When the Homily is about Immunology

Joe Smith's "holy" spirit can't translate

So "elder(s)" Hatch and Gordon (both I am guessing were perhaps 18 or 19 years old) stopped by my house last saturday. We did not talk long, but they left me a "Book o' Mormon" and asked me to read a few select passages and then pray about it. Ok, sure. They are supposed to return to see if Joe Smith's "holy" spirit has enlightened with a burning in my buttocks...ahem...I mean busom. (Wow, I am in an onery mood today)

Anyway...I read the passages that were suggested (including the introduction) and then went on and read a bit more. Interesting is the 3 Nephi 12:22 verse in which Jesus is in the middle of reusing His Sermon on the Mount to the Nephite people here in America (who are said to have left Israel sometime around 600BC)...word for word.

Now the introduction states that Joseph found these gold plates and by the "gift and power of God" was able to translate them. Amazingly enough, much of the translation is a perfect copy of numerous KJV verses, and apparently Joe Smith admitted that when he came to sections of the BoM that mirrored the Bible that he just used the KJV he was familiar with. Huh...lazy translation work, indeed.

But in the Nephite account of Jesus' recycled Sermon on the Mount, our Lord apparently uses that Hebrew/Aramaic word "Raca" which the KJV (and numerous other versions, including the BoM) leave untranslated into English. Now, I'll not spend much time marveling about how the Nephites (seperated from their semitic brethren for 600 years and thousands of miles) would somehow be still familiar with this term, but take that for what its worth. The reason we often see it untranslated is because no one is entirely sure what it means or how it ought to be translated. You'd think that Joe Smith through the "gift and power of God" - even if Jesus did amazingly use the term - would have cleared the issue up for us.

Oh well. Raca!