2nephi

From CleanPosts

Nephi's father Lehi was dying and he knew it. He spoke his last words, and they filled the first four and one-half chapters of 2 Nephi.

Lehi had a vision whereby he knew that Jerusalem was destroyed, and he said that had they remained in the city they would have perished (In reality, most of the inhabitants survived. The slaves were set free and their owners, about 4,000 of the leading citizens, were taken into captivity).

To his sons Laman, Lemuel, and Sam, he admonished them to listen to Nephi, and not give him any more grief, because everything Nephi had said and done was for their own good. He told them that God had said, "Inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments ye shall prosper in the land; but inasmuch as ye will not keep my commandments ye shall be cut off from my presence."

Lehi blessed Zoram, the servant of Laban who had thrown in his lot with Nephi, as long as he and his seed obeyed the commandments of the Lord also

But to Jacob he departed from law-based righteousness and said, "And by the law no flesh is justified; or, by the law men are cut off. Yea, by the temporal law they were cut off; and also, by the spiritual law they perish from that which is good, and become miserable forever. Wherefore, redemption cometh in and through the Holy Messiah; for he is full of grace and truth."

At this point Lehi expresses a Manichaeist dualism that is never found in the Bible.

"For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, my first-born in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad."

He is saying that God's goodness cannot exist as a foreground absolute apart from a background of resistance to that goodness. God needs the wicked in order to show forth his righteousness.

"And to bring about his eternal purposes in the end of man, after he had created our first parents, and the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, and in fine, all things which are created, it must needs be that there was an opposition; even the forbidden fruit in opposition to the tree of life; the one being sweet and the other bitter."

Lehi asserts that if Adam and Eve never fell in the Garden, they would have had no joy, because they would have never known misery as a background against which to know joy. They would have never done good, because they would have never known sin as a background against which to judge good.

"Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy."

The Book of Mormon, in short, asserts that God willed that Adam sinned!

Now Lehi speaks his last words to Joseph, his youngest son, and this is where it gets confusing because Lehi tosses a lot of Josephs around. He reveals previously unknown prophesies made by Joseph, son of Jacob, the dream interpreter and Pharaoh's lieutenant. So exact are Joseph's prophesies that he claims that God even names the name of the prophet who will lead the people out of bondage:

"And Moses will I raise up, to deliver thy people out of the land of Egypt."

Pretty good. Even the prophesy that the Messiah would be named Emmanuel was not so precise.

Then Lehi says that Joseph saw that a great seer would arise, also named Joseph, who would have a father named Joseph. (And Lehi is telling all this to his own son named Joseph!) This great seer is none other than Joseph Smith, Jr., who must have gotten really excited when he translated this part of the golden plates, because it was talking about himself.

One of Joseph Smith's favorite phrases was "fruit of thy loins", mentioned 21 times in chapter three alone. Here are just two verses from chapter three, describing the "future" authorship of the Book of Mormon, so you know what I mean:

[18] And the Lord said unto me also: I will raise up unto the fruit of thy loins; and I will make for him a spokesman. And I, behold, I will give unto him that he shall write the writing of the fruit of thy loins, unto the fruit of thy loins; and the spokesman of thy loins shall declare it.

[19] And the words which he shall write shall be the words which are expedient in my wisdom should go forth unto the fruit of thy loins. And it shall be as if the fruit of thy loins had cried unto them from the dust; for I know their faith.

Then Lehi told his oldest sons Laman and Lemuel that they were cursed by God, but notwithstanding, they were blessed by Lehi, and the two things would cancel out and therefore in the long run their seed would not perish. But it amounted to damnation by faint praise, so it really cannot be their fault that they rebelled soon after that.

Then Lehi spoke to the sons of Ishmael, and it's not recorded what was said to them, but whatever it was, it was sufficient to cause them to throw in with Laman and Lemuel against Nephi, Sam, Jacob and Joseph.

After that, Lehi spoke to Sam, and said he was blessed like his brother Nephi, and their seed would be blessed all of their days. Then he finally died.

But Nephi records, "And it came to pass that not many days after his death, Laman and Lemuel and the sons of Ishmael were angry with me because of the admonitions of the Lord."

Gosh. Ya think?

Nephi's older brothers again sought to take his life, because they would not have their younger brother rule over them. Nephi, warned by the Lord, fled into the wilderness with all who would go with him.

Wherefore, it came to pass that I, Nephi, did take my family, and also Zoram and his family, and Sam, mine elder brother and his family, and Jacob and Joseph, my younger brethren, and also my sisters, and all those who would go with me.

Nephi took the brass plates with him, and also the spherical compass that was made by God.

When they arrived at a good place and pitched their tents, and the people insisted they call the place Nephi, and they call themselves the people of Nephi. So they were the Nephites. They planted seed and raised flocks of animals.

Nephi also used the steel sword of Laban as a model to make many more such blades, "...lest by any means the people who were now called Lamanites should come upon us and destroy us..."

Nephi built a temple which was a copy of the gigantic one Solomon built in Jerusalem, which was pretty good considering that the Nephites were probably about twenty people at this point.

The Nephites were all racists, and dark skin repulsed them, and God knew it, so he made the Lamanites repulsive to the Nephites with a "curse" of black skin, so they would not mix their seed.

God said, "And cursed shall be the seed of him that mixeth with their seed; for they shall be cursed even with the same cursing."

And because they were black, the Lamanites "become an idle people, full of mischief and subtlety" just like the black people Joseph Smith knew in New York in the 1820s.

Contained within the book of 2 Nephi is a separate "book" by Jacob, a sort of prequel to the actual book of Jacob which follows the Book of Second Nephi in the Book of Mormon. It runs from chapter six through ten, before Nephi comes back in and pads out most of the rest of his book with words copied directly from the King James translation of Isaiah.

Jacob says the Gentiles will be saved if they repent and do not fight Israel and do not join the Roman Catholic Church (his actual words are "...blessed are the Gentiles, they of whom the prophet has written; for behold, if it so be that they shall repent and fight not against Zion, and do not unite themselves to that great and abominable church, they shall be saved...". This is all well and good, but it has nothing to do with Jacob's audience in America, because Zion is an ocean away, and the Catholic Church is nearly 3000 years in the future.

Jacob says, "And now, the words which I shall read are they which Isaiah spake concerning all the house of Israel..." and he proceeds to copy all of Isaiah chapters 50 and 51 into 2 Nephi chapters 7 and 8. Later, Nephi copies thirteen more chapters of Isaiah into 2 Nephi, which makes my job easy, because I'm also blogging the Old Testament, and when I cover Isaiah I'll automatically be covering much of 2 Nephi.

So jumping ahead to chapter nine, Jacob says the purpose of the Messiah's death on the cross is not to redeem man, but to put all men under his rule:

"...it behooveth the great Creator that he suffereth himself to become subject unto man in the flesh, and die for all men, that all men might become subject unto him...

Jacob teaches that the spirit of righteous men is in paradise with God, and on the last day they are booted out of heaven to be reunited with their bodies. And this is a novel doctrine, found nowhere in the Bible. Nowhere does scripture say the spirits of the righteous are in heaven with God. The closest the bible comes to that is Jesus teaching a parable in Luke about Lazarus being in the bosom of Abraham after he dies, but this is a fable about the importance of treating people well in this life and is probably not meant to reveal the actual conditions of the afterlife. So vague is the Bible on this topic that the Seventh Day Adventists teach "soul sleep" where even the righteous dead are unconscious, and not raised, neither body nor spirit, until the last day.

When Jacob is not quoting Isaiah, he's ripping off the New Testament and calling it his own words. He says, "...this corruption could not put on incorruption..." and this is from 1 Corinthians 15:53. He says "...death and hell must deliver up their dead..." and this is from Revelation 20:13. He says "...to be carnally-minded is death, and to be spiritually-minded is life..." and this is from Romans 8:6. On and on. There's no point to cataloguing all these incidents of plagiarism because Mormons would just say the same Holy Spirit who put it in St. Paul's mind or St. John's mind to write those things put in Jacob's mind to write his identical things.

To this point the Book of Mormon was written in a faux Early Modern English style with lots of "thees" and "thous" to make it sound Biblish, except that Joseph Smith had a fondness for certain phrases such as "at came to pass" and "grew exceedingly" and "fruit of my loins" and used them until they were wore out. Now the English of the Book of Mormon takes a radical jump in quality because Smith inserts, wholesale, thirteen chapters from the Book of Isaiah in the King James Version.

Curiously, the chapter breaks in 2 Nephi follow, exactly, the chapter breaks in Isaiah, even though neither Isaiah's original text nor the golden plates, presumably, had chapter breaks in the original text. But that is a side issue. The main point I want to make is this:

The King James Bible was translated from Hebrew to English in 1611, while the Book of Mormon was allegedly translated from Reformed Egyptian to English in 1829. Over those two centuries, English shifted somewhat. Even if the golden plates did exist, when Joseph Smith translated them, there would have been marked differences in the text. But the text of chapters 12-24 in 2 Nephi correspond almost exactly to the text in chapters 2-14 in Isaiah (Smith sprinkles in a few instances of "it shall come to pass" for flavor).

What we have here is a thing like the Telephone Game, where information changes with each generation from the original source. Since Isaiah wrote in Hebrew, he had to translate Isaiah into the Reformed Egyptian of the golden plates. Then Joseph Smith, through the miracle of his seeing stone, translated this Egyptian to English. I can demostrate what is wrong with this picture by using the Babelfish feature at Yahoo (formerly Altavista).

Both 2 Nephi 12:4 and Isaiah 2:4 say this:

And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plow shares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

Translated to Greek this reads:

Και θα κρίνει μεταξύ των εθνών, και θα επιπλήξει πολλούς ανθρώπους: και θα κτυπήσουν τα ξίφη τους στις μετοχές αρότρων, και τις λόγχες τους στους γάντζους περικοπής. Το έθνος δεν θα ανυψώσει επάνω το ξίφος ενάντια στο έθνος, ούτε θα μάθουν τον πόλεμο άλλο

Translated back to English this reads:

And it will judge between the nations, and epiplixei a lot of persons: and will knock their swords in the action of ploughs, and their lances in the hooks of curtailment. The nation will not raise above the sword against nation, neither will learn the war other.

In the same book where we are told that Gentiles could be saved if they, among other things, don't fight Zion, Nephi cuts loose with some raw anti-Semitism:

For I, Nephi, have not taught them many things concerning the manner of the Jews; for their works were works of darkness, and their doings were doings of abominations.

I guess it's a matter of "do what I say not what I do". Nephi says don't be like the people who stayed behind in Jerusalem, because look what happened to them they were conquered and taken away captive to Jerusalem. But the people have no way of knowing that, they only have what Nephi calls his "prophesy" which amounts to what the new-age folks call "remote viewing". Nephi says just take my word for it, that really happened. But this news was about as important to the Nephites as a prophesy of the arctic ice cap melting would be to a Mars colony.

...and when the day cometh that the Only Begotten of the Father, yea, even the Father of heaven and of earth, shall manifest himself unto them in the flesh...

This part of the Book of Mormon has a defective view of the Holy Trinity, it teaches the Son is the same person as the Father. This is the heresy of Sabellianism or modalism, and it is also found among Oneness Pentecostals. When members of either group convert to Catholicism, their baptisms are considered non-valid and must be performed again.

Nephi says according to the prophets, the Messiah would come six hundred years after Lehi left Jerusalem, and also according to the prophets, Messiah would be named Jesus Christ. But he does not identify which prophets made that claim, so no one can check the scriptures to verify it.

Now comes one of those "aha!" moments that reveals the true process Joseph Smith used to create his Book of Mormon. Of the God-fearing folk who anticipate the coming of Messiah Nephi says, "But the Son of righteousness shall appear unto them; and he shall heal them...

Where did he get that language? From Malachi 4:2 in the Old Testament, which says, "But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings"

You see it, of course. Only in English is it possible to confuse the Son with the Sun.

Nephi makes a very commendable call to universal brotherhood when he says that Go "inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile."

Except that even by mentioning "black and white" he introduces race into Paul's original formula in Galatians 3:28 that "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." And because it's black and white, his injection of race is from a uniquely American perspective, because of the outstanding issues left over from slavery in this country. When the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints forbade blacks from being in the Aaronic Priesthood (until 1978) it contradicted this passage.

Nephi prophesies the events that will surround the translation of the golden plates, that they will be hidden from the world, except that three witnesses will see it apart from Joseph son of Joseph, the unlearned man who will deliver it.

And the learned shall say: Bring hither the book, and I will read them. And the man shall say: I cannot bring the book, for it is sealed. Then shall the learned say: I cannot read it...Wherefore it shall come to pass, that the Lord God will deliver again the book and the words thereof to him that is not learned; and the man that is not learned shall say: I am not learned...Then shall the Lord God say unto him: The learned shall not read them, for they have rejected them...

Anticipating the outcry that arose when Joseph Smith introduced a "sequel" to the Bible, he has the Lord say, "Thou fool, that shall say: A Bible, we have got a Bible, and we need no more Bible. Have ye obtained a Bible save it were by the Jews? Wherefore, because that ye have a Bible ye need not suppose that it contains all my words; neither need ye suppose that I have not caused more to be written."

That is to be expected, of course, but what makes it interesting to me is that nowhere in the Bible does the Bible mention the word "Bible". When it talks about itself, the Bible says "the law and the prophets" and the very concept of a bible (which means library) did not come into existence until the division of the Jews and Christians led each group to define a canon, beginning at the Council of Jamnia in 90 AD and culminating with the Council of Trent in 1546.

Nephi describes the whole House of Israel as having three parts, and that someday all their writings would be restored and made known one to the other:

And it shall come to pass that the Jews shall have the words of the Nephites, and the Nephites shall have the words of the Jews; and the Nephites and the Jews shall have the words of the lost tribes of Israel; and the lost tribes of Israel shall have the words of the Nephites and the Jews.

The problem is that only the Jews remain today among these three groups. The Nephites were destroyed (sorry to spoil the ending of the Book of Mormon), and the lost tribes of Israel are...lost. They were interbred with other people in the Middle-east and no longer exist as tribes.