Daniel Peterson - The Book of Ether

I I'm grateful to be here I think my mistake was in telling who go that I was coming and so so here I am it's vacation right I was going to apologize to him because when I when I get going I tend to speak very very rapidly and so that's always terrible for translators it's terrible for people who do sign language translation it gives them a real aerobic workout but I won't apologize to ago because after all he's the one who made me come here tonight so speaking of Hugh Nibley he mentioned that I knew he owned a Blee it reminds me and the prayer and the question of blessing the food it reminds me of a time for a nibblies 80th birthday where I was asked to give the invocation at the at the dinner and at the end of it an argument broke out in the audience about whether I blessed the food or not and elder Maxwell of the quorum of the twelve was there and people were going back and forth and so I just said to heck with it I walked back up to the podium and gave an addendum in addition to the prayer and bless the food just to make sure I I thought I had and afterwards I was pleased that elder Maxwell came up to me and just whispered I think you did but anyway it was covered if was blessed at least once possibly twice I was asked to speak about the book of ether tonight and I don't really have a fireside prepared this isn't really a fireside as I would give one I it's a class this is an institute class on the book of ether and so or at least tonight's session is on the book of ether so I thought I'd just talk about the book of ether the way I might teaching a class and I will be fairly brief don't worry it won't go on for long you've got a Mexican dinner waiting and you've got to dance in anyway I'm jet-lagged and I'm afraid if I talk too long I myself will fall asleep during my talk which which would be bad you know my favorite defin of the word professor is a professor is someone who talks in other people's sleep so I want to look at the book of ether just a little bit first of all before we do that if you look at the last chapter of the Book of Mormon that is not the not the whole book of Mormon but the small B book of Mormon the Book of Mormon within the Book of Mormon it's pretty clear to me that the last chapter of that book the features of farewell from Moroni Mehran I thinks that he's finished there are a couple of places maybe three places in the Book of Mormon where Moroni says goodbye and then he sort of surprised to reappear he's still alive he he knows that the Lamanites are trying to find him that they would like to kill him he's the keeper of the records he's the son of the last major me fight general and they would really like to get him and he expects to die so at the end of the Book of Mormon he says goodbye and then suddenly he's back with the book of ether and then you'll notice again in the book of Moroni after the book of ether he's back again and the book of Moroni has always seemed to me sort of in a way a collection of things that he's noticed were left out he throws in the sacrament prayers there are several other things instructions on how to run a meeting for example because he notices they're not covered in what he's already given the book of ether is another one of those things that's added on it seems to me it's not part of the Nephite record it's a very different kind of book the Book of Mormon proper that is from Lehi to Moroni takes about a thousand years it starts around 600 BC it ends around 421 actually the last battle is about 35 years earlier than that so a little under a thousand years of history more or less of history the book of ether alone by itself contains between 1500 and 2500 years and yet one of the sting things about it is that it most of the histories covered very very quickly if you take off the first six chapters which are essentially about the first generation it's about Jared and his brother right and their departure from the from the old world to the new world you take off those six chapters you take off the last four chapters or so they're only 15 chapters in the book the last four chapters are about the last battle between Corey Antoine or the last war between Corey antemer and his various enemies if you take those off the historical portion of the book of ether that covers somewhere between 1500 and 2500 years is only about what six chapters so it is it's it's a very rapid summary of those of those portions the first six chapters give us the most detail about anything and and they also reveal something of the nature of the book of ether the whole book of Mormon is what a friend of mine John Sorensen calls a lineage history it's a history of a particular family line it's not very interested in things outside the family line my favorite illustration of that probably is is simply this if you've seen the pictures of Samuel the Lamanite remember the painting of Samuel the Lamanites standing on a city wall he's preaching to the to the Nephites and they're firing arrows at him and so on well first of all don't be deceived I'm sorry to say the star at history majors but but artists don't always get the history right you noticed that when the Holy Family is fleeing into Egypt in many paintings they seem to be going through Switzerland you know between Israel and Egypt or through Flanders the Netherlands or something it's just it's very strange people put in features that are familiar to them and the Holy Family may be dressed like Turks because that's what people knew in those days so people tend to imagine things that that look like what they would expect so the wall that you see and in Arnold Freiburg's painting with sama lamaa tied up on the wall is an enormous wall of a kind that you see in Peru for example from the Incas but it's not the kind you read about in the Book of Mormon do you remember the kind of wall Moroni makes in the Book of Mormon it's a very simple thing this is midway through me fight history and he has the idea brilliant new idea of digging a pit our trench and then piling the dirt up and then putting logs along the top it's not a very sophisticated wall but it keeps the Lamanites out because they've never had that kind of thing before it's nothing like the wall in arnold freiburg's painting well anyway that's a long way of getting back to my real point which is this have you ever noticed that one of the greatest prophets in the Book of Mormon Samuel the Lamanite you know nothing of his history before he shows up on that knee fight wall you know nothing of his history after he's on that knee fight wall now one explanation would be he jumps off the wall remember you know if it's Arnold Freiburg's wall you never hear more about him because he's dead right he jumps off the wall he breaks his neck and that's it but it's not that kind of a wall but the Book of Mormon is only interested in him when he's speaking to the Nephites ok and he has a long history presumably before that of preaching to the Lamanites Book of Mormon knows nothing about it book Mormon knows nothing about what he says after his message to the Nephites because the Book of Mormon is focused on the knee fight history you can sort of put together a knee fight history from the Book of Mormon but you can't begin to put together a lemonade history from the Book of Mormon because it's not talking about them now look at the book of ether and it's it's a lineage history to an even greater degree than that you have two main characters in those first chapters of the book of ether do you remember who they are one is Jared and the other is the brother of Jared do you know his name if you do you didn't learn it from the Book of Mormon we learn it from another experience of Joseph Smith's and this one has always been funny to me there was a day in Nauvoo when a man by the name of Reynolds Cahoon came up to Joseph Smith and his wife had just had a new baby and he asked Joseph if Joseph would give the baby a name and a blessing and so Joseph gave him a name and a blessing and the name he gave him was Mahon rhyme or en coma a bet brother Cahoon wished he had not asked this little bit of a strange name you could pronounce it Mahoney Maury on camera something like that that's probably closer to the way it was pronounced but Joseph explained that that was the name of the brother of Jared and it had just been given to him by revelation during that blessing terrible name for that little boy to carry around now Maury an camera appears in the Book of Mormon it's a place name it's a name on the Seacoast but we're never given the name of the brother of Jared we only learn it later and yet if you read those first chapters who's more important in those early chapters who's the most important character in the first six chapters of the book of ether it's clearly the brother of Jared not Jared it's the brother of Jared who has the vision of Christ I'll come back to that in a minute it's the brother of Jared who's the spiritual leader of the community and so on and yet we don't even get his name why is that look at the genealogy of the person who's keeping the account it's the book of ether and who is he he's a direct descendant of Jared not the brother of Jared so we get all sorts of stuff about Jared we get his name for one thing but we don't get the name of the brother that's kind of interesting to me and if you read the the text carefully you'll notice that the kings are always in the line of Jared because when the people wanted a king they came to Jared and Jared's brother and I said we would like a king in Jared's brother comments this thing leadeth to captivity he's not happy about the fact that want a king well the people come to him and he's no don't like I will not be your king Jared won't be their king they go to the sons of the brother of Jared all of them refuse to be king they then go to the sons of Jared all of them refused to be king except one the youngest and he turns out to be a good King though he's about the last one they have so the line of Kings is always in the line of Jared not the brother of Jared ether is in the line of Jared so the whole story is told from their standpoint and even in those those historical chapters it's quite interesting that very often the King the person who should be king is in prison spends his entire life in prison has children in prison it's a different kind of prison they will be named the person who's actually acting as King is not named sometimes you know the name of the person who ought to be king again because it's this line it's the line of Jared and everything else is left out so the Book of Mormon is not a history the book of ether is certainly not history in the sense you might expect where you know you give all the historical facts and so on it's a family history it's a history of that particular line and what doesn't affect that line often is left pretty sketchy pretty vague I want to say something about that name maurienne comma in the English edition I presume in the Italian Edition it's spelled at the end with a C um er my suspicion is that it's supposed to be spelled see um see um are because you have another named cauri antemer at the end that is spelled with a T um are now there is no word in English I'll bet there's no word in Italian that ends in an M R that's really really odd and there's a kind of a fun note about that we have the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon for this period for this part of the Book of Mormon and it's in Oliver calories handwriting and you see Oliver writing the name he writes Corey antemer and he spells it T um er Corey and to mer because that's the way he heard it and then he crosses it out and he doesn't just cross it out a little bit he crosses out with a flourish you can see it's like this like how was I supposed to know that it was spelled with an ER R with an oo mr instead of an M er how could I know that nothing like that appears in English here's the trick Joseph Smith often spelled out the names that he encountered sometimes because he couldn't pronounce them they surprised him when they came across he'd never seen them before and he spelled this one out there are indications that sometimes Joseph could tell if Oliver had misspelled something because sometimes Joseph would correct him across the across the table and this is one case where Oliver felt frustrated that he'd spelled it the way he thought it ought to be spelled but it was wrong but he could not possibly have guessed okay now the most important thing in those first few chapters is the great theophany the appearance of Christ to the brother of Jared it's spectacular because it reveals a bit of doctrine that's really really important it it is that first of all that Jesus pre-existed this life that he was already the God of the Old Testament he was the God who revealed himself to the prophets before his coming it shows that he was in the form of a man in the form of a human being because the brother of Jared saw his finger and he was shocked he didn't know he didn't know much about God apparently at that stage and he learned something new a shock to see it and eventually the Savior shows himself the pre-existence Savior shows himself to him in his entirety now do you remember what the brother of Jared's reaction was he was terrified he was really intimidated by this there are some wonderful stories about this kind of thing I'm an Islamist by training and there's a story about about the prophet Moses in one of the Islamic texts that I get a kick out of in this Moses is up on the mount Mount Sinai and he's talking with the Lord and he asks God to show himself to him and the Lord says to him are you really sure that you want me to do that and Moses says yes I would like to see you and so God says to him alright I'll tell you what I'll do I'll show the tip of my little finger to that mountain over there and then after I've done that we can consider the question again well he shows the tip of his little finger to the adjacent mountain and of course the mountain is destroyed and then he says to Moses now would you like to see me and Moses says no no I'm I'm really fine you know forget it dumb question but but there are some interesting things about that story one is that that even in the Islamic tradition God is depicted as having a finger he can show the tip of his little finger to that mountain and the glory of his little finger is so strong that it flattens the mountain okay now there are other accounts that actually have Moses see him and so on but it's always intimidating do you remember how as a arow spawns when he sees the Lord in the temple in nazia 6 he's afraid he's going to be destroyed because he's unworthy he says I'm a man of unclean lips and I have seen God he wasn't expecting to see God and he was scared we forget sometimes how intimidating an experience it can be the Joseph Smith story that we often tell is fairly calm but there's another version of the Joseph Smith story that's quite interesting where he tells in another account what it was like when he first saw the light coming down it didn't just appear in front of him it came down slowly from up above and as it came down he was afraid that when it touched the trees they would catch fire he was terrified and you know the very first thing that that angels typically say to people when they appear to them what do they say they say fear not right now that the tense is important because in Greek there's a specific tense I won't bore you with the details but it's an imperative Erised that says basically stop doing what you're doing and that's the tense being used here it's not don't become afraid it's stop being afraid you know you're terrified calm down I'm not going to kill you okay in other words when an angel appears it's not just someone who's kind of in white clothing with a light shining on him it's a little scarier than that I'll give you another example this has nothing to do with the book of ether but another example that I really like of that tense I've heard sermons maybe you have two about the experience that Mary Magdalene has when she goes to the tomb on the Sunday morning Christ has risen from the dead but she doesn't know it yet and of course she sees a man she thinks it's the gardener and then he speaks her name and she realizes who it is and then he says in at least the King James English version I haven't I've thought about this but I didn't know I'd say it tonight I don't know what the Italian version does but in the King James English version of the Bible it says touch me not for I have not yet ascended to my father which is in heaven don't touch me and I've heard sermons in church and lessons where people have tried to figure out why this why he would say that can you not touch a resurrected body before it goes up to God maybe to be certified in some way or something like that that's not what he's saying the tense is different and the verb is mistranslated it's actually I think the Latin Vulgate miss translates it no law made Tom Jerry I think in the Greek it says stop holding me okay it's a completely different scene mary is so overjoyed to see him it's not that she's tempted there you know touch like that now she's thrown herself at him she's grab hold of him and he says stop holding me I've not yet ascended to my father in other words I can't stay I've got to go stop holding onto me she's just grabbed on as you can imagine to me that's a totally different scene that's that's real emotion there and Joseph Smith by the way in the Joseph Smith translation gets that right if you look up the jst version of that it's stop holding me or something to that effect revelation he didn't know Greek not well enough to know that I think okay that's theophany is really important we learn a lot of doctrine from that there are some other things that we learn about in the book of ether it's our first hint the earliest historical hint oh I guess after the story of Cain and Abel themselves about secret combinations and you have a description of them at some length in the book of ether about these groups that get together and and organize themselves with oaths of secrecy and so on this is this is more important in history than then you might expect there have been a lot of organizations like this throughout history the mafia at times has had this kind of quality to it the conspiracy of Catalina I think in Italian maybe Cataline against the the government of Rome was a conspiracy it actually began in the temples of Rome with sacred oaths of secrecy and vengeance and so on so this idea of secret combinations is a very very common when throughout the world the the closest group that I can think of comes from my beloved Middle East who gave us the word that gave us the word assassin comes to us via Marco Polo and where did the word assassin come from supposedly because when they would do assassinations they were a religious sect in the Middle East they would get high on hashish they were the hashish II and hence the ssme the assassins now I don't believe they got high on hash before they did assassinations they were too good at it they were really really good it but the thing is it was a religious order they had oath of initiation they had special robes garments that they wore and they had all these sorts of things very much like what you find in the Book of Mormon so the Book of Mormon is not making this sort of thing up it's been around for a long long long time I'll tell you a story about my own involvement with the with secret combinations they show up later in the Book of Mormon in the form of the getti and robbers and when I was growing up when I was a kid I became really interested in guerrilla warfare and so I began reading the great theorists of guerrilla warfare mouths a tongue che guevara venutian gap from North Vietnam and I don't know why I did this I just thought it was interesting other people had wholesome healthy hobbies that was what I was doing right it got me in trouble once at BYU some of you might appreciate this when I my time at BYU if you were in the honors program you had to fill out occasionally something called an individual curriculum planning form or something like that and I hated filling them out I I'm kind of an anarchist at heart and I just didn't want to do it and they began to pester me for it so one semester I said okay okay I'm sure they don't even read them so I'm just gonna fill one out and make things up so it was about the time almost none of you are old enough to remember this most of you weren't born yet but there was a famous case in California of an heiress to a fortune very very wealthy girl by the name of Patty Hearst Patty Hearst was kidnapped by some weird left-wing group called the Symbionese Liberation Army and and when she was captured she couldn't kind of gone over to their side it's the Stockholm Syndrome you know where you begin to identify with your captors and you feel more on their side than on your own and when she was captured she gave her profession or described herself as an urban guerrilla that's not gorilla three English speakers it's in gorilla right that there is a difference and and so I thought well that sounds good that sounds like a good career plan so I fill that in a my form for BYU that my goal was to be an urban guerrilla and and then I began looking around for the kinds of courses you would need to take so I thought well you know you want to blow up bridges so I looked under civil engineering found of course on bridge design and I put that in and then I put in some courses military courses on weapons use and put those in and so on and it was it provided me an opportunity to meet with most of the leadership of the university I think that went on for about two months I mean they just couldn't believe it was a joke I was amazed they read it so anyway I've done that on several occasions where I've gotten to meet important people by getting into some sort of trouble that was one of my first great achievements as a student but but later on I was teaching gospel doctrine class in Jerusalem and we were reading the section in the book of Helaman and in 3rd Nephi where it describes the Gaddy Anton Roberts and I began to realize that the Gaddy Antin robbers were a textbook case of guerrilla warfare theory they're absolutely perfect when they succeed it's because they're following the rules that were laid down centuries later by these great theorizes of guerrilla warfare when they fail it's because they violated the rules they've committed an error that now talks about in one of his manuals and so on and I thought how in the world did joseph smith know that joseph smith's idea of warfare he was never really in a war and you know he kind of liked americans of his generation got a kick out of dressing up in a military uniform and he was the lieutenant general of the Nauvoo legion and he got on his black horse Charlie and review the troops and they'd beat the drums and play a Fife and and that sort of thing but guerrilla warfare is anything but that it's not glamorous it involves no uniforms no parades sneaking around sudden attacks and all this sort of thing and that's what you get in the Book of Mormon described very very accurately by a man who actually knew war in this case the Prophet Mormon himself who knew about this stuff knew it all too well and so to me that's a kind of testimony I could go into more detail on that but I won't there's a brilliant article on this subject written by me a number of years ago in which well actually several and I've got one more in me I want to compare it compare them to the assassins in particular because I think they are just the same kind of thing they behave in exactly the same ways and so many people have seen the gaddy and robbers in the Book of Mormon is coming from the Masons the Freemasons of Joseph Smith's time they're not very much like the Masons but they are very much like these ancient groups and medieval groups now the last section of the book of ether slows down again it starts off very slowly you get six chapters on on just basically the two brothers and then it slows down again for the last four chapters or so and you get the account of Corey antemer and Corey antemer is a I was gonna say a tragic figure but he's really not in a way because he's he deserves it but what you have there is the wars that destroy the Jared i'ts and it goes on and on and on until it's just a two-man show with coriander and shiz and Corey antemer kills shiz and Corey antemer is barely able to stand himself but around them is the just the ruins of their civilization they they brought down everything around them now it's it's an absurd story in a lot of ways and yet I think here's the moral application have you ever been in a situation where you were so angry that you just you didn't care if it really hurt you but you were gonna get the other person and maybe you don't have that sort of situation maybe I'm just that kind of a creep but but I've been in those situations I've seen those sorts of situations where people sometimes will will just become so angry it's no longer about their own interests they want to get the other person so badly they don't care if everything around them is destroyed while they have to do it if they have to pee huge price to do it so to me one of the one of the lessons in the book of ether is a lesson against this kind of anger this kind of desire for vengeance Corey antemer won but in winning he destroyed everything he was trying to win for he was trying to preserve his kingdom his rule and at the end of it yeah he's defeated his enemy but there's nothing left to rule everything has been destroyed so the question is do you ever find yourself in that kind of self-destructive mode if you do you should reread the book of ether and get yourself out of it because it doesn't do you any good it doesn't do anyone any good now I want to say something about this - that I'm betting not all the Jared i'ts died they were probably some who escaped some who were not affected you know ancient Wars often involved a certain class of people while the peasants were kind of left alone nobody cared about them a good example of this is found in the game of chess there in English that what is he you're trying to achieve in chess when you play chess what's the goal you're trying to yeah you're trying to get the other guy in what's called checkmate in English where you get the king you corner the king nobody else really matters you can destroy all the pawns the lesser player is it doesn't matter you can still lose the game and you've taken all the other players pawns but the goal is to neutralize the king that this is interesting because chess is an ancient near-eastern war game goes back to at least ancient Persia and in fact the the phrase checkmate is a really interesting one this is the state that you get to at the end of chess checkmate is a very corrupted form of an Arabic / Persian phrase it's in the original language it's it's Shah MOT you know what the Shah is who the Shah was there was a Shah of Persia for example the King Shah MOT means the king is dead hence checkmate now does anyone know the word for chess in Russian it's sha mati okay and the word in German is Schaaf from the word Shah for King what is it an Italian sketchy which i think is a distorted form again of shah it's all about getting the king so in in ancient Middle Middle Eastern game ancient Middle Eastern Wars everybody else could die it comes down to the king and that's the way it comes down to in in the book of ether she is versus quarry antemer but what about all those other people they don't matter they don't matter at all so did any of them survive probably and one of the noteworthy things about the Book of Mormon is that several times when a villain shows up he has a Jared ight named like Korra hora who's the great villain of the book of Alma well there's an earlier core in the book of ether why is that interesting I think maybe this is one speculation it's not original with me it's from Hugh Nibley one of his speculations was that some of these people are a kind of preexisting group within the society they've lost power there's a foreign group that's come to dominate them and they resent it and so whenever you find rebels coming up bubbling up in Nephites society very often they have jared ight names it's I don't know what happened here when the Romans took over from the Etruscans but I can imagine that their assume there were some Etruscans who survived into that period who didn't like it these foreigners come in with a different language different customs different culture and now they have the power and we don't you can bet that there were a lot of people who caused trouble from the previous Etruscan population look at the United States with the American Indians many of them didn't like the new white people who's shown up and had taken over so they resisted they were attempts to rebel were attacks on white settlements and so on because they were unhappy at being under the control of another group understandably so and so the Jared ice didn't disappear the leadership was annihilated and in the game of chess that means the war is over but a lot of the population was still there different language different customs different beliefs different attitudes and they did not like what had happened to them okay not I promised this wouldn't go on very long so I'm gonna wind it down by just pointing out something at the very end this whole book of ether is is a summary by Maroni Maroni has gone through the 24 gold plates that they found and he's boiled it down to what he thinks is the essential stuff in other words he's cut out most of the history but he's emphasized the those first six chapters the story of the two brothers Jared and the brother of Jared and at the end again he slows down he tells the story about the destruction of the Jared itpeople why do you think Moroni would find the destruction of a people interesting because he's just been through it himself exactly the same thing and and so this resonates with him this means something to him he's seen it before and he's seen what happened he sees that secret combinations had a great deal to do with it so he wants people to learn the lesson and the very last verse he says the last words recorded by ether the Prophet who wrote this account who's been hiding in a cave watching everything happened the last words are Isis you know whether I am translated or whether I suffer the will of the Lord in the flesh it matter if not unto me so long as I be saved in the kingdom of God now when he quotes that I think he's speaking for himself as well that's his situation Moroni spends the last what is it the last battle is 385 the Book of Mormon closes in 421 so he has spent 36 years 36 years basically alone running for his life he knows that people are after him and so his sense is it doesn't matter to me whether I die whether I'm translated as long as in the end I'm saved he's resigned to the will of God in ether he finds a kindred spirit someone who thinks the same way he does who's been in the same situation he was and I'm sure that he takes comfort in that this means a lot to him so in a way this is another farewell from Moroni he closes it with a sentiment that could have been his words he borrows the words of an earlier prophet but they're his words really too and and so it's a powerful testament from somebody who's lived to see the destruction of his people and who wonders what his own fate will be and frankly we don't know what his fate was we simply know that he buried the plates run 421 what happened to him after that we have no idea we don't know was he killed by someone that he live to die a natural death we don't know but already 36 years he's been wandering until he goes to the place where he's been told to deposit the plates and then his task is done after that he can be taken I think prophets in that situation to have a sense for that sort of thing with Joseph Smith and I'll probably close with this though you never know this is this is sort of what James Joyce in English called stream-of-consciousness up here so whatever comes it comes and I am jet-lagged so but Joseph Smith it's pretty clear to me there's a wonderful article on this that was published in a very bad venue it needs to be resurrected somewhere so people can read it but there was an article done Oh 20 30 years ago by Richard Anderson at BYU about Joseph Smith's own sense of his destiny and it's really clear up till about the winter of 1841 42 that Joseph feels he cannot be killed he just doesn't expect he will be he's got things to do and then all of a sudden that the tenor changes about that time Heath begins to realize I'm done or close to done and then he starts making preparations to pass the keys on to others starts talking about his death and about the trek of the Saints westward and how he won't be going with them and all this sort of thing and just like the death of Jesus nobody really believes that they're not really listening they they're not expecting this sort of thing but Joseph knows it Joseph knows that he's just about finished and that he has a kind of guarantee of not immortality but a guarantee of safety up to a certain point and then when he's done he's exposed to whatever happens and you sense that change in if it's it's really distinct sometimes during that winter that he suddenly realizes I don't have the guarantee anymore I could die at any time and so I better make preparations Maronna is in that situation he doesn't know he's resigned to the will of God it's been a long time since he's been had the support of his people long time since his father died a long time since his people even existed and he's been on the run ever since and so he's in a way ready to go well there's a lot packed into the book of ether it's a remarkable book and in some ways in some very distinct ways it's very different from the rest of the Book of Mormon if you read it it's a different society they even mentioned swine in it and some people have raised the question well what about the law of Moses good Jews would not have kept pigs well they weren't Jews these were jarred i'ts they left before there was anything like that there was no law of Moses they weren't under the law of Moses it's a foreign society a friend of mine in my department David honey has actually done some work on the Jared i'ts has a typical Central Asian group nibbly did the same thing they're very different from Israelites it shows the richness of the Book of Mormon that this book contains two such very different cultures constantly moving no capital no mate city's the Nephites have cities Jared i'ts don't so read it with that in mind don't just see it as yet another chapter of the Book of Mormon it's a very different thing it's a foreign document incorporated into the Book of Mormon but it's very very different and yet like the rest of the Book of Mormon its chief testimony is of Christ the centerpiece of the Book of Mormon is the coming of Christ to the new world the most important portion of the book of ether is the appearance of the pre-existent Christ to the brother of Jared a testimony of his once and future stature as a member of the Godhead as the savior of humankind I want to bear you my testimony even though this is a class I'll bear a testimony at the end the Book of Mormon is true to me it's inconceivable this book was created by the young frontier farm boy Joseph Smith with his two months of formal education it's it's far too complex for that too rich for that and I don't think most Latter day Saints I don't think any Latter day Saints understand how deep and how rich the Book of Mormon is but it repays study and and everything you can bring to it it will reward you I buried that testimony in the name of Jesus Christ amen

Channel: Istituto di Religione - Campus di Roma

Views: 39,353

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Keywords: peterson, libro di ether, libro di mormon, sug, lds italy, istituto di religione, campus di roma

Id: Y3j695n5a8A

Length: 41min 35sec (2495 seconds)

Published: Mon May 26 2014