christmas 2008 -081211: 3 nephi and christmas sourcesedgemontscripturestudy.com/002christmas...

Transcript of Classes on Book of Mormon Series 1 by John W. Welch, September 2007 to March 2009

Christmas 2008 -081211: 3 Nephi and Christmas Sources

Tonight have our work cut out for us. I told you that we would talk first about Christmas, and I hope you picked up the three handouts. Since we are talking about the three wise men, I thought we should have three handouts tonight. I hope they are worthy of the three wise men. But before we dive into that, last year, if I remember correctly, we talked a little bit about some of the scripture passages, especially in Luke about the normal Christmas story. We shall add to that tonight, but I will add a couple of things that you may like to know if you were not here or have forgotten. It is very important when we translate the Christmas story that we do so correctly.

Whereas it says there was no room in the inn, it does not say that there was an innkeeper who was mean and who would not let anybody in. No innkeeper is mentioned in the Gospel of Luke. He is a fabrication, but it does bear a message that we should be kind, open, and welcoming to all people. The word used for inn when it says there was no room in the inn, does not even mean a hotel. The word that refers to a hotel or inn is pandocheion, and that is the word used in the parable of the good Samaritan. When out on the road, the good Samaritan rescues the beaten man and takes him to what we would call a wayside inn or a kind of hostel, which was there to allow people to feed their animals and get a little shelter from the weather.

But once you arrived in a town in the ancient world, there were no hotels. There were no motels because they did not have cars, but you had to stay with family or friends. You had to have a host or a sponsor who was responsible for you within the village or the town. Thus, when Paul goes to Thessalonica, for example, Jason is his host, and becomes responsible for Paul. If the visitor misbehaves, as in the case of Paul visiting in Thessalonica—Paul is accused and leaves town quickly—but Jason is held liable. He finally is able to persuade them not to convict him, but he has to stand trial as the host who was responsible.

So what does the word inn (Greek, kataluma) mean in Luke, Chapter 2? Well, we do not know for sure, but it is interesting that Luke uses this word twice. He uses it once in Luke Chapter 2, and he uses it again in Luke Chapter 22, where it says that Jesus and his disciples go into an upper room for the Last Supper. In that case, they are going into a guest room that is being given to them to use for a meal— whether it was a Passover meal, which appears likely we cannot be sure—but they used the room for the meal before Jesus goes with the disciples to Gethsemane. So it is interesting that Luke has the life of Jesus begin in a guest room, in a kataluma, and end in a kataluma—his first night and last night.

A kataluma in Bethlehem most likely would have been a guest room in the family where they were staying. Joseph and Mary both have family in Bethlehem, and although I do not know exactly when they arrived in Bethlehem, I hope it was a week or two before Mary gave birth. If not, Joseph may have been a little irresponsible taking her. “Why not ride on a donkey? you are 8 months, 3 weeks and 6 days pregnant and ….”

(Student) …in fairness though, they may not have known exactly how to calculate the time of birth …

That is true, so in fairness, we do not know when they arrived but let us assume they arrived up to a week ahead. Maybe they were there before a lot of the other family had started to gather, because they all had to be there to be registered for the village tax. Maybe it got crowded, and in the guest room there were lots of people. They all slept on the floor. They had their blankets and all they needed was a little part of the room. The rooms were small but you could sleep a dozen

Christmas 2008 11 December 2008 File ( 081211)1


people comfortably. There was not much room and certainly no privacy, so to me, it makes sense to go out to the stable, which was probably the family stable that may have even been connected to the house. The Palestinian homes in those days were shaped in a kind of U-shape and in the two outer rooms, they had sheep, goats, and cattle if they had any. It would, in some ways, have been a clean place. At least there are not a lot of human bacteria there, though it is a lowly stable.

One other thing we talked about last time was the fact that in the early manuscripts, the words of the angels appear in two different forms and I like both of them. Biblical scholars argue about which is the right reading of this text, but I say, “Well, maybe the angels meant both. Maybe some angels said one, and the other angels said the other. Maybe they had a first chorus and a second chorus. I do not know how all this happened, but some manuscripts say, “Peace on earth, good will to men.” Other manuscripts say, “Peace on earth to men of good will.” In the Greek, there is only one letter difference between those two. It leaves open a question. If you read it as “the men of good will,” does it mean, the men who have good will towards their fellow men? Possibly. Or does it mean, peace on earth toward men whom God has good will toward? It is not clear whose good will is referenced there.

The word good will (eudokia) is interesting. When the voice of the Father speaks out of the heavens at Jesus’ baptism, and said, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased,” this word (eudokia), which is a noun in Luke, appears in a verbal form to express God’s pleasure at his Son. It also may be so here. “Peace on earth toward all mankind in whom God is well pleased.” God loves his children. Perhaps there were three verses and we have three different meanings, but all of them, I think, are really interesting and beautiful passages.

Now are there any questions you would like to ask about Matthew or Luke? Do you all know that Santa Claus is not in there, right? Do you all know my views about Santa Claus? No? Santa Claus is Protestant, and Santa Claus represents the idea of grace, giving of gifts where there is no obligation to give back to the person who gave the gift —a free gift. Now that is classic Protestantism. You cannot give anything back to Santa Claus even if you want to. You can be nice to other people, but we send a message to our children that all you have to do is be reasonably decent and Santa Claus will shower you with undeserved gifts. I just think about the theology of that. I love Santa Claus but I do not like the theology, that is all. Yes, sure, I will take all he will give me but in the -

(Student) Children believe.

They believe and it works for them, but it is interesting that in the ancient world the word for gift, Greek charis, does not mean grace. The word for gift describes a reciprocal obligation. It is an obliging bequest or favor given by one person to another, so if a patron made a gift to one of his underling clients, that created an obligation on the part of the client to do something for the patron, and when the clients behaved in the favor of the patron, then he had an obligation to do something for them. The Latin words here, you know the word beneficium- is the benefit which you get that gives rise to what the Romans called an officium which is a duty. And there was no such thing in their mind as a beneficium without an officium and that is what the word charis is all about. Jesus has given freely to us, that is true. We then have an obligation so in a sense it is free, yes, but it comes with the moral and spiritual obligations to keep his commandments - to obey his will - to love him and do the things that he has asked.



00:13:22 Mormons sometimes get accused of being too works oriented, right? But the Sermon on the Mount is certainly heavily works oriented and many other passages in the New Testament as well. And to me, I think as we give gifts, I think it is important for us to reciprocate as often as we can for kindnesses and good things that are given to us.

(Student) …in our works orientation sometimes we think it is works rather than grace that enables us…

00:14:09 Absolutely. It is both. And if we do not keep that in proper balance, and I hope I have with my statements tonight— to keep that in balance, because what is important here is not the giving and receiving of gifts, it is the creating of a relationship between God and us - between us and other people. Life is all relational and so that is why it has to be a two-way - and that is why covenants are two-way relationships too. Anyway -

(Student) …no theological bail-outs for mismanagement?…

Well, there actually is a theological bail out, but it requires repentance and fortunately, the treasury is unlimited and you can draw on that as many times as you sincerely and in good faith can do so. Okay? Alright.

00:15:20 Well, if you look at the chart that starts with the birth of Jesus, a noble king, as you enjoy and celebrate Christmas in your family or in your study this year… I like to look at the difference between Matthew and Luke. You know, a lot of people when they read these two stories say, “These are just so different. They are just coming from completely different historical accounts. How can you read these two together?” They can be integrated but they have a very different purpose in mind and Matthew and Luke, because of what they are going to do throughout their gospels, will emphasize different parts of the Christmas story.

00:16:11 For Matthew, the story is filled with royal elements. He wants people to realize that the King of Israel has been born. The prophecies of the coming of the king— the three kings or however many there are —the wisemen—these are people who seem to have a lot of prestige and the kind of visit that a royal birth would call for. Herod is mentioned here. The King of the Jews. And you go down the list. Bethlehem? Well, why Bethlehem? This is the City of David, the preeminent King of Israel. Again, there is a kingship theme there. Shepherds are not mentioned. You go down the list and you can see that it is king, king, king, king, the king is born.

00:17:16 Now for Luke the angels do not say, “For this day is born unto you a king,” they say, the emphasis there is he is the Savior - to be the Savior of all mankind. And the emphasis is more on Jesus coming to ordinary people - the ordinary shepherds. The ordinary shepherds were very ordinary people. These are the people of the land - people of the dirt. They mostly were dirty. They spent a lot of time with animals, obviously, but that meant that they had impurities as far as the ritual law was concerned. You do not help your lambs give birth and not get blood all over you, and you do not have good showers where you can go wash out in the fields.

00:18:13 Shepherds were— it is an interesting ambivalence—in shepherd ideology in the ancient world, Kings are sometimes called the shepherds of their people. So in that sense, the shepherd is the servant of all, as Jesus says, but it can be a symbol for the one who leads and guides the sheep. Under Jewish law, shepherds were a despised group of people. They were considered dishonest. They could not testify in court. They were basically uneducated, so they are looked down on. So that the angels would appear to the shepherds. We just think well, the lowly shepherds, they are nice, humble people, but in their cultural world, this sends a message of the



Savior coming down from the highest—“Glory to God in the highest,” —all the way down to the lowest of humanity and of course they are in Bethlehem not as descendants of the king but because they have to be taxed, and they are there as the subjects and so on.

00:19:43 Well you can follow the chart here and I hope that will - help you with the contrast because Jesus, like we were saying with the gifts, it is a two-way thing. Is Jesus the king? Or is he the lowly shepherd? Both. And so you have to tell both sides of this story to be able to tell the complete account. “Jesus once of humble birth, now in glory,” well, that’s the great message of Christianity and he who will abase himself will be exalted. And those who exalt themselves will be abased.

(Student) Do you know about when the two different accounts were written? Would Matthew have been earlier than Luke or vice versa?

00:20:45 Very interesting question and we really do not know, but some people think that Mark was written first. We know that Luke used Mark, but we do not know whether Matthew used Mark although it appears that he did. Some people think that he did not but that is a diminishing minority now. You can get debates. Many people think that Mark was written before 70 AD with the destruction of the temple, but there are some who think that the prophecies in Mark about the destruction of the temple are just too good and they could not really be prophecies so that must all be written after 70 - but you can get wild debates over this. One document that I mentioned a couple of times when we were talking about the Sermon on the Mount, the Didache, has traditionally been dated as late as 130 or 140 AD. I heard people two weeks ago arguing that it should be dated in the 40s or 50s so there are 90 years of difference and people cannot tell.

00:22:04 I mentioned Professor Charlesworth who was here a week ago. Recently people have been reassessing what is called the Gospel of Thomas. It is a bunch of sayings of Jesus and there was a lot of excitement when they were discovered and people figured, “Ah, this may be one of the missing sources that Luke and other people had used.” So people were dating the Gospel of Thomas to the 40s or 50s, very early. Charlesworth told me, and I was shocked to hear this, people are now throwing it way back into the 3rd or 4th Century as a late Gnostic text.

00:22:41 Now why do we have this fluctuation? Well the evidence just is not there one way or the other, but more than that, it keeps all these scholars employed as they keep arguing about their theories. So I wish we knew but it is— we can be certainly grateful that we have what we have in the Book of Mormon that tells us so much about the original, early material and what Jesus taught there at the temple.

(Student) Chronologically, when does John’s account come?

00:23:16 Well John’s account appears to be written after at least a couple of the what we call the synoptic gospels— maybe all three of them were first, because John seems to be filling in gaps that the other three have not picked up. But what scholars now realize…and there is a big project going on with the historical material of John, John presents a puzzle, because the more we learn about 1st Century Judaism, the more people are convinced that John, who, after all, was right there with Jesus is more Jewish in a lot of ways certainly than Mark and Luke: that the Gospel of John even though it may be written late, contains the most historically accurate cultural material of the Four Gospels. So it may have earlier traditions, but written at a later time.

00:24:17 You know we have the same kind of thing with a lot of early pioneer accounts where people wrote down things that had happened maybe 30, 40, or 50 years earlier, and sometimes



the later material turns out to be historically more authentic, more verifiable. We did not have CNN on the spot with the cameras there. Can you imagine? “Here they are in the stable.” Excuse the blasphemy. You know, what would the reporter ask Mary? Microphone right. Wouldn’t that— “How would you feel when …”

(Student) CNN proximity to the event would probably have ruined history because they take some little aspect that seems to sell well, some focus group something or other, and they multiply it 50 times its importance, and in the perspective of the long haul you see things much better.

(Student) Back in that period of history, they had no way to record immediately what happened. It was difficult to find a way to write those things.

00:25:45 I am sure glad you are here, Brother Kepis, you remind us of so many important things that are very different. You could not go down to the book store and buy a ream of paper. It was difficult—in the 1st Century, it began with the oral tradition and then finally people were able to start writing it down. However, I think that some of these things, like the Sermon on the Mount, were written down very early, and they were able to write parts of these pieces, parts of the story that would then be later incorporated into the bigger picture. But just in terms of expense - yes -

(Student) …the brother of Jesus…writing…

Well, we’ll talk about that in a minute. That is the way it is presented. I am not saying that is the way it is. But in terms of books, what Brother Kepis is saying, in the 1st Century, if you wanted a copy of let us say Book 1 of Plato’s Republic, which took a whole papyrus scroll or parchment scroll to write it out on, you would have to get a slave— they had slaves who—there were people who ran book stores. You would order a book and the slave would then start copying and they would copy and it would take weeks .

(Student) My father was a lawyer in the 1930s in Athens, and there were no typewriters.

Especially no typewriters with Greek.

(Student) He copied the law by hand…

00:27:50 Well, we talk about going to a lecture, well lectus comes from the Latin word to read and why was this? The professor would read his copy of a book, so if you wanted to go to lectures on Thomas Aquinas, the professor would sit there and would read in Latin the Thomas Aquinas, and what are the students doing? They are writing it down and that is how they got their copy which then made them qualified to go out. Otherwise, we calculate the price of a book - just the Gospel of Matthew would be about a thousand dollars in today’s market - I mean in today’s comparable values - very expensive. And so one of the things Jewish boys had to do was copy their own text of the Torah. You could not buy and sell the scriptures because they were holy and there was a prohibition against selling sacred things for money - something we can appreciate.

(Student) Just as people today - young people will use calculators or their iPhones or whatever to do simple calculations rather than do it longhand…and they are losing that skill…I wonder if we have lost the skill of memorizing…of hearing something and retaining it with great accuracy. They may have been very skillful back then.

Well wonder no more. I think we’re beyond the point of wondering on that.



00:29:48 Let us turn to the back of this page just quickly because I thought you might be interested in the Infancy Gospel of James. We’ve mentioned Margaret Barker in this class a few times, a British Scholar who is very interested in pushing back to the original version of things that we have in the scriptures, and especially finding temple-related elements. What I found interesting in Margaret’s book, which has just come out, called Christmas, the Original Story and she relies heavily on the Infancy Gospel of James.

00:30:32 In Matthew we have the king. In Luke we have the shepherd or the ordinary prophet. Well Jesus was going to come as prophet, priest and king. What you have in the Infancy Gospel of James are all temple preparations associating Jesus’ birth with the birth of the new High Priest and Jesus would become our new High Priest. He would be the one who would go into the Holy of Holies. He would be the one whose own blood would be shed that could be then sprinkled upon all people for the infinite atonement, not on the day of atonement in the Holy of Holies, but the eternal atonement through the blood that he shed in Gethsemane. But Jesus is all three - prophet, priest and king, so we have here a third story, and just as some things have been thought to be early, and now people think are late, we have known about this Gospel of James for quite a while, and people thought it was very late, but along comes a manuscript that dates to the middle of the 3rd Century —around 250; that is extremely early— earlier than most of the manuscripts that we have for the New Testament. That means that this account was circulating perhaps even more widely than, say, Matthew or Luke’s account in early Christianity and if the art work and some of the Christmas stories are any indication, this was the more popular of the three.

00:32:20 You know, as I said, in Luke, you do not have a number of elements mentioned but they show up here in this early story. Well just quickly to run through the story with you, a rich man whose name is Joachim and his wife Anna had no children. He doubled his gifts to the temple hoping that God would forgive him of whatever he had done wrong. He assumed that he must be cursed because he and his wife were without child. He was a very wealthy man and he gave generously hoping that a child would be born. An angel came and told Anna that she would conceive and she said to the angel, “Whether it is a male or a female child, I will offer it as a gift to the Lord to serve him all its life.” When an angel then told Joachim that his wife had conceived, he offered ten pure lambs to the priests. He then gave twelve tender calves to the elders, and 100 kids— goats—for the people of Israel as a whole.

00:33:39 As he approached the altar in the temple with his sacrifices, the gold plate on the High Priest’s turban, which had the name of Jehovah written on it flashed to him, and showed him that he, indeed, was not a sinner. This is important because the word Jehovah on the head-dress, on the turban of the priest, identified the priest as the representative of Jehovah, so the High Priest is in a way a type of Jehovah, of Jesus, who himself would come from Joachim’s lineage.

00:34:25 Well, Anna gives birth to the baby and calls her Mary, so Mary herself was born in an extraordinary way, and Anna made her nursery into a holy place so that Mary would be kept completely pure and promised to give Mary to the temple when she was old enough. At the age of three, Mary was then taken and dedicated to the temple, somewhat like Samuel, and when she did, she danced, it says, on the third step of the temple of the altar which was a sign that there was great joy and she was comfortable, and belonged there. It said, “And all the house of Israel loved her.”

00:35:17 Mary did not turn— this is my summary of a longer document, by the way—Mary did not turn away from the temple, so when her parents leave her, she does not cry. She is



comfortable staying there. She lives there in the temple serving as a child, protected and taken care of and helping in the temple as she could, until she is twelve. Now at the time she turns twelve, and menstruation is about to set in, the priests decide that they cannot keep a girl in the temple. This would create purity problems and so the High Priest had Zacharias, this is the father of John the Baptist, call together all the widowers in the area, one of whom was Joseph. Joseph did not know— well he may have known Joachim as a friend, but was not related to him in any way. They put all of their staffs —each had to throw their rod onto a pile and then the rods were—like pickup sticks, right? The High Priest reached in and pulled out one of the rods and he pulled out Joseph’s. And Joseph was then trusted to become Mary’s guardian, and as the rod was given back to Joseph, a dove flew out of his staff and landed onto his head, so the sign of the dove was foreshadowed there.

00:36:56 Well the Priests then decided to have a new veil woven for the temple and Mary was chosen by lot to weave the true purple and the scarlet threads which were the most important of the threads. And while she was spinning, and you will notice in a lot of art work, Mary is often shown spinning either red or purple thread, the angel told Mary that she would miraculously bear the Son of the Highest. After she became pregnant, the angel assured Joseph that the child was from the Holy Spirit. But later, when Joseph did not appear once in the assembly of the elders as he should have, Annas, the High Priest, came and paid him a Home Teaching visit and happened to notice that Mary was pregnant.

00:37:54 Annas requires both Joseph and Mary to appear at the temple to drink the test of the bitter waters. This is interesting; normally only the woman is required to drink the waters, but in this text, Joseph goes first and he drinks the waters and goes out into the wilderness for a while, returns and is still whole. So then they make Mary go through the ordeal. She goes out and returns, and when she is also found to be pure, the High Priest said, “If the Lord God has not revealed your sin, neither do I condemn thee. Again, foreshadowing words that Jesus will say in the temple to a woman taken in adultery.

(Student) What is the trial of the bitter waters?

00:38:49 You can read in Numbers 5, there is a long text there about if a husband is jealous or suspicious that his wife has been unfaithful, the two of them can go to the temple and if the wife says, “I am innocent,” she must drink some water which the Priest prepares. In the Greek it is called living water, and so the priest will give her living water. The water contains some dust from the floor of the temple, and it also contains ink. Ink in the ancient world was water-soluble. So the Priest would write a curse on a piece of parchment. The curse would say, if “I am not telling the truth, then may all these things happen to me. And then they would rinse off the ink into the water so the words go into the water, and then she has to drink the water. If the curse does not materialize, then she is exonerated. And at that point, the husband cannot make any further accusations and do things to restore the harmony within the family. It is an interesting part of the Law of Moses about which people spend a lot of time wondering what the symbolism is and how it works.

(Student) It says Joseph was a widower. He had been married?

It means he had been married and that he had a family. He is an older man, and so by giving Mary to him it was not expected that he would marry her. He is the guardian who is entrusted to



take care of her, at least there was nothing said particular about that, but it did not look like…I mean here she is…

(Student) …betrothed…

00:40:57 The word betrothed can mean entrusted, though usually we think of it as engaged to be married. But Mary was only 12 according to this account, and we do not know in Matthew how old Mary was, but typically, they got married when they were about 13 or 14 years old. So thinking of Mary as a Beehive or a Mia Maid changes the picture a little bit.

(Student) Why widower?

00:41:28 Why a widower? Well I think it was because they knew that she was devoted to the temple, and she was to be kept pure, so they were not going to have a teen-age boy marry her, or take care of her, that does not … I won’t go there, but you get the picture. So it was for her protection and for her well-being, and what would have happened to her down the road we do not know, but normally a father would be responsible for finding a husband for his daughter. It may have been that she would have then ultimately married one of the priests, or maybe even the High Priest. That is just … if she belongs to the temple and she has been kept completely pure, it looks like she was being prepared to become the wife of the holiest person in their temple world. At least that is the picture that we are getting here.

(Student) Did they have polygamy back then?

Yes they did.

(Student) I am wondering if her question was why not a father with a family? Father, mother, family. Why a widower?

00:43:01 Well, it does not say. But as the story goes on, as they leave the temple they go on to Bethlehem to register. Joseph finds a cave, and he is going with his sons because the whole family has to register. He leaves his sons to protect the cave while he goes to find a midwife to help with the birth, but by the time they arrive, they see this light shining, not out of the heavens, but out of the cave, and it is the light of the birth of the Savior. The midwife performs an interesting purpose in this story because she is a witness to the fact that there was no midwife there. There was no one helping with this birth, and the birth was somehow miraculous in that sense. She also testifies that she saw the light, and then it says she also performs an inspection. She asks, “What’s going on here?” and she is told that this is a birth of a woman who has not had sexual relations with any man and as a midwife she says, “Well I do not believe that! Let me check her out!” And so she decides to inspect Mary, and her hand, it says, starts to burn, and the angel who is standing there says to the midwife, “Touch the baby, and your hand will be healed.” She does that. So she is there as a validation of the miraculous virgin birth.

00:45:05 Now we mention James here. James is a son of Joseph.

(Student) …Jacobus

Right, but there is a James, the brother of Jesus. They are all called Jacobus in Greek

(Student) The King James translators put that name for the King.

(Student) Is this the James that James and Simon and Judas of the Twelve.



00:45:37 Yes, and he is the one who becomes the bishop in Jerusalem. This document will end with the certification, “I James wrote this in Jerusalem,” and if he is a son of Joseph by a previous mother, by a different woman, then he’s really Jesus’ half-brother, but he would have been, interestingly, there as an eye-witness to this, and if there is historical kernels of truth in here, it may come from someone who was present. Luke was not there, Matthew was not there, John was not there, but maybe James was.

00:46:21 Now there are some things in this story that are odd, there is no question about that. But as we take and put all three of these stories together, you can see why Margaret Barker thinks that we can get closer to the total original story of all that happened. The wise men are mentioned here. They come following the star and the story is very similar to what we have in Matthew, and if you will turn to the page on the wise men and their gifts… I did not bring a tablecloth, I apologize to the Relief Society for that, but I did bring my visual aids and here is gold, if you want to pass this around.

00:47:20 You know, these wise men are interesting. The Greek word here is not sophoi - not the wise guys, but it is the Magi, and a magus —we get the word magician from that. So these are people who studied the stars, they were involved in divination, reading the signs of the times. They probably had some very religious function. We say, “We three kings,” but these wise men may have had more of a religious, priestly role than a political one. Barker—I have given you some lists, some citations here— emphasizes that they were priests who had been priests of the temple in Jerusalem, who were now living in exile, and that when the temple was destroyed at the time of Lehi, they were priests who fled and took some of their sacred objects and traditions and went to Arabia— they had gone to the east. According to the Jewish stories, they were waiting for a time when they could bring their knowledge of the temple back to Jerusalem. They would have been Jews and priests, and if it was not that group of priests, when Herod builds the great temple of Herod, there were other priests who objected to that temple and also fled. When they bring gold— and here is some frankincense, the white material, and here’s myrrh—these gifts would have been perfectly suitable to be given by priests to their new High Priest. Look here, what is important about gold?

00:49:37 According to the instructions for building the temple, certain things had to be made of pure gold. Gold does not tarnish. Gold was thought by the ancient people to have been a metal that had absorbed the sun and had kept all of that brilliance of the golden light of the sun, somehow. They do not know what makes gold the color it is, but it obviously looks a lot like the sun, and so it had special importance for bringing the sun and divine powers into the temple. Things like the table for the bread of the presence , the shewbread, the lampstands, and the drinking vessels all had to be of pure gold, so an appropriate gift would be to bring gold. I wonder, I mean we just have little flecks of gold here, did they bring gold objects? Did they bring a gold candelabra? That would make a better wedding present, right? Well, it would make a better gift if it were actually a useable implement.

00:50:58 The frankincense, what was frankincense used for? It is used in the temple together with all of the sacrifices, the burnt offerings had to have this frankincense put into it and it would burn and gave off a beautiful smell. I do not know if you like the smell of incense when it burns, but in the ancient temples it at least covered up the smell of the blood and the sacrifices, and it was required under the law in Leviticus 24. All sacrifices had to have incense with them. The



commentator said that the purpose of the incense was to carry the prayers of the people up to heaven, so that it is the substance of the prayers that ascends.

00:51:50 Myrrh! Some of you have heard that myrrh was used in preparing bodies for burial, but the reason they did that was temple-related, and it has to do with a special anointing oil, the recipe for which is given in Exodus 30 and myrrh is the critical ingredient in making this anointing oil. This is the oil that then was used to anoint the High Priest. It was the oil that was used to anoint the kings, and it imparted a special kind of holiness. According to Jewish tradition, this oil had disappeared from the Holy of Holies and had been hidden away at the time of Josiah when Lehi is there and the temple is being changed and destroyed after Lehi left.

This oil was known as the dew of resurrection. And it was used to anoint the priests after the order of Melchizedek and transformed them into sons of God. A gift worthy of a great High Priest.

00:53:16 Well I love Pope Leo the Great’s statement. “He offers myrrh who believes that God’s only begotten Son united to himself, man’s true nature.” That it was with the anointing of the flesh that it can be resurrected and the true, divine and mortal natures of man are brought together. Well, you can read a few other things there but I take away from that an interesting - at least a lesson for me - that these gifts were really holy conveyances - the last little point there. They, of course, were inherently precious. The incense had to be imported from a southern part Yemen and Oman, a long caravan route to bring it. They would have come right up on Lehi’s trail. It is quite possible that these things had been long treasured, were deeply valued, and had eternal importance. Just a thought, but as you give gifts, wouldn’t it be nice if we could give gifts that had those three qualities to them?

(Student) It is popularly held that these three wise men were Zoroastrians, but I think that your explanation gives it so much more depth, more spiritual than a bunch of Zoroastrians.

00:55:02 And as I have thought about this, and this does not come from Margaret Barker, this just comes from me, it seemed to me that it helps the story to make sense when both James and Matthew tell us that when Herod learns that the three wise men have come to him and said, “We have seen his star, and we would like to know more about where we might find him here in your kingdom,” and Herod has called his consultants in and they said “Bethlehem,” and he said, “Oh, when you find him come and tell me.” The wise men are warned, of course, not to go back, but if they were already priests who are suspicious of Herod, they would have plenty of reasons not to go back and to know that they needed to get out of harm’s way themselves.

00:56:25 (Student) So what is your feeling about the Infancy Gospel of James?

Oh, I like it. I like lots of it. I like the temple connections here. I do not know whether it is the real thing. I am arguing for all three of these traditions to be embraced.

(Student) We get a different picture of Mary that if you do not know about it you just think she is maybe a peasant girl, but this makes for a very spiritual - very….

This was Jeanie’s reaction.

(Student) When she responds to the angel Gabriel…the first thing is, how is this possible? And the angel says to her, “All things with God are possible,” and then she cheerfully responds, then “Be it unto the handmaid of the Lord.” So this is a girl who is like Samuel who has grown up in



the temple…has this submissive nature. Okay, anything God wants me to do I am ready to do. I will do whatever he asks.

(Student) This makes you feel good…Heavenly Father almost prepared her for to be the mother of …

(Student) It makes so much more sense than somehow just happening upon some child, a really young girl, but this one has been prepared. That makes sense too, the Lord would really not leave it so much to chance.

00:58:04 And it would have been quite a shock to her.

(Student) The stories in here are quite commonly in the history of the Catholic Church?

Yes. Now Maryology has advanced far beyond what we have here.

(Student) What I mean is the story of Joseph being a widower and having children etc.

Well, and if you are an art historian, you know that these are the dominant images that you see, with the ox and the ass.

(Student) My question is how early was this book found in our day?

00:58:46 Well, there were later versions of it that, of course, had circulated, but the manuscript which we saw when we were in Geneva at the Bodmer Museum, like I said, dates to the middle of the 3rd Century.

(Student) No, I am thinking of extant and translated in our time. Have people known about this before?

Yes, yes. This has not been — I mean parts of it, but the new manuscript has an earlier version which is not so elaborate as the older one. I have not made a study of all of the manuscripts of this and how it may have changed over time.

(Student) So essentially the Catholic Church probably got most of their stories from here.

00:59:31 I am sure they did, and these stories, I think probably circulated in lots of different forms. Now this is not canonical, of course, but you remember what Joseph Smith said about the apocrypha? When he was translating the Bible he asked, “Well should I translate the apocryphal books, which were the Old Testament apocrypha, but the same thing applies to the New Testament apocrypha. Those are books that were lost or for some reason were not included in the Bible as we know it. What was Joseph told? This is the 90th Section of the Doctrine and Covenants. What did the Lord say?

(Student) Some things there are true and some things are not true.

“So it is not necessary for you to translate them because you have more important things to do right now, but those who read with the spirit of the Holy Ghost will be benefitted,” which I think is exactly the right thing to say.

(Student) Could this have some illustration for why the Catholics believe that the immaculate conception was actually Mary, not Jesus?

Yes. 01:00:48 Well, it is both. The immaculate conception refers to Mary, the Virgin Birth refers to Jesus. We do not know how, according to this story, how Anna become pregnant? It does not really say. Joachim is told, “She is pregnant,” but the text does not say that they have not been



sleeping together for the last few months. It is just here they are, she is an older woman who has been barren. She is like Sarah, and it is a miraculous way that it happened. The Catholics, like you say, have expanded that.

(Student) Do you have a longer version of this?

01:01:48 I do. Not on the internet, but I can get you a Xerox copy. I can have it all typed out and send you if you would like. I mean, do not go tell anybody.

A lot of people will just say, “Oh, this is just fictional,” but again, I asked Charlesworth, “What are people thinking about the Infancy Gospel of James these days?” And he said, “It is being held in higher and higher esteem,” and that is when he said that the stock is going down on Thomas but up on James. The market may go the other way when Obama gets in but who knows. If you read it cautiously as part of this big picture, I think it is very interesting. I was thinking of the myrrh…

Oh, the myrrh…

(Student) It seems to me that we talked about this; the dew is a symbol of the appearance of the Holy Ghost. It is such a new idea to me, especially when you read 121…

The connection that the dews, when you have the right approach to the powers of the priesthood, will distend upon you as from the dews of heaven.

(Student) At the exoneration of the High Priest— I have had that question all my life because I know that if they had known, she would have been stoned. I mean there was just no Christian, so apparently he exonerated them, and it was done. End of story and no matter what they are …

I have a hard time believing that a Christian in the 4th or 5th, or 3rd or 2nd Century whatever, would write this story. This is so Jewish. This is the way that question would be posed.

(Student) And somehow she was, and just went on with her life.

So this gives an answer to that one, doesn’t it?

(Student) I was just curious. What group of people did Professor Charlesworth talk to when he came here and was there any publicity on it at all?

01:04:49 It was, I think by invitation only. It was not a public lecture is what I am saying, but it was the first Annual Truman G. Madsen Lecture sponsored by the new Wheatley Institution at B.Y.U., and Professor Charlesworth has been a good friend of Truman Madsen’s for many years and was invited to give this inaugural lecture. He came as a theologian from Princeton. He is a Methodist, a very faithful man, and he chose to speak about the divine nature of man and if you have read Truman Madsen’s books, you can see how fitting that topic would be, but coming from a biblical scholar, to emphasize the divine nature of man is a step for him in our direction to do that. He was very gracious about that.

(Student) This text adds a lot of credence to why Mary would go rushing down to Elizabeth.

Yes, and who is Elizabeth?

(Student) The wife of Zacharias.

Right. We will come to that in just a minute. Because Zacharias is a big player in this story.



(Student) Her genealogy would have been royalty, had the Romans not been there, wasn’t she? That is what I had always heard, that Joseph was in the line of David and she was also.

Yes. That’s correct. Now Luke gives that genealogy

(Student) Did she have children of her own then?

Afterwards?

(Student) Or were these all Joseph’s children….?

Well, we do not know the answer to that question.

(Student) But for those of you who are interested we have these sets at the B.Y.U. Bookstore, gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Oh, Yes. Where they came from?

01:07:03 On the Zacharias point, notice that the story ends with Herod, of course, now beginning to look for boy babies who had been born fairly recently, and John the Baptist is only 6 months old. He is Zacharias’ son. This is an extraordinary child as well, and so it is interesting that the story ends by Mary hiding Jesus in an ox manger, and so when Herod’s soldiers apparently come through, that is why she lays him in a manger. It is to hide him, and Herod then cannot find Jesus, and says, “Well maybe it is John that I am looking for,” and so he goes and asks Zacharias in the temple, “Where is your son?” And Zacharias says, “I do not know” because Elizabeth had already been warned and she had taken John out into the hills, and Zacharias did not know where he was. So Zacharias, according to this account, is then killed.

01:08:35 And you remember in the Gospel of Matthew it will say that Zacharias was slain in the temple and we do not know any more of the details of that but if this gives a motive for his killing, that is another very interesting historical possibility here. Interestingly, it says that when he was killed, the panels of the temple, so the walls, the fabric and the wood that coated the walls of the temple wailed and split in two, so like the veil of the temple being rent at the death of Jesus and his blood turned to stone.

(Student) This does not say anything about them going to Egypt and…

No. No it stops right at the death of Zacharias. What happens after that? We do not have anymore.

(Student) But would that have been before?

Well, this could have all happened within days of the birth of Jesus…

(Student) So when they came back, the wise men find the child in a house.

01:10:08 Well, they go to Egypt and the angel finally says, “Okay, it is safe to come back, Herod is now dead,” and that could have been a year or two or three or four. We do not know how long, but then the coast is clear and they now go back to Nazareth which is far enough away and remote enough— it is a very obscure village that Jesus will not be sought after, and will not be threatened by people. He has to keep a low profile, and I suppose the shepherds were told as soon as they knew what had happened. You wonder why the shepherds are not out there telling everybody. As soon as it becomes clear what is going on, the shepherds probably do not want to be implicated in any of this. You saw what happened to Zacharias so we do not hear any more from the shepherds.



(Student) Herod killed all these little kids up to two years old. Is that in any historical record?

01:11:27 No we know a lot of awful things that Herod did. He killed many of his own sons and he had a lot of them. He had a whole bunch of wives and a lot of sons. There was a saying that went around in Jerusalem, “Better to be a pig than a son of Herod.” And Herod got mad at a bunch of Pharisees once and ordered the execution of a bunch of them. In fact, on his deathbed, and he died a terrible death, he had all kinds of diseases from— you name it, he had it—he just rotted inside out, and when he died, one of the last things he ordered was that several hundred Pharisees be put to death and his Captain of the Guard refused to carry that out. Herod was known for having this kind of very brutal temperament. He would do that kind of thing. So it is not out of the historical reality that he might have actually done this.

01:12:52 Now Bethlehem is a very, very small town too. How many people were there in Bethlehem? We figure about 200 families. How many of them would have had women who were bearing children within that two-year period? We are talking about maybe 20 or 30 and half of them are going to be girls, so maybe 10 or 15 baby boys. So this is a small event, small enough that it could well have happened and Josephus never have heard about it. Again, CNN was not there, so you know, it is just when we exaggerate it and think he is out there killing thousands of babies that historically that could not happen without that being somehow remembered.

(Student) Do you have any knowledge of when the Romans had taxes or censuses….

01:13:56 We do, we do, and Luke is translated incorrectly here when it says that there went forth a decree from Caesar August that the whole world should be taxed. There was never such a tax. And when they go... but it is the whole land. Maybe the region, maybe it is the province of Syria, because Syria is mentioned, and they had these from time to time. Now, we know when the taxes were held, but in order for the taxes to be collected, the first thing that had to be done was, you had to have a census. You had to go and count how many people there were in every city, or village, and then they would calculate the tax liability. Usually it was what we would call a poll tax, a head tax, and so it’s based on how many of different kinds of people you have, how many male adults, how many children, how many women, and sometimes they also included other things like cattle and so on.

01:15:05 There was no property tax, but there were several different kinds of tax. They would do this census. It was an enrolling, and then the tax liability would be sent to the town elders, and then it was the responsibility of the town elders to collect the taxes. It was like your ward budget assessment or something. “Okay, here is what you have to pay, and just as happens in our world, you would go out and try to collect as much as you can from the poor people, but there would always be a shortfall, and so the wealthy people would step forward and cover the tax for the city. This is a part of the beneficium/officium. When they paid the tax, people are now obligated to them within this close patronage system to render services or to help in other sorts of ways. It was a bonding of the people together.

01:16:14 So when Joseph goes, what the Greek says there, they do not go to be taxed, but they go to be counted. So they are just being inscribed. Now that means when they leave Bethlehem, I do not know if they left their taxes with them, with the family, but the Bethlehem tax was a little higher because they had been there to be counted, and somebody would have to have paid for them. But that is why it is very difficult. It cannot be pinpointed, because these countings could take place years in advance of the actual assessment.



01:16:55 We have not turned to 3rd Nephi, but I do want to just explain the handout and then we will wrap up tonight. In your questions, I hope you all read Chapters 17 and 18, and we may pick up with some of this when we get back together in January but I do not want to leave Christmas without at least pointing out some Christmas connections with what we have here.

01:17:28 We were supposed to pick up with Question 5 from last week where after the healing of the sick, we have a passage where Jesus prays for the parents. You remember he stands in the middle. He puts all the children in a circle around him. It would have been a large circle and then the parents stand in a circle around the children and then Jesus prays for the parents. We do not know what he prayed. When we talk about 3rd Nephi 17, we always talk about Jesus blessing the children, but he begins by blessing their parents and expressing, I am sure, great joy and gratitude for parents, for what they were doing to raise their children. I think that is a wonderful thing for us to have in the scriptures.

01:18:32 In the New Testament we have Jesus saying, “Bring the little children to me.” We never have him recognizing and blessing the work of parents, and if families are eternal units, why would he not have done that? I hope at Christmas time all of the parents and grandparents will feel the love of the Lord and the joy that comes to the Lord because of the things that we do for our children and grandchildren. As Jesus finished his prayer, he said, “and now my joy is full.” And why? He was looking at these families. He was looking at the parents. He was looking at the children.

01:19:14 And then point 6, he blesses the children, each one, one by one. In all of our homes at Christmas time we give gifts to each child, gifts that we try to tailor for their needs and interests, to let them know that they are valued one by one. They open their presents one by one. They receive these blessings individually, but what they need to also remember is that this is the way the Lord deals with them, that the Lord blesses each of his children one by one. I love the place where after Jesus has blessed them all one by one, touched them, again. They had come at the beginning and touched him, and now he reciprocates by touching each one of them. Then he looks at the parents, he looks at the children, and he says to the parents, “Behold your little ones.”

01:20:24 Now I like to think that the scriptures are not just casual or trivial, that when he is saying to the parents, “Look at your children,” they are now somehow related to the children - the parents and the children are now belonging to each other in a way that they had not before, or that maybe in his prayers and blessings he had taught them that they could become an eternal family. I do not know that, and certainly sealings did not happen at that very time, but if he has simply promised them that they will be yours and will be yours forever, what a great blessing of joy that would have been, and that all happens, the end of Chapter 17 says, in the presence of God—Jesus himself—angels who had come down, and witnesses as the people were all asked to be witnesses of what had happened. Now that does not sound to me like just an ordinary event.

01:21:45 When we baptize, when we perform ordinances in the temple, they are done in the presence of God, angels and witnesses so I think something very sublime was happening there. Jesus then, of course, in Chapter 18 calls all the people together and says, alright, we have gone this far, and we need to now enter into a covenant. I cannot just leave you at this point. You know too much. You have to enter into a covenant. I have given you too much, you now have to give back to me. You have to give me your commitment that you will keep the commandments



which I have given you today in all of what we have been studying for the last couple of months in the Sermon at the Temple. And so he does.

01:22:34 He begins by asking the disciples to go and get bread and wine. I find this very curious. Why doesn’t he ask the mothers, the wives. Why doesn’t he say to the Relief Society, go get some bread and wine, you guys know where it is. He says to the priesthood, “Go and get some bread and wine,” and they probably went and asked their wives, “Have we got any? I hope we do.” But you know you may wonder, why is it the responsibility of the priesthood to bring the bread for sacrament meeting every Sunday? I believe it’s because we are following the pattern that is set here in 3rd Nephi 18, although I have never heard anyone state it in so many words. They bring the bread, and the chart that I’ve given you with the Moroni 4 and 5 and 3rd Nephi 18 is a very interesting comparison.

01:23:39 We all know our sacrament prayers, “Oh God, the Eternal Father, we ask thee in the name of thy Son, Jesus Christ, to bless and sanctify this bread,” and so on. Now the sacrament prayers are in the third person. It is in first person plural, “We ask thee, in the name of thy Son to bless and sanctify to the souls of all those who…” but when you look at the words that are in 3rd Nephi 18, you can see all of these phrases. Jesus says to ask the Father in my name. That phrase will come into the prayers. He took bread and brake and blessed it unto all those who shall believe, he says, “Ye shall eat in remembrance of the body of thy Son.” well that is the way it shows up in the prayer. He said, “this ye will do in remembrance of my body.” You see he is not going to speak –he is not going to say, and bless it “that they may eat in remembrance of the body of thy Son” while he is right there, so he says, “my body.” You see what is happening here? There is somebody, and I think it was Nephi, who took these words of Jesus and formalized them into a prayer that we use for the bread and the water, but these are the words of Jesus simply being put into a context where we can now use them. Notice that when it says, in 3rd Nephi, that we will eat in remembrance of the body, Jesus says I want you to remember the body which I have shown unto you. Now that’s different than the New Testament, the body which is broken for you.

01:25:47 In the New Testament we have the Last Supper, the sacrament of the death of Jesus. What we have in 3rd Nephi is the memorial sacrament of the resurrection of Jesus, that what we partake of when we touch the bread, we have a physical reminder of the physical body that these people had felt. So we have both. It is not one or the other, but I think all of our sacrament hymns are all about dying, Gethsemane and so on. We need some good musicians, Staci, to write us some hymns for the sacrament, for the celebration of the sacrament of the resurrection here in 3rd Nephi.

(Student) When we sing only the first verses of the hymns, we leave Christ on the cross. We do not sing the resurrection verses.

01:27:08 We need to think both but I think that this is a very interesting thing restored for us here in the Book of Mormon. Well I leave it to you to simply appreciate the words of these prayers and I want to conclude with the last… there are some things in here about teaching the multitude to pray in their families and the church, instructions to the disciples to be sure that people do not partake of the sacrament unworthily, and finally the last thing that Jesus does on this first day, before he ascends, he brings the Twelve together around him and a cloud comes over them somewhat like the cloud at the transfiguration account in Matthew and the people cannot see what is going on and they cannot hear what’s going on but Nephi tells us there in 3rd



Nephi 18, that he gives the disciples then the power to give the gift of the Holy Ghost. He touches each one of them, and he had given them the Aaronic priesthood, if you will, the power to baptize, back in 3rd Nephi 11; he now gives them the power of the Melchizedek priesthood to give the gift of the Holy Ghost and it is here in this text that I believe Joseph Smith learned that even though he had been given the Aaronic priesthood and had the visitation from John the Baptist, as they translated that text in 3rd Nephi 11, they realized “Hey, we do not have that priesthood, we had better go ask for it. I believe when they translated this text just a couple of days later, they would have said to themselves the same thing. “We do not have that power, we should seek for that.” We do not know exactly when that prayer was answered, but it was answered before long and Peter, James and John come and give the restoration of the Melchizedek priesthood.

01:29:36 This is all right here in the Book of Mormon. The orders of the priesthood do not develop in Kirtland as some people have argued. Right here. The idea of a temple does not emerge in Nauvoo. It’s basically all right here. The order of the Church, how we worship Jesus, the sacrament, and the prayers are all right here, springing full-blown, fully developed, fully perfected with the earliest translation and the earliest inspiration that Joseph Smith gave us. I think it is marvelous.

There are many miracles that we celebrate at the time of Christmas, the miracle of the Book of Mormon which helps us to know that Jesus is the Christ. This is a testament of Jesus Christ and we can see in so many ways how it functions that way.

01:30:47 I am very grateful for the Book of Mormon - for my knowledge of the gospel, for my testimony that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, who came to this world as prophet, priest and king to fulfill all that the Lord had prophesied and promised to all of his children here on this earth. What a blessing it is to know that. What wonderful light and life this brings into our world, brothers and sisters. I hope that that light will bless your lives through this Christmas season, that you will love and enjoy this time of the year more than ever before. I pray for that blessing upon you, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen. Transcribed by Carol H. JonesEdited by Rita L. Spencer


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