Boylan the Debater

[MsJack]

Thank you. Since you posted this I've been able to do some research (with your help) which further brought to light for me how the concept of the LDS priesthood is a theological and historical liability.

Happy to have helped.

This last point does seem like the obvious real reason for Mormon priesthood and the rest of the vague yet elaborate Mormon concept of "keys". But MsJack's first point hadn't struck me before, and it seems pretty compelling once she has stated it. There is indeed no way that anything like Mormon priesthood would have been removed from early Christianity by corrupt apostates, when all they would have had to do was usurp it. We know that early church leaders were trying to impose their authority over wannabe rivals. Denunciations of heretics have survived, and traditions about how teachings and offices could be traced back to apostles. If anything like Mormon priesthood had ever existed in early times, history would still echo with all the claims and counterclaims about who had the real priesthood keys, and who didn't. I don't believe that any such language has survived from the early church. That really shows pretty clearly that any specifically Mormon concepts of priesthood were not restored but invented.

An interesting modern development relating to this is the idea of priesthood keys. In the church until recently, the idea was that every leader had their own key to accomplish the duties of their station.

Now, the correlation committee has declared that the actual keys reside only in one person: the president of the church, who is currently Russel M Nelson. And the power from those keys flows out from him to the underlings.

It's all about concentration of wealth and power.

Another point along these lines: if priesthood were deleted, we'd expect to see tampering with the few proof texts that Mormons cite as retaining vestiges of their version of priesthood, such as Heb 5:4 and Matt 16:18-19. But unless I'm reading my witness lines wrong, I see no significant variations for either of those verses. No one was trying to delete them from the texts.

We'd also expect to find some manuscripts or CF quotations that had missing lines about priesthood in them, but I haven't heard about anything to this effect.

One final control group here is modern-day Mormon splinter groups. These groups are supposedly "apostate," yet did any of them do away with priesthood like the early Christians supposedly did? To my knowledge, Community of Christ / RLDS, FLDS, AUB, the Strangites, the Snufferites, and Centennial Park all retain systems of priesthood ordination and authority similar to the main LDS church. None of them deleted it despite the modern historical problems with Joseph Smith's claims. They just claimed to be the true holders of it.