The Gospel According to Jeffrey

Yesterday afternoon, I asked a few questions of my Facebook friends: specifically: If you believe that we (i.e. humans) were created for a purpose, what is that purpose? If you do not believe that we were created for a purpose, do you believe in some form of extramortal existence, i.e. that we exist in some form before and/or after our lifetime here on Earth? If you do not believe that we exist extramortally, what do you believe constitutes a person’s existence? For example, is one’s existence predicated on being alive? If so, what criteria dictate that someone has begun or ceased to be alive? etc. My friend Liana posted an amazing summary of her beliefs, one that matches the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ almost exactly. The crux of her response is as follows: I do believe we are here for a purpose. Each of us come with different lessons that we are working on while we are here. These are decided before we incarnate. Over multiple lifetimes, we work towards lear...

“The course of their travels. They come to the large waters.” So once again we come to the question of “why.” If the headnote features the most important points of his book, why are “the course of their travels” and their arrival at “the large waters” so important to him, especially when, at least in our modern minds, the former is barely mentioned (see  1 Nephi 16:13 ) in the text itself? Well, I’m going to go out on a limb here: it’s important to him . Nephi was a living, breathing, very human human being. As a product of his time and society, the way he writes is as indicative of his life’s experience as the way you or I write, today. When he says, for example, that the Liahona led Lehi’s party “in the more fertile parts of the wilderness” ( 1 Nephi 16:16 ), it’s second nature to him. He knows where those “more fertile parts” are, so he doesn’t need to explain it to himself; and his audience—who, at this point, is still his own family and descendants—would either alr...

“They take their families and depart into the wilderness.” So let’s think about this for a minute. We’ve already established that Nephi and his brothers are married. Those of us who have read the book previously realize that this happened as a result of their second return to the land of Jerusalem, so it would seem that none of them were married before they left. On the other hand, it would seem that at least some of them also had children by that time, else why the use of the word “families”? Everything between chapter 7 (the second journey) and chapter 16 (when they “[take] of the daughters of Ishmael to wife”) seems to have preceded the weddings, which is not tremendously surprising since those chapters consist almost exclusively of Lehi’s vision and Nephi’s reprise thereof, with only chapter 16 relating a different series of events. Thus, they probably spent much of their “sojourn for the space of many years, yea, even eight years in the wilderness” ( 1 Nephi 17:4 ) as married ...