Dr. Daniel C. Peterson [pictured at left], professor of Islamic Studies and Arabic at BYU in Provo, turned to a range of modern and ancient scholars during the annual Joseph Smith Lecture Series at BYU-Hawaii on February 19 in the Cannon Activities Center to show that the Latter-day Saint Prophet's revelations restored a number of early Christian doctrines and practices.
"I have enormous respect for the Prophet Joseph Smith," he said, "and I hope today's lecture indicates just a part of why I hold him in such awe."
Peterson then noted that famed antiquities professor Eduard Meyer, who took a year's leave to study the Saints in Utah, concluded the Church "is not just another of countless sects...but a new revealed religion" which possessed "great and unusual value for the student of religious history."
"Such comments do not surprise Latter-day Saints," he said. "From the beginning they have understood their Church and the doctrines it teaches as restorations of ancient originals, and most specifically of a Hebraic Christianity as yet largely untouched by Greek philosophy."
"But it is not Latter-day Saints alone who recognize resemblances between their Church and more ancient movements. For Joseph Smith, as the great German social theorist Max Weber recognized, 'resembled, even in matters of detail, Muhammad and above all the Jewish prophets.'"
"Writing about the Dead Sea Scrolls, and about the community at Qumran that seems to have produced and guarded them, the Austrian scholar Georg Molin reflected in 1954 that the title 'Latter-day Saints,' although it belongs to a modern religious movement, could also properly have been given to the ancient authors and custodians of the Scrolls." he said.
Peterson also pointed out that the Book of Mormon — "produced in roughly 63 working days in what might justly be termed an 'information vacuum,' by a semiliterate young farm boy who had essentially no access to data of any kind about antiquity — has fascinating parallels in many other documents from antiquity."
For example, he noted that "the account of Lehi's Arabian sojourn after his hasty departure from Palestine is remarkably accurate — in fact, likely Book of Mormon locations have been identified inland from the Red Sea and on the coast of the Arabian Sea — but no scholar in the nineteenth century, let alone Joseph Smith, could have written that account."
"But the Book of Mormon is not the only canonical Latter-day Saint text that claims ancient origin," Peterson continued, listing the Book Abraham that "clearly seems to reach back into ancient materials regarding its hero and his environment to which Joseph Smith could not have gained access through natural means." For example, he noted the Book of Abraham mentioned "the plain of Olishem" [1:10], which is not included in The Bible, but reference to it can be found in an inscription of the Akkadian ruler Naram Sin, dating to about 2250 B.C."
"Similarly — and strikingly, in a book produced by an uneducated farmer at the very time when the discipline of Egyptology was being born across the Atlantic Ocean — the Book of Abraham correctly identifies the Egyptian crocodile deity Sobek as 'the idolatrous god of pharaoh.'"
Peterson also noted several other close ties to ancient beliefs and practices:
- "Latter-day Saint patterns of temple worship strikingly echo ancient patterns from around the world, but particularly from the ancient Near East. As Protestant scholar Harold Turner has observed, with specific reference to Latter-day Saint sanctuaries and their ancient prototypes, temple architecture and temple functions are quite distinct from those of ordinary meeting houses."
- "Ordinary Christians for at least the first three centuries of the current era commonly (and perhaps generally) believed God to be corporeal [embodied]... The belief was abandoned (and then only gradually) as Neoplatonism became more and more entrenched as the dominant world view of Christian thinkers."
- "The doctrine of theosis [becoming like God] occurs in Jewish sources, as well. Consider this passage from an early Midrashic text: The Holy One . . . will in the future call all of the pious by their names, and give them a cup of elixir of life in their hands so that they should live and endure forever. . . . [and He will also] reveal to all the pious in the world to come the Ineffable Name with which new heavens and a new earth can be created, so that all of them should be able to create new worlds." Or, as St. Justin Martyr, killed in A.D. 63, wrote: All men are deemed worthy of becoming gods, and of having power to become sons of the highest.
"There is more, much more, that could be said about the restitution of ancient Christian doctrines in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," Peterson said. "Suffice it to say that, for these and many other reasons, Latter-day Saints rejoice in their Church, the doctrines it teaches, and the ordinances it administers as restorations of what was had among the saints of early Christianity and the patriarchs and prophets of ancient Israel."
— Photo by Ian Nitta