Archive & Musings
Barring the discovery of a stronger direct source indicating an alternative, historians should not need a signal pronunciation to serve as a shibboleth for technical versus amateur understanding of her life or of early Mormon history.
A new narrative telling of the attack that killed Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum, based on recent archaeological surveys and all primary source documents of the event.
Considers the claim by Eusebius that Jesus wrote a letter to Abgar of Edessa and assesses the probability of whether the historical Jesus did write this purported letter.
A woman heard that Jesus dined at Simon’s house and broke conventions to reach him.
So much mystery surrounding the “wise men from the east” who visited the infant Jesus. Who were these people?
A tour through study resources about the New Testament for English readers.
So we pull open our trusty King James Version of the Bible to the New Testament and we see right away the Gospel of Matthew,
In my world religions class at BYU, I’ll sometimes present a slide that shows a couple dozen images of Jesus, each likeness looking different
Early in my doctoral program in the history of Christianity, I was required to take a graduate seminar on the first century after Jesus. We
I teach world religions at BYU and I hold off from discussing Mormonism until the last day of class. This allows us a new context for looking at the religious
This week, I had the privilege of meeting with a student group of evangelical Christians who visited Salt Lake City as part of an extended field trip in their religious
Monday was Holy Monday in the Western-Christian liturgical calendar, and my thoughts went to one of the most consequential events in Jesus’s life. The final Monday of his life,
D&C 109–110
D&C 137
D&C 107, Part II
D&C 107, Part I
The pericope of the herders depicts perhaps the most dramatic moment in all the infancy narratives: the sudden appearance of an angel of the Lord and a multitude of the
It’s Christmastime and I’m always drawn to the few accounts of Jesus’s birth (what historians often call the “Infancy Narratives”). Our best sources for the Nativity remain
In two previous posts, I’ve been exploring Joseph Smith’s first vision, and already examined the evidence for where JS prayed in 1820 and what kind of setting that
In discussing how we may improve our interpretation of Joseph Smith’s first vision, I mentioned three prevailing notions about the event I would amend if I could: * That the
Since the first edition of the Pearl of Great Price was published in 1851, its account of Joseph Smith’s 1820 vision became the most popular of the nine contemporaneous