Monday, August 27, 2007

Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon

[Listen to this episode] [Subscribe to the MP3 feed via iTunes]

Dr. John W. Welch, instructor of Law at Brigham Young University, discusses chiasmus in The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ. Chiasmus is a literary element common in ancient Biblical scripture that also appears throughout the Book of Mormon. It was only beginning to be rediscovered in Joseph Smith's day, in parts of the world far from where Joseph Smith lived and translated the Book of Mormon, and only mentioned briefly within massive reference volumes[1]. Therefore, it is quite improbable that Joseph Smith knew about chiasmus at the time the Book of Mormon was translated, which serves as evidence of the Book of Mormon being an ancient record as opposed to a modern fabrication. (55 minutes)

Following are links to some Book of Mormon scriptures referenced in this talk, for your convenience:
Video of this lecture is available in English in QuickTime and Windows Media formats.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why is this podcast and the other two by Elder Hales, and Brother Peterson not available in iTunes? I can't play them from the website either. Do you know a reason why just these 3 are apparently unavailable?

Josh Long said...

Thanks for the feedback, Anonymous. At some point the locations of the original files had changed unbeknownst to me. Now that this has been brought to my attention, I've fixed the problem. The podcast feed itself should work fine now, and the iTunes Store play buttons should work sometime later today.