where can I find that? If the Church's job isn't to teach the scriptures from any point of view except what commandments we should live then they need to stop reprinting the student manuals and publishing new books that dedicate a lot space to the historical and archeological background to the stories. Deseret Book is full of books that expound on the New and Old Testament from a scholarly stand point. LDS literature has always concerned itself with studying every aspect of the scriptures including the stories, and their historical background. The Old Testament's view of prophets appears to be very different from the New Testament's. In the NT there are even prophetesses and women apostles. I haven't really checked to see if the ten commandments appear the NT except in maybe in Matthew or Luke.The saving principles and ordinences of the gospel as we know them today don't show up in the Old Testament at all. Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ? The principle of faith isn't in the Old Testament. The word faith only appears in it twice and each time the footnotes tell us that it has more to do with loyalty - the same way someone is faithful to their spouse. Repentance doesn't appear very often in the OT either and when it does, it's usually referring God repenting, not man. While scholars have been able to show that baptism was an ancient Hebrew rite, it wasn't performed the same way that early Christians did. The Israelites were baptized several times throughout their life, not just once. And, of course, the concept of the Holy Ghost doesn't appear in the OT at all. The more one looks at it, the more one gets the impression that the Judeo/Christian religion was a work in progress that evolved slowly overtime with new concepts and docrines being added until we have what we have today. Studying and understanding the scriptures has always been a central theme of the Church's mission. One of the key purposes for the Book of Mormon is that it testifies to the truthfulness of the Bible. If I was responsible for my own education regarding the Bible, then the Church shouldn't have dedicated so much time and material for that very purpose. It shouldn't have tried to answer the scholarly questions regarding the sacred book.The truth is that the Church and Church scholars have produced mass amounts of material discussing all aspects of the Bible. Historical, archeological, ecclesiastical, spiritual, and even philisophical. Yet in the overwelming majority of them, never do they address contradictions or discrepincies. In fact they go to great lengths to cover them up or brush them aside. Well, if an LDS member wanted to study the topic of the New Testament, wouldn't their natural course of action be to go to LDS sources? And if LDS publications are full of what appears to be scholarly research about the topic being studied, why would that member have cause to doubt the veracity of such works enough to go out and get another book from an alternate source? One that seems to be refuting many things the LDS sources say?

Just because Egyptians had the mathimatical knowledge to discover the earth was spherical doesn't mean they discovered it. The technology existed for all kinds of inventions before they were actually invented. There is nothing in Egyptian literature or mythology that denotes that the Egyptians believed in a spherical earth and the Egyptian creation story and history of the Egyptian pantheon specifically state otherwise. People in the Ancient Near East didn't need to know the earth was round in order to find India. Trade with India had begun in the 3rd millenium with the Sumerians and Akkadians. All they had to do was sail through the Persian Gulf and hug the coast until they ran into India. It's right there. India was never a major trading partner with Egypt until the domestication of camels around 1000 BC and the creation of extensive caravan land routes. It was also at that time that Indian goods began to flood into Greek and Roman markets.Egypt didn't need to know the earth was round in order to sail around Africa either (why you think they would want to do this is beyond me). All they had to do is follow the coast and it would take them around the entire continent. I'm not aware of them ever doing this, but it's not impossible. That's funny because according to the The Book of the Courses of the Heavenly Luminaries which comprises chapters 72 through 82 in the Book of Enoch, describes how the sun emerges from a huge hole in the heavenly dome where earth and "heaven" meet in the east, rides across the vaulted dome-sky to the west, and then disappears in an aperture on the western side of the dome. The moon and stars have there own gates that they ascend and descend through. You can start reading about it here: Book of Enoch: The Book of the Courses of the Heavenly Luminaries: Chapter LXXII.If you click on this link (The Flat-Earth Bible.) and scroll all the way down, you'll see an artists rendition of what Enoch is describing (I suggest you read that entire article, actually. It demonstrates quite clearly that the ancient Hebrews believed the earth was flat). Why on earth (literally) would the Israelites need to sail around Africa to get to India? India is completely in the opposite direction. The only "historians" who don't agree on this are ones who take the traditional view that the Bible should be interpreted literally. Anyone who compares what they say to what the historians of the critical view say will see that when it comes to the birth narratives of Jesus, the critical position is the only logical one. There are only two gospels that give an account of Jesus' birth and a careful reading of both clearly demonstrates that they are not different perspectives on the same story but different stories alltogether.A better way to look at the gospels is to think of them like historical dramas, like a novel, or a play, or a movie. In movies based on historical events, many details of the history will be changed or compramised for the sake of the story (an added love story for example). There are at least 3 different films that I can think of based on the famous gunfight at the OK Corral, Wyatt Earp, Tombstone, and Gunfight At the OK Corral. Each one of them is based on an historical event but each of them takes several liberties with the facts surrounding it. In each the gunfight is alwasy very similar and the characters are the same but no one would say that these films are documentaries. Everyone knows that many parts of the movie are embellishments. Likewise, sometimes the gospels are telling different perspectives of the same event, sometimes they're changing events to suit the moral of their stories, and some events are dropped completely or invented whole sale to make a theological statement unique to that particular author.

Can you please supply a link for this. From everything I've studied to everything I keep finding on line, pre-hellinized Egypt believed the earth was flat along with everbody else in the Ancient Near East. The stories in the Old Testament don't come from Jesus' time, they come from long before the Near East was hellinized. Citations please? What "requirements" are you talking about? I don't know where you get your information from, but you seem to have some seriously bogus sources. Your above statement is complete hogwash. The New Testament gospels were not written in the Ancient Era and the Nativity texts contradict each other in the original greek just as much as they do in old and modern english. They just aren't the same story.

I have no motivation to get into contentious arguments. I came on this board with very specific questions and concerns and it seems that many were (are) more interested in turning the whole thing into a competition then actually being helpful. I didn't come on here to see who was the most clever debater or who could eat who for lunch. These are what I call "games" and I'm not interested in them. I welcome and have no problem responding to challenges to the points I raise but personal attacks and sidetracking comments are techniques for lawyers and debate teams. They are not methods used by people who are trying to come to a common conclusion and be "edified together". None of this was meant to be an attack on the Church or the gospel which I have a very strong testimony of. Snow, forgive me if I sounded ungrateful at the recommendations you mentioned. I do have Jesus Interrupted (though my favorite of his is still probably Misquoting Jesus) and the other recommendations look good as well. But I'm more interested to find out if you knew of any LDS sources/scholars (this side of the millenium) that address these issues which you claim is "hardly breaking news" to the LDS community. Books from the historical critics I can find on my own. I can't be more specific than that. You said you believed that the Bible was a book that shows that the Lord allows man to fumble along with what the Lord gives him but that He had a hand in it enough to make sure that the "gospel truths necessary for our salvation" remained in tact. So I'm asking you for an example. What specific gospels truths necessary for our salvation do you believe remained intact throughout the Old and New Testaments?I don't understand the position many of you are taking that asking questions of others is somehow avoiding the responsibility of doing research. I have always considered discussion among people who are studying the same things as part of doing research. I also don't understand your belief that members who go to LDS sources to do research and get insights on the Bible are being irresponsible. It's natural for members to be predisposed to trust LDS scholarship. Most members feel that LDS scholars are the best sources to learn from because they not only have access to what's in the professional, secular fields, but also have additional insights because they accept modern revelation. How are Church members supposed to know that LDS scholars are not being honest, completely upfront or thorough in their research and that the sources on the outside (it has nothing to do with looking at the world with an "us" or "them" perspective) contain mountains of material that demonstrate the inacurracy of claims by scholars like Ogden and Skinner?

Sorry, not quite. Verse 9 may be a new day but the heaven and the waters mentioned represent the same heaven and waters talked about the day before. There is nothing to suggest a shift to a different heaven and body of water. Yes, too true. But a year is still a lot longer than 40 days and remember that Luke has the divine family return immediately to Nazareth after this period. There is no flight into Egypt. King Herod doesn't enter the picture in Luke at all. The Egyptians beleived that the sun was the eye of Horus who died at the end of each day in the West, travelled under the earth to fight the demons of the underworld and then come out the other side and rise in the east signifying his victory at the dawn of each day. The Greeks were the first people to develop the idea that the earth was round in the late first millennium B.C. The universe that Genesis is describing is the flat earth with vaulted sky from ancient Mesopotamia. All Ancient Near Eastern cultures believed in a flat earth and vaulted sky created from the primordial sea (including Egypt) and scholars universally accept the idea that this belief came from the Sumerians out of Mesopotamia. The Caananites were heavily influenced by Mesopotamian culture and this influence is seen in many Bible stories. This is one of the most common misconceptions of history. In reality, no educated person in Europe believed the earth was flat since at least the 5th century A.D. The false idea that people in the Middle Ages believed the earth was flat was invented and popularized by Washington Erving in his 19th century book, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. The truth was, only the most ignorant of the masses didn't believe the earth was round. The argument in Columbus' day was not about whether it was round or flat, but whether it was small or big. Columbus believed the earth was actually smaller than it was and thought Eastern India was about where Eastern America is. Those who wouldn't support him were people who believed the earth was much bigger and that Columbus would never make it that far across the ocean.I don't know much about Egyptian history yet but I'm almost certain the idea of a round earth developed in Greece at about 300 B.C. Either way, it's obvious by numerous passages in the Bible that the Hebrews did not believe the earth was round.

That's a creative interpretation, brother Rudick, but unfortunately it's not very likely. There are multiple examples in the Bible of the scriptures describing the flat earth and vaulted sky of the Ancient Near Eastern mythological cosmology. After studying Sumerian and Babylonian (as well as Egyptian) literature, a person can recognize the language immediately - as people living in those times would also have done.Edited to add: Besides, how would verses 9 and 10 fit in with that definition? "And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas".

Oh, right. I should have known right off the bat that LDS scholars were out to lunch. Afterall, everyone in the Church knows that. All this time I thought I could learn about the Bible from going to Church, reading the Ensign, and shopping at Desert Book. What was I thinking? If so then you're straying from what's in your teacher's manual, aren't you? If you and your folks have known about "this stuff" for years and years, it wasn't from studying LDS material or growing up in Mormon communities. You learned these things from outside sources. And then you chided me for not doubting everything the Church brought me up to believe? Why don't you look at some of the posts on this thread? Apparently the "slow crowd" I've been running with all these years has been the bulk of the members of the Church? Is that what you're saying? I'm afraid this isn't true at all. Many LDS scholars for at least the last 100 years have created works that were specifically aimed at the lay public at least since the early 20th century and continue to steadily krank out more. The problem is that if they really know about "this stuff" they are not informing the lay public of it.I have a book here: Verse by Verse: The Four Gospels written by two BYU scholars, D. Kelly Ogden and Andrew C. Skinner. After promoting the old, debunked view of the two contradictary geneologies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke (that one geneology is of Joseph and the other of Mary), the book goes into the details of the birth narratives (but not too closely, of course) trying its hardest to reconcile the different accounts and get around the historical inaccuracies by using outdated argements and dubious sources (not to mention skipping over conflicting passages). This book was published in 2006. If LDS scholars really do know about "this stuff", they're going to great lengths to cover it up and keep the lay public from hearing it. That's wonderful, Snow, not one single LDS scholar among them. You don't think I have access to Amazon.com like everyone else? When did you last read Ehrman's Jesus Interupted by the way? Sounds fair. Which specific "gospel truths necessary for our salvation" are you referring to exactly that you see remaining intact from the Old Testament on through to the New? Obviously you are getting fluttered because your smug tone and condescending remarks are out of character for someone whose faith has gone through "the wringer" and come out victorious with a renewed testimony and the peace of reconciliation. You sound more like someone who has been confronted with these things before, never found satisfactory answers for them, dismissed and pushed them aside when it became too overwelming, and allowed time and a fading memory to heal the wounds. When someone like me comes along to open them back up again, your knee-jerk reaction is to attack and belittle the messenger in the hopes that he/she won't see through your little game and put you through "the wringer" all over again. You can prove me wrong, of course, by offering helpful, intellectual insights that you have discovered to help you reconcile modern historical research with your traditional faith. This is what your fellow saint is asking of you. I'm not really interested in playing immature games. The versus I'm referring to are the ones I've specifically quoted from Genesis 1:6-8 which have been reproduced almost verbatim in Abraham 4:6-8 and Moses 2:6-8. And, no, I don't think that Joseph Smith thought the earth was flat and the sky was a round dome. But, like most people who read the creation story in Genesis, I think Joseph Smith didn't understand what he was reading (there were no Ancient Near Eastern sources in translation available to him in his day to clarify these passages), and (one possible explaination) just lifted those verses straight out of the Old Testament and into the Pearl of Great Price having no idea what those texts truly signified. But, thanks to modern archeology and scholarly research, the beliefs and myths of the Ancient Near East are available to us today and anyone familiar with them would recognize straight away in the Bible's account the belief that was universal to all peoples of that time in the Near East - that the earth was a flat disc encased in a solid dome surrounded by water above and below and that if a person travelled far enough they would reach the edge of the world where heaven and earth touched eachother as it is described in Nehemiah 1:9 "But if ye turn unto me, and keep my commandments, and do them; though there were of you cast out unto the uttermost part of the heaven, yet will I gather them from thence, and will bring them unto the place that I have chosen to set my name there." And Mark 13:27 "And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven."

I've been studying the Ancient Near East as a hobby for over a year and have been studying the historical critical angle of the New Testament for a few months now. After being convinced of so many discrepancies and evidence of human influence on the NT (and the Old), I decided to search out an LDS website like this one to see if I could find some other members (and this is what I stated from the very beginning in my first post) who had ran into the same things I did and who were struggling like I am to reconcile or combine in someway these facts with what the Church teaches and believes and my own testimony of the Church's work. Guess I'm on my own. I was prepared to explain my position to those who had questions and challenges but never intended on coming in here just to argue with people.

Because people in Hollywood are very politically active and use entertainment as a medium to influence others' views and, sadly to say, many people are influenced by what they see in movies whether they think they are or not. Hollywood as a whole is one of the most anti-Western, anti-religious institution on the planet. After Angels and Demons is released, check out the imdb.com boards of that movie and you'll see just how much people believe what they see in films.

Look, guys. Everyone can believe what they want. I'm not here to convert you to something you don't want to accept. A person can explain away anything uncomfortable if they completely close their mind to the reality of what they're looking at. All they have to do is isolate all the details, refuse to put them together and then find the tiniest bit of doubt for each detail one at a time. That way the big picture disappears and all coherence gets lost in the minute points. People from all persuasions can do this. I'm satisfied that I've made my case and I think anyone who looks at the evidence with intellectual honestly will see these facts for what they are. Oh, please! You know very well that most members have no idea of these things. I've been raised in and around the Church all my life. I've studied the scriptures along with stutent manuals, taken semenary, and debated religion since I was at least 17 and I never came across these things until I was researching on line one night. I can only conclude that what you mean when you tell me I need to get out more is that I need to get out from under the influence of the Church more. Is that what you're saying? If there are any LDS scholars who address these things, I would be grateful to know about them and their work. The problem is that when I realized Matthew and Luke were telling two totally different birth narratives, I began studying the Bible from the "historical critical" position to see what other problems it had and discovered that historians have made enormous progress in the last forty years uncovering and interpreting new data which exposes much of the Bible as a book that was influenced more by the times and conditions in which the authors lived than by an all knowing Heavenly Father. The more I sudied, the more I realized that the problems were so great that the only way I could reconcile what I was reading with what I've been taught by the Church is to come to the conclusion that Joseph Smith got it wrong...about many things. And that there is a possibility that even sections and teachings from the Doctrine & Covenants and Pearl of Great Price (not to mention the Joseph Smith Translations) are wrong as well. I think any member who was even slightly familiar with LDS teachings would understand why this would be a problem.For example (this "problem" I discovered previous to the Nativity problem while studying ancient myths from Mesopotamia), Genesis chapter 1 says, "And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth..." Creationists have stretched these scriptures to no end to try and explain this scientifically. The truth is that what Genesis is describing is the creation of the universe as the people of the Ancient Near East understood it. They believed that the earth was flat, that the sky was a round dome, and that the whole of everything was surrounded by water ("the abyss"). Now I have no problem with the ancient Hebrews believing these same things and even incorporating these concepts into their sacred scriptures. I don't think it was that important to God for the Israelites to the know the exact science of creation. The problem is that these verses are reinforced in the Pearl of Great Price in both Abraham and Moses and these are supposed to be revelations given to these men (and then regiven to Joseph Smith) straight from God! Why would God lie to these prophets and tell them the earth was flat and encased in a dome called "Heaven" when he knew these scriptures would come forth in an age that knew better?

If Matthew didn't want us to infer that Jesus' parents were already living in Bethlehem when Jesus was born then why doesn't he explain to us what on earth they're doing there? He doesn't mention an inn or a manger. When the wise men find Jesus, they find him in a "house". And even if he did believe that his parents were new arrivals to the little town (something that he nowhere states), he obviously doesn't believe they originally came from Nazareth as evidenced by the wording in Matt 2:22-23 which would suggest to anyone reading the story away from the influence of Luke that Jesus' family had never lived there before. But which can also be extended to mean young child. Matthew 2:16 says, "Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men." In other words, when Herod enquired of the wise men at what time the star appeared in the sky, they told him it was two years before the wise men arrived in Judea. See verse 7. And the little po-dunk town of Nazareth would have been the second most logical choice? If anyone is inferring explainations from the gospel accounts things for which there is no evidence, it's you. The most logical conclusion is that Joseph was going back to Judea because that's where Matthew believed (or would have his community believe) that that's where Joseph and Mary were from in the first place. That could easily be explained by pointing out that Nephi was writing for the benifit of his own people who were no longer living in the Middle East and had no concept of Levantine geography. To the Nephites, the "land of Jerusalem" encompased the region on the other side of the world where their ancestors originated from. If Nephi was trying to be as specific as you say I think he would be more likely to refer to it as the kingdom of Jerusalem. Matthew 2:22-23 -"But when he [Joseph] heard that Archelaus did reign in Judaea in the room of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither: notwithstanding, being warned of God in a dream, he turned aside into the parts of Galilee: And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth..." Because Luke is a poor historian. For example, Luke tells us that Jesus was born in the days of king Herod when Cyrenius (Quirinius) was governor of Syria. But the historical reality is that Herod died in 4 BC and Quirinius didn't become governor of Syria until 6 AD (a whole ten years later). Luke also claims that the census which drove Joseph and Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem was decreed by Ceaser Augustus and encompased the entire Roman empire. This is just rediculous. Are we to believe that everyone dropped what they were doing, left their homes and their jobs and travelled back to "their own city" (whatever that means) and that the Roman economy didn't collapse? Are we also to expect that that this massive shift of populations was not recorded by a single chronicler of the time other than Luke?The census Luke is referring to is well known in history. It is the census of Quirinius conducted in 6 or 7 AD, after the Romans ousted Herod Archelaus as ruler of Judea and the Levant came under direct Roman rule. The census was not conducted over the whole empire, only over the newly created Iudaea Province and, as I mentioned, nowhere in any historical source (other than Luke) does it say that people were required to travel anywhere specific to register. It's something histirians refer to as the criterian of dissimilarity. The idea is that if a particular saying or story goes against the interests or concerns of the message that the author is trying to convey, then it is probably more reliable. In John's gospel, the biggest reason people reject Jesus as the Messiah is because he comes from Nazareth instead of Bethlehem. Jesus' messiahship is challenged in several places in John and not once does John try and refute the accusations that Jesus can't be the Messiah because he doesn't come from the City of David. He never says, "but the people didn't know that Jesus was really born at Bethlehem" or anything like that. It's almost as if John knows Jesus wasn't from Bethlehem but just didn't care about it. Unlike Matthew, John is not trying to convince Jewish people that Jesus is the Christ. He doesn't quote a string of Old Testament prophecies. John doesn't care what the Jews think. In his gospel, he even has Jesus tell the Pharisees that their father is the devil. He then renounces the entire Jewish nation in front of Pilate, telling him they are not his kingdom. Thus being liberated from Jewish tradition, John's Jesus can comfortably be from Nazareth regardless of what any old Jewish prophecy might say to the contrary. He just isn't bothered.Either way, the point is that all three gospels are considered to be scripture by our Church. What does it matter which one is more realiable than the other. If any of them are that unreliable, it calls into question the Church's position, not only on the Bible, but other things as well. This comparison is not even close to the gospel narratives of Jesus' birth. First of all, Matthew and Luke were not present at the birth of the Savior like you and your wife were present at the accident. Second, there is no trace of additional witnesses to the birth of Jesus to corroborate either story in the gospel accounts. Third, you and your wife have no motive for fabricating an accident involving an SUV, but both Matthew and Luke do have a motive for fabricating a story that places the birth of Jesus at Bethlehem.All Israel was waiting for the coming of a messiah who would save their people and they all knew that it was prophecied that this messiah would come from Bethlehem. The problem is that the Christian messiah comes from Nazareth. So in order to convince others that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah of Old Testiment prophecy, Matthew and Luke came up with their own stories (or took them from oral tradition) of how Jesus was born at Bethlehem but raised at Nazareth and because they both were writing independantly of eachother, they both came up with wildly different accounts. It would be like you and your wife saying that you were in an accident with an SUV, which was now missing, and when the police seperated the two of you to get each person's side of the story, you both came up with completely different narratives of where you were coming from, where you were going, and how the accident happened. The police would rightly assume at this point that there probably was no accident involving an SUV and that both of you were lying. Likewise, the Nativity narratives of Matthew and Luke don't corroborate each other and are not historically plausible. The only explaination is that they are lying or getting their information from extremely dubious sources. Even if Jesus really was born at Bethlehem, it couldn't have happened the way either of those gospel writers say it did.

Who? LDS scholars? Bible scholars? Were those scholars there? The only sources scholars have to believe Jesus was born at Bethlehem are Matthew and Luke and as we have seen, they are unreliable sources for the birth of Jesus. They both had a motive for concocting such stories. Many Jews had a problem with Jesus being the Messiah because he was from Nazareth and every good Jew knew the Messaih would come out of Bethlehem. It doesn't matter to me whether Jesus was really born at Bethlehem or not. The problem I have is that all my life I believed the stories in the Bible were, even if mistranslated here and there, nevertheless true. Now I'm finding that's not the case and I'm concerned that I had to discover this outside of Church sources which are supposed to be the supreme, enlightened authority on the scriptures.

The point is that there is nothing in modern revelation which specifically says that Jesus was born at Bethlehem. The only scriptural sources that do are Matthew and Luke and their explainations of how Jesus got there are not plausible. So there is every reason to suppose that Jesus wasnt born there at all or if he was, the real reason he grew up in Nazareth and not Bethlehem has been buried beneath oral tradition. I have recently sent e-mails to several scholars who often appear on the LDS round table discussions on the BYU channel. I'll let you know what they say. But I'm familiar with several student manuals and commentaries and none of them have ever aknowledged the contradictary stories of Jesus' birth.

You should read it again. The wise men were the ones who told King Herod that the star appeared two years previously. When the wise men find Jesus, Matthew specifically refers to him as a "young child". After the wise men leave, then the Lord warns Joseph to flee into Egypt. Then why did they return (your words, not Matthews) back to Nazareth? Did they assume everyone in that one-horse town would forget the whole unholy affair after a few years? Which contradicts Matthew who says, "he turned aside into the parts of Galilee: And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth". Compare the wording of the two. Yes it does because it says, "when they had performed all things according to the law of the Lord" and since we have the law in Leviticus, whe know that it wouldn't have been more than a month - nowhere near two years.

I've been studying the Ancient Near East lately as a hobby and I thought it would be a unique user name. Have you studied the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia? On the contrary, it is those who try to reconcile Matthew's account with Lukes who are drawing upon inferences. Nowhere in Matthew's gospel does it say that Jesus' parents are from Nazareth. If we only had Matthew's gospel (like many early Christians in the 1st century), we would naturally assume that Jesus' family was from Bethlehem. It is Luke's gospel that says that Mary and Joseph are from Nazareth.It's obvious that the Savior's parents in Matthew's gospel are from Bethlehem. It was their home. That's why they stayed there so long after Jesus' birth. That's why they were planning to return there after Herod's death. Luke's divine family are not from Bethlehem, that's why he uses the story of the census as a mechanism to get them there. That's why they stay there only a month before they return home. Nephi isn't wrong at all. Nephi doesn't say what city the Savior was to be born in. That's the point in all the standard works of the Church, the only sources that say that Jesus was born at Bethlehem are Matthew and Luke and not only do they completely contradict each other about how he got from there to Nazareth, their accounts of why he was born at Bethlehem but raised in Nazareth are not credible historically.Matthew says Joseph moved to Nazareth because he was afraid of Herod's son who became ruler in Judea which is not a valid excuse for him to "turn aside" into Galilee because one of Herod's other sons was also a ruler in Galilee. Luke says that Jesus' parents already came from Nazareth and had to travel to Bethlehem because of the census of Quirinius which is not a valid excuse for getting Jesus to Bethlehem because Roman census' didnt require people to register at the town of their ancestory (not to mention the fact that the census took place in 6 AD the same year that Herod Archelaus - the ruler of Judea Joseph was trying to avoid in Matthew - was banished and seven years after Joseph Smith said the Savior was born). In other words, Matthew and Luke both try to explain how Jesus was born at Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth. They both contradict each other and they both provide unhistorically credible reasons for how it happened. Since these two authors are the only ones in scripture who ascribe Jesus' birth at Bethlehem (John practically denies the idea that Jesus was born at Bethlehem) and since their accounts can't be trusted in the slightest, chances are the Savior was never born in Bethlehem at all. I don't really care whether Jesus was born at Bethlehem or not but the point is that if he was it didn't happen the way Matthew and Luke said it did.

The Articles of Faith state that we believe the Bible to be the word of God "as far as it is translated correctly". The Nativity stories in Matthew and Luke aren't mistranslations. The entire narratives are completely different accounts. Church manuals and commentaries have always took these stories literally and I believe the General Authorities have too. If that's the case then it can't be scripture. And if Paul's opinions were wrong regarding women's role in the Church, could he have been wrong on other parts of doctrine as well?But I think we can rest assured that Paul did not have such a demeaning view of women. One of the most notorious passages of Paul's opinion of women's role in the Church is 1 Timothy 2:11-15. But scholars today almost universally consider 1 Timothy to be a forgery written in Paul's name. The other passage is in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 where Paul supposedly says that women should not speak in church. 1 Corinthians is not disputed by scholars to have been written by anyone other than Paul but these verses are disputed for a number of could reasons. First, it contradicts what Paul says earlier in chapter 11 where he says that women can and do speak in church. Second, many of the oldest manuscripts historians have of 1 Corinthians contain those verses out of order or in different places in the chapter. Some texts even have those verses at the bottom of the chapter or out to the side in the margins as footnotes (written by scribes obviously influenced by 1 Timothy). These and a few other reasons are why most scholars refuse to believe Paul wrote those passages. But the Lord, apparantly, didn't reveal this to Joseph Smith while he was tranlsating the Bible because instead of leaving these passages out, Joseph Smith simply retranslated them to read that women should not "rule" in the churches. If the Holy Ghost doesn't reveal to a prophet like Joseph Smith the discrepancies and interpolations found in the scriptures, how are we to have any chance of discovering the truth of these Biblical passages? Certainly not without professional scholarship. But LDS scholars by and large have rarely address these issues it seems, let alone formed a scholarly hypothesis about them. We are forced to study the works of scholars outside of the Church who do not believe that the Bible is inspired but take an evolutionary view on the beliefs expressed in the scriptures. And with so many discoveries historians have made concerning the New Testament as well as of the Ancient Near East and its influence on the Old Testament, I think LDS scholars should start addressing these issues to help serious students of the Bible and the Church's interpretation of it.

The last paragraph of my last post sums it up. Little discrepancies don't bother me but whole narratives that completely contradict eachother call the entire gospel(s) into question. There are other things in the gospels which can't be reconciled and the more one sees them the more one starts looking at the New Testament as a very flawed (human) book full of conflicting views of doctrine and history.It would bother me less if LDS scholars would touch on these things instead of shying away from them. I just don't understand the Church's literalist approach to the Bible.

There are a lot of problems with Matthew's account. For one thing, the idea that Joseph would avoid Judea by turning aside into Galilee because the new ruler of Judea was Archelaus, a son of Herod is not historically viable because the ruler of Galilee at the time was Herod Antipus (another son of Herod). Second, many of the prophecies Matthew quotes to support the authenticity of his story were never recognized as messianic prophecies, are often taken out of context, and are quoted from the Greek Septuigent (not from the original Hebrew) and don't mean what he says they mean when taken from the original Hebrew writings. For example, Matthew quotes Isaiah 7:14 to show that the virgin birth was predicted in scripture. The problem is that the scripture he quotes is the Greek translation which uses the word parthenos (an ambiguous Greek word meaning either "young girl" or "virgin"). The original Hebrew reading uses the word aalmah which simply means "young girl" (the Hebrew word for "virgin" is betulah) and would not be construed by anyone reading Hebrew to mean that a baby would be born from a virgin. Also, Matthew claims that it was "spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene" when no such prophecy in ancient scripture exists. I'm sure that we could suppose (like the Bible Dictionary does) that this prophecy exists in one of the lost books of scripture but if the Jews of Matthew's day had a copy of this lost book then why do the Jews of John's gospel have such a problem with Jesus coming from Nazareth. In one case (John 7:52), when Nicodemus tries to stick up for Jesus, the Pharisees retort, "Art thou also of Galilee? Search, and look: for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet." I think if Matthew believed that Joseph and Mary originally came from Nazareth, the wording in his gospel would not be, "And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth" after returning to Israel from Egypt. The historians' arguement is that the fact that Jesus was from Nazareth was always an embarassment to early followers of Jesus (who believed him to be the Messiah) because Jewish tradition held that the Messiah would come out of Bethlehem. So Matthew and Luke, determined to make Jesus the legitimite Messiah of the Jews, concocted their own accounts (or borrowed stories from two seperate oral traditions) of how Jesus was both from Bethlehem and Nazareth (John didn't care where Jesus was from and one of the major themes of his gospel is that if you're worried about where Jesus comes from, you won't be able to recognize him for what he really is) and came up with two totally different renditions. It doesn't bother me so much to believe that the Bible was originally written (or copied) by unenlightened men who were writing several years after the original stories were written. But many of the Joseph Smith translations seem to be completely oblivious to these discrepencies and the fact that all the LDS student manuals and scripture commentaries I've ever read keep trying to force these two birth narratives to fit together bothers me because now I feel that nothing can be taken at face value anymore, even if it comes from a general authority...which is a disturbing thought...

While Matthew might not specifically say that Mary and Joseph are from Bethlehem, a close reading of the story shows that this is so. There's no mention of the census or any trip from Nazareth. After Jesus is born, they're still in Bethlehem two years later when the wise men find them and the only reason they leave is because Herod threatens Jesus' life. After Herod's death, they left Egypt, but Matthew makes it clear the only reason they didn't return to Bethlehem (home) was because Herod's son was ruler in Judea, so Joseph took his family and "he turned aside into the parts of Galilee: And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth". Luke's gospel says that Mary and Joseph travelled from Nazareth to Bethlehem, staid there a month (not two years) and then immediately returned to Nazareth after presenting the baby Jesus to the temple. Herod's decree, the wisemen, the star, the flight to Egypt; are all from Matthew's gospel. These elements of the story do not appear in Luke's. Likewise, the census, the trip to Bethlehem, the manger story, the shepards; these all appear in Luke but not Matthew. The only things that both accounts agree on is the virgin birth and that Jesus was born at Bethlehem. Other than that, they are completely different stories.

It recently came to my attention that the birth narratives of Jesus in the gospels of Matthew and Luke are irreconcilably contradictary. According to Matthew, the Savior and his parents are from Bethlehem, stay there for two years after Jesus' birth, fly to Egypt to escape King Herod, and arrive at Nazareth for the first time once Herod is dead. In Luke, Mary and Joseph are from Nazareth, travel to Bethlehem for the census, stay there only a month during her purification according to Levitical law, and then return back home to Nazareth. There is no flight to Egypt, no wise men following a star, no death decree by Herod. After reading these narratives closely, it becomes obvious that Matthew and Luke are telling two totally different, contradicting stories. Both of them can't be true. The prophet, Nephi, prophesied that Jesus' mother would be from Nazareth but only says that Jesus would be born in "the land of Jerusalem". There are no other places in the standard works that specify where Jesus was born or how he got there. My question is, has anyone else here noticed this and how do we reconcile it with the Church's position that the Bible is the word of God (originally written by inspired men) and that the only errors in it are mistranlations and interpolations here and there?