Book of Mormon Intro

I have re-read the Book of Mormon again. This is not exactly a news flash, rather, something I do twice a year since 1986. Before that, I read it once annually since 1978 but first read it all the way through in 1973. I have read the Italian and Spanish translations each a couple of times. “Why,” you may ask, “Would a sane person read the same book over and over again with such frequency.” The answer comes only with reading it over and over again in reality and in simple terms, it is not just, “A book.” In my estimation, it is simply the most profound and poignant book to have been written in human history.

By the way, it is not the only book I read either. I have read the Bible three times and the Koran once (I understand that to a Muslim, I have not read the Koran but an English translation of it but, that is ok too). I have read much of the writings of Buddha, the Apocrypha, much of the Pseudepigrapha and the Gnostic gospels. I have read works by Homer, Herodotus, Xenophon, Julius Caesar, Churchill, Marx, Hitler, Jefferson, Voltaire, Che Guevara, Mao, Aldus Huxley, Jimmy Carter, Plato, Yeats, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Socrates, Aristotle, Solon, Shakespeare, Heaney, Keats, Shelly, Milton, Dickens, Payne, Swift, Steinbeck, Llosa, Einstein, Hawking and Kaku and lots of others, ad nauseum really. Simply stated, nothing compares with the Book of Mormon for content and relevance.

Since I first started to read and then immediately re-read the book each year, sometimes a page per day and sometimes ten or twenty, the book has overwhelmed me with its contemporary relevance. Joseph Smith translated the sacred volume by the gift and power of God and hence, it is not so much a translation as it is the word of God spoken directly to us in our own language of modern times. Indeed, even the strange names in the book were each spelled out by Joseph Smith to avoid misunderstandings by his scribes. These people spoke a vernacular of Hebrew with Egyptian overprint, much like the Jews at Elephantine Egypt but corrupted by time and separation until the book itself says that no one knew their language… Hence, Joseph Smith’s need for the support of God to translate it was met and we have this remarkable volume essentially direct from God to us and to serve as a guide to us. I love it and treasure it above all other books.

As a result, I have decided to create this Blog and dedicate the space to my thoughts on the Book of Mormon this year.