**Revelation 22:16
“I, Jesus, have sent My angel to testify to you these things in the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, the Bright and Morning Star.” **
If the verse in Isaiah refers to the Devil as the Morning Star, why does this verse in Revelation refer to Jesus as the morning star? I always kind of wondered about this, and not just from an LDS perspective, but in Christianity as a whole that points to the chapter in Isaiah as the rebellion of Satan.
But it’s not “blank space”; it sounds like a blatant contradiction between what is stated in one of their holy sources (Bible) and their other holy sources. It’s not left unanswered; one answer contradicts the other.
Of course, you don’t need multiple sources to find contradictions. The Bible contradicts itself just fine without help from other documents.
I remember reading a Greco-Roman mythology story that featured a stable boy who cared for Apollo’s horses. His name was Lucifer and he carried a torch to guide the horses out into the dawn sky.
It seems that the name Lucifer has nothing to do with the Semitic Shaitan. His name seems to be more linked to the Egyptian Set, (which predates him and shares some other traits) or the Greek Saturn.
In the New Testament, Jesus refers to the devil as Beelzebub. I honestly don’t know what that means, but it sounds like Baal or Bel, which I have heard/read as an agricultural deity of the Caananites/Philistines, Carthaginians/Phonecians, et al.
According to the Church formerly known as Mormon circa 1980, their other scriptures are more reliable than the bible since they were translated from the golden plates and a set of papyri purchased from (depending on the source)either a mummy side-show or an undisclosed antiquities dealer by Joseph Smith, a Prophet under God’s guidance and not by common scholars and linguists of the early christian era.
There is NO “church formerly known as Mormon.” The LDS Church was, in 1980 and even before, called, as it is now, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." The Church leadership’s requesting the media to refer to it in that manner isn’t even new.
Perhaps you’re confusing the RLDS (that’s the abbreviation used for "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Reorganized)) with the LDS. The RLDS recently changed their name to “Community of Christ” but still maintained the full name, which is abbreviated as RLDS, as their legal name.
The Mormon church doesn’t pretend that their scriptures are the most comprehensive writings ever to be produced. Indeed, it is often stressed that only through faith and diligence, the true meanings of the scriptures would be revealed. That is why they depend so much on the Prophets, who have a closer tie to God than most… through him (and through other faithful and diligent members of the church), interpretations and lessons can be provided.
That’s probably why I never picked up anything more than just an interesting story when I read the BoM (the book of Alma is pretty cool… battles galore)… I never had much faith.
Try this… go read just about any passage in any major religious book, and tell me how many possible meanings can be derived from it.
I’d say that that’s good sense, regardless of one’s religious beliefs or lack thereof.
The problem with “Lucifer” on the plates, of course, is the question of how Moroni, who is said to have lived in the Western Hemisphere, came to identify that name with the Evil One by 421 A.D. As I understand it, the LDS beliefs about the provenance of their faith trace back to the separate development of that faith from Eastern Hemisphere Judaism and Christianity between about 600 B.C, when they claim Lehi led his followers out of Jerusalem and ultimately across the sea to the West, to the final battle at Hill Cumorah in the year 421.
Whatever Lehi and his followers may have run into on such a trip, they weren’t likely to run into speakers of Latin. And the Hebrew Scriptures wouldn’t have been translated into Latin until sometime after Christ; after all, Greek was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire, and the language of the Septuagint. And until those Scriptures were translated into Latin, the word ‘lucifer’ would presumably not have existed in a Scriptural setting.
And that’s just for the word ‘lucifer’. Its association with the Devil - any of our scholars know when that first got started? (Brother Maynard, consult the Book of Armaments! )
What jab1 is of course suggesting is that the appearance of “Lucifer” as the name for the Devil in the LDS scriptures that supposedly date from A.D. 421, has to be much more modern in its origins. It sounds like a pretty strong argument to me.
Hebrew was written right to left, and English is written left to right. So in transliterating from Hebrew to English, one reverses the order of the characters, to keep them consistent with the order of pronunciation.
So a Hebrew word pronounced ‘hay-lale’ would be transliterated HYLL, rather than LLYH.
Neither Moroni nor Mormon (the compilers of the plates) identified “Lucifer” with “the Evil One.” The word shows up only once, in a quote from Isaiah 14:12. There is no commentary in the Book of Mormon about it. Hence the only thing that we can conclude (assuming that the Book of Mormon is what it purports to be) is that Joseph Smith translated the phrase on the plates to the same English word as appears in the KJV Old Testament.
According to this, it took St. Jerome 15 years to translate both the Old and the New Testaments into Latin, finishing in the year 406 A.D. He translated the O.T. from the Hebrew, not the Septuagint. He translated the N.T. from the Greek.
Except that the KJV is NOT referring to Satan, it is referring to a king of Babylon. If Smith thought “Lucifer” is one of the Devil’s names (or his ONLY name), he was mistaken. And if he’s mistaken, then how could his translation be divinely inspired? Does God make mistakes?
Read Isaiah, Chapter 14 all the way through if you don’t believe me.
As for the plates, did anyone but Smith see them? What happened to them? And what about the device he supposedly used to read the plates?
As one interpretation has it. Some eminent Christian theologians, including Tertullian, interpret the Isaiah passage as a reference to Satan. Whether this is right or wrong is a matter of opinion, but there is a Christian tradition interpreting this passage consistent with the Book of Mormon. There are also Christian traditions for interpreting other Old Testament passages in ways completely foreign to the traditional Hebraic understanding. Mainstream Christians don’t have a problem departing from the “natural” interpretations when it suits them, and then calling the results “divinely inspired”. So I don’t see why the Mormons ought to be singled out.
Only according to some. “Lucifer” appears in other Christian contexts as a synonym for Satan the devil, although current Christian scholarship shies away from it. It’s a matter of opinion, not fact, whether this is correct, and it must be evaluated in the context of early 19th century American nomenclature, not modern nomenclature. Was it acceptable in Smith’s time and place to call the devil “Lucifer”? I believe it was.
“Divinely inspired” is not a synonym for infallibility.
Irrelevant. Why would God’s infallibility propagate to those who have claimed to be his agents? The Bible contains error and inconsistency. So does the Book of Mormon. All these documents were written by people who claimed to be God’s agents. Today people who claim to be God’s agents interpret these documents and extend their meanings.
It is generally acknowledged among reasonable people that Smith rendered the text of the Book of Mormon in the vernacular of his time and place. If Smith wrote it himself, then this would be expected. If he translated it from some other language, as Mormonism claims, then the paraphrasing inherent to translation would allow this as well. The first English version of the Book of Mormon is definitely at home in 19th century English diction.
Yes, and if you had actually seen a Book of Mormon this question would have been answered. The introductory material contains the testimonials of those who claimed to have also seen the plates.
Unclear. It is generally believed that the angel who led Smith to them took them up with him after Smith was done with them.
They why on Earth should anyone care if something is divinely inspired? I thought the only value of writings being divinely inspired was that they were Truth. What good are they if they are infallible?
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