jfro18 wrote:In the context of the vision it wouldn't help since John was not from Abraham's time.
And the thing for me is that Joseph retrofitted the priesthood revelation in 1835 to claim seeing John there, so in 1836 with this vision he would know that was John and would have no reason to use the name Elias instead.
It would be like if I met say Abraham Lincoln and then a year later I met "President." Would I say I was visited by "President" or would I be like "and then Abraham f'n Lincoln dropped by to hand me some anachronistic sealing keys."
The church wants it to be a heads I win, tails you lose approach, but it doesn't really work either way unless I'm missing something.
You're not missing something. Joseph tripped up here. Joseph has just as much reason to call John the Baptist Elias as I have to call my wife Moses.
Both Elias and Elijah also are reported to have appeared as two separate beings in the Kirtland temple (D&C 110:12, 13):
12 After this, Elias appeared, and committed the dispensation of the gospel of Abraham, saying that in us and our seed all generations after us should be blessed.
13 After this vision had closed, another great and glorious vision burst upon us; for Elijah the prophet, who was taken to heaven without tasting death, stood before us, and said:
14 Behold, the time has fully come, which was spoken of by the mouth of Malachi--...[emphasis added]
However, Elias and Elijah are the same person. Elijah is the Hebrew name of Elias (Greek). But Joseph thought they were two different people and thus referred to them as such. http://www.mormonthink.com/glossary/kir ... cation.htm
It's just the Joseph Smith rendition of Jekyll and Hyde.
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." Isaac Asimov
jfro18 wrote:In the context of the vision it wouldn't help since John was not from Abraham's time.
And the thing for me is that Joseph retrofitted the priesthood revelation in 1835 to claim seeing John there, so in 1836 with this vision he would know that was John and would have no reason to use the name Elias instead.
It would be like if I met say Abraham Lincoln and then a year later I met "President." Would I say I was visited by "President" or would I be like "and then Abraham f'n Lincoln dropped by to hand me some anachronistic sealing keys."
The church wants it to be a heads I win, tails you lose approach, but it doesn't really work either way unless I'm missing something.
You're not missing something. Joseph tripped up here. Joseph has just as much reason to call John the Baptist Elias as I have to call my wife Moses.
As long as it's not leading up to or during sex, if you want to call your wife Moses, go right ahead.
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." Isaac Asimov
fetchface wrote:You're not missing something. Joseph tripped up here. Joseph has just as much reason to call John the Baptist Elias as I have to call my wife Moses.
As long as it's not leading up to or during sex, if you want to call your wife Moses, go right ahead.
If you're really crafty you could even incorporate it in there with some sweet innuendos.
I'm not going to type them here because I have too much class, but you can imagine the possibilities.
But it's even worse than me calling my wife Moses. It is like me telling a story about my wife to a coworker and referring to her as Moses and expecting my coworker to know who I'm talking about. Oh, and the story I'm telling about my wife also contains references to Moises (the Portuguese form of the name Moses) which refers to the actual Old Testament Moses. And I don't explain any of this to my coworker, I just expect him to understand who I'm talking about at each turn.
The explanation is too bizarre to even entertain. Apologists who offer this explanation are insulting our intelligence and denying the plain meaning of words. If names can mean anything like this, how do we know that Alma and Amulek are different people? They could just be the same person playing different roles. See, we know nothing now. We just destroyed language itself to save Joseph.
You see this quite a bit in apologetics now. Maybe 'translation' means something else. Joseph's lies were carefully worded denials. What do words even mean in the new Mormon church? This is not the church I grew up in. Jesus, they've ceded a lot in the last 20 years.
This post is not meant to be exhaustive all the arguments and responses to this issue. However, it should be clear to the reader that (1) Joseph Smith knew that Old Testament Elijah and New Testament Elias were the same person; (2) contemporaries of Joseph Smith used New Testament Elias to denote a forerunner in the same way that the prophet did and, in light of these facts (3) the claim that this is a “blunder” on Joseph Smith’s behalf is without warrant.
#2 is pretty funny since Joseph Smith did a lot of things that his contemporaries were doing when creating his theology, yet they choose to ignore that for all of those options (multiple tiers of heaven, Melchizedek priesthood, Adam Clarke's works in the JST, non-infant baptism, etc, etc).
But it's worth reading - I need to go over it more later as I read it a while back and it jumps around a bit when making the arguments.
Okay, so that's a little more well thought-out than I initially thought. So now we are saying that Joseph went around throwing the name Elias on all sorts of prophets for...what purpose again?
I guess to show that they are acting in some forerunner role? God, Mormonism is so weird. Why do we need to give people names that show how they act (and that obscure their real names). Can't we just surmise how they act by their actions?
It's almost like Joseph spent too much time reading Pilgrim's Progress or something...
jfro18 wrote:If that storyline had existed in the 1830s you know Joseph would've incorporated it somewhere.
Think how much more enjoyable and widely known Book of Mormon stories would have been if Joseph Smith had a copy of Rod Serling's book The Twilight Zone.
Runtu had a very good thread about this topic on this board a few years ago. But the search feature on this board is not that good so I don't have a link to that thread now.
Brackite wrote:Runtu had a very good thread about this topic on this board a few years ago. But the search feature on this board is not that good so I don't have a link to that thread now.
What I find interesting isn’t so much that Joseph made an obvious error, but how he (and later apologists) dealt with the problem. Once the Doctrine and Covenants was published, it was more or less set in stone, and unlike the never-published Book of Commandments, not available for serious revision. So the error stood.
Joseph at some point must have realized the mistake, and his solution came in the form of his “translation” of the Bible. For example, we read in JST Matt. 17:10-14:
We're told the Joseph did most of the JST by like 1833 but we also know he made changes to it up until he died. I would love to know when Joseph Smith put the part in Matthew that tries to ID Elias... if it was changed at a later date that would be a very solid admission that he knew he screwed up in the Kirtland temple.
