Commenting on 1 Nephi 13 (cf. 1 Nephi 11-14):
What Was Lost, When, From
Where
A careful reading yields three
observations.
First, the great and abominable
church is identified as a historical agent, operating after the time of the
twelve apostles. Doctrine and Covenants 86, given to Joseph Smith in December
1832, describes the parable of the wheat and tares in apostasy terms. After
identifying the apostles as the sowers of the seed, the revelation continues, “And
after they have fallen asleep the great persecutor of the church, the apostate,
the whore, even Babylon, that maketh all nations to drink of her cup, in whose
heart the enemy, even Satan, sitteth to reign” (D&C 86:3). The timing is
specific. After the apostles. After the gospel went forth from Jewish apostolic
hands in purity. After the book left the hands that wrote it.
This means the great and
abominable church is not an Old Testament problem. The Old Testament was
already in circulation, in Hebrew and in Greek (the Septuagint), centuries
before the apostles. Nephi’s vision shows the book proceeding forth from Jewish
apostolic hands in purity, which means the Old Testament reached the apostolic
generation intact. Whatever the great and abominable church did, the Old Testament’s
textual transmission to the apostles was sound.
Second, what is lost is
identified by content. The verses repeat two things: part of the gospel and the
Lamb, and covenants of the Lord. The losses are theological and covenantal,
focused on teachings and ordinances. Robert J. Matthews, the Brigham Young
University scholar who spent decades on the Joseph Smith Translatoin, suggested
two distinct processes at work in the Bible’s history: a deliberate corruption
by agents intent on perverting the right ways of the Lord, and the ordinary
gradual variants that arise from copying and translation, Matthews identified
the deliberate corruption with the great and abominable church, and the gradual
variants with the normal scribal and translational difficulties scholars
discuss. The two processes are different in kind. Nephi’s vision is about the
first.
Third, the process happens
through hands across time. The phrase in verse 28 is “through the hands of the
great and abominable church.” It describes a process, with the book moving from
one set of hands to another across the post-apostolic period. Lori
Driggs, in a Brigham Young University essay on the vision, has noted that the
phrase suggests a process unfolding over time, through many people and
influences. The vision describes a diachronic process of loss, with multiple
agents acting in turn across the centuries.
A Latter-day Saint reader who
holds these three observations together has a careful reading. The losses are
post-apostolic theological in nature, and unfold across time. The vision
focuses on what happened to the gospel of the Lamb after the apostles, with the
Old Testament Hebrew text occupying a different position in the picture. (Taylor
Halverson, The Book Jesus Trusted: Why Latter-day Saints Can Receive the Old
Testament with Confidence [Line of Sigh Publishing, 2026], 105-6)
