Come Follow Me: The Nativity

 Ok, it feels... weird to be studying the Nativity in January. I'm all set to be working towards Easter, and here's Christmas again.

But we had this thought in our conversation about Zacharias and John the Baptist (our family's discussion sort of glossed over Elizabeth; not where the kids' attention was, this time around), and I'm still kind of mulling it over:

John the Baptist and Baby Jesus are just about the only baby stories we have in the scriptures. We don't know about Isaiah or Daniel or Nephi or Samuel the Lamanite as infants. Even modern prophets, even Joseph Smith where stories from his childhood are pretty common, they're not baby stories. Hannah's son Samuel, that story talks about the desire for a child, but then pretty quick it's right on to Samuel as a precocious child-prophet in the temple.

My kids love baby stories. They ask for their own all the time. 

So why are these stories in the Bible when nowhere else in scripture do we see the first moments of a prophet's life?

Using a Concordance: What is an Oracle?

 

I love the notes on the Hebrew and Greek roots of words you sometimes see in the footnotes of the LDS edition of the Bible. Where those have been included, they almost always add clarity to the meaning of a difficult passage, and I often wished there was more of them.

Then I discovered Strong's Concordance.

What they've done with Strong's Concordance is made an index. Of every single word in the entire Bible. And then cross-referenced each and every word with the Greek or Hebrew word it was translated from. So any word that puzzles you, you can trace back into Hebrew for the Old Testament, or Greek for the New Testament, look at its definition and entomology, and see what else it was translated as, and where else it was used.

My oldest and I are reading through a chronological edition of the King James (another magical invention - I'm absolutely loving having it arranged chronologically, rather than the traditional order) and recently we were reading the 28th Psalm:

A Testimony of the Bible

Recently, there were some missionaries standing around with an investigator after church, teaching him a discussion. They were talking about the Bible. And, to my dismay, I realized that they were telling the gentleman that it's not as valuable, not as good as, not as important as, not as inspired as the Book of Mormon. I could feel the resistance rising in the man, as they told him that this amazing book of holy writ that he cherishes is... not that important.

I really can't blame the missionaries; they were teaching the same thing that I've heard in numerous Sunday School classes, sacrament meeting talks, and other conversations in the Church over the years: We believe the Bible to be the word of God -- but only as far as it's translated correctly... and it's not very correct: The Book of Mormon is the word of God. It's not an uncommon attitude to encounter in the various classes. Our missionaries are young; they teach investigators the things that we teach our children and our youth. There's a big problem with that in this instance:

This idea that the Bible is "less than" other modern(better) scripture is false doctrine.

Say it again: "We believe the Bible to be the word of God."