The Written Records

Jesus didn’t write any scriptures.  The apostles didn’t write the gospels down as things were happening.  They didn’t sit in that upper room during Pentecost, making sure they got everything written down so they could go out and organize the church of Christ based on the authority of their scriptures.

The point with written scriptures is that they must be understood as the product of believers in Christ organized as his church – not what believers in Christ need to use to become organized as his church.  The written records are the trail that’s left behind – not the hand guiding us through.

The scriptures are just printed ink on processed wooden pulp.  Destroy every copy of the written word of God – and it wouldn’t do a thing.  Because a group of believers in Christ would just produce more scriptures.  Only dead congregations, who have no real connection with God through the spirit of prophecy and revelation, would be scrambling – because they lack the ability to produce anything new.  They can only re-tell the stories they’ve inherited from a by-gone generation.

It’s essentially idolatry [see, Making an Image out of God] – to look at the image that’s pointing and cling to and serve it, rather than to Look, Follow, and Live [see, ...and the labor which they had to perform was to look...].

The church of Jesus Christ is not established on scriptures:

A book cannot authenticate itself.  It takes an outside authority to do that.  Written records become “scripture” when the church of Christ covenants to be bound to that written record by common consent.  That means that the 66 books that make up the King James canon have authority as “the Bible” by virtue of the Catholic Church’s word alone – not by virtue of them simply being “the Bible”.

Further, you accept the English word-choice of the King James translation by virtue of the word of the Church of England alone – God did not dictate the creation story to Moses, or the epistles to Paul using 1611 English words.

The reason the King James text is also known as “The Authorized Version” is because, prior to its commission – there were many attempts by English commoners [i.e., not clergy or royalty] to translate the Bible into English [the language of the unlearned common-folk].  This threatened the power of the elites – who believed that the translations of the commoners did not, “conform to the ecclesiology and reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and its beliefs about an ordained clergy.”

So, a new state-sanctioned English translation was commissioned that would render phrases in such a way as to justify and legitimize the hierarchical authority of the crown and of the church.  And it would be the only one “Authorized” by the state and the church for use.

Joseph Smith’s view of the bible:

• It can be ambiguous,

“The teachers of religious understood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible.”

This ambiguity in the meaning of revelations happens when interpreters make false assumptions about the Bible and then just start guessing away at the correct interpretation.

They’ll assume the scriptures are cryptic [that they’ll say “A”, when they really mean “X”], are relevant [that all the narratives can be applied as personal lessons], and are perfect [that there are no contradictions, missing pieces, or extraneous material].  Their guessing either takes place horizontally [applying the past to the present] or vertically [applying the physical to the spiritual].

The meaning of the word of God should not be guessed at in this way.  Guessing is what Laman and Lemuel did.  Guessing is what Judeans did with Jesus’ parables.  Guessing is what the brethren at Jerusalem did [see, And they understood me not, for they supposed].  The meaning of scripture [in a gospel context] has only one signified attached to it.  And there is only one way to “figure out” what it means –to ask God what it signifies.

• irrelevant,

“The Bible contains revelations given at different times to different people under different circumstances.”

The blessings promised in the scriptures pertain to the people to whom they were spoken.  The laws outlined in the scriptures were tailored to the conditions under which they were given.

For example, at Wheat & Tares I commented on the definition that “hot drinks” in D&C 89 means “tea and coffee”.  The standard interpretation used by the church in regards to verse 9:

and again
hot drinks are not for the body
or belly

[D&C 89:9]

says that Joseph and Hyrum Smith all told members that “hot drinks” meant “tea and coffee”.  Sounds pretty straight-forward.

But – so what if Joseph or Hyrum in fact did say that “hot drinks” meant “tea and coffee” to this-or-that member back in the 1830’s?  That’s all well-and-good because that’s what the saints were in the habit of drinking hot at the time the revelation was given.  Brigham Young reasoned:

I have heard it argued that tea and coffee are not mentioned [in D&C 89]; that is very true; but what were the people in the habit of taking as hot drinks when that revelation was given? Tea and coffee. We were not in the habit of drinking water very hot, but tea and coffee — the beverages in common use.

Now – to follow his reasoning – if the saints ended-up falling out of the habit of drinking tea and coffee hot and started drinking other things hot or started drinking tea and coffee cold — then the revelation still calls us to be guided by the general concept of avoiding the habitual drinking of hot liquids [rather than be bound to the specific conceptions of tea and coffee per se].

The revelation meant “tea and coffee” for them [because that’s what they were in the habit of drinking hot] — but it does not necessarily mean that for us today [if we get in the habit of drinking other liquids hot or drinking tea and coffee cold].

When the Lord said “Don’t drink hot drinks,” Joseph/Hyrum rightly took a look at what the saints were in the habit of drinking hot at that time — and they concluded that it was tea and coffee — so the leaders rightly taught the people to not drink tea and coffee.  But the interpretation of “tea and coffee” pertains to them – given under conditions where the people were in the habit of drinking tea and coffee hot.

• transmitted erroneously,

“I believe the Bible as it came from the pens of the original writers.  Ignorant translators, careless transcribers, and designing and corrupt priests have committed many errors.”

If our understanding of some particular point of doctrine is based on a scripture that is the translation of a translation of a translation – that was taken from a copy of a copy of a copy – and somewhere along the line [there are centuries between the original and what we have extant, in many cases] a rendering was screwed-up [whether accidentally or maliciously] – then it may well reveal how weak some of our beliefs could be.

Our centuries long history and traditions of scriptural interpretation, some of Joseph’s wording choices in the Book of Mormon, and much our the temple endowment ceremony are all based on the scriptural renderings common at the time [taken from the King James English text].

I’ve heard people say that:

You’ve got to believe that God created the universe in six 24-hour periods because it says it right there in Genesis, ‘And the evening and the morning were the ____ day.’  The Bible clearly says ‘day’.

When, in reality, the Bible clearly says “yohm”, as it was recorded in Hebrew.  That’s a word that could mean a variety of things in English.

And even getting back to the original Hebrew can be more complex than it might seem at first.  The Meru Foundation found that the origin of the Hebrew characters lie in a series of ritual hand-gestures — or sign language.

Also, the Chronicle Project has found an alternate system for how the written Hebrew characters work, and publishes alternate, “original meaning” renderings of the Hebrew scriptures.

• and incomplete.

“Much instruction has been given to man since the beginning that we do not now possess […] to say that God never said anything more to man would be claiming a new revelation – because such a thing is nowhere said in that volume by the mouth of God.”

In The Concept of Race, in the Gospel, I wrote:

The best thing to do is to take it as granted that the current scriptural record we have in the Bible is a pretty incomplete picture concerning the affairs of God throughout the whole human race.  The Bible is the book that’s come by way of the Jew and is their record — and so we find that it deals primarily with Arabians [go figure].

Until the scriptural record is more complete — until we receive the prophets of the other nations, tribes, and people, with their prophetic records that will come forth from Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Pacific Islands, etc. — we cannot speak with certainty of how God has dealt with the other races and if there are promises made to them that we know that of.

Now, I’m not trying to say that we can draw no good lessons from our historical translations and traditions.  I’m not saying all current Biblical teachings should be repudiated.  Rather – it’s that any explicit meaning we’re going to gather from them ought to be accepted with the understanding that it comes skewed.  That the scriptures come to us as time-and-space artifacts of a particular culture – given in their language and suited to their circumstances.

What we have is just what we have.  It’s better to be honest about what we’ve got with our scriptural record — rather than try to pedestalize it into something it’s not meant to be.

Religions become concerned with ethical behavior and doctrine, and using the scriptures as an all-encompassing moral rule-book – instead of being concerned with changing people’s minds/hearts and how they view/experience their world, using the scriptures as a collection of stories that motivate believers to go live-out their own stories.

The problem with approaching religion as though it were a method of relaying ethics and doctrines from “the Good Book” is that ethics only teach us how to live as though you were one with your neighbor.  You learn the modes of action that imply a compassionate relationship with another person.  It offers you incentive to act in a certain way – but it cannot generate the genuine feeling of it.

While there may be certain ethical implications of having made a covenant with the fundamental Reality of existence – such things neither add to or subtract from current pool of human ethical wisdom.  It is not the domain of religion to lay down specific “hither thou shalt come and no further” guidelines for human behavior that transcendent time, space, culture, and circumstance.

Rather, religion is about providing the environment for people to experience the miraculous works of God and manifestations of the spiritual gifts.  Because once the experience is had – the very way in which a person approaches and experiences human problems/decisions will be altered.

The gospel is about that transcendent experience of a direct connection with God — one that smashes a hardened, left-brain sensation of being separate and opens a person up the fluid, right-brain awareness that all creation is a continuous and connected event that we are all a part of .

Next Article by Justin: The Revelation of God in Jesus Christ

Previous Article by Justin:  The Concept of Race, in the Gospel

(What R. U. Scared Of ?)

A note from Stan Tenen

Note: The following is a private message that Stan Tenen sent to me on March 17th, 2010, via my Facebook account, concerning the post Bringing Stan Tenen and The Meru Foundation to the Attention of all LDS [alternate title: Doing what4anarchy's Job] and its comment section.

While searching for something else, I ran into your LDS Anarchist website, and found the materials related to me and my work.

This is all very sad. It’s a sad commentary on the state of education, and on the emptiness of our society.

Instead of engaging a new idea, it just gets picked to death by children.

This is why I’ve pulled away from LDS (which previously was a strong supporter of my work from several quarters) and other religions. People involved in religion — with rare exception — are, as Marx and Freud taught, merely hiding from their own mortality. Intellectual honesty is not possible from people who are “scared to death of death”, and don’t even know it.

For people who don’t understand why I’m elucidating the fluid rabbinic form of the alphabet, all I can say is, you really haven’t a clue about how science is done. I follow the data.

I didn’t know that the letters at the beginning of Genesis would form a particular geometry. I didn’t know it would be a model hand. And I didn’t know it would be related to the alphabet, or any particular alphabet. I followed the data.

The letter-text led to a particular geometry.

I first took this geometry to represent a model light or flame.

Later, I realized that this was not functional, even though it generated shapes that matched all the Hebrew letters of a particular alphabet.

Later, during an exploration of the Jewish ritual of tefillin, I realized that what I had taken to be a flame was actually a model hand, and given the known properties of our hands, everything else then fell in place.

I didn’t choose the alphabet. I found the shapes that matched, and then identified them. I’m sorry if religious believers and scholars have become fascinated by many other alphabets. I didn’t have a choice. When you’re doing science, you don’t force-fit. You take what you find and try to make sense of it.

Anyone going to the trouble of actually checking out more than the headlines of what I’m proposing would know the audit trail from the Canaanite to the modern letters. (I’m proposing two separate lines of development.)

I’m no Newton, but I like his methods. Newton taught how gravity worked, but said he didn’t have a clue as to why it worked that way.

It’s for critics to explain how come one alphabet comes from hand gestures and the others don’t.

I found the alphabet in the letters of the first verse of Genesis. I found the letters matched a particular alphabet, and not other alphabets; and I provided a theory that makes sense of this — i.e., hand gestures are universal among all self-aware creatures. (All intelligent creatures know that when you point to something, you’re drawing attention to it — etc.)

Please feel free to post any or all of this if you’d like.

If there are any serious responses, please pass them on to me via email. I don’t do websites, and I don’t do blogs. (Life’s short.)

Have a happy LDS Passover/Easter. Whichever, whatever.

Be well,
Stan

Previous Stan Tenen article: Bringing Stan Tenen and The Meru Foundation to the Attention of all LDS [alternate title: Doing what4anarchy's Job]

Complete List of Articles authored by LDS Anarchist

Bringing Stan Tenen and The Meru Foundation to the Attention of all LDS [alternate title: Doing what4anarchy's Job]

Some Background Information

what4anarchy and I have a running joke—at least, I think it’s funny; he isn’t all that amused—where every time he mentions the name Stan Tenen, I can’t help but chuckle. The joke is that over the years he has mentioned Stan so many times in conversations—in fact, I’d say that in pretty much every conversation we have it is fairly guaranteed that he will mention Stan—that I kid him that Stan is his prophet, that he is engaging in Stan worship or prophet worship.

Now, although he has mentioned him to me for years, it still took what4anarchy awhile before he actually got a Stan Tenen video in front of me; and despite my teasing, I did watch it. But I think I was really tired from working and ended up falling asleep, not remembering everything/anything, etc.

Well, to his credit, what4anarchy kept after me and got another media production in front of me: a Meru Foundation dvd. This time I was awake. Although it was still the same tall, long-haired Jewish guy at a white board lecturing in a small classroom setting that I had seen earlier, I didn’t fall asleep. My kids did not appreciate that I was spending hours watching this guy talking about “weird” things. They wanted to see a “real movie,” an “entertaining movie,” not some “boring” movie.

It struck me that my young, inexperienced children were defining the word “boring” to mean anything that engages the mind to think deeply, whereas anything that disengages it so that they don’t have to think things through, but only receive visual and audio stimulation, is “exciting.” My own definition of those two words would be quite the opposite.

As I said, this time I was awake.

Afterward what4anarchy asked me what I thought and he wanted to know if I “got it.” Well, I got it. And here’s what I thought:

MY THOUGHTS

Now, before I begin, you need to understand that what4anarchy and myself part company when it comes to “striving with the masses.” (By “the masses” I’m referring to a strictly LDS audience.) He will continually strive with them, trying to open their minds. I will give them the time of day, but the instant I see a closed mind, I shut my mouth and say nothing more. But he will attempt to bait them again and again, hoping for a bite in which some more truth important to the gospel can be thrown in. In fact, he even uses Stan as bait. Stan. Before hearing Stan Tenen speak (without sleeping through it) that didn’t impress me. Now it does. You see, Stan Tenen is on a whole ‘nother level than your average church-going member.

Mental laziness

We LDS (in general) are mentally lazy, just as all of us Americans (in general) are mentally lazy. Stan cannot be watched and comprehended without engaging the mind. So, in my estimation, trying to open up Stan to a LDS is a futile effort. It is like trying to get young, inexperienced children to watch a guy at a white board talk about geometric shapes. They ain’t going to do it! Even if you force them to sit and watch, they will be thinking of other things and will learn absolutely nothing. There is no way children can do it. Adults can do it, but children can’t, unless they are above average in maturity.

And that’s basically what I told what4anarchy. “Yes, Stan and The Meru Foundation research is amazingly pertinent to a study of the restored gospel, despite he being a non-LDS Jew. You know it and now I know it. It will benefit us, but there is no way LDS can be shown this and they’d be interested. It doesn’t come from Salt Lake. It’s about the Hebrew language (not the English language in which the modern prophets of God speak, if you get my drift.) Stan’s a mathematician, not a theologian. This is scientific, not religious. They’ll never go for it.” Etc., etc.

So why am I doing it? Because I inadvertently mentioned Stan in a recent comment on this blog and since I’ve now let the cat out of the bag and since what4anarchy was really the man to talk about Stan but he’s too busy to do it, I guess I’ll do it just to do it and get it over with. But I don’t expect anyone at all to actually be interested in him.

Why Meru Foundation Research Is Important

Stan found a fundamental gesture language in Hebrew, which contains both the one and the infinite all locked together. Using the gesture language alone, he has been able to uncover secrets of the Universe and about God, things which only temple-attending LDS should know. When a temple-attending LDS (that doesn’t sleep through sessions) takes what Stan Tenen and The Meru Foundation have discovered and learned using this gesture language, and then super-imposes it upon the restored gospel knowledge base, suddenly new “mysteries of godliness” open up to view. To those LDS who never access Tenen’s work or who never study Hebrew in the way he has done, revealing the hidden “gesture language,” they will remain perpetually in the dark concerning these other mysteries.

Personally, I think that is as it should be. But in case there are some interested in learning more about Stan and his work, click any of the following video links to open up a new window and see some of the free video nuggets he has allowed out. Then, if you are still interested, go into his web site and dig deeper. Good luck!

The Videos

All of these are on Google video:

A Good Introductory Video

First Light: An Overview of Meru Foundation Research (30:36)

The “Extreme Kabbalah” Series

Hebrew, Ayin to Tav (1:31)

Geometric Metaphor in Torah (1:10)

Genesis is Woven (1:18 )

Genesis in Base-3 (1:31)

Framing Meru Research: Reconciling the Irreconcilable (1:35)

Finding Geometry in Genesis (4:07)

Bible Math: Wreaths, Baskets, Braids, and Knots (2:35 not currently available)

Bible Literalism (1:16)

Bible Codes (1:57)

Beyond Babel: The Gesture Alphabet of Genesis (1:14)

All Letters are from Yud (1:59)

Modeling Genesis (1:47)

Mind–Hand–World (1:31)

Logic and Hierarchy of Genesis (1:45)

Literal Meaning in the Bible (1:22)

Hebrew Flame Letters (1:18 )

Vortex Flame Letters: Separating Sense from Nonsense (1:25)

A Universal Mode of Life (3:58 )

Torah and Pi (2:05)

Torah: A Universal Constant (1:34)

Toku K’varo: The Hand Unifies Mind and World (2:29)

The Tree of Life (2:29)

The Meditation in Genesis (1:52)

The Letter-Text of Genesis as Creation (1:44)

The Letter Bet (1:21)

The Hand of Genesis (1:46)

The God of Abraham (3:58 )

The Genesis Torus (“Donut”) (1:18 )

The First Word of Genesis and the Bible Codes (1:53)

Solving Babel: Universal Gesture Language (1:24)

Self-Reference in Genesis and the Alphabet (1:20)

The Letters of Genesis: A Natural Unfurlment (1:31 on YouTube)

Hebrew, Greek, Arabic Letters from Genesis (1:11 on YouTube)

Introducing Hebrew Gesture Letters

Dance of the Hebrew Letters (34:34)

Next Stan Tenen article: A note from Stan Tenen

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What did Jesus Christ look like?

For most people, the answer is, “No one knows.” Such an answer seems acceptable as there were no known portraits made of him in his lifetime and the photograph wasn’t invented, yet. Even for religious people, unless they’ve had a vision of Jesus (which does happen from time to time), most religionists just don’t know. Surely we’ll just have to wait until the Second Coming or Judgment day to find out, right?

Maybe not. Maybe we already have the image of Jesus Christ.

what4anarchy recently brought me a DVD entitled, The Fabric of Time. It was a documentary that presented the results of all the scientific studies done on the Shroud of Turin, a burial cloth that contains an image of a crucified man in the fibers of the cloth itself. No one knows how the image was created; it is not a painting. Despite intense scientific examination, scientists are still baffled. However, we do know the following:

• It is not a painting
• It is of an estimated 5′ 11″-6′ 2″ semitic man in his thirties, who weighed approximately 170 pounds
• The man was crucified
• The man was scourged in a manner exactly corresponding to Roman techniques
• The man had long hair and a beard, part of which appears “plucked out”
• There are head wounds consistent with the damage inflicted by a crown of thorns
• There is a right side wound consistent with a spear thrust
• Scrapes on the knees and shoulders are apparent
• Bruises on the face are apparent
• The wrists had wounds that are consistent with Roman crucifixion, i.e. as if nails had pierced them
• The thumbs curled under, consistent with a wound inflicted by nail insertion at the wrists
• Two coins were placed over the eyes, one on each eye and from their markings they can be traced to Jerusalem, being struck in 29 AD
• The coins were of equal value to the widow’s mites
• A plaque was placed over the neck in burial with four Hebrew letters written on it, which together mean, “Abba” or Father.
• Images of flowers were also found on the cloth
• The flowers were determined to be those found only in the Jerusalem area, only blooming during March and April, the time around the death of Christ
• The cloth (the Shroud of Turin) is fourteen feet long, half covering the bottom of the body and the other half covering the top of the body
• The image was transferred to both top and bottom parts of the cloth, so that half of the cloth shows the anterior of the body and the other half of the cloth shows the posterior
• Both anterior and posterior images of the crucified man are perfect, meaning the image was impressed upon the cloth while the body was suspended in mid-air and while the cloth was pulled perfectly taut
• 2-d photographic images taken of the cloth have recently been processed and converted into 3-d images, allowing the image of the man to be viewed in 3 dimensions
• Testing is undergoing to determine whether the fibers of the cloth itself are actually holograms, which, if this proves true, will allow complete reconstruction of the entire image (parts of which were lost due to fire damage in the Middle Ages)
• The few dissenting scientific opinions (concerning paint particles and Carbon-14 dating) have been scientifically disputed in peer-review journals, for very good reason
• I’m still working my way through all the bonus features, but I could have sworn that expert, scientific testimony also stated that the body had no broken bones

All in all, the evidence is overwhelming that the Shroud of Turin contains an actual image of the full body and face of Jesus Christ, front and back, processed in some yet unknown way. The mystery of the anomalies of the cloth—for example, the apparent position of the body when the image was impressed upon the cloth (hovering or levitating over the stone slab, instead of resting upon it)—leads the more religious of the scientists to theorize that this image may have been created at the moment of Christ’s resurrection.

I invite other LDS to look into this for themselves. If you haven’t yet seen Jesus in vision, this may be the opportunity to do so. In addition to the above DVD documentary, you may want to visit The Shroud of Turin web site, which also contains the latest research.

Previous Jesus Christ article: How the atonement of Jesus Christ solves the “victim” problem

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