Transcript of John Welch’s Classes on Book of Mormon (Sixth Series.). Sept 2017 to Oct 2017
BoM 6 Chiasmus Jubilee and President Monson’s plea –170907T
Chiasmus Jubilee
Well it is good to be back home! …..It has been an amazing summer for me. I hope it has been for you also. Since many of you always ask, So what have you been doing, I thought I should maybe take a few minutes at the beginning of class to talk about the Chiasmus Jubilee.
How many of you were able to go to the Chiasmus Jubilee? About half of you. Wonderful. Would you like to see some of the things and get a little back-story on some of what went on there?
Then I wondered, what should we start with tonight after we have finished some of that, and I thought back to a devotional that I was asked to give at the LDS Business College. Do any of you know much about the LDS Business College? You know where it is? It is in Salt Lake City. Any idea how many students they have there? About 2500. And how many different countries are represented in their student body? More than one – about sixty. And what happens, I think, is that a lot of these students joined the Church, some of them that I talked to came from the Philippines, some from the Ukraine and they come to Salt Lake City – I think they get scholarships.They are encouraged, they have friends here who bring them, and they get trained in business: how to do entrepreneurial startups, how to run businesses, and most of them will, we think, go back to their countries that they have come from and help to be a strength and an organizing force in their home countries.
Well it was a privilege to speak to them and I wondered, what should I say? I had been asked to give the Tuesday morning devotional.It was in June and a clear impression that I received was talk about President Monson’s last Conference talk. It was short. You can get the whole thing on one page. So as I thought well what should we start with, with this new season of classes in our scripture study, the answer was the same. Let us start with President Monson and talk specifically about what you think you can do to follow his counsel.Your answer will be different than the answer that I think was given to those students, how they felt. That is how I wanted to finish the class today with talking about that.
Book of Mormon Central and KnoWhys
In addition, we are going to talk a little bit about Book of Mormon Central. How many of you are now on the Book of Mormon Central weekly material? Some of you? I have hereBook of Mormon Central business cards.On the back, it has my name but it also has all of the web address, the Facebook, YouTube, things that we are putting lots of Book of Mormon material out on the web.If you would like to take ten of these, they are just up here, pass them around, and pass them out. If people say, What are you doing to study the Book of Mormon? I use Book of Mormon Central and it is really taking off.
Just a couple of days ago, Covenant Communication published, Knowing Why. This is the first 137 KnoWhys and there are some books out on the back as you came in, so let me pass these around and just let you get a look at the book. Covenant printed 5000 copies of this. Grandin published 5000 copies of the first edition of the Book of Mormon. So a word from our sponsor. If you would like to purchase a copy of this book or Opening the Heavens, which came out last Spring, right? Some of you have seen this but it has new charts and it is all updated with Joseph Smith Papers references to all the footnotes. These are all of the primary sources for the six key events in the Restoration: the First Vision, translation of the Book of Mormon, restoration of the priesthood, the events in the Kirtland Temple and the falling of the mantel of Joseph Smith on Brigham Young – all of the primary sources here.
So you have these two books and here is the deal: the deal on this page – we can only do this tonight but we will bring the books next week, but if you will turn them in, deal number one is what I think most of you will probably want but if you want the KnoWhybook, you can get as many as you like for $30 a book – normally $35 plus sales tax – no sales tax here. Opening the Heavens - $20 apiece. Now, I hope that you will all donate a little bit to Book of Mormon Central. One of the things, for example, that we are doing with these KnoWhys now is we are translating them all into Spanish and our following in Spanish speaking parts of the United States especially, Mexico all the way down through South America, is enormous. We have almost as many people viewing the KnoWhys in Spanish as we do in English now – not quite, but that is how hungry they are. They have never seen this kind of material. They do not have these books. They do not even have commentaries written in Spanish about the Book of Mormon and so a little donation will help.And who will it help? It will help members of the Church who are working for us in Pueblo, Mexico translating this as native Spanish speakers. We just think this is a great service.
Now if you really want to donate, deal two, donate $100 and then you get the KnoWhy books for $22 apiece and Opening the Heavens for $15 apiece. So you have come to the factory outlet and this is a factory outlet deal and with that, I will not say anymore but this is our word from our sponsor. The address that we will need, if you have a check and want to give it to me after class, that is fine. If you want to use a credit card then we need to have an email address and a telephone number and we will call you and get the credit card number. I think whatever contact information would work the best. But the books will be delivered here. Otherwise, shipping and handling gets really complicated. Make out the checks to Book of Mormon Central. Any questions about that? I hope you are all okay with that.
(Question) Is the $100 tax deductible?
Yes. It is a 501C3 public charity and none of this money goes into any private pockets, especially not mine. I just donated two football tickets for Saturday night’s football game for fund-raising efforts for Book of Mormon Central. I do not know what the street value of them might be. But I plan to deduct the cost.
For those of you who went to the Jubilee, you will recognize some of these pictures.What we have here on this background is, of course, Alma chapter 36 and the chiasmus with the Greek letter chi.Some people ask me where does the word chiasmus come from? And somebody asked, Does it have anything to do with a chasm? No. The Greek word chiázō means to mark something with an X, meaning that it is important. So when the Greek writers put an X by something in the margin, that was to help draw attention to it. Also, one of the meanings of the word chiázō means to write a chiasm. They actually had a rhetorical term in the ancient world; people have asked me, How do you know whether these ancient people knew what chiasmus was? And one of the answers to that question is, they had a rhetorical, technical term that they used for it. So we have seven different authors who used that term throughout the Hellenistic period. So we use the chi there to do that.
Now why fifty years? Well August 16th was the day when this all happened and that was exactly fifty years from the day that the first Book of Mormon chiasm was discovered. Not only did we have that big Jubilee, but on the Tuesday and Wednesday – Wednesday was the 16th, and on the 15th and 16th, we had a conference. We invited people and they came from all over the country; some came from foreign countries, from Canada, we had people like Gary Rendsburg, a Jewish scholar – he uses chiasmus in studying the Book of Genesis, the whole story of Joseph in Egypt is written in a chiastic framework. He is also interested in showing how Genesis uses some of the same structures that we find in things like the Gilgamesh Epic, which was the standard, kind of the national saga of the ancient, near-eastern cultures in Babylon and Syria. So this again was a style of writing that was well-known, enough known that people who wanted to tell their story – the Jews wanting to tell their story of origin, would likely have turned to that because that would have been recognizable and feel good to people in that ancient world. So Gary Rendsburg talks about that kind of thing.
Now this is Father George Ulokozeel, he is a Jesuit Priest and he came all the way from India and he is holding here a copy of his book that I have right here which is – how many pages long? About 600 pages long? – 728 pages long on the Gospel of John, analyzed meticulously using chiasms. So a lot of people ask me, Are Mormons the only ones who care about chiasmus? Absolutely not. We also have a slide where we did a chart – I love charts, as you know – we charted out how many publications about chiasmus there were inthe 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and every decade.Starting right about fifty years ago when chiasmus was discovered in the Book of Mormon, it was right at the leading edge of a wave of accelerating interest in chiasmus, not just from our perspective, but lots of other people. In a way, when we have someone like Father George who did his doctoral dissertation at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, his first edition was in 1987, so this is thirty years ago. When he sees chiasms in the Book of Mormon, he thought, This is a wonderful text. I could read this. I can understand this. I can appreciate what an impressive, masterful composition this is. He has no idea, he is learning. We gave him copies. He did not know anything about the Book of Mormon when he came to Provo, except that he knew that I had been the editor of this book, Chiasmus in Antquity which he quotes heavily and he wanted to come to meet me because he depends on it so much in his scholarship.Now he has done a second edition of his book, and he just loved being here. After the Jubilee, he was one of the first ones up to just stand and hug me and say, God has brought us together.We understand the meanings of the word of God because of our attention to the details of how these words are put together. What an experience to have people like that come to Provo, Utah to help celebrate an event that means a lot to us, but to other people as well.
And did they come!We even had an overflow room.I do not know if any of you ended up in the overflow room, some of you, but we filled the Joseph Smith Auditorium. At first we thought we were only going to use the Joseph Smith Auditorium for the Jubilee, the Wednesday night, but we had so many people who wanted to come to all of the papers that were presented on Tuesday and Wednesday, that we had to move out of the library auditorium into the Joseph Smith Auditorium for that too. Now we did not fill it for all of those papers, but on some of them, we had 250 to 300 people there, and never fewer than 150 or 200.It was a respectable audience. And you know these people who came from Canada, Baptists who came from Pennsylvania, a minister who has published on chiasmus in the Gospel of Luke, a minister from Michigan, these people go to conferences that I go to, academic conferences on biblical literature. Guess how many people are usually in the room when we speak? Well, if you take out the other people who are presenting at the same session and their friends, it is about two. Usually if you have twenty people in a room, that is an impressive showing. How do you think they felt when all of you people came to welcome them, to listen to them, appreciate them, to speak in front 300 or 400 people? I am thankful to all of you for coming. So we did have a big audience.
This was the program that we handed out and I did not have much to do with this, but somebody decided that the program should be a chiasm. Now opening prayer, closing prayer, that is pretty easy. But we also had an opening organ number by my brother and a closing organ number by my brother. And that was pretty easy. Opening remarks by President Kevin Worthen, closing remarks by Jeffery R. Holland, and John was saying as he came in that he listened to Elder Holland’s comments again, they are available where? Book of Mormon Central, that is right. ( will not play that tonight, but it is a powerful manifesto of where we are in the Church on faith and reason, on the purpose for evidences, and our obligation to present the strongest case we can for the Church. We do not want to overstate it, but where we have strong arguments, it is our duty, he said, to advance those arguments, and there are lots of people who do not know – not just the people who speak Spanish – lots of people in our own neighborhood who do not know where to turn for answers to some questions that they might have.
Now in a couple of weeks we are going to have a Q and A here. Any questions you have will be fair game. We will talk more about that next week, but that is Elder Holland and what a marvelous evening it was. I had no idea what some of these pieces of the program were going to look like, but here is Kevin Worthen, [President of BYU and a Seventy in the Church] he used to be a law faculty member; I was on the faculty when we hired President Worthen, and I was surprised.I did not know, however, that he talked in his comments about how he as a teenager preparing to go on his mission had his life deeply influenced by reading this article that appeared in the New Era in February 1972 [on chiasmus in the Book of Mormon]. Now this was just a couple of years after I had published the article in BYU Studies [on chiasmus in the Book of Mormon]( and Jeannie and I were in England; I was studying at Oxford and they had a little meeting – I say a little meeting because they asked every Latter-day Saint studying in a university or college of higher education to come to a meeting connected with the Manchester Conference, the first regional conference that the Church held. They had nine Apostles who came to Manchester. And you know what? We all fit in one, small chapel.
Well, we have come a long way since then. But in that small chapel, Jay Todd who had just been asked to be the editor of the New Era had read my article in BYU Studies and he said, We have got to get this word out. Would you write a more popular version of that so that especially our young people can appreciate it? They will get excited about this. I said, Well why (unclear) go in the New Era?He said, Well, because the young peoplepeople are open to this kind of thing.I did not ask him, well what about the people who read the Ensign?But it did finally make its way into the Ensign. In any event, the New Era is a good place for a lot of this material.
Now I did – you get the joke here, right? Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon; the Book of Mormon does it again.It does it again; it comes through with another amazing evidence that this book is more than anyone had thought before. Can you imagine fifty years ago how we were reading the Book of Mormon? It was pretty simple. We just were not really getting it. So Kevin Worthen read this and like many people – how many of you remember reading this article in that?Several? Can you remember reading any other article in the New Era in the 1970s? What is the take home message? Yes, it is something that we can feel good about, but people who are teenagers are at the most impressionable stage in their life. They are deciding whether to go on a mission or not. They are deciding where to go to school or not. High school is a tough time for all of us. I like to say, our lives are all divided into two phases: high school, and the rest of our life when we try to get over all the damage that was done to us in high school. That is a joke, but it says how impressionable these people are. Why are we doing what we are doing with Book of Mormon Central? Why are we putting all of this social media together?You Tube? All of these visuals and graphics? Interactive texts? Things that they can get on their iPhones? This is the world they live in. This is where they will read something, they will hear something and it will click with them and they will say, like some of you did reading this article, that is going to make a difference in my life.