Episode 52: Kevin Christensen on King Josiah and the Deuteronomistic Reformation

Summary

In this enlightening conversation, Robert Boylan hosts Kevin Christensen to delve into the Deuteronomistic Reformation under King Josiah and its implications on biblical scholarship and Latter-day Saint thought. Christensen, known for his extensive research on Margaret Barker's work, discusses his journey into Barker's scholarship and the controversial take that King Josiah's reforms were not purely beneficial as traditionally perceived. The discussion also touches on the relevance of Barker's work for Latter-day Saints, highlighting how her findings resonate with the faith's emphasis on temple theology and restoration of ancient truths.

Highlights

• Kevin Christensen elaborates on his journey into studying Margaret Barker's work and its implications for understanding the Book of Mormon. 🌟
• The episode reveals how Barker's scholarship challenges traditional views about King Josiah's reforms, suggesting they were more complex. 🧐
• Christensen explains the significance of temple theology in Barker’s work, which aligns with Latter-day Saint beliefs. 🕌
• An engaging discussion on the convergence of ancient scriptures, Barker's theories, and modern Latter-day Saint doctrine. 📖
• Christensen shares insights into current and future projects related to Latter-day Saint studies. 🔮

Key Takeaways

• Kevin Christensen discusses the influential work of Margaret Barker and its impact on understanding biblical texts from the Latter-day Saint perspective. 📚
• Barker's research suggests King Josiah's reforms might have suppressed ancient religious traditions rather than purging pagan practices. 🏛️
• Christensen highlights connections between Barker's findings and Latter-day Saint scripture, illustrating shared themes and revelations. 🔍
• The dialogue underscores the importance of re-evaluating traditional historical and religious narratives in light of new archaeological and textual findings. ✨
• There is an ongoing conversation within the Latter-day Saint scholarly community about the implications of Barker's work on modern religious thought. 🤔

Overview

In this episode, Kevin Christensen takes us on a scholarly adventure into the world of Margaret Barker’s research, which scrutinizes the Deuteronomistic Reformation led by King Josiah. Challenging the traditional narrative, Barker’s work proposes that these reforms might have obscured valuable religious traditions rather than enhancing them—a notion that has significant implications for biblical scholarship.

Christensen, a revered figure in Latter-day Saint scholarly circles, connects Barker’s research to the doctrinal structures of the Latter-day Saints, particularly focusing on temple theology and the restoration of ancient truths. His dialogue with Boylan underscores how Barker’s interpretations might align with and enrich the understanding of Latter-day Saint scriptures, offering a fresh perspective on ancient Judeo-Christian beliefs.

This episode is not just a scholarly critique but also an exploration of faith and how new historical and archaeological discoveries can reshape our comprehension of religious texts. It opens a window into the ongoing dialogue within the Latter-day Saint community about the potential and future of integrating modern scholarship with religious tradition.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 03:00: Introduction This chapter introduces the basic concepts and sets the stage for the subsequent discussions. It emphasizes the importance of clear communication, particularly focusing on ensuring that audio equipment, like microphones, are properly set up for effective interaction.
• 03:00 - 10:00: Discussion on Margaret Barker's Work The chapter begins with a technical issue where the speaker has trouble enabling their audio and video during a virtual meeting. Once the issue is resolved, they express readiness to discuss the subject matter.
• 10:00 - 20:00: Josiah's Reformation and Biblical Interpretation This chapter pertains to a discussion or interview with Josiah focusing on his approaches to reformation and the interpretation of biblical texts. The dialog begins with a casual exchange as participants apologize for prior communication errors, indicating familiarity and previous interactions. The friendly tone transitions into reflectively discussing the complexities and fullness of life, possibly hinting at the subject's perspective on change and personal growth as informed by biblical study.
• 20:00 - 29:00: Margaret Barker's Influence and Reception The chapter discusses the influence and reception of Margaret Barker, focusing on a presentation or talk about her work. The speaker mentions having slides prepared to discuss Barker's interpretation of theistic themes. The context suggests this presentation was prompted by a request from a podcast follower interested in exploring both supportive and critical perspectives on Barker's ideas.
• 29:00 - 40:00: Criticism and Paradigm Shift The chapter delves into the criticism and paradigm shift in biblical studies, focusing on the reforms in the time of Josiah. The narrator plans to engage with multiple scholars to discuss different interpretations, including a critical perspective from a professor at BYU. This chapter highlights the evolving understanding and reinterpretation of historical sources, featuring diverse viewpoints to illustrate the complexity and dynamism within this field of study.
• 40:00 - 74:00: Margaret Barker's Books and Recommendations This chapter discusses Margaret Barker's books and recommendations, comparing her standing and the impact of her ideas on religious texts such as the Book of Mormon. It mentions Grant Hardy's annotated Book of Mormon where Hardy, while acknowledging the quality of Barker's work, dismisses her as controversial with a single line. He suggests that the Book of Mormon aligns with a deuteronomistic outlook, which emphasizes blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience, an approach described as being repeated 19 times. The chapter seems to set the stage for a contrasting viewpoint against Hardy's claims.
• 74:00 - 79:30: Conclusion and Future Work In this chapter, the focus is on the actions of Josiah, who instructs the high priest to remove the Tree of Life from the temple, destroy it, and scatter its ashes on graves as a form of desecration. This act is compared to Lehi's vision of the Tree of Life, suggesting a link between the two. The chapter also alludes to the interpretation and different instances of the Bible.
• 79:30 - 86:40: Live Stream and Upcoming Content The chapter discusses the theory presented by Richard Elliot Friedman in his work 'Who Wrote the Bible.' The theory suggests that a significant portion of the Bible, particularly the Deuteronomistic History, was written and prepared during the reign of King Josiah. After his death, additional edits were made to account for subsequent events and assign blame for any misfortunes. King Josiah is portrayed as a central and culturally significant figure in this context.

Episode 52: Kevin Christensen on King Josiah and the Deuteronomistic Reformation Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 I think you to turn on your mic and the audio but
• 00:30 - 01:00 thank you have to turn on your audio does that work yeah I can hear you I can see you though okay now the seeing let's start the video come on there we go there you go it's working
• 01:00 - 01:30 okay sorry for the mess up on the email don't worry about it don't worry about it it's it takes a little getting used to yeah that's makc okay well that's well great to have you on again I hope you've been keeping well yeah I have yeah good life is always full of something or the other that's good so um
• 01:30 - 02:00 we wanted to talk a little bit about Margaret Barker yeah um I'm not sure like you said you had like a presentation not sure like you just want to talk or you have any slides or how go about it well I do have I do have some slides that I could if that's the case I'll let you be able to share screen um so to my PowerPoint here yeah no that's perfect um yeah because I was reached out by someone who follows my podcast and they were they asked if I could have someone who's for and against Barker and and her interpretation of theistic
• 02:00 - 02:30 reforms and um in Josiah so I thought that would be a good idea like um I mean talks with a professor from BYU would be more critical of marker's reading of the sources um Tyler hson so he'll be coming on later but I thought I'd reach out to you because you've readed a lot about it so uh I you the first person to give K Josiah Pro Barker interpretation if you will well like I I just got through Reading um or through doing a review of
• 02:30 - 03:00 say of Grant Hardy's annotated Book of Mormon you which it's a very good book but when it comes to Barker he basically dismisses her as controversial one line one label and then he says the Book of Mormon is basically adopts a deuteronomistic Outlook uh because it has if you're obedient you'll be blessed and if you're disobedient you'll be cursed and that's repeated 19 times he said and for him that's the whole case and um my case is
• 03:00 - 03:30 uh you got to pay attention to a lot more than that and that is uh when Josiah sends the high priest into the temple to take out the Tree of Life to burn it to crush the ashes and to scatter the ashes on the graves to uh to desecrate it and then you compare that with say Lehi going out and having a vision of the tree of life we ought to see connection and there's the there's the instance that say the uh that the Bible we have it like uh Richard the first
• 03:30 - 04:00 thing that I read that filled me in on Josiah was Richard Elliot Friedman's who wrote the Bible where he's making a case that that that a big chunk of the Bible of deuteronomistic History was written specifically for King Josiah that was edited and prepared in his lifetime and then after he was killed there were additions made to kind of you know to to report subsequent events and also to to blame you know cast blame for what went wrong so he's Central and uh culturally
• 04:00 - 04:30 in the church we just really haven't paid any attention you know because I don't remember ever having a lesson about Josiah barely having heard mentioned and that then I read fredman so that was the background that I had then after I after I read the great angel I decided I need to know some more about this and so I got you know several other books I've got up here but um most of them just basically take it for granted that uh that Josiah was the good
• 04:30 - 05:00 guy because that's what the book says and you it's the Bible so you you take it at its word and then come along and you read things uh in the great Angel and her other books and especially when she came to BYU in 2003 and she made she made there's a statement that she made there that that uh that Josiah's changes concern the high priests and where thus changes at the very heart of the temple so that made me go back and so
• 05:00 - 05:30 like when I wrote paradigms reg gained when I wrote this guy I was kind of drawing on fredman and seeing the reform happen on layers but when I heard her talk of BYU I started you know went back and took another look at things and started reading Jeremiah really closely and uh the thing notice about Jeremiah he's called the year after the re the year after the reform starts so Josiah is made King when he's eight years old his father Ammon is killed the people of the land supposedly kill the people that
• 05:30 - 06:00 that that killed Ammon and then they make Josiah King when he's eight years old when Josiah comes of age he's a 20 21 years old he launches the reform the year after that is when Jeremiah is called so the reform was not launched by the prophets the reform was launched by the Kings and Jeremiah is called the year after the reform the year after the reform begins and he's called against the Kings against the priests against the prophets and against the people of the land who installed J jiah and it doesn't give an exception
• 06:00 - 06:30 for Josiah and then there's another key thing is uh Ellen goof published an article on the Illusions and typ scenes and there's there's some differences in the account in Second Kings of Josiah and Chronicles and I think the most important difference now there are some differences but the most important difference is that when the death of Josiah is described in Chronicles there's a
• 06:30 - 07:00 what they call a type scene and the type scene is a disguise narrative where when they're going to the battle against the Egyptians Josiah adopts a disguise so that he won't be recognized but he's killed anyway and the point is is that gof makes the point that there are these uh three different disguise narratives in the Bible and the all involve a king all involve adopting a disguise that immediately fails and there things always end badly the kings in the disguise narratives are Saul
• 07:00 - 07:30 jeim and Ahab so you've got something subtle and interesting going on there where there's this unresolved tension where how come the most perfect King who ever lived is all of a sudden being associated with the ones that they think are the worst you know and I've never seen anybody discuss that much so there's there's stuff going on uh plus uh in uh in the older Testament uh Margaret starts making the
• 07:30 - 08:00 case that that third Isaiah is deliberately responding to the to the deuteronomist and she says she read all of these other commentaries on on third Isaiah she says nobody pays any attention to who he's objecting to she said but if you start paying attention clearly the deuteronomist so there's a case to be made that there's something off and for all the times I've seen people you know trying to dismiss Barker nobody really addresses the case they just say well this stuff sounds duter and Mystic end of story so anyway I do
• 08:00 - 08:30 have my little PowerPoint here if you oh no that's perfect uh you mentioned like your paper paradigms regained I'll link to that in the show notes also to your interpreter Auto page because you had like a two-part response to of Barker as well so I think that would be like a good overview um but like for maybe listeners like how did you get tuned into Barker scholarship initially uh and what get you interested in going down this kind of rabbit hole if you will okay well um got in all my Farms reviews
• 08:30 - 09:00 up there and there are two different authors in the Farms review that in reviews there was an article criticizing Book of Mormon christology and two different reviewers uh both quoted from the great angel in it and they both quoted the same passage at least both of them quoted the same passage and then then uh one of them quoted another one and they just kind of stuck on my head so I just they were there and then I was walking through a bookstore and you know visiting my brother in Dallas and he took me to this huge ug Half Price Books and I was just
• 09:00 - 09:30 wandering around there and go to the religion section and there is the only time I had ever seen any of Barker's books in an American bookstore or Library anywhere and I saw there's this you know some copies of the great Angel so I just reached up and I thought yeah that sounds like an interesting book and this is this is the most marked up and mangled book in my entire library and I read it and I started reading it by the time got halfway through I was home and
• 09:30 - 10:00 I called my brother and I said go back to that bookstore and buy up every copy of that book and send them to me because this is something important this needs to be shared so I I just realized that there's something going on here that really resonated with what we have in the Book of Mormon and I think the thing that I did that was different even other people have been quoting Barker before I did but I just started I just wanted to place it in the context you've got leeh height in Jerusalem 600 BC and you've got Barker her picture and uh the thing
• 10:00 - 10:30 is you got Joseph Smith 23 24 years old dictating you know the book Mormon in two months and you've got Barker who when she was uh like I think 13 years old asked for for her birthday she wanted to have a a Hebrew lexicon and so she taught herself how to read Hebrew from that young age she went to Cambridge and she studied this stuff and she just realized that uh at Cambridge
• 10:30 - 11:00 there's they they weren't they were treating the Old Testament the New Testament and early Christianity all the separate compartments with no continuity they just weren't interested and she also had come through a couple of reasons to think that there's neglect of the temple one thing that she told John tetus was that when she was at Cambridge she in the library she was reading through an issue of Jewish quarterly review and read an essay called Christian Envy of the Temple by one Hugh ni and that sort of pointed her this way
• 11:00 - 11:30 and there's some other things that U aren't my story to tell uh that kind of got her pointed toward the temple but she came to to decide that um to understand Christianity you had to go back to the first temple you had to reconstruct what was going on in the first temple and that would be the roots of Christianity and it turns out so you got Margaret using her methods and her sources you know she's using things that weren't available to anybody anywhere you know
• 11:30 - 12:00 she uses the Dead Sea Scrolls and the piger and the ocer and Christian liturgy and different editions of the Bible the seant and the Dead Sea Scrolls versions and the aric and the Babylonian tal you know she just she just reads everything and she comes up with her reconstruction and Joseph Smith comes up with his and they shouldn't fit but they do and none of the people that have uh criticized Barker have ever accounted
• 12:00 - 12:30 for that and I think the best way to account for it is accuracy and common inspiration because otherwise it's not just a few random parallels it's this elaborate thing when uh when I got uh the great Angel after I read it then I started tracking down everything else she'd written and I was very it was providential for me the first time I went to the uh library in Lawrence Kansas at the Kansas University KU I found a copy of the older Testament that
• 12:30 - 13:00 was out of print but there happened to be one in that little college town I was living in and I you know actually zerox it so I can really work on it but um I contacted her in 1999 and I just I decided when I was just I got her address through I saw the name of one of the scholars that had written a blurb on the one of the back of her books and looked his address up on the net and asked him for her address and this guy provided it
• 13:00 - 13:30 to me and then I wrote Margaret and as I was getting ready to wrote Margaret I had a picture of a bookstore that I'd been to a couple of months before and I'd seen a pristine copy of Enoch the prophet there and I just had that picture flash into my head so I took that as a hint went and bought that particular book and also uh uh the 40-day ministry by hly because she has an essay called The Secret tradition that's covers basically us the same sources and covers the same ground and I
• 13:30 - 14:00 just thought she ventured so put those in the package Cent sent them off to her and um she writes back this is first Contact 13th September 1999 uh dear Kevin thank you for surprise package in your kind letter I read everything with great interest I know very little indeed about Mormon studies so it was fascinating for me to discover these things for the first time you will probably have realized by now that my books are a Serial production the older Testament is the groundwork
• 14:00 - 14:30 for everything that follows and year by year I setting out the picture as I see it unfortunately there was no American edition of the older Testament so many American Scholars have been confused by my work and even misrepresented it because they have missed the first episode so to speak there are also a number who do not like what I'm doing because it questions what they are doing and they have given me a pretty hard time have two two more volumes in press there's a commentary on Isaiah which I now realize uh will be at uh of great interest to Mormon studies this is going
• 14:30 - 15:00 to be part of the commentary 2000 but unless erdman's hurry up they will miss 2000 and there's a new reading of the Book of Revelation dueing a few months from TNT Clark Edinburgh the revelation of Jesus Christ in addition I have two books in progress this is a big map the Isaiah commentary shows that Isaiah presupposes not the Judaism of Moses and the Old Testament as we know it but it is based on the Enoch Cult of the first temple the Revelation book argues that the original Oracles of the book are from Jesus who saw himself as the great
• 15:00 - 15:30 MCHC and so fueled the expectations of his time and that his prophecies were a major factor in prompting the war against Rome you did not tell me about your own special interests I assume it must be in this area but I should be interested to know and what you're working on and I have incidentally an article on the secret tradition in the American Journal of high criticism all good wishes Margaret Barker so I told her then well I'm going to compare the book of marma to your work so I spent uh the first year working I
• 15:30 - 16:00 run across Daniel Peterson at a who want to talk to him after he' given a talk at the open house for the St Louis Temple and asked him if anybody was working on Mark Barker stuff and he uh he said he was interested but he didn't know who was working on it so but he put me in touch with Bill Hamlin who was doing the occasional papers so I wrote up a draft over a year sent it to Hamlin and he sent it back with like five sentences on it that kept me working for another
• 16:00 - 16:30 year and so two years of work and then I sent Margaret a copy of this when it came out and uh and she emailed back she says it came about five hours ago I've read it already dot dot dot all upper case I had no idea that what I was doing was of such interest for studies thank you for sending me a copy and for that matter thank you for writing the book and then after this apparently uh n Reynolds had been working at a project
• 16:30 - 17:00 at the Vatican library and on the way F flyed back to Utah he had a copy of the great Angel and he read it he thought he discovered Margaret so he went into the Farm's headquarters and he talked to Midgley and he said has anyone heard of Margaret Barker and they said oh yeah we just published Kevin's book so and he later told me that my writing the book saved him the trouble so I feel like that this was something that was going to happen you know whether I got to be part of it or not but it was just going to happen so then uh he arranged through me he
• 17:00 - 17:30 arranged to go see her in England and he spent about five hours with her talking about the temple and after that they invited her to BYU so then she went to BYU in 2003 and there's a lot of interaction and meetings with different people there that have continued on and then in 2005 they had her come to the Joseph Smith conference where she spoke on the Book of Mormon and there that was at the Library of Congress it was this huge f audience and they would have these
• 17:30 - 18:00 multiple speakers and then after the the session they'd send up questions and for for that session every question was directed to Margaret I mean it was clear that she'd really she'd really nailed it she she just got people very very excited and since then there's been things like the uh she started the temple studies program in uh London and several LDS Scholars started going there and LDS scholars in Logan started the Academy for temple studies so there's been this cross fertilization of things
• 18:00 - 18:30 that have been going on on uh when she was at BYU she started talking to or Jack Welsh was driving her around and he just started you know they looked up at the mountains and they said yeah and the mountains are like the mountain of the Lord and then Jack started saying well he's written a lot about The Sermon on the Mount as the temple as the temple text and she just paused and started asking more questions and eventually that led to the book The Jack that she edited and she published she said I want you to do this you know like you've done
• 18:30 - 19:00 for Illuminating the sermon at the temple and The Sermon on the Mount I'd like you to do that for us and she did you know he he did it and it's just great book and he's he's done more work since so uh I would periodically hear that you know lots and lots of different LDS Scholars have just been in contact with her she's always gracious always helpful uh one of my favorites is when Kevin Barney said he sent her his uh his article on Joseph Smith in you know commentary on on Genesis one and he said
• 19:00 - 19:30 that she wrote back and approved and said the key to everything is what is missing from Genesis which is to me sounds really good but it's just been this this amazing phenomenon um when she went to speak at uh at yoner she was invited by the Orthodox Church in America to go there to speak to the school where they teach all of their Ministry and the the head of the Orthodox Church uh Metropolitan
• 19:30 - 20:00 Jonah was there and you know other notables and had two or three hundred of these very learned uh Orthodox priests and and they treated my wife and I went up there and they kind of quickly sused out that we were LDS they treated us like visiting dignitaries and then after U she gave the talk on Jesus as the great high priest um for the live presentation the first question that was asked you know this's one guy just would I be just look real um indignant and says well what do
• 20:00 - 20:30 you think about Jesus and she said Jesus is everything to me I preach you know this every Sunday you know for her it's a real thing not just an academic exercise but something went wrong so they had to have her read the talk again for the radio broadcast and for the radio broadcast so the first question they asked her was what is it about you and the Mormons and so she said well it's because you know the temple she says they had the if you're serious about the temple you should ask the Mormons
• 20:30 - 21:00 because they have the best Scholars on the temple Barone so she hasn't backed down from the connection what in the slightest um I had a shortly before the the seminar I got an email from um M Katherine Thomas who's brilliant scholar on the church she wasn't able to go to the seminar because she had to be elsewhere but she asked she she just wondered how is this you know she's just you basically come from nowhere and just getting accepted she was elected to the
• 21:00 - 21:30 presidency of the society for Old Testament study in England where you have to know Hebrew to get in you know and then they they had her be the president she's edited several lines of botes um and uh lost my thought there but um oh she how's she goingon to react that was this and Katherine Thomas kind of said How's she GNA react you know she's just getting accepted she's just we show up how's how's she going to
• 21:30 - 22:00 react and she's just never blushed or back down she's been upfront about it the whole time she mentions this on her website and the interest that we've had in this book you know this is the book that got the Mormons interested so she's just always been upfront and been collaborating and she's she's uh she's been in the You Know spoken at not only BYU and and and Logan but also at uh dayi Temple The Visitor Center there she's been there for things Jack invited her for the uh dedication
• 22:00 - 22:30 of the uh I think it first was the Paris Temple and they took her through there for a special tour she was so impressed she just said everything's ancient but the electric lights and then a couple years later for the uh dedication of the Rome Temple she called Jack and she said H would it be too much trouble if we did it again in Rome you look at her websites for those years she both in Rome and Paris she gave talks on being in the Temple you know she didn't mention us but everything she says
• 22:30 - 23:00 because we're so Temple centered it's directly relevant to what we're interested in so um I just think that the whole thing with Barker has been phenomenal and from paradigms are gained on from my first publication on this on I believe that her work is literally the Fulfillment of the prophecy in first Nephi 13 about the restoration of plain and precious things specifically get my handy dandy missionary scriptures
• 23:00 - 23:30 out here it's very specific about what's going to come back okay so it gives the it gives the sequence there's plain and precious things are going to be taken away and then other books are going to come by the power of the Lamb unto the convincing of the Gentiles and the remnant of the seed of my brethren and also the Jews upon the face of the Earth that the records of the prophets and the twel apostles are true and the the angel spake unto me saying these last records
• 23:30 - 24:00 which thou has seen among the Gentiles shall establish the truth of the first which are of the twel Apostles of the lamb and shall make known the plain and precious things which have been taken away from them and shall make known to all kindreds tongues and people that the Lamb of God is the son of the Eternal Father and the savior of the world and that all men must come unto him or they cannot be saved well that's that's the thesis of this book you know so it is a literal fulfillment of that specific prophet y using sources that have come in exactly the same way so it's not just
• 24:00 - 24:30 a little kind of yeah yeah I can kind of see that it's very specific and uh I think I'm still astounded by all of this and to be you know a little bit part of it and it's been exciting to see other people picking up on this work and doing interesting things with it you know like B Larson lately or Allison ffel did some really good things and you know there's there have been several that have been using it Neil rapley has done some good good stuff extending it out so it's not
• 24:30 - 25:00 just me it's people that have really got the credentials David Larson's been involved in doing this too and um so she's she's she's the real deal and um I take it very seriously and one of the reasons say that I wrote uh the 20 years after article for interpreter is because I was seeing a few people that were just poo pooing it you know just weren't taking it seriously like that BYU studies articles specifically where he just kind of you know brushes her
• 25:00 - 25:30 aside um and so I just I had to on my waiters and go after it now I think that's a good uh background like say your interest in studies and you would say like it's not simply like say a stray parallel or two it's basically the bar from the language of Garner and others it's like it's a convergence from all these various aspects of her scholarship Fe of like the temple and that her scripture especially the book of Mormon's pre-exilic background yeah it's the right time the
• 25:30 - 26:00 right place the right Doctrine the right information and it just and it's fruitful it's it's you know things like uh you know that that Jack did with her with the temple book and the stuff that he's done since he's kept working on it you know that was there's that the Academy of Temple studies did that wonderful volume on Mormonism in the temple I think it's 2011 2012 or so and I I quoted from that quite a bit and there's some really good stories there where Margaret tell tells her story and Jack tells his and several other people
• 26:00 - 26:30 about their interactions Dan Peterson all this um so it's the just the fruitfulness of it and that the closer we look the more exciting it gets and the people that are critical basically they they're not giving a close look they're just basically saying well have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on her well it turns out yeah they do you know I've seen it I've heard him I've got I was able to quote from NT Wright you know talking about what she's done and uh and the Archbishop of Canterbury awarding her the her Lambeth doctor of
• 26:30 - 27:00 divinity in the Queen of England you know involved in this and the uh the head of the Orthodox Church writing an introduction to one of her books um you know so there's there are and it's the people that are that really like work are the ones that really are believers you know that really believe all of this is real have a faith in a living price not just as an academic exercise you where you can go to university and and write critical things and kind of tear
• 27:00 - 27:30 apart the gospel and then you know she says then go to the even song um it's it's the people that she gives them a Jesus that they can not only accept as Scholars but they can have faith in as Believers and that's those are the kind of people that like your work that are really into this as as a personal testimony that they have and I think that uh the Mormon connection for her is completely unexpected she said she had no idea and we had no idea either we
• 27:30 - 28:00 just we just see all of this that comes together in such a powerful way the people that have taken it further than I have like b b Larson andil rapley they have you know have skills that I don't but uh so they take it further and so it's it's not just that I saw there was to see back 20 years ago it's it keeps on being fruitful no that's that's good um just in terms of my background like um I
• 28:00 - 28:30 heard of Margaret Barker um I first read her book The Great Angel back in 2004 when I started University and I think it was around this time when I heard about your work and um read the occasional paper in as well so as I said for those who are listening to this episode the occasional paper link below as onside Kevin's auter page on The Interpreter website where you'll see his trueart response to various criticisms of Barker from LDS and non LDS as well but um yeah that's that's kind of a good overview SP do you want to start your presentation now if you probably won't be able to do
• 28:30 - 29:00 the whole thing but we can we can do some let's see okay it's here if you want to you're gonna share the screen with me oh you can share uh you should be able to share the screen okay you want to share my screen yep yep okay I'm gonna share that and we're gonna go with this guy and from the beginning okay can you see that mute myself yeah I can see it so I'll just mute myself and I'll let you out go as long as you want okay so this is like I did a Fireside on this but I say this is just some of the
• 29:00 - 29:30 background that she's I'll go back she she got her her doctorate for a significant new contribution to our understanding of the New Testament and opening up important fields for research she's just not saying what everybody else is saying and she's basically says the Christians saw themselves as restoring Solomon's Temple and Christian theology grew rapidly around this fundamental claim and so then you've got Solomon's Temple and that's built by Solomon 950 BC reformed by Josiah in 621 BC which means when
• 29:30 - 30:00 Lehi was alive I think he was very young I think uh I think he was probably born around the time that the reform began and that he his oldest Sons were born toward the end of Josiah's life and that they grew up during when jeim was King so you'd have Nephi being you know young very young but large in stature so probably around 14 years old um it gets it's destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar 587 or BC after Lei left
• 30:00 - 30:30 Jerusalem so much smaller than herod's Temple but the idea of it and she's making a case it provides the background for contemporary Christianity it's the source and or the second temple is the background for when Christianity happened but the first temple was the source of inspiration and so she's written a lot of books by now and uh she says Temple theology is the original context of the New Testament in so far as the hopes beliefs symbols and Rich rituals of the temple shaped the lives of those who came to be
• 30:30 - 31:00 called Christians in new of incarnation and atonement the sons of God the life of the age to come the day of judgment justification salvation the renewed Covenant and the kingdom of God when Temple theology is presented even in barest outline its striking relevance to the New Testament becomes clear so she says for the temple there's going to be evidence for the temple is a place of creation and renewal these themes Center upon the Garden of Eden which the temple was built to represent there will be evidence for the temple as a place of mediation and atonement
• 31:00 - 31:30 themes associated with the veil of the temple which symbolize the boundary between the material and spiritual worlds and third there will be evidence of the temple as a place where some could pass beyond the veil and experience the vision of God seeing into the essence of all things past present and future of course think of Truth as knowledge of things as they are as they were and as they are to come and then she talks about this is an important one the anointed high priest of the first temple was remember as having been different from the high priest of the second temple cold since
• 31:30 - 32:00 the latter was described simply as the priest who wears many garments a reference to the eight garments worn by him on yam kapor and who is the anointed high priest he that is Anointed with the oil of unction but not he that is dedicated with the many garments and she says this is from the great Angel page 15 it is also remembered that the roles of the anointed high priest and the high priest of the many Gs differed in some respects at yam kapor when the rituals of atonement were performed the anointed High priests they believed would be restored to Israel at the end of time in
• 32:00 - 32:30 the last days so the early Christians who used the Greek text of the psalm 110 becoming mesic priest mean meant being born as the son among the angels in Temple terms this is a ritual in the holy of holies in the place of the angels in which the human becomes Divine the holy of holies represented the state of creation that was both Beyond and before the material creation and this was where the mesic priest was born the rest of Psalm 100 103 has become opaque in the Hebrew and
• 32:30 - 33:00 we have to ask why this might have happened I suggest this was it was because this verse described the making of the ancient mzc priests who were described as sons of God so she can say what was assumed by the New Testament writers was a traditional understanding of the temple rituals and the myths of atonement when the rituals had ceased and the myths were no longer recognized for what they really were the key to understanding the imagery of atonement was lost that's from the atonement right of healing so we've got the crucial time and this is
• 33:00 - 33:30 what she says at the end of the introduction of her first book in 1987 the life and work of Jesus were and should be interpreted in light of something other than Jerusalem Judaism this other had its roots in the conflicts of the 6th Century BC when the traditions of the monarchy were divided as an inheritance among several HS it would have been lost but for the accidents of archaeological Discovery and the EV of pre-christian texts preserved and transmitted only by
• 33:30 - 34:00 Christian hands from the Old Testament then Nephi I just was reading this these last records other books besides the Bible and the Book of Mormon which thou Hast seen among the Gentiles shall establish the truth of the first which are of the twel Apostles of the lamb and shall make known the plain and precious things which have been taken away from them and shall make known to all kindred's tongues and people that the Lamb of God is the son of the Eternal Father and the savior of the world and that all all men must come unto him or they cannot be saved so we have to pay attention to the
• 34:00 - 34:30 reforms of Josiah look at the destruction of the temple by the Babylonians there's been increasing recognition during you know my lifetime that this as a period was crucial for the formation of much of the Hebrew Bible so the Bible says his father Ammon was killed when he was eight now I think it's interesting here just to that Ammon is a Boran name but Josiah isn't why is that who was installed as King by people of the land I think the meaning of that
• 34:30 - 35:00 phrase changes over the years but I think at the time of Josiah that would have been the land owners that would have been the people who had power and influence and Ambitions he launched a violent reform in the 12th year of his Reign either as a response to the discovery of the book of the law that's how second king puts it or during a reform that led to that Discovery during a renovation of the temple that's how sacred Chronicles put he was killed killed in battle by the Egyptian Neco at age
• 35:00 - 35:30 39 father of jeim who was installed by Egyptians and zedekiah installed by the Babylonians there's two other sons of Josiah that had little three-month terms so I I don't pay attention to them much the Bible says he is the best King since Moses according to fredman who wrot the Bible an addition of the deuteronomist history was written during his Reign to honor him subsequent additions to the histories deal with his Unexpected death the Reigns of Jehovah and zedekiah and the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and the
• 35:30 - 36:00 Exile it's described in 2 Kings 2223 with some significant variations in 2 Chronicles 34-35 It's associated with the book of the law which was a version of Deuteronomy and he removed the Ashira the Tree of Life from the holy of holies and destroyed it and it involved public violence against existing priests including destruction and killing and he slew all the priests of the high places Jeremiah observes that your own sword
• 36:00 - 36:30 hath destroyed your prophets like a destroying Lion in thy skirts is found the blood of poor innocence I have not founded by secret search but upon all of these so this is they're talking about public violence and the only biblical account of extensive public violence against religious figures in Israel During the period to compare with Jer Jeremiah's report and lehi's report by the way is Josiah's reform and Jeremiah's called after the the reform began against the kings of Judah against the princes thereof
• 36:30 - 37:00 against the priests thereof and against the people of the land people land of course being the ones that installed Josiah and the others being the ones who were involved in uh in the reform right at that time and you can get that there's a p a chapter in Ezekiel that goes through all of the same groups of people and gives more details on what they're doing wrong and also I think uh Zechariah does the same thing and who wrote the Bible Freedman declared that Jeremiah agrees with the deuteronomic history on practically every important
• 37:00 - 37:30 point and agrees with Deuteronomy on virtually every point that presumes you don't have to ask any further questions about what's important so uh in fact this is what Grant Hardy says he says you know he says the book of woman takes a basically deuteronomistic approach with a frequent you know promise in as much as you keep my Commandments you shall prosper in the land in as much as you will not keep my Commandments you shall be cut off from his presence and then he points out there's that's first Nephi or second
• 37:30 - 38:00 Nephi 120 and 19 additional citations but there's other stuff going on and of course he's you this is Hardy saying he thinks that if the Book of Mormon is anti deuteronomic that's C to the ethos of the Book of Mormon as a whole but he doesn't really engage my work or hers actually so is that all that's going on and I say given that Jeremiah and nephite authors show a detailed knowledge of and respect for Deuteronomy
• 38:00 - 38:30 that implies that any contradiction they make is both deliberate and significant so let's take a look and let's see what's going on this is from Thomas Coon's book the structure of scientific revolutions he has a chapter in there called the invisibility of revolutions he says for reasons that are both obvious and highly functional science textbooks and too many of the older histories of science refer only to the part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the text's Paradigm problems partly by selection and partly
• 38:30 - 39:00 by Distortion the scientists of earlier ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed cannons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and Method has made seem scientific no wonder that textbooks and the historical tradition they imply have to be Rewritten after each Scientific Revolution and no wonder that as they are Rewritten science once again comes to seem largely
• 39:00 - 39:30 cumulative so we have a new history written specifically to honor Josiah and this is important to dishonor those who became who came before our Barker suggestions Unthinkable that the histories were edited to depict earlier ages as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed cannons that Josiah's Revolution made seem orthodox and this is what she said to beu Josiah's changes concerned the high
• 39:30 - 40:00 priests and were thus changes at the very heart of the temple what Josiah purged from his kingdom and from the temple in Jerusalem was not a forbidden Canaanite cult it was the religion of the Patriarchs as described in Genesis first they were to have the law instead of wisdom it's Deuteronomy 46 what was the wisdom that the law replaced second they were to think only of the formless voice of God sounding from the fire and giving the law Deuteronomy 19:12 Israel had long had a
• 40:00 - 40:30 belief in the vision of God when the glory had been visible on the throne in human form surrounded by the Heavenly hosts what happened to the visions of God and third they were to leave the veneration of the host of Heaven to peoples not chosen by Yahweh Deuteronomy 4:19 to20 Israel had long regarded Yahweh as the Lord of hosts of Heaven lord of the hosts of heaven but the title Yahweh of hosts was not used by the deuteronomists What happened to the hosts the angels in the revelation of Jesus Christ
• 40:30 - 41:00 she added references to two other deuteronomic her scriptions the Jews were not to inquire after the secret things which belonged only to the Lord that's Deuteronomy 299 their Duty was to obey the Commandments brought down from SII and not to seek someone who would Ascend to heaven for them to discover remote and hidden things Deuteronomy 3011 Deuteronomy 16 lists the festivals as Passover weeks and T Tabernacles no day of atonement and this is Barker again later
• 41:00 - 41:30 tra tradition remembers that the oil of anointing was lost when the temple was destroyed which means the high priest became the priest of The Many Colored robes rather than the anointed Messiah and Christ both mean anointed so there's a conflict between law and vision and she says this can most can be demonstrated most easily by comparing Exodus 2410 and Deuteronomy 4:12 The Exodus text describes the events on Mount Si the elders saw the god of Israel on his throne presumably
• 41:30 - 42:00 in a vision this vision of God exactly like that scene by Isaiah and Isaiah 6 Ezekiel and John the Deuteronomy text wants none of this and emphasizes that there was only a voice at SII the presence of the Lord was not division to inspire them but a voice giving commands that had to be obeyed the tension between word and vision was also a tension between the new and the old between the law-based religion and the temple based religion it can be traced All Through the Bible That's from on
• 42:00 - 42:30 Earth as it is in heaven page 4 so we get this in sheram of Jacob sheram says Thou goest about much preaching that which he called The Gospel or doctrine of Christ and you have led away much of this people that they might pervert uh pervert the right way of God and keep not the law of Moses which is the right way to which Jacob responds I have heard and seen and it has also been made manifest unto me by the power of the Holy Ghost wherefore I know if there should be no atonement made all mankind must be
• 42:30 - 43:00 lost Deuteronomy has the law as replacing wisdom keep therefore and do them that is the statutes and judgments of the law for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of all Nations which shall hear these statutes and say surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people Deuteronomy 4:6 Jeremiah I think here is directly responding to that verse how do you say we are wise and yahweh's Torah is with us in fact it was made for a lie
• 43:00 - 43:30 the lying pen of the scribes that's how fredman translates it it's a bit harsher than the King King James version the wise men are ashamed they are dismayed and taken Lo they have rejected the word of the Lord and what wisdom is in them Jeremiah 88 to9 Deuteronomy on the law for this commandment which I command thee this day it is not hidden from thee neither is it far off it is not in heaven that thou should say who shall go up for us to heaven and bring it unto us that we may hear and do it Deuteronomy
• 43:30 - 44:00 Deuteronomy 30 11-12 now Baro who is said to be Jeremiah's scribe in the book of Jeremiah and the Book of Baro has this who has gone up to heaven and taken her and brought her down from the clouds who has gone over the sea and found her and will buy her for pure gold it's Baro 329 to30 comparison with baroo shows that the rejected object of the Deuteronomy passage was wisdom as represented by the tree of life in the temple it's from the mother and the Lord it says in Proverbs
• 44:00 - 44:30 she is the Tree of Life to those who lay hold of her those who hold fast to her are called happy and she says in the great Angel reform of Josiah the deuteronomist then reconstructed as best we can from both biblical and non-biblical sources seems to have been a time when more than Pagan accretions were removed from the Jerusalem cult wisdom was eliminated even though her presence was never forgotten the Heavenly ascent and the vision of God were abandoned the hosts of Heaven the Angels were declared unfit
• 44:30 - 45:00 to be the for the chosen people the ark and the presence presence of Yahweh which it represented was removed and the role of the high priest was altered and that he was no longer the anointed all of these features of the older cult were to appear in Christianity and she says she points out the texts dealing with the Holy ones and the Holy One have significant elements in common theophany judgment Triumph for Yahweh Triumph for his anointed son Ascent to a throne in heaven conflict
• 45:00 - 45:30 with beasts and with Angel princes caught up in the Destinies of Earthly kingdoms many of these texts are corrupted much of their subject matter is that of the Lost tradition thought to underly the apocalyptic texts the textual corruption and the lost tradition are aspects of the same question that's from the older Testament okay and she says in the great Angel the exile and Babylon is a formidable barrier to anyone wanting to reconstruct religious beliefs and
• 45:30 - 46:00 practices of ancient Jerusalem enormous developments took place in the wake of enormous destruction great Angel page 12 so the Book of Mormon starts right there in the commencement of the first year of the reign of zedekiah king of Judah my father Lehi having dwelt at Jerusalem first Nephi 1 introduces many of the things that the reformers condemned vision of the Heavenly Council the hosts the throne The Descent of the Holy One the association of the stars
• 46:00 - 46:30 and Angels lehi's first public discourse manifested plainly that there will be a messiah and the Redemption of the world this invited trouble because the reformers had changed the role of the high priest so that he was no longer the anointed that is the Messiah and removed the day of atonement which richly enacts the Redemption of the world the reformers had destroyed the tree of life during lei's lifetime when he leaves Jerusalem and enters the desert he has his vision of the tree
• 46:30 - 47:00 Nephi also has the vision and the interpretation as Daniel pedition observed Associates the tree with the virgin mother of the Lord Margaret Barker often refers to passages in first Enoch 937 to8 that describe a condition and a time of blindness and after that in the fifth week at its close the house of glory and Dominion shall be built forever and after that in the sixth week all who live in it shall be blinded and the Heart of all them shall Godless forsake wisdom and in it shall a man Ascend and
• 47:00 - 47:30 at its close the house of dominion shall be burnt with fire and the whole race of the chosen root shall be dispersed other prophets talk about the same blindness Ezekiel son of man thou dwellest in the midst of a rebellious house which have eyes to see and see not and have ears to hear and hear not for they are a rebellious house Jeremiah hear this now foolish people without standing which have eyes and see not and have ears and hear not Jeremiah 5
• 47:30 - 48:00 Zephaniah and I will bring distress upon men that shall walk like Blind Men because they have sinned against the Lord Isaiah 59 your iniquities have separated you and your God and your sins have hid his face from you that he will not hear we grope for the wall like the blind Barker observes that the third Isaiah attacks those who Advocate deuteronomist ideals that is the returning Exiles backed by Cyrus Jacob also talks about it behold the Jews that Lehi knew in Jerusalem in
• 48:00 - 48:30 the period before the destruction were a stiff necked people and they despised the words of plainness that is concerning the Messiah and and the Redemption of the world that word plainness there goes back to first Nephi 19 where it says Lehi spoke plainly concerning a messiah and the Redemption of the world and killed the prophets and sought for things which they could not understand wherefore because of their blindness which blind this came from looking beyond the mark that is the anointing of the high priest that designated and symbolized the Messiah as
• 48:30 - 49:00 atoning Lord they must needs fall for God hath taken his plainness away from them and delivered unto them many things which they cannot understand because they desired Jacob 4:14 so vision is the opposite of blindness for who hath stood in the Council of the council the were there is sod for the Divine counsel of the Lord and hath perceived and heard his word that's Jeremiah the Lord hath appeared of B unto me so Jeremiah is one is seen he also says the Lord says to him call unto
• 49:00 - 49:30 me and I will answer thee and show thee Great and Mighty or hidden things which thou knowest not that contradicts jeremi uh Deuteronomy Ezekiel and the man said unto me son of man behold with thine eyes and hear With Thine ears and set thine heart upon all that I will show thee Ezekiel 4:40 uh Nephi or this is actually talking about Jacob in second Nei thou Hast beheld in thy youth his glory Jacob for I have heard and seen Lehi uh Lehi
• 49:30 - 50:00 testified to the things which he saw and heard which made him a Visionary man and the great Angel talks about uh there were many in the first century Palestine who still retained a world view derived from the more ancient religion of Israel that of the first temple in which there was a high God and several sons of God one of whom was Yahweh the Holy One of Israel Yahweh the Lord could be manifest on Earth in human form as an angel or in the davidic king was as a manifestation of Yahweh the Son of God that Jesus was acknowledged as
• 50:00 - 50:30 Son of God Messiah and Lord Jesus in the gospels was described as a Son of lelon God most high Jesus is not called the son of Yahweh nor the son of the Lord but he is called lord and when Barker read the book of Mormon and spoke about it in 2005 in Washington DC she asks this question do the revelations to Joseph Smith fit in that com context the reign of King zedekiah who is mentioned at the beginning of the first book of Nephi
• 50:30 - 51:00 King zedekiah was installed in Jerusalem in 597 BCE I am not a scholar of Mormon texts and traditions and I must emphasize that I'm a Biblical scholar specializing in the Old Testament until some Mormon Scholars made contact with me a few years ago I would never have considered using Mormon texts and traditions as part of my own work since that initial contact I have had many good and fruitful exchanges and have begun to look at these texts very closely I'm still however very much an amateur in this
• 51:00 - 51:30 area what I can offer can only be the reactions of an Old Testament scholar are the revelations to Joseph Smith consistent with the situation in Jerusalem about 600 BCE and she says um she's talking about this the Tree of Life made one happy according to the Book of Proverbs but for other detailed descriptions of the tree we have to rely on the non-canonical texts Enoch described it as perfumed with fruit like grap but a text discovered in Egypt in 1945 described the tree as beautiful fiery
• 51:30 - 52:00 and with fruit like white grapes I don't know of any other source which describes the fruit as white grapes so you can imagine my surprise when I read the account of lehi's vision of the tree whose white fruits made one happy and the interpretation of the vision that the virgin of Nazareth was the mother of the Son of God after the manner of the flesh this is the heavenly mother represented by the tree of life and then Mary and her son on Earth this Revelation to Joseph Smith was the exact ancient wisdom symbolism intact and
• 52:00 - 52:30 almost certainly as it was known in Jerusalem 600 BCE now one of the more formidable criticisms of the Book of Mormon was David writes article in the approaches on meles and he says if scholarship recognizes that Hebrews does not create all of its argument by itself but relies on tradition and perhaps even on some unknown written sources in addition to the Bible in some of the places where we have seen the epistle parallel elements in Elma
• 52:30 - 53:00 12-13 but these traditions and sources are in general relatively recent developments for the author of Hebrews not Traditions going back 700 years moreover the traditions and sources found or supposed by Scholars for the passages in Hebrews relevant to am 12-13 are diverse they are not likely to be found in one traditional source and this is what Barker wrote six years before that mzc was Central to the old Royal Culp it is quite clear that this priesthood
• 53:00 - 53:30 operated within the mythology of the sons of Elon and the Triumph of the royal Son of God in Jerusalem we should expect later references to the mesic to retain some memory of the cult of Elon the role of the ancient Kings was that of the mestic figure in 11q milk that is a pre the pre-christian text from Kuman this accounts for the mesic material in Hebrews and the early Church's Association of mzc and the Messiah the arguments of Hebrews presuppose the knowledge of the Angel mythology which
• 53:30 - 54:00 we no longer have so contrary to right the sources do go back 700 years and are unified in the first temple and it turns out that Elma 13 is crowded with other first temple themes that receive no notice whatsoever in right's discussion is the Book of Mormon 2 Christian before Christ Alexander Alexander Campbell in 1831 the Nephites like their father for many generations were good Christians Believers in the doctrines of the Calvinists and methodists and preaching baptism and other Christian usages hundreds of years
• 54:00 - 54:30 before Jesus Christ was born and it turns out that most of the expansions hypothesized in osler's 1987 expansion Theory are based on the same concern Barker's work undercuts this kind of critique by pointing back to the first temple as the root of Christianity Christianity was he to the temple tradition and so was by no means a new religion in the first century now most Scholars including Barker see the Book of Mormon or see the book of Isaiah as containing writings from a first Isaiah dating from the time
• 54:30 - 55:00 of Hezekiah 100 years before Lehi a second Isaiah writing during the Exile and a third Isaiah writing after the return marker wrote the Isaiah essay for erdman's commentary on the Bible which happened because of her Isaiah chapters in the older Testament so she works with the scholarly divisions first second third Isaiah and the idea of an Isaiah with students and disciples she sees the second Isaiah as responding to the disasters of the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in the Exile the second Isaiah declared
• 55:00 - 55:30 that Yahweh was lelon and reformulated the theology towards strict monotheism however the Isaiah chapters in which this argument is made chapters 40 to 47 do not appear in the book of Mor in which Yahweh is the son of el Elon God most high first Nephi 116 Barker has also made the case that Isaiah 53 the suffering Servant Song was composed during the reign of Hezekiah in response to hezekiah's bout with the plague and against the background of the day of atonement ritual see here say the
• 55:30 - 56:00 original context of the fourth serum song and that makes that particular Isaiah chapter available to abinadi Via the brass plates and at a 2016 Fair conference she claimed that all four servant songs were composed by Isaiah of Jerusalem she also argues that the third Isaiah directly opposes the deuteronomists and talking about the heavenly mother she he says it is bad practice to reconstruct the male God of Israel from the biblical texts and the
• 56:00 - 56:30 female from the archaeological evidence as this gives the impression that the lady cannot be found in the written sources the correspondence between the great lady of ugarit and the Lost Lady of Jerusalem is however striking as we shall see that the lady of Jerusalem was described as a winged Sun deity the mother of the king named the morning star and the mother of the sons of el that is the Angels the advantage of having archaeological evidence to support a hypothesis constructed from texts is that archaeological evidence is less likely to have been edited although
• 56:30 - 57:00 the archaeological reports from the first half of the last century show that numbers of these figurines were discarded as rubbish because they had no possible relevance to biblical AR archaeology that's from Temple theology so Barker and the Latter-Day Saints the first quotations were from the great angel in the mid 90s the Farms review had some BCM restoring the ancient Church several other essays First Direct contact was me in 1999 my study in paradigms regained came out in
• 57:00 - 57:30 2002 and then nol Reynolds visited her she joined with my response to the new new Mormon challenge in the the review 141 and2 uh she came to boou for a weeklong seminar and in conversation with John fedus and Lou midley reported that as a student at Cambridge she had read Christian Envy of the temple by H at the Joseph Smith conference she openly spoke on the book of Mor there's been much contact and collaboration since notably several sbl
• 57:30 - 58:00 meetings on LDS topics on the tree of life on Enoch on mesic on nibi on Su and there were several successful Temple studies groups uh meetings in London and Logan up until covid uh several books and essays she had John Welsh do the sermon on the mountain light of the temple 2016 she came to fair and Provo and spoke to almost a thousand listeners on the heavenly mother and their children many OT Scholars use her work including Brant Gardner John Welch Steve Ricks John Fitness Barry bigmore David
• 58:00 - 58:30 Larson Robert boand M Katherine Thomas Allison vonf felt Z nib Peterson Jeffrey Bradshaw Daniel Peterson B Larson Neil rapley Joe Spencer and others and she's fil featured in the LDS temples Through Time video speaking first after a modern Apostle and last before he closes and she's got a few critics and there's notably a the guest edited BYU study in 2021 and I did respond at length and in detail to that so Barker is aware that she is
• 58:30 - 59:00 proposing a new paradigm against recent scholarship that has been of little help to the life and faith of the church in fact the ex very opposite we have witnessed the extraordinary phenomenon of people who spend their lives studying something they are bent on destroying and passing on yay insisting similar attitudes in their students the Jesus seminar is a good example she says the current Paradigm is going towards a non-faith-based study which has no future by this I do not simply mean that study is not faith-based it is based on
• 59:00 - 59:30 non-faith and so criticism does not mean close study it so often means destructive study new paradigms emerge from those aware of this crisis who recognize that the situation is not likely to be remedied by the methods that caused it what she offers is an approach that reveals that the Jesus of history is the Christ of Faith okay there's that and then I will stop my share and come
• 59:30 - 60:00 back oh no that was really really informative I do appreciate it one of the questions I had in the back of my head was like um because you mentioned Isaiah and tur Isaiah to start before he went to your slides is like I should ask him about her scholarship and do through try through Isaiah but you kind of touched upon it like her article on the original saying for the for Servant him which is Isaiah 5213 to 5312 which is's more or less quoting mosiah 14 by Abad and mosiah 15's exposition of it that actually belongs to a Proto Isaiah
• 60:00 - 60:30 Corpus although I believe she herself does not believe in the unity of all 66 chapters she just some chapters should be in proto as opposed to Du her Corpus yeah she she kind of follows that but and when I read the older Testament that was the the thing that really struck me was that she made this argument based on these chapters that weren't in the Book of Mormon so I don't think the Isaiah situation is completely resolved but um I don't think we should just you know pack up our tents and say well that's you know that's Kryptonite for us we can't deal with it I I think there's I
• 60:30 - 61:00 know there's a range of LDS responses and uh I think mine is kind of you know mine's gone her Direction Just because I find it fruitful and promising there's there's some interesting stuff I think some of the stuff we have in the Book of Mormon you know it's it's a translation into our culture according to our learning so um I don't have a problem with it even using some of the language that you know may have been worked worked over by an exilic Isaiah it's for us and it points Us in the right
• 61:00 - 61:30 direction but I don't think we have you know I think we can imagine well you know we could uh there's there's a passage in in Dr in Covenant section 128 where Joseph Smith is saying well this this translation is sufficiently plained for my purpose as it stands you I think if we had take that attitude to our reading of the scriptures we don't have to agonize over well it's not exactly perfect not what I want from an inspired translation you know it's well you're not the one who gave us the inspired translation that Joseph Smith and God
• 61:30 - 62:00 and they've got a different agenda than you do you know you have we have to just step back and if we've got room for that then we've got some wiggle room and then if we're not focused on what looks to us like a flaw and we see the bigger picture and I think that's uh over and over I see that there's that tendency you know it's nibbly or talked about how the big pict pictures thousands and thousands of images and you can take some you know mess with some of the pixels and still have the same basic
• 62:00 - 62:30 picture so I think that's one of the reasons I think that's one of the reasons that I write the way that I do is I'm trying to be a big picture scholar since I don't have the specialized techniques to do some of the detail stuff but the big picture is helpful and dealing with yeah like um one topic um I've done work on here and there like over the last couple of years like C the Isaiah fence and the Book of Mormon like going through like David Wright's work and John Trenton's work I do believe like
• 62:30 - 63:00 that kind of reminds like there should be like a balance between like it being a sufficient translation and like something more going on beyond the surface I like what bran G or these commentaries yes yeah he's like say the use of the Bible in the Book of Mormon he yeah kind of comes to mind as well but like for those you're wondering about like say second Isaiah in the Book of Mormon um at the B Roberts Foundation we do have an article and research on the topic um so if you go on Mormon or.org and kind of go down like the her questions it will be there and there's
• 63:00 - 63:30 going to be like a huge project book more and acronyms coming out for soon as well so so be on Outlook for that but sorry I had to do the play my work face but um so um why I can of understand like say maybe like a mon like SoCal mainstream uppercase o or lowercase o Orthodox Christians there would be like some kind of push back in sparker because you know she kind of assumes like Josiah was not the good guy contr the biblical texts or Le Second Kings and if you believe like say the Bible is
• 63:30 - 64:00 take up new Stu in its totality that can't be the case so understand like say the um push back but um why like there's been some push back by L Saints I mean like I'm sometimes critical of her work but like I kind of see like some people who have never read her work kind of think she's nuts so and among some of the more academic that they things are critical of her um why you think there's sometimes this kind of a knee-jerk reaction because you know we're not in arists um we do believe like you know any Scripture not just the Bible is prone to the works of uh human
• 64:00 - 64:30 errors and stuff like that so A prior should not really be an issue necessarily with us but what do you think there's sometimes like this com out need your I think I think well it's one of the reasons why I use Thomas so much in his book the structure of scientific revolutions is that uh scholarship Works in schools where people are taught using standard examples standard approaches so that's ingrained and and you're taught in the textbooks and your examples and say this
• 64:30 - 65:00 is how we do scholarship and know like say you know like uh Richard Elliot fredman who wrote the Bible you know that which is it's a it's a good introduction to the documentary hypothesis people go to school they're taught that they see that way they're surrounded by people who see that way and it's just people get socialized into a way of thinking that they can't see as a way of thinking they think it's just a way are and I think uh you know when Joseph Smith talks about you know the latterday Saints you know that if he
• 65:00 - 65:30 people just have a hard time getting past the traditional way of thinking things there's there's personality temperament there's uh the thing called the uhh the Parry scheme uh for uh cognitive uh cognitive and ethical grow growth that I use a lot there there's different ways of there's temperament there's training there's just socialization I think some people just get in you know they'll they'll look around and say well here's something new
• 65:30 - 66:00 what should I think of that so they'll ask an expert and the expert will you know just poo poo it but there's not a real critical response you know the the BYU studies article you know if if you look at what he actually says how he actually engages her work he doesn't doesn't engage my work either for that matter they just kind of give reasons for not looking at it rather than looking at it so the difference between ideological dismissal and Paradigm comparison is it
• 66:00 - 66:30 for ideological dismissal that they can dismiss Barker by saying well that's not us a paradigm comparison means you got to say Why Us you've got to step back look at the beam in your own eye and say what's going on here you have to understand it and then you have to look back and forth and say well is it testable uh can you what are the accuracy of its key predictions if you try it on for s is it fruitful you start seeing things that you never would have seen otherwise what's the breadth and depth of the explanation how well does
• 66:30 - 67:00 it fit with everything else we think we know and what's the future promise and if somebody isn't doing that then what what you're getting is ideological dismissal I mean that's you know that's when the evangelicals do it they'll sometimes they'll say well she's just not us and then they'll they'll rush off with just a bunch of Declarations of what their training says these are the the key passages and these are the key approaches and that's all you need to know but there's no real comparison and it's so even though I
• 67:00 - 67:30 haven't had uh you know formal PhD training and I'm just to be in English uh I didn't have any trouble taking on say that BYU studies article because quite frankly he didn't really give any arguments that were challenging it was more ideological dismissal based on an Insider's view saying this is the inside view she's outside well that's easy to do but it's not the same thing as doing a real Paradigm comparison if they did that it might be harder for me but they
• 67:30 - 68:00 don't so I can do it because I can say here's what they say and here's you know what this other information provides and uh sometimes it it's just I I'm a little embarrassed for them sometimes because it just seems like it's it's more based on on social conditioning rather than a genuine inquiry I have to say that and I I think this what I've got in print demonstrates it no that's cool and you kind of
• 68:00 - 68:30 mentioned Thomas cun B the um structures of Scientific Revolution um yeah I I think everyone should read that book it's it's excellent um but terms in terms of say book because Burker has written like a lot of books and a lot of Articles 19 books so if someone wants to like start going into your scholarship you know um of course like they should read the great Angel because everyone references Dash but uh do you think that should be the book everyone begins with or do you think it depends um most of the people that started you know most of
• 68:30 - 69:00 the LDS Scholars did start with great Angel and I've heard five different top LDS Scholars you know people with the degrees all gave me the same one-word review of this book independently they all said wow that's that's that's Daniel Peterson that's Steve Ricks that's John fedis you know that's people like that they just all said wow but if and but but they're all niop files they're all people who who've got you know a certain amount of background and kind of know what the source is because you know Margaret
• 69:00 - 69:30 doesn't she doesn't wait for you to catch up she's like nibbly that way she's she's off and running at least in that book but there's books like uh Temple theology it's just you know the little 100 page book that's designed as an introduction that's a good place for if you don't have the background that's the best place to start and that was re a couple years ago by T&T Clark yeah yeah also just uh she's got a website with uh lots and lots of Articles and uh every
• 69:30 - 70:00 single one of them is of direct relevance to latterday Saint scripture that's at Margaret parker.com and there's the the papers section it also lists all of her books but just like uh one of the papers I recommend to people is she has one called text and context which is her study of how the Old Testament scriptures were transmitted through time and what happened to them along the way and what's to me what's extraordinary is is uh well she she she
• 70:00 - 70:30 presented that material at BYU on on the Wednesday when she was here for a week and uh Jack Welch was kind of sitting up on the back row and you know when I first talked to him at the start of the week he's kind of guarded and reserved the way he is and after that presentation of the material in text and context about how the scriptures were transmitted he kind of bounded down to the front like a gazelle they given her like a triple combination you know monogrammed and he popped it open to first Nephi and he just started saying have you read that you know first Nephi 13 have you read this have you read this
• 70:30 - 71:00 because they tell the same story about the loss and restoration of plain and precious things you know so I think something like that you you'll get a picture of of uh how we got the scriptures that you know for me I think it's mindblowing plus just uh she's she just makes such good sense all the time um she has like articles on she has one on called belonging in the temple or or now I see there's you know there's preaching there's there's a
• 71:00 - 71:30 couple of dozen videos you know if you just want to watch your talk you know I I pref you know I like to watch your talk but you know I prefer books myself because then I can I can look at footnotes I can Mark things up I can you know where things are coming from I can make connections better that way but at the same time um when we went to Yonkers uh my wife had been listening to me you know talk about this stuff for years and she' she'd been with me before to see Margaret but there Margaret was talking to these Orthodox priests about the temple and how that helps you understand
• 71:30 - 72:00 Christ and my wife that was the one that really got to her you know after she heard just that talk she just went up to Mark and she had tears in her eyes and she just said we have no idea what we have so there's that um there are lots of places to start if you have an interest um I think there are things like um like well with the book uh Temple theology um Joe Spencer in his little
• 72:00 - 72:30 book uh on on the Book of Mormon and other Testament he's got a section in there where he goes through and looks at first Nephi and he says uh he says that the overall first and second Nephi are structured in a way that says it's a creation fall Covenant um Vision you know something basically like that and he can show how that's how first NE first and second Nephi are structured overall but then he goes and looks at the very first verse and he says I Nephi having been born of goodly parents at
• 72:30 - 73:00 creation having suffered many afflictions in the course of my days that's the fall nevertheless being blessed you know he goes on like that and he shows that the that that passage basically gives the structure of a preview of the structure of first and second Nephi and then uh he was impressed because when he read the temple theology he saw that the chapters the whole structure was exactly the same and he said he'd been working on this approach for years and yet here it is in one of her books so I think U I think
• 73:00 - 73:30 just reading her work you know at one point uh Jeff Lindsay was asking me about some of the quotes I was using just just from her books when I was kind of going through her career in the first part of 20 years after paradigm's regained he said do you need to explain some of this more and I said no I think it take a pretty obtuse reader not to see the relevance you know if I'm just quoting something from you know several of her key books and articles and you see where she's going to go with this stuff I don't know how you could not be excited because it seems to me
• 73:30 - 74:00 it's just obvious no that's cool uh before we kind of ends um are you working on anything or do you know Burker is working on anything at the moment um well I know she's working on her book on uh she had you know a Health crisis a few months ago she so she's kind of slowed down but she's she's doing okay now um she's working on her her book on the Jordan uh the Jordan books and I know those are very controversial and indeed some of
• 74:00 - 74:30 the bloggers that have spoken out against the Jordan books been LDS um which is kind of interesting too but at the same time she says they they may be you know copies of originals but she sees them as going back to uh time of Isaiah in the first temple and I I think it's real interesting what she's come up with there's a a very good presentation at the Academy for temple studies it's that's the organization where she explains that and that's kind of a preview of where things will be going um for myself uh I did a
• 74:30 - 75:00 review for interpreter a few months ago of the first the first response to uh Grant Hardy's annotated Book of Mormon which I think is It's a Wonderful book and great Tool uh but at the same time his basic approach was to defer to biblical scholarship and the you know mainstream conclusions and since we're not mainstream there's going to be some tensions so I just sent off another 30,000 words uh to interpreter to see
• 75:00 - 75:30 about you know that going in so that's currently with the editors and we'll see what happens to it cool like for to reading this so that's good but uh yeah thanks again for Kevin really do appreciate you coming on giving like CD Pro burer barer side of things um it's it's always my pleasure yeah well really do appreciate your time and also a link to the previous episode you were on with me just over a year ago where you uh give an overview of your response to Dan Vogal truth and Method kind ofo because he's kind of going on the live stream as we speak now critiquing The Book of
• 75:30 - 76:00 Mormon again so uh that'll be fun okay but yeah really thanks for coming on i' really do appreciate I do look forward to reading your um the link to yes you've just made The Interpreter once it gets uh published so okay yeah I look forward to seeing more of your work because you know you're one of the good ones some dispute that thank you oh well no it's it's good stuff I like seeing what you've done and I'm excited you told me you were working on some of John Tess's material to bring that to light so yeah um I came AC yeah I came across
• 76:00 - 76:30 like he's unpublished Old Testament notes he t uh used when he was teaching seminary or Institute so um I gave him to Jeff Brad she to see what he wants to do hi doggy but uh yeah so um and also like some other stuff um I came across like he's the unpublished few chapters of his book on textual criticism of the Bible so I'm trying to track down the entirety of the manuscript um as well so yeah I think it's and so I I was really excited when you told me you're doing that because I you know kind of worried about some of this stuff he said he had a book uh project called ancient text
• 76:30 - 77:00 and Mormonism or or something Mormon in the ancient world Joseph Smith in the ancient yeah Joseph Smith in the ancient world yeah that that hadn't seen Prince so I'm glad that that you're working on that yeah so well hopefully that will see the light of day sometime and it won't take one Eternal round but uh with that thanks again Kevin for coming on really do you appreciate it and um Hopey we'll have you on again in the near future as well there some other topic but until then take care and thanks again okay thank
• 77:00 - 77:30 you okay folks that was the live stream by Kevin Christensen I hope you enjoy that um yes when he was when he said Orthodox in Yonkers he means Eastern Orthodox I believe it's the Russian Uh Russian Orthodox church outside Russia Rog core but yeah Orthodox is in eastn Orthodox where she spoke in yers uh just a reminder tomorrow probably at 500m Utah time I will have the review of the Trent
• 77:30 - 78:00 horn James wi debate on solo scriptura um I might be joined by a Baptist um who's looking into Mormon claims um might actually have two as well but beyond that I'll look for that I think I might be John by Travis Anderson and or Sarah Allen discuss that as well and in the unlikely case someone actually knows Tren Horn's contact if you want to make him aware of this if he wants to come on he can hand as well not going to happen but as I said um that was a pro pro maret Barker con deistic reform episode hopefully sometime later
• 78:00 - 78:30 this year I will have the other side of the kind and informed person in this case a BYU professor who is critical Barker um who actually does know who stuff when it comes to the book of J on me as well will be um coming on as well so just to get a balance there but I hope you enjoy the episode and as I said there'll be a stream tomorrow of VI the solar script debate from last week 5:00 p.m Mountain Standard time um I might change that to 400 p.m. or 6 p.m. because I do have a important phone call in the evening but you'll see the
• 78:30 - 79:00 announcement and until then good long prosper