Christmas confusion: the divine birthday

Current apostle Dave Bednar stated in the April General Conference of this year that the date of Jesus' birth is known by revelation to be April 6. That's the same day James Talmage believed was Jesus' birthday, but is it Jesus' birthday?

It must be - Dave said it was revelation.

But not everyone agrees. In fact it looks like Dave can take his revelation and smoke it because he was dead wrong. Or Joseph Smith was. Or Joseph's scribe was. It's very mysterious.

When the historical facts and the scriptural text are considered, it appears Jesus was probably born in early December. I hope that means that December 5 will now feature a new holiday called Mormon Christmas.

Then again the person reaching this conclusion, one Jeff Chadwick of BYU, isn't a prophet, seer or revelator, so what the hell does he know?

The Bible! The Bible! Who assembled the Bible?

A common pet peeve among Mormons is when someone assumes the Book of Mormon is the Mormon version of the Bible. Fuck's sake, people, "we believe the Bible to be the word of God" (Article of Faith 1:8)! We just have another book of scripture to help straighten things out. See, it's like a pair of glasses - one corrective lens isn't going to be enough to get your vision into focus...

So if Mormons are cool with the extra books found in The Book of Mormon how do Mormons feel about the Apocrypha? Well, quite frankly, Mormons never touch it. Here's what God told Joseph Smith:

"Verily, thus saith the Lord unto you concerning the Apocrypha—There are many things contained therein that are true, and it is mostly translated correctly; There are many things contained therein that are not true, which are interpolations by the hands of men. Verily, I say unto you, that it is not needful that the Apocrypha should be translated. Therefore, whoso readeth it, let him understand, for the Spirit manifesteth truth" (D&C 91:1-4).

In other words, there's too much shit to wade through; don't waste your time. Oh, and don't read the Songs of Solomon either - they're not inspired. Those Old Testament apocrypha are the worst! (But the Book of Judith seems to have inspired the Book of Mormon somehow.) But the New Testament apocryphal gospels are a little trickier. Some of those darn Gnostic gospels actually predate the gospels included in the final cut. It seems as though their exclusion from the Greatest Hits compilation was more a matter of politics than unbiased research.

What if, in addition to pseudopigrypha, there were a huge absence of authentic and essential texts in the Bible? Why aren't the LDS Church and Mormons at large more interested and involved in a revision of the canonical Bible texts? Does corrective power of The Book of Mormon really justify having the wrong prescription in the other lens?

The biblical authors

Mormons "believe the Bible to be the word of God" (Article of Faith 1:8). Does this go for all of the words in all of the books? I ask because Bible scholars have found that, for example, Moses didn't write the first books of the Old Testament, Solomon didn't write the Psalms, Isaiah was written by at least two people, and Paul is not the author of all of his epistles. Those are significant problems, but there are still more.

Are they still the words of God if we know that the author is different than what was traditionally believed? Do we need to treat the questionable books, chapters, and verses with any particular care? How can the Bible's pseudopigrapha not be subjected to doubt? Do we need to revise the eighth Article of Faith? Couldn't one of our prophets, seers, and revelators go through and separate the actual words of the prophets and apostles from those of the impostors? What would remain of the Bible were we to remove everything of false or highly questionable authorship? Would we finally have a bulletproof Bible full entirely and only with the Word of God?

Vagueness of prophesy

I always loved how hard the Big Fifteen emphasized being "PROPHETS, SEERS, AND REVELATORS". The world needed to know it! God's hand-picked team was running our show! The problem is I began feeling uncomfortable when it came to understanding what they were prophesying, seeing, and revealing. I couldn't really pick out their prophecies, visions, and revelations. In the mid-'90s they gave us the "The Family: A Proclamation to the World", but I've already mentioned how unhelpful that piece of work was...

Maybe God has run out of things to say. Or maybe I'm just crazy. Tommy's always blasting God's children with details of the future, right?

"Let me tell you about when I was just a mere deacon - oh, you've heard that one!

How about a story about when I was in the military?..."