By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

I normally avoid the “horizontal harmony” model of New Testament commentary—analysis that takes pieces out of each gospel and strings them together into a single narrative that supposedly tells a single story. That’s just not how narratives work. Each gospel was created to be a complete story in its own right. Each evangelist had different doctrinal and rhetorical objectives, and we miss these when we smush them all together or treat the New Testament like a jigsaw puzzle with nicely interlocking pieces spread across four different boxes.

Guest author Elizabeth Cranford Garcia’s most recent work has appeared in Tar River Poetry, Portland Review, CALYX, Tinderbox Poetry, and Anti-Heroin Chic, is the recipient of the 2022 Banyan Poetry Prize, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is the author of Stunt Double and serves as the current Poetry Editor for Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought. Read more of her work at elizabethcgarcia.wordpress.com.

My four-year-old daughter is leaning her whole body over my arm from the back seat, waiting to be dropped off at preschool, reaching to press the “skip” button on the music for the tenth time—a need she’s developed in my habit of allowing her to choose the music in order to persuade her to go to school at all. I’m hungry, eager to get a bite after drop-off, having chosen to exercise, shower, and put on makeup this morning instead of eat (because all my experience with mothering three kids has taught me that to skip my workout will lead to late afternoon burnout, tipping the domino that leads to a depressed and grumpy mommy at bedtime)—and my daughter’s body pressing in on me suddenly evokes a barrage of irritation at all the ways in which I’m expected—by them, by whatever idealized image I have in my head—to go without, to put myself second, in order to mother them. That when I metaphorically raise my hand to protest (“Could you please fill my glass of ice water at the dinner table after I’ve laid it with homemade hot food?”), it’s like I’m suddenly asking for an appendage.

Last Friday our ward celebrated the Relief Society’s 181st anniversary with an ambitious program involving all the organizations: the Relief Society prepared a play in three acts recounting the founding; the Primary was tasked with sewing bonnets for all the women; the Young Women and Young Men decorated the cultural hall; the bishopric set up the sound reinforcement; and the elders quorum was asked to cater dinner in accordance with guidance provided by the Relief Society.

The central feature of the dinner menu was to be roast chicken. There were a lot of moving parts for the dinner, so I decided to delegate the side dishes and deserts to members of the quorum and took responsibility for the main dish myself.

A week before the Relief Society’s gala event, I placed an order for 20 roast chickens at the grocery store deli just down the street from the church to be ready for pickup a half hour before the dinner was scheduled to begin. The same deli had taken care of twice as many chickens for our Christmas party, so I figured they were up to the task. Deli staff were happy to take my order, and when I followed up in person on Wednesday they gave me two thumbs up—everything was on track.

“It is not possible for man to sever the wheat from the tares, the good fish from the other frie; that must be the Angels Ministery at the end of mortall things.”—John Milton, Aeroipagetica

The Kingdom of God is the ultimate ineffable concept: a kind of society that has never existed before and that contradicts every established theory of social or political development. Even its name, “kingdom,” implies a human domination structure that is completely alien to the thing described. To inspire his followers with the possibilities of this society, Jesus must first find ways to describe something for which his audience has no point of reference. This is the central narrative problem of the New Testament: how to eff the ineffable.

The solution to this problem comes in the form of the “Kingdom Parables,” a subset of New Testament parables designed to illustrate some element of the Kingdom. The thirteenth chapter of Matthew is the mother lode of Kingdom Parables. In this one chapter, Jesus gives eight parables, fully interprets two of them, and explains the reasons that he speaks in parables in the first place.

“CHRISTIANA began to knock . . . she knocked and knocked again. But instead of any that answered, they all thought that they heard as if a dog came barking upon them. A dog, and a great one too; and this made the women and children afraid. Nor durst they for awhile to knock any more, for fear the mastiff should fly upon them. . . . . Knock they durst not, for fear of the dog; go back they durst not, for fear that the keeper of that gate should espy them as they so went, and should be offended with them. At last they thought of knocking again, and knocked more vehemently than they did at the first. Then said the keeper of the gate, “Who is there? —John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part II

Even by the standards of 1678, the first volume of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is hostile to women. When the hero, Christian, discovers that he is among the elect, he turns his back on his wife and sets out to find salvation on his own. Though The Pilgrim’s Progress went on to become the bestselling book of the century (and of the next two centuries after that), readers expressed great dismay over the fate of Christian’s wife.

In the ninth chapter of Matthew, Jesus seems to have gotten really fed up with people asking him why he eats with publicans and sinners. Here’s how we can tell. After he gives his standard answer to the question, he gives the guys who asked it a reading assignment:

And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto his disciples, Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners? But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. (Matt 9:10-13, KJV)

[Read more…]

You may know that the LDS Young Woman’s program was way cooler in the early 20th century than it has been during the lifetime of anyone alive today. But you probably didn’t know how cool it was. Mikayla Thatcher is here with Beehive Girl to tell you that it was amazing beyond your wildest dreams.

In our church, we don’t do confession. Nor do we offer absolution. The church has made the decision to not be an arbiter of your stance before god. However, we do have worthiness interviews.

“A church is not a museum for the saints—it is a hospital for sinners.”
― Abigail Van Buren

Much of America’s national theology in the 20th century came from syndicated advice columns, including the sentence quoted above. Though the phrase has been attributed to Saint Augustine, Saint John Chrysostom, and many others, its first recorded use actually occurred in a 1964 column by Dear Abby A couple calling themselves only “Sinners” wrote Abby to say that they had been living together without the benefit of clergy for 25 years and did not feel worthy to go to church. “The very fact that you are troubled by the way you have been living proves that you are worthy,” Abby wrote. “A church is not a museum for the saints—it is a hospital for sinners.”

It would not have been out of place coming from Augustine or Chrysostom, though, because the sentiment (factoring out the modern origins of both hospitals and museums) comes directly from Jesus. When the Pharisees saw Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners, they (quite logically) asked his disciples, “why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus heard them and said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (Matt 9:11-12, NRSV).

For my money, the best joke in the New Testament is the one about the camel going through the eye of the needle (Matt 19:24). This is not a slam dunk. The bit about forgiving your brother 70 x 7 times is real hoot too (Matt 18:22), as is John the Baptist’s bit about God making children of Abraham out of rocks (Matt 3:9). But the camel through the eye of the needle joke gets all five stars. It is a first rate joke.

Here’s how you can tell that it is a good joke; for 2000 years, serious Christians with limited senses of humor have been making themselves look ridiculous by not getting it and trying to explain it away as a serious statement

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
—Matthew 13:13-16

The first thing we must grapple with in interpreting the “salt and light” passage from the Sermon on the Mount is that Jesus does not speak in the form of a command. He does not say, “be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.” He does not even make it a suggestion, like, “it would be really cool if you guys could be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.” There is nothing in the grammar to suggest that he is instructing us to be salt or light at all.

Click here for Eric Huntsman’s translations of New Testament passages created specifically for readers of this book.

Latter-day Saints have always been allergic to liturgy. This allergy has nothing to do with doctrine or even church policy. It is just our inheritance from the pragmatic Yankee Puritans and low-church English immigrants who first converted to Mormonism and created our worship patterns. For these Christians, there were very few things more important than not looking too much like Catholics.

Without any liturgical tradition, however, Latter-day Saints find themselves separated from much of the Christian world at times like the Advent season and Holy Week—the extended periods of devotion and reflection that surround the holidays of Christmas and Easter. We often lack knowledge about basic things that most Christians take for granted And we deprive ourselves of both the structure and the opportunities for reflection that come with a regular liturgical calendar. [Read more…]

In yesterday’s post, I said that it simply didn’t matter whether or not John’s story about Jesus turning water to wine actually occurred because historical fact is not the kind of truth that John was telling. I also suggested that nobody in John’s day would have considered the question important because biography and documented history were not genres that people in the ancient world understood. These, of course, seem like the kind of flippant and faithless statement that academics are always making in order to tear down people’s faith. Like Korihor. Since that is actually not what I was trying to do, I wanted to do a follow-up.

The University of Virginia’s Mormon Studies Program invites applications for short-term fellowships to conduct research in the Gregory A. Prince Collection during 2023 on any of the religious communities identified with Mormonism. Three fellowships of $2,500 will be awarded this year. Especially welcome are proposals related to race, gender and sexuality, or international Mormonism.

Prince Collection Fellowships are open to U.S. citizens and foreign nationals who live beyond a 60-mile radius of Charlottesville, VA, and hold the PhD or equivalent degree, or are doctoral students who have advanced to candidacy, or are independent scholars with a significant record of scholarly achievement.

Applications will be reviewed beginning April 15, 2023 and will be accepted until award funds are committed. Applicants will be notified of the committee’s decision by May 15. Once awarded, funds must be expended by December 2023.
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Kathleen Flake
Richard Lyman Bushman Professor of Mormon Studies
Department of Religious Studies
Co-Director, Virginia Center for the Study of Religion
Grant Administrator, Virginia Forum on Democracy and Religion
University of Virginia

And just as Mōüsēs lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so must the son of mankind be lifted up, so that whoever trusts in him can have life for all time. This is in fact how much god loved the world: he gave the only son born to him, so that everyone who trusted in him wouldn’t be annihilated, but would have life for all time.God, you see, didn’t send the son into the world to judge the world, but so the world could be rescued through him. Whoever trusts him isn’t judged; but whoever doesn’t trust in him has been judged already, because he didn’t trust in the name of the only son born to god.—John 3:14-19 in The Gospels, a New Translation by Sarah Ruden

This year, I have been thoroughly enjoying the New Testament in a new translation by scholar and classicist Sarah Ruden. Almost everything about the translation makes me uncomfortable. The language is sparse and strange, and the translation uses unfamiliar names for people we are all familiar with, like Loukus, Iōannēs, and Iēsous instead of Luke, John, and Jesus. This all makes it seem like the New Testament is a work from a foreign culture whose values, beliefs, and core assumptions about the world are fundamentally different from ours in ways that we don’t entirely understand.

Ooops, we did it again. BCC Press has come up with a book that is so amazing, so relevant, and so in tune with both the zeitgeist and the spiritus mundi that you are going to have a hard time finishing this article before heading over to Amazon to buy it. That’s OK. We know the feeling. We’ll wait.

An inclusive group of women and artists are working to create “Meetinghouse Mosaic.” Their goal is to fill LDS meetinghouses with art that is more accurate in representing the historical Jesus and will allow diverse Saints to more fully identify with representations of Him. They are sponsoring a gallery show at Writ and Vision next year. The call for submissions is below, but be sure to check out all the other virtuous and lovely things they are doing at https://meetinghousemosaic.com/

“Victory and triumph to the Son of God,
Now entering his great duel, not of arms,
But to vanquish by wisdom hellish wiles!”
—John Milton, Paradise Regained

Milton turned a lot of heads in Paradise Regained by setting Christ’s victory over Satan in the Wilderness Temptation scene, rather than the places that most of his contemporaries placed it; the Virgin Birth, the struggle in Gethsemane, the Crucifixion, or the Resurrection. But Milton had a method to his madness. For the author of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, the battle between Jesus Christ and the devil was a battle of interpretation. Both knew the scriptures well, and both had the ability to incorporate them into their own narratives. As Milton sets it up, the victory must go to the better reader.

This is not quite what Matthew and Luke are doing in their versions of the Temptation scene, but it is also not quite NOT what they are doing. Especially Matthew, who is the most scripturally knowledgeable of all the gospel writers and whose audience had the most interest in understanding how Jesus related to the Hebrew scriptures. Matthew’s version of the Temptation might reasonably be described—though not with anything like Milton’s scope—as a competition between Jesus and Satan to determine the best reader of the Bible.

Here’s what I mean.

The first edition of A World of Faith, by award-winning Salt Lake Tribune religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack, with illustrations by the phenomenal artist Kathleen Peterson, was published in 1998 to thunderous applause. Plaudits for this edition came from former president Jimmy Carter, Notre Dame University President Theodore Hesburgh, and professional free-thinker Paul Kurtz. It was an enormously successful volume. A commemorative version was published in 2001 to celebrate the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.