Our current scripture study is strongly affected by correlation and scriptures in a language that has shifted.
For example, consider the real meaning of a scripture we often read. The scripture reads:
However, the meaning is tempered by changes is meaning, as explained here:
14:2 Some translations prefer the word mansions (originally used by Tyndale) instead of rooms. The word mansion has taken on a dramatically different meaning in the last century, but it originally referred to a house where travelers stayed while on the road. The idea in Greek is that of a temporary resting place or way station. The Greek word used here means single rooms, probably referring to a room within a larger structure, or places to stop and rest.
From the notes in the Wayment Study Bible New Testament translation published by Deseret Book.
I’m using that note because it comes from a Deseret Book source.
If you studied the scripture in Sunday School you probably did not get that reading.
That is because it appears that the manual just lacked knowledge.
McConkie once commented as to the manuals and similar materials: “We cannot avoid that responsibility. And as long as we have to do it, we have to get competent professional people. We cannot expect it to be done by an eighth-grade Sunday School teacher or someone not trained.”
He said that correlation should not be asked to do something “they were not prepared by training or knowledge to do.”
Boyd K. Packer in his talk on authority said similar things. He was proof texting in a talk he prepared (proof texting = misuse of scripture because of lack of context or other reasons).
When he discovered that, he changed his talk and was grateful for the additional knowledge and stressed that getting knowledgeable and scholarly help was important.
It is too easy to edit the scriptures, skip huge parts of them and to misread the rest.
Why? The language has shifted. Which is a problem for anyone reading the scriptures.
There are lots of shifts similar to my example that lead to modern readings that have nothing to do with what the words meant to King James—not even getting into places where Tyndall just did not have the right meaning for the Aramaic, Greek or Latin he was dealing with.
So, when you read scripture, how do you find scripture that is translated correctly into the language you speak?
What scriptures can you think of that we misunderstand because the words have shifted?
Wheat & Tares 
Not so much about the validity of different translations, but using the scriptural reference to mansions/rooms made think of my time in La Rochelle, France. During this trip I took a bike ride to the Ile de Ré. There are a few small towns on the island. As I was biking along the roads, I noticed a modest home that was absolutely gorgeous. Not a mansion, probably not more than 2 bedrooms, but the location near the ocean and the way its small yard was cultivated made me think, I would be super happy if that were my mansion on high. Just a nice, lovely and comfortable home.
A positive step forward in the church to minimize proof texting and to shed insight into the original manuscripts and their meaning I highly recommend Thomas Wayments translation. It’s definitely easier to use this translation in lessons and talks because he is a faithful member but that isn’t to say you won’t encounter pushback from the KJV only, Mcconkie Mormons but at least you’ll know you’re on the right track while being accused of teaching apostasy:)
We misread pretty much any verse with the word “virtue.” Until the reign of Elizabeth I, virtue exclusively meant “power”, and that power was about good resource management. (See also: Machiavelli’s THE PRINCE, which describes a virtuous renaissance lord. Almost certainly not chaste, but good at resource management.) During Elizabeth’s reign, the additional “chastity” meaning was added—but I don’t think it was the standard meaning the way it is now, even in Joseph Smith’s time.
I’m young enough to have experienced the YW program with “virtue” as one of the values. My YW experience was pretty bad, so I’m not sure if I was supposed to learn both definitions, but I only learned about chastity. Several verses made no sense to me because of this language shift. An example: why would chastity/sexual purity leave Jesus when he healed the woman with an issue of blood?
Thanks for an important post. Doesn’t answer your questions but I just had to give a shout out to John Barton’s ‘The Word: On the translation of the Bible’ (2022). Highly recommended for anyone interested in the approaches to (and pitfalls of) Bible translation.
The Parable of the Talents. This one is personal for me, so I feel the need to tell the story. I was in a phase of not going to church, but I was caregiver to my mother, and made sure that if she wanted to go, I or someone else in the ward would take her. I always asked her how it was, and on the particular day the lesson was on the Parable of the Talents, she was extremely frustrated.
Today, talent is something that gets you on a reality game show because you can sing, dance, do magic, etc. And in the church we typically talk about talents in that fashion. However, the scriptures are very clear in the parable that talents were also something buried in the ground. Not metaphorically buried. Literally buried. This confused my mother, but it never got brought up in the lesson, as the modern usage of talent is not something that can literally be buried, dug up, and then presented back to the master.
With a quick search on the web, I showed her that talents were a form of coin. It was the money of the day, but that we would apply the metaphor of our abilities and gifts and not use them. Quite similar to how the British pound sterling was a weight before it became the actual currency.
Now, for those who check, there is a footnote, which states: “TG Talents; Work, Value of.” If you read through the Topical Guide will give a list of cross references, as well as: BD Weights and measures.” If you click through the Bible Dictionary and read its quite lengthy waffling on how we don’t know how precise the measurements are, you will eventually come (about 2/3 of the way down) to:
Talent. (Hebrew kikkar); equivalent to 3,000 shekels (see Ex. 38:25, 26); about 75.6 pounds, or 34.272 kilograms. (Note: The foregoing are relevant to the Old Testament. The words talent and pound in the New Testament refer not to weights, but to sums of money.)
So we scroll back up to the BD link to Money, which after another lengthy article, gives us: “The talent (Matt. 18:24; 25:15) and the mina (pounds) (Luke 19:13) are not coins but sums of money.”
After putting the pieces together, you will finally realize that the talents given are physical money, but by that time, the lesson has moved on to other parables. Meanwhile, Wikipedia’s entry on the parable provides:
A talent (Ancient Greek τάλαντον, talanton ‘scale’ and ‘balance’) was a unit of weight of approximately 80 pounds (36 kg), and when used as a unit of money, was valued for that weight of silver.[4] As a unit of currency, a talent was worth about 6,000 denarii.[1] A denarius was the usual payment for a day’s labour.[1] At one denarius per day, a single talent was therefore worth 20 years of labor (assuming a 6-day work week, because nobody would work on the weekly Sabbath).
This very quick explanation also gives context to its worth relative to what we could even expect, today, telling us that the single talent given to the third servant was like a life’s savings.
Unfortunately, my mother didn’t know any of this until I explained it to her, and we began a much more complex discussion about the parable, something that would probably have benefited the class. My mother also didn’t feel comfortable asking about this because everyone else seemed to know and understand, and she didn’t want to single herself out. I’m sure there were other people who didn’t know, as well, but these shifts in language can make people uncomfortable asking questions when other people just steamroll ahead.
The footnote for mansions in John 14 is even less helpful. The church needs to do better with footnotes that provide clear, concise, and contextual information rather than making assumptions about language having modern meanings. Better yet, since the language has shifted so much, why does the Church insist on using a translation over 400 years old (when in England the word servant in the parable was often a euphemism for slave)?
“Misreading Scripture” is a book worth listening to/picking up also about this subject (though the focus is on the fundamental differences in thinking between the Western point of view and the Eastern/Middle Eastern point of view). The authors themselves are Christian pastors and scholars raised in North America (probably American) who served and lived in island countries for years. Their experiences overseas taught them that there is a “what everyone knows and doesn’t say” community rule/way of being that bit them in the butt many a time. They connected their experience to how there are “what everyone knows and doesn’t say” components to what Western readers “add” subconsciously (padding the text with meaning that wasn’t originally intended to be there) and how there are “what everyone knows and doesn’t say” components to the Israel/Judea/Roman societies that Jesus Christ was teaching in that are overwritten/omitted in the process of “translation over time” (so some meaning that was originally intended to be there gets converted to the opposite meaning or is dropped entirely).
It is my understanding that Jewish culture, both ancient and modern, use scripture to begin conversation, not bring it to an end. We, Mormon culture, however, almost exclusively approach scripture, not as an exploration, but as God’s owner’s manual, complete with all the “answers” to life. Ben Cremer said, “Christianity should look more like questions seeking answers, not answers that are not able to be questioned.”
I have sat through many a boring Elders quorums and Sunday School lessons where the discussion is clearly more about confirming what has already been decided. Eric Facer wrote in his article about critical thought; “True scholarship, by definition, must “be conducted without bias, and results published, regardless of whether they confirm any particular hypothesis or doctrine,” he said. If you begin with a desired conclusion, you must ignore contradictory evidence. “That is not scholarship; it is propaganda.”
This statement is a stinging indictment against any intellectual or spiritual endeavor that begins with the need to confirm what has already been decided. This problem, in my opinion, not only threatens “True Scholarship”, but also meaningful “Faith”. If my faith is pinned, at every turn, to confirming that “The Church is true”, then it already lacks what I think Moroni is teaching us in Moroni 7.
Moroni seems to suggest that faith carries with it an ethical responsibility, which is, a willingness and humility to continually place my beliefs back into the experiment of mortalities crucible, to be tried and tested, to bring forth fruit meet for repentance. For as Moroni says, “Ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith”.
Faith is not a clinging to what I know, it’s taking the assurance I have and using it to hurl me towards the unknown. It’s exposure to the mystery of what God is and what I am capable of becoming.
We might say faith is where rationality meets intuition. It’s when we have enough evidence to make things, not seen, plausible, and our common sense, moral compass urges us forward into the unknown.
2 books that have served me well are;
The Fifth Way – Dave Brisban, a comprehensive view of Jesus’ message through the lens of the original Aramaic language he spoke.
All Things New – Terryl and Fiona Givens
A deconstruction of religious terms that have come to mean very different things than where they started.
It seems that a massive part of modern Christianity’s issues stem from our use of legalism as the dominant metaphor. We inherited language that was
shaped by the Roman empire commandeering Christianity to exploit power. Since then, ALL our primary principles and doctrines carry legalistic definitions.
Sin, Atonement, Repentance, Forgiveness, Justice, Mercy, Grace, etc. All of them adhere to law-based ideas, black and white thinking, always prescribing
suffering / punishment, as opposed to the original eastern metaphor being “Medicinal”.
What scriptures can you think of that we misunderstand because the words have shifted?
Any KJV scripture that has the word virtue in it. It used to mean something more on the order of the power to do good.
Webster’s Dictionary lists this idea of strength or power as it’s first definition.
VIRTUE, n. vur’tu. L. virtus, from vireo, or its root. See Worth. The radical sense is strength, from straining, stretching, extending. This is the primary sense of L. vir, a man.
1. Strength; that substance or quality of physical bodies, by which they act and produce effects on other bodies.
The closest I can find from an LDS source supporting that is from the Church News:
But the context of these passages gives us to understand that the word can also be taken to mean power — specifically, the power to heal. As we glance at the footnotes, we find that, in each instance, the word virtue is a translation from a Greek term meaning “power.” Indeed, a popular dictionary gives one of several definitions for virtue as “effective power or force; efficacy; esp., the ability to heal or strengthen.
https://www.thechurchnews.com/2006/5/13/23234853/healing-virtue#:~:text=We%20read%20in%20both%20the,8%3A46%2D48).
Scripture is meant to be wrestled with, not wrested from original context and meaning. We as a people, in our scriptural illiteracy, do the latter far more than the former. Amy’s suggestion of the book “Misreading Scripture” as well as Todd’s of the Givenses I fully endorse. Modern scholarship and thought has so much to offer ahurch lessons unless the mend it will never appear in the discussions in cmbers introduce it.
@Todd, there have so many SS and EQ lessons where I felt we could have been using Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings and it would have made no difference to the answers. There have many times I wanted to bang my head against the pew when going through the Old and New Testaments and shoehorning verses that obviously were relevant only to the context in which they written into some sort of 21st century meaning.
And to your second point, legalism is at time off putting. Everything has to be a “LAW.” Law of Chasity, Law of Tithing, Law of Sacrifice., even the Law of Witnesses. It sometimes seems a little ridiculous.
@PWS, Virtue is a great example. Although virtue or virtuous always had some moral undertones, from Roman times to art least the Renaissance, virtue meant manly behaviour, which included sexual activity. The equation of virtue with virginity as taught to the youth would be an incomprehensible idea to earlier cultures.
Here’s one of my favorites:
1 Thessalonians 5:22
Abstain from all appearance of evil.
This is -not- about drinking hot chocolate in a Starbucks cup. In Greek the scripture means “avoid evil every time it crops up;” or, “whenever evil appears, abstain.” The Greek word doesn’t carry the sense of something that looks like one thing but is actually something else (which is a fairly new meaning of “appear,” in English, if memory serves).
It may or may not be prudent to avoid doing things that are in fact okay but may look bad from the outside, but that is NOT what the scripture is advising.
If we think about the implications, the correct translation assumes that Christians will inevitably be in places and among people where evil happens. In those cases, they should be examples. The incorrect reading may, on the other hand, promote a pharisaical hedge around the law mentality and keep Christians from associating with those that, in their view, might implicate them in evil by association. When a stake president told the youth in my old stake that he was ask/telling them not to attend senior prom (it was awful; one of my Laurels was on prom court), he cited this scripture. And the proms of our stake were deprived of some really great kids who’d have made the night better for everyone. Not to mention the bummer for the kids. (Explaining the meaning of the scripture, btw, changed no one’s mind. I tried.)
In thinking about this post, and there is a lot to think about here. I agree with Old Man that scripture is to be wrestled with in the original context and meaning. A classic example is the parable of the Good Samaritan in the gospel of Luke. Most of the time the parable is quoted by itself and out of its narrative context. One needs to read the complete conversation that Jesus was having with a lawyer to gain the full impact and meaning of the parable. The Latter-day Saint scholar Dan McClellan talks about the idea of the reader of scripture needs to be in negotiation with the text and its meaning.
I recognize this 😉
Mark Ward details a lot of these. He has both a book (Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible) and a YouTube series about this kind of thing. I discussed some excerpts from his book at
https://benspackman.com/2020/04/scriptural-language-and-false-friends-a-book-note-and-observations/
“What scriptures can you think of that we misunderstand because the words have shifted?”
I have written several essays on this topic in particular and on our failure to read the scriptures in their original context. Here is a sampling of my work:
Revelation 3:15-16. https://thewellexaminedlife.com/tolerance/#more-352
The Parable of the Mustard Seed: https://thewellexaminedlife.com/what-can-we-learn-from-a-mustard-seed/#more-541
The Prodigal Son: https://thewellexaminedlife.com/the-dysfunctional-family-of-man/
Luke 22: 40-46 (here, words were added to the text after the fact, distorting its meaning): https://thewellexaminedlife.com/sweating-blood/
Luke 2: 34-35: https://thewellexaminedlife.com/mary-and-the-sword/
The Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard: https://thewellexaminedlife.com/jesus-christ-capitalist-or-socialist/#comments
The Healing of the Blind Man at Bethsaida: https://thewellexaminedlife.com/christ-moves-at-our-pace-not-his/
Mary in the Gospel of John: https://thewellexaminedlife.com/the-wine-and-the-cross/#more-1568
Matt. 19: 16-22: https://thewellexaminedlife.com/what-do-i-still-lack/
Matthew 2: https://thewellexaminedlife.com/a-massacre-that-likely-never-happened/
Genesis 1; 1 Corr. 3:16-17; & 1 Corr. 6:19: https://thewellexaminedlife.com/a-massacre-that-likely-never-happened/
Thank you to everyone for your comments. I’ve learned from them.
Mormon culture is all about reading scriptures with the intent of seeing how a select few words in a verse or two confirm preexisting beliefs and make them feel emotionally good. They mostly ignore questions of who wrote the text, how they arrived there, and the cultural surroundings that may have informed the text. I have no interest reading the Bible through the Mormon lens.
@Margie,
You might not have gotten as much traction with your explanation as you hoped because even though you are correct about the interpretation of Thessalonians, you are incorrect in your conclusion that avoiding doing things that give the appearance of evil is ascriptural. There is an in depth discussion of this topic in 1 Corinthians 8.
Hi @Mike Sanders,
In general, I think it’s more trouble than it’s worth to worry about how things may look to others. But it would be foolish to think there aren’t some occasions when it is wise to be mindful of giving a false impression. The situation under discussion in 1 Corinthians 8 is probably a good example. There is a lot to think about in the remarkably nuanced discussion and context in that chapter. Being two thousand years on and many cultures removed, I’m not sure if I agree with Paul’s conclusions in this case or not, but I see his larger point. Impressions matter. So does context. So, depending on how hungry I was… 😉
What I dislike about the misreading of Thessalonians is that people tend to use that scripture to shut down conversations and/or cudgel others into doing what they find appropriate. The stake president’s concern, it turned out, ultimately, was not that the youth would be giving the wrong impression by going to prom and cause others to question their faith (Paul’s concern in 1 Corinthians)—but that the “appearance of evil” might be a slippery slope to actual evil. He felt that the scripture gave the advice to abstain from giving the impression of evil (which, again, it doesn’t) so that it didn’t become -actual- evil down the line. Not a reading justified by that text but also not a concern without warrant, or even a concern that isn’t addressed elsewhere in scripture. I still disagreed with the decision.
Also, fwiw, I never suggested in my post or in the discussions we had in our stake that being mindful of the way we present to others isn’t scriptural or even a bad idea. It’s just not, as you say, what that particular scripture is about.
Ultimately, my concerns got no traction because my views were at odds with the stake president’s.
@Margie, you’ve piqued my interest. I’ve never heard of a stake president telling youth not to attend their high school dances, including prom. In my experience, Mormons generally attend their school dances. Yeah, they have to search hard for “modest” dresses and avoid some of the partying afterwards, but Mormon kids go to school dances. Did he give specific reasons for this?
15 years ago, or so, we had a weird situation where a stake president told everyone in the stake not to go to a particular, high-end gym/fitness club in our town. This gym is a really nice gym–too high priced for me, so I never joined. The stake president’s reasoning was that there had been too many affairs that had started because married people had met new partners at this gym–as if these types of problems wouldn’t happen at other gyms. Instead of teaching about being loyal to your spouse and avoiding compromising situations, this stake president just preached that avoiding this particular gym was the solution. A number of stake members cancelled their gym memberships after hearing the stake president’s advice. Pretty weird in a similar way to your prom story.
Exactly, very similar reasoning, @mountainclimber479. The SP didn’t tell me this, but somebody who could see I did not agree with decision pulled me aside afterward and said the SP had to listen to a lot of confessions after prom every year. And he had heard there were -gasp- drugs there too. (I wondered why the bishops weren’t hearing these confessions—but maybe they reported them up the chain? Idk.)
As if there aren’t drugs and hookups the other 179 days of the school year. I thought we needed to have more faith in our youth and more appreciation for their positive influence on their peers.
The president at the time had family connections in the higher ranks, and I think was looking to make a name for himself. And Sister Margie had already acquired a reputation as something of an overeducated if well-meaning kook. Up until that point my experience with proms and church advice was “Go, have fun, be a good example,” but I guess there was (maybe still is, I’ve been out of the youth programs for 10+ years) a fad a decade or so ago among some stakes in the rougher parts of SoCal to do church sponsored proms in place of school ones. The thing is, our stake was working-class (with some nicer areas and some less-nice) but not what I’d call rough.
It was so hard on the youth though. The ones who went anyway and couldn’t enjoy it and especially the ones who stayed home.
@Margie, very interesting. I would sure think that some complaints about this edict from well-connected members in the stake would have made it up to the area presidency. I wonder if this stake president received a talking to afterwards.
from jasonsager05 above – “there have so many SS and EQ lessons where I felt we could have been using Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings and it would have made no difference to the answers.”
which is why I can in good faith tamp down my concerns about BOM historicity and keep my Gospel Doctrine calling next year.
D&C/church history in 2025? that would start my 4th year in the calling so hopefully I will be miraculously released by then.