Hank Smith: 00:01 Welcome to Follow Him, a weekly podcast dedicated to helping individuals and families with their Come Follow Me study. I am Hank Smith.

John Bytheway: 00:09 And I am John Bytheway.

Hank Smith: 00:11 We love to learn.

John Bytheway: 00:11 We love to laugh.

Hank Smith: 00:13 We want to learn and laugh with you.

John Bytheway: 00:15 As together, we follow him.

Hank Smith: 00:19 Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode of followHIM. My name is Hank Smith and I am your host. And I’m here with my talented co-host, John Bytheway. John, when I was reading the Parable of the Talents and it said that one of the men received five talents, I thought that is John Bytheway. He is a five-talent guy.

John Bytheway: 00:39 What have I done with them though?

Hank Smith: 00:40 Yeah. What have you done with those talents? Hopefully, you’ve doubled those talents. John, do you remember how old you were when you found out a talent wasn’t a talent, but it was an amount of money?

John Bytheway: 00:50 I think I was in seminary. It’s like, “Wait a minute. What? What?”

Hank Smith: 00:53 Yeah. Yeah. It was a bag of gold? I was wondering, well, what the guy could do. He could speak Spanish, he could play basketball, he could play the piano.

John Bytheway: 01:01 How did that become the other meaning? That’s a fun etymology study someday to figure out how it became-

Hank Smith: 01:08 How it became, yeah, the amount of money became a talent. Maybe our Bible expert can help us out today. Who’s joining us today?

John Bytheway: 01:16 Well, Hank, we’re excited to have Dr. Avram Shannon back with us again. He’s been with us before. And I had an occasion at a followHIM function to sit at the same table. And I could listen to him forever. And I love reading these bios when we hear how far and wide some of our guests have been in studying in their education. So let me share this with our audience.

  01:39 Dr. Avram Shannon was born in Quantico, Virginia, spent most of his young life in Virginia. He served a mission first in the Oregon, mission, then in the Washington, mission after the Oregon, Portland mission was split. Dr. Shannon earned a bachelor’s in Ancient Near Eastern Studies from Brigham Young University, a Master of Studies in Jewish studies from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures with the graduate interdisciplinary specialization in Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean from Ohio State University.

  02:14 And he and his wife, Thora, have seven children. Some of his areas of expertise, I just really wanted to read this, Rabbinic Judaism, Ancient Mediterranean Religions, as I just mentioned, Jewish Studies and Ancient Biblical Interpretation. So Avram, we’re so glad to have you back again. Thanks for being with us.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 02:32 I’m very happy to be here.

Hank Smith: 02:34 John, Avram is as kind as he is brilliant. He’s just a fun person to work with. We have good times in the JSB at BYU, right, Avram?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 02:44 We do, absolutely, have good times.

Hank Smith: 02:46 Yeah. Lots of meetings.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 02:48 Yeah. Lots of meetings.

Hank Smith: 02:49 Lots of meetings.

John Bytheway: 02:51 Every year, we’ve talked about this before. They have this Sperry Symposium at BYU. And in 2021, they had an old… Their Sperry Symposium was on the Old Testament. And that volume has been published called Covenant and Compassion, Caring for the Marginalized and Disadvantaged in the Old Testament. And Avram was a contributor to that. So I wanted to mention that because those books are deep and they’re wonderful.

Hank Smith: 03:12 John, the Sperry actually has been changed recently. Avram, you know its name better than I do. What’s the new name for the Sperry Symposium?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 03:21 The new name is the Come, Follow Me Symposium in honor of Sidney B. Sperry. So it’s still the same thing, but we’re trying just to align it more closely with the Come, Follow Me curriculum.

Hank Smith: 03:30 Beautiful. Speaking of curriculum, we are going to be in Matthew 24 and 25 today, also in Mark and Luke and in the Pearl of Great Price. So we’ve got plenty of places to go. Avram, what do you want to do for Come, Follow Me this round?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 03:45 So, this is, as events by the fact that it’s so distinctive and so used here, this is one of the most important discourses in Jesus’ mortal ministry. It’s both important in terms of what Jesus is doing with it, but it is especially important in terms of Latter-day Saints’ self-understanding, i.e. this is one of those passages that becomes incredibly important for us in the restoration as we work through really what it means to be Latter-day Saints. That’s kind of one of the key notions here.

  04:23 These various passions is often called the Olivet discourse because Jesus gives it on the Mount of Olives, but it’s really about his second coming. That’s actually part of why we have it in the Pearl of Great Price. The Pearl of Great Price is basically stuff from Joseph Smith that doesn’t fit really well anywhere else. So we have extracts from the JST.

  04:46 We have Book of Abraham. We have Joseph Smith History. We have the Articles of Faith in there. So the Joseph Smith translation of Matthew 24, and a little bit of Matthew 23 is the translation of this. And the reason we have it in Pearl of Great Price is it’s one of two sections that Joseph Smith published and circulated separately.

Hank Smith: 05:06 Oh okay.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 05:07 You remember that he didn’t publish the entire, just the new… He called it the new translation. We call it the JST. Actually, we call it the JST because of the Bible manuscript. When they’re producing the edition of the scriptures in the 1970s, the new one, and they wanted for the first time to really include stuff from Joseph’s new translation. But if you put it in a footnote with NT-

Hank Smith: 05:31 It sounds like-

Dr. Avram Shannon: 05:32 … New Testament.

Hank Smith: 05:33 … it sounds like New Testament. Yeah.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 05:35 Our friends at Community of Christ called it the Inspired Version. But you put IV, it looks like four in Roman numerals. And so, the committee, at that point in 1978, basically coins the phrase Joseph Smith Translation, which is why we now call it JST. Joseph would’ve called it the New Translation. But there are two parts that he circulated. He circulated kind of the Book of Moses stuff, sort of the Enoch material that we have in our book of Moses. From the New Testament, he published separately in a broad sheet.

  06:05 Actually, it was a single page newspaper. He published what we now have as Joseph Smith Matthew. And so, that’s part of why we have it is because it was published separately from the rest of Joseph Smith’s new translation. And the reason is because it bears so much on this notion of what it means to be a Latter-day Saint.

  06:27 In the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we care deeply about the second coming. In some ways, the 19th Century, we cared extremely deeply. It’s pretty clear that Joseph Smith and most of his co-religionists thought that the second coming was happening in their lifetime. They were pretty sure that this whole restoration thing was in preparation for Jesus coming back right now. That’s part of why it’s so important to them and us in many ways.

Hank Smith: 06:54 Yeah. So do you want to jump in here, Avram? Where do you want to start?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 06:58 We’re going to be jumping around here. We’re primarily going to actually be in Matthew 24. We will be just with Matthew. There are some key things that the translation does, but we’re going to be in Mark too. But primarily our text is going to be Matthew 24. Matthew has, I feel the most complete and fullest version here. And Joseph Smith really focuses on things for our day.

  07:21 We’ll get into that point, but one of the things I think is very clear about the Joseph Smith Translation is as we read it, sometimes we talk that the Joseph Smith Translation replaces the texts in the Bible, and it’s pretty clear from just his own writings that he did not view it that way.

Hank Smith: 07:39 That wasn’t the intention.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 07:41 That was not the intention. As I read this translation, I think God just wants us to have more because he wants us to know more and to see more, we’re going to think through things together.

Hank Smith: 07:54 Avram, I think that’s a crucial piece of understanding, maybe we’ve talked about it in the past, John, but Joseph Smith’s inspired version of the Bible is not meant to say, “Let’s throw out what we have in the Bible and just read this.” Because I’ve had students ask me before, why don’t we just use that Bible? And I’ve said, “No. It’s meant to be a supplement. It’s meant to be some inspired help for us instead of replacing the Bible.” And that’s something I think is pretty crucial to understand about the… I call it kind of the Joseph Smith Bible project sometimes.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 08:26 And actually Doctrine and Covenants 128 gives us actually a really clear example of this. So Doctrine and Covenants 128, this of course is the letter about the work of the dead and baptism for the dead in the Doctrine & Covenants there. And in it Joseph Smith quotes from Malachi four, five and six, right? And I’ll send the lives of the prophet, the whole thing.

  08:44 And then, this is documents 12018. He says, “I might have rendered a plainer translation to this, but it’s sufficiently plain to suit my purpose as it stands.” So it’s very clear of Doctrine and Covenants 128 here that Joseph is okay using the KJV here alongside his own translation, because there is a JST to Malachi here. He says, “This is good enough for my purposes, we’re just going to go ahead and use it.”

Hank Smith: 09:11 Yeah.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 09:12 Different scriptures can be rendered differently and all of them can be correct.

Hank Smith: 09:17 Yes.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 09:17 Right.

John Bytheway: 09:18 There’s levels of meaning. And I think my son was asking me the other day, is it restoring ancient text or is it more of a clarification? Is it more additional revelation? And I was like, “Uh-huh.”

Dr. Avram Shannon: 09:32 Yeah. And Ken Jackson and Robert J. Matthews did really good work showing very strongly that it’s all of those things all at once. And which means, by the way, in some ways that increases the importance for us as readers of it. Because we can’t just read it as a blanket. We have to take each JST change and say, “Oh, what is this doing? How is this working?” And it requires us to think and have the spirit even more strongly as we read scripture.

Hank Smith: 09:57 That’s fantastic. And to contrast and compare the different versions.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 10:01 Exactly.

Hank Smith: 10:02 Okay. So we’re back in Matthew 24.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 10:05 Yeah. Matthew 24. And the key thing here is the whole thing is in response to a very specific set of questions. This is not just generic Jesus talks about the second coming. The JST does this. It actually includes the last verse of Matthew 23. Remembering that our chapter in verses are recent compared to the, they’re from the Middle Ages. But they’re not original to the New Testament texts. It is oftentimes you read scripture, you’re going to want to read across chapter and verse lines, because sometimes you’re going to miss things. And then, we’re going to say Joseph Matthew 24 and 25 are the same discourse.

Hank Smith: 10:41 Yeah. So you’re saying Matthew 23, verse 39, Joseph Smith-

Dr. Avram Shannon: 10:46 That’s right.

Hank Smith: 10:47 … into Matthew 24? Okay. I didn’t know that.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 10:49 And again, JST actually does this. For I say unto you, you shall not see me henceforth. To you shall say bless you that come with the name of the Lord. And so, here Jesus introduces this notion that he’s coming, but also he’s coming again. Right? This idea, you’re not going to see me again until you can say, “Blessed who comes in the name of the Lord.” So he pushed it to some future date. And this got the disciples a little confused.

Hank Smith: 11:18 This isn’t the resurrection he’s talking about. This is a second arrival, second coming.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 11:24 That’s what the disciples are going to ask him, basically. They’re like, “Well, what are you talking about here? What’s going on?” Because then they, they’re going out, he’s been preaching the temple. Remember this is holy week. So this is Wednesday, Thursday-ish, depending on when you want to date it in there. And his disciples look at him and they point out the temple to him. And Jesus says, “You look at that.” This is verse 2 of Matthew 24. “See not all these things verily I say unto you, there shall not be left here one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down.”

Hank Smith: 12:02 That’s got to be the biggest structure they know of. Right?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 12:05 It’s enormous.

Hank Smith: 12:06 Yeah.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 12:06 I mean Herod had made the temple in Jerusalem one of the great temples of the ancient world.

Hank Smith: 12:11 Yeah. Massive, right?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 12:13 Massive. Covered in great stone. Covered in gold. And in ancient Judaism in this period, again, we’ve talked a lot this year in Come, Follow Me and previously about various Jewish groups, about Pharisees and Sadducees and all these various things. And kind of what we see is kind of things that all Jews agreed on are kind of two things, law and the temple.

  12:35 And so, this idea of Jesus saying, look, you think this temple, whatever, it’s going to get destroyed. Destroyed, so you won’t be able to see it anymore. The two together make the disciples going, “Oh, what does this mean?”

Hank Smith: 12:50 Yeah. I mean when he says one stone not upon another, we’re thinking small little stones. No. These are massive, massive. Like these blocks of stone are tons and they’re one on top of the other. It would take significant force to move all those and get, and throw them down.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 13:07 So which is why they knew they go out and his disciples are like, “Huh? Tell us more.” Right? And it’s actually interesting because in Mark’s version in Mark 13, like I said we’ll be jumping around a fair bit today. It’s actually, 13:3 in Mark, it’s Peter, James and John and Andrew who ask him privately. It’s not all the disciples in Mark. They’re a little bit, “So what do you mean by this, Jesus?” This is a hugely shocking statement that Jesus has made here.

Hank Smith: 13:36 Yeah. Peter, James and John and Andrew asked him privately. “Tell us, when shall these things be? What shall be the sign when all these things shall be fulfilled?”

Dr. Avram Shannon: 13:46 In Matthew, that’s what shall be the sign of thy coming and end of the world?

Hank Smith: 13:53 Yeah. A different set of questions.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 13:56 From Matthew what’s very much framed in terms of both Jesus Christ coming and also specifically the end of the world. They’re also framed as two questions. I’m not sure the disciples think that those are going to be identical events. Jesus will kind of explain this to them. There’s one other thing where Joseph Smith, Matthew had something very key here. Joseph in Matthew says, again, in terms of these different questions we get in Mark and Matthew, Joseph, Matthew has what should be sign that you’re coming and the end of the world or the destruction of the wicked, which is the end of the world.

  14:33 So Joseph Smith Matthew does not understand the end of the world as this kind of zombie apocalypse. This kind of everything ends, the total cessation of all society. That’s not just Matthew understands end of the world. The end of the world there is world, we’re talking about the world versus the church or the world versus wickedness.

  14:57 So at the end of the world there is the end of wickedness and we’ll see that play distinctively in how Matthew understands and how I think we’re supposed to understand what happens at the second coming. It is not the total dissolution of all society before or after.

Hank Smith: 15:12 It’s the destruction of the wicked according to Joseph Smith Matthew 1:4.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 15:16 Exactly. Which is the end of the world.

John Bytheway: 15:18 The end of the world, or the end of the worldly, the end of worldly things because the planet continues and we know that from Article of Faith 10.

Hank Smith: 15:26 Yeah.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 15:27 It’s pretty clear from Brigham Young, Joseph Smith on other places, and actually even from here, from Joseph Matthew and Matthew that society continues, partially because it’s also very clear that, especially in the gospels, Jesus’ primary purpose is to prep the disciples for the destruction of the temple. Remember that that’s kind of the first question they asked.

Hank Smith: 15:52 When shall these things be the destruction of the temple?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 15:55 Yes. JST move some things around because that’s already happened for us. So Joseph Smith is like, “Let’s talk about the second coming because that hasn’t happened yet.” There is second coming Matthew 24. But one of the things I think as I read scripture that’s very clear is the prophet’s primary audience is the people hearing it right then. And then, through the Holy Ghost, we can learn other things about it.

Hank Smith: 16:17 Jesus is going to answer both questions and then Joseph Smith is going to say, “Look, the destruction of the temple happened. That was 70 AD so let’s kind of clear that out so we can focus on the second question. The sign of thy coming and the end of the world or the destruction of the wicked.”

Dr. Avram Shannon: 16:35 That’s exactly right. So as you read Joseph Smith Matthew verse Matthew 24, you’ll see that Matthew 24 tends to focus much more on the events that it play out in first and second century Judaism/Christianity, while Joseph Matthew was going to really focus on those things that are happening at the second coming.

Hank Smith: 16:51 Got it. That makes perfect sense because of the audience, like you said.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 16:55 Yeah. Exactly. And Jesus answered and said, and this is the very first thing he has answered their question. “Take heed that no man deceive you.” At the very outset, and we’ll talk about this a little bit later on when we get to the hour and day of the coming. At the outset, please make it very clear. This is a topic about which there is possibility for deception. We need to be aware of that. We need to think through that, because in Christianity broadly throughout the last 2000 years of Christian history, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, because we want Jesus Christ to come back so badly, I’m right there with them, “even so, Lord, come quickly.” Right?

  17:39 I mean that’s it. Come back, please. But because of that, this is a place where sometimes we get too excited and we can be deceived. And I think it’s very compelling that Jesus starts the whole thing by saying, “Look, don’t let anybody confuse you on this.”

Hank Smith: 18:01 So almost a listen closely type message.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 18:05 Yeah. I’ve got a quote from President Ballard, I think is really helpful on this topic about who knows when Jesus Christ is coming back. We’ll get to that when he talks about who knows when he’s coming back, which is spoiler alert, nobody, basically.

Hank Smith: 18:17 So…

Dr. Avram Shannon: 18:19 But then he goes through and he talks about, he’s like, “Look, people are going to come into my name saying I am Christ.” And by the way, in sort of that first century Christian environment, this sometimes means people saying, “I’m Jesus.” But it also means other people saying they’re the Messiah.

  18:35 After the Jewish revolt in AD 70, there was another revolt about 70 years later. This guy named by the name of Bar Kokhba, son of the Star and Bar Kokhba was actually from a tradition of messiah, messianic context, more successful as a Messiah than Jesus was. I mean not successful in sort of salvation from sins. But in terms of driving out the Romans at least momentarily and setting up a Jewish state, Bar Kokhba was pretty successful. He coined his own money, did these things. I mean he also like everybody who fights Rome got crushed in the end.

Hank Smith: 19:09 What is that, 120?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 19:10 Oh 120 to 150-ish. Yeah. Was when that whole thing happens. And that’s when the temple gets raised. Jerusalem gets knocked down and rebuilt as a Roman city, Aelia Capitolina. Jew’s not allowed to go there anymore. It is a major, major, in some ways the destruction, even worse than the first Jewish revolts.

Hank Smith: 19:29 So there’s two Jewish revolts after Jesus.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 19:33 There are two revolts after Jesus. But the reason why the Bar Kokhba is interesting is because Jesus says, “Look…” He’s like, “There’s going to be other Christs. Don’t believe them.”

Hank Smith: 19:40 Other Messiahs. Okay.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 19:42 Yeah. Other Messiahs. Exactly. And they shall deceive many. Then he says, “But look, there’s going to be fighting.” And in some ways, this is something I want to think through as you do this together today, is in some ways eternal applicability of these prophecies. They have specific fulfillment, second temple, Jesus Christ second coming. But there are always wars and always rumors of wars. There’s always people fighting. In some ways, in a lot of ways, actually, the world’s always ending.

Hank Smith: 20:14 When has there not been a war somewhere on the earth? Right? Sadly.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 20:17 Exactly. And when did people not have to struggle? Part of the whole thing, we’re going to get to this, especially when we get to Matthew 25, is that part of his point here is to kind of help change our thinking a little bit. One of the things about life, I call this thinking cosmically, thinking of the end.

  20:37 You and I can go through our life every day, eating, drinking, getting dressed, getting other people dressed, getting other people fed, doing our work, doing every day what Korihor calls the management of the creature. We can spend every day just living without a thought for our eternal nature, our destiny.

  20:59 And of course, that’s not what God wants. He wants us thinking about higher and more eternal things. Part of the purpose of this discourse, with all these things is to sort of shock us out of our everyday doing things the way we’ve always been doing them so we can think again about something bigger and more than ourselves.

Hank Smith: 21:20 That’s great. Look around.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 21:22 Look around. Exactly.

Hank Smith: 21:24 See what’s happening. See the world around you. Do you guys know what would Clayton Christensen call that? Disruptive. It’s disruptive innovation.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 21:34 That’s a good thing. Because part of the point is that, and this is something that we don’t always think about, but the presence of God is disruptive. It changes things. It moves things. It makes things different. It disrupts. And so, Jesus is saying, “If you think things are going to go on the way they’re going, they’re not.” So we have to move past the management of the creature.

Hank Smith: 21:55 This is verse six and seven, which is moved by Joseph Smith to a different part of the chapter. You shall hear of wars and rumors of wars so that you’d be not troubled for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. So you’re hearing all this and you don’t need to be troubled, but don’t think it’s right around the corner.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 22:16 Right. So that’s a key thing. We’ll talk about that a little bit because he moves things around quite a bit.

Hank Smith: 22:21 Joseph Smith.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 22:22 And in many ways that’s his hinge verse though. As Joseph Smith does it sort of 26… Sorry. Well, honestly, sort of 30 and back is referencing Jesus’ first coming and the destruction of the temple and things like that. And then, 31 forward he says, “All right, now we’re going to start talking about the second coming in earnest.”

  22:41 So he says, “Because it’s not yet guys, it’s not here. We’re not ready. More rumors.” There’s some things he does with that that are pretty key in terms of how he rearranges it for it. All the way nine through 21, very much this notion of the disruption that’s happening in the Jewish revolts, the destruction of the temple. Abomination of desolation.

  23:05 And actually this is kind of fun. In verse 16. He says, “Let them which be in Judea flee into the mountains.” Lesson in the first Jewish revolt, but during the Bar Kokhba revolt, there were Christians who had Matthew 24, who actually when the Romans coming down fled from Jerusalem and were spared some of the reprisals that happened against there by the Romans.

Hank Smith: 23:30 Is this where they fled to Pella?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 23:32 Yes. That’s exactly. And they did so explicitly because they were reading their scriptures and saw that as a fulfillment of the prophecy, which I think is really cool.

Hank Smith: 23:44 I mean it saved their lives.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 23:45 Exactly. Well, verse 19. Woe unto them that are with child and to them that give suck in those days. And there’s something the scriptures are concerned very deeply with is that these kinds of calamities tend to be hardest on those who are most vulnerable. Nursing mothers, pregnant mothers.

Hank Smith: 24:05 Children. Yeah.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 24:06 Children. And he says, “This is going to be hardest on them.” We’re going to see when we get to the parables in Matthew 25, Jesus is going to say, “We’ve got to do something about this.” But part of the warning he is just like, “This is, it’s going to be hard guys.” And recognize that the being hardness of it is in some ways part of the point, but it’s also just part of the world we live in.

Hank Smith: 24:27 It does sound like he’s trying to get them to think more globally than just about themselves.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 24:33 Yes. Absolutely.

Hank Smith: 24:33 Famines, pestilence, earthquakes in diverse places. Nations rising against nation, kingdom against kingdom. Kind of think about the world as a whole instead of just our area, our little area.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 24:44 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 24:44 And wouldn’t you say perhaps knowing that this text is going to outlast those that he’s talking to and will be a benefit to us? Yeah.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 24:54 Absolutely. And has been a benefit to Christians for millennia. This is one of those things where we have specific examples of early Christians and medieval Christians reading this text and actually following its advice and using it to help them.

  25:10 One of these fun big words is eschatology. Eschatology comes from Greek, the end, eschaton. But it’s that part of sort of doctrinal and theological discourse that’s concerned with the end of the world and the afterlife. We can also talk about groups that care about these things. And those groups are eschatological. Among world religions, Christianity is an eschatological religion.

Hank Smith: 25:36 It’s concerned with the end.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 25:38 We’re concerned with the end deeply, deeply about the end. Partially because Christianity is as we’re talking about earlier. It’s an inherently disruptive message. Jesus comes and says, “I’m going to change everything.” We’ve seen that extensively in the gospels this year in Come, Follow Me.

  25:53 He comes and says, “Look, you thought things were this way, I’m going to change it all. For the better guys, but I am going to change it all.” And actually, even within Christianity, the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is an eschatological religion within those confines. Because as Elder Holland said in the devotional once that he was talking about this and somebody asked him about end times whatever. Elder Holland said, “What do you think the Latter-day part in Latter-day Saint means?”

Hank Smith: 26:26 I know the story. It’s a missionary who says, “Elder Holland, are these the last days?” And he said, “I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but even I know the name of the church, right?” Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Yes. These are the last days.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 26:43 It’s been the last days for at least a hundred years now. All right. And we want to think through that because that’s one of the key, we can say difficulties that may be too strong a word. One of the key things to talk about in this particular discourse is this nature of why is Jesus talking about his second coming so early in human history?

  27:07 Again, the whole thing begs this question is Jesus Christ says, “I’m coming back.” And we’ll get there when he says that. But you’re like, “Been a really long time, Jesus.” And that’s one of the great questions we need to think through as we read and teach and think about this particular passage, because it’s not easy and we’ll talk about that.

Hank Smith: 27:25 I mean Matthew 24, he talks about false prophets shall rise. That’s verse 11. Iniquity shall abound. Love of many shall wax cold. I look around and I think we are definitely living during these times. Specifically the abomination of desolation of Daniel the prophet. Is that the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 27:47 Yes. That’s going to be its primary initial focus. This idea of, again, you’ll see it. It’s actually probably Roman individual, something like that. Somebody coming who’s desecrating the temple, stands in the temple and then destroys it. That’s exactly what it is.

Hank Smith: 28:02 Now you mentioned that the temple is destroyed in 70 AD, but then it’s raised in 120 AD. what’s the difference there?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 28:09 So the destruction of the temple, I mean they burn it down. The sacrifices ceased. Really we’re talking about the destruction of the temple in AD 70, we’re talking about the cessation of the sacrificial system, i.e. that no longer is there an operative Jewish sacrificial system. Actually, somebody once called Titus Vespasian, the greatest religious reformers in history, because they pushed Judaism in very distinctive directions, and Christianity, as we’re going to read in the book of Acts.

  28:35 The early Christians continue to sacrifice throughout their testament period, Peter, Paul. Like Paul gets arrested because he is going back to Jerusalem to offer sacrifice, to fulfill a vow that he made according to the law of Moses. It’s very clear that Christianity and the earliest Christians continue to offer sacrifice up until the point it’s destroyed.

Hank Smith: 28:56 They hang on to their Judaism.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 28:59 Yes. And my friend and colleague, Jeff Chadwick, he’s done some good work on this. He postulates that that’s what God intended. That is actually a different situation than what we see in the Book of Mormon where Jesus says, “Look, we’re done with this now.” He thinks that there’s two different things happening in the old world, the new world with this.

  29:16 But the point is, suddenly everything ceases and suddenly you’ve got a chain circumstance. But there’s always still a hope that, again, with Bar Kokhba and things like that, we can get these things back, which is why after Bar Kokhba Rome says, “Nope. We’re done. It’s all over. We’re going to take it all the way down to the ground.”

  29:35 Although, again, Julian Apostate, at least talks about… He’s a Roman emperor, after the Roman Emperors have Christianized, Julian converts back to Paganism and basically writes a letter where he says, “I ain’t going to let the Jews rebuild the temple because I hate Christians.” But he never gets… He gets killed in battle with the Persians.

Hank Smith: 29:54 So it never happens?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 29:55 Dude, it never happens.

Hank Smith: 29:56 Oh, okay. I didn’t know that. That’s really interesting. So 70 AD would be the destruction of the temple on top of the platform, the actual temple itself.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 30:06 Do you see he’s talks about burning and things like that and-

Hank Smith: 30:09 Yeah. And then, the 120 is the let’s pull down the entire platform.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 30:13 Let’s put on the whole city, basically. They refound Jerusalem as a new city, as a pagan city dedicated to Zeus.

Hank Smith: 30:20 Okay.

John Bytheway: 30:21 I had people ask, how do you tear down stone? And one of the things I’ve heard, and correct me if I’m wrong, is they could paint these huge blocks that we talked about with pitch or tar or something, and then light it on fire, which they get so hot they would crack and fissure and that’s how they would fall.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 30:38 Exactly. And of course Romans had siege materials and you get enough people dedicated to taking something down, and you can take it down. Just sheer manpower in certain levels.

John Bytheway: 30:50 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 30:50 If you go to Jerusalem today, you can see where some of those rocks were pulled down and they destroyed the road when these stones hit it, just blows to pieces. But some of the original stones are still there so they didn’t take all of them.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 31:05 Some of the original stones of the platform.

Hank Smith: 31:08 Of the platform. Yeah.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 31:09 That’s important because sometimes you hear people say, “Oh, the western wall of the temple…” No. No. No. The temple’s gone. But there are still some of the platform, and again, those apparently were buried, forgotten. Occasionally we see some reuse of some of these things. Secondary usage in places.

Hank Smith: 31:24 If you go to Jerusalem today, you can see Jews going to that wall and worshiping, I would say, or praying at that wall.

John Bytheway: 31:32 Last remnant of the outside wall of the temple area. Think of it like Temple Square kind of, where there’s a wall around it.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 31:40 Very much so. You’ve got the sacred precinct and then you have divided space in various levels of sacredness inside the temple grounds itself. Even like Temple Square, and then got the gate around the temple proper, grounds proper. They’ve got the temple itself and they’ve got even inside the temple there.

Hank Smith: 31:58 Wow. Rome was sure dedicated to getting rid of that temple. In their mind, is that the end of Judaism if they can destroy that temple?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 32:06 It’s the end of their problems. I don’t think they care about Judaism as a religious system, in many ways. They’ll actually create in the fiscus Iudaicus where they will make Jews pay to Rome, the redemption, the temple tax that they used to pay to the Jerusalem temple.

Hank Smith: 32:26 Okay.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 32:27 They’ll actually extract tribute from, and they just took throughout the diaspora. So Jews all over the Roman Empire have to pay this tax for it. So it’s not Judaism as such, because again, there are Jews all over the world. Remember that religion in antiquity, even in this period is fairly locative. By which I mean it’s fairly focused on place.

  32:51 I’ll give you an example of this. Remember naming the Syrian? The Syrian, remember he’s healed by Elisha, dips in the water. He’s like, “Take these gifts.” He says, “No.” And he is like, “All right. But let your servant take two bags of dirt from Israel so that I can worship Jehovah.”

  33:08 The idea here is that Jehovah is the God of the land of Israel. And so, you need the land of Israel to worship Jehovah.

Hank Smith: 33:16 He’s taking a little bit of the land.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 33:18 So even though that’s already had to break down in this period, this idea that the temple is Jehovah’s house is huge, because temples are often associated with a polity. It’s the symbol of the polity and basically the idea here is if we can destroy the temple, then we can root out the polity. They will no longer have anything to rally around and they will no longer be able to revolt. Because that’s all Rome really cares about.

Hank Smith: 33:44 Are the revolts.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 33:45 All Rome cares about are the taxes coming in and is everything fine?

Hank Smith: 33:50 Are they loyal to death?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 33:52 Loyal to the emperor, in the case of being obedient to what we want them to do?

John Bytheway: 33:56 I’ve had students ask, “Well, what happened to Judaism? Do they still offer sacrifices?” And I love your insight on this. They kind of adopted a post-temple way to worship. Is that what we call that?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 34:08 Well, yeah. I mean you see elements of it already even before the destruction of the temple. Their synagogues are already there. Prayer houses is what they’re called in Hebrew. Their gathering places, places where you come together. So there’s already in place there worship and ideas and prayers that are already extent before the destruction of the temple.

  34:31 In many ways what the temple does is accelerate that process, partially because… And again, my friend Matthew Gray, who’s also teaches with us over there in the JSB. Matt Gray has done some really good work on the priests don’t go away, but they’re sort of incorporated. And actually, the famous Jewish scholar, Jacob Neusner, once basically wrote this thing, who talked about the temple in Rabbinic Judaism.

  34:55 And he says, “Basically, the temple is everywhere absent.” It’s not so much that it’s post-temple, it’s that it’s taking the temple and applying it in ways that do not involve animal sacrifice. For example, there are prayers in the Jewish prayer book to this day that have the names of the sacrificial system. Like specific names of the sacrifices and part of the idea is, is that when you say these prayers, you are still participating in the sacrifice.

  35:29 But even there, this idea of it’s almost Passover time, Pesach here is in a couple of weeks and the way the Passover ends, we eat the Passover here and now, but next year, next year we’re going to eat it in Jerusalem. This idea that even as we’re doing it here, we’re doing it, we’ve got, we’ve adapted it, but this isn’t the end of the story. There’s still what we would call an eschatological perhaps, hope for that return.

  35:58 And so, that’s why I like to think of it as everywhere absent in it. Judaism is still very much a temple focused system, but a temple focused system where there’s a temple shaped hole in their religious discourse. The Mishna is the earnest codification of Jewish law, and they are a huge track dates. [inaudible 00:36:17] divide up Mishna concerned with how the sacrifices are run and concerned with how you keep purity laws, and concerned with all these temple concerns because it is still central to their conception of what law is.

Hank Smith: 36:31 Even though it’s no longer there.

John Bytheway: 36:32 Wow.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 36:33 Even though it’s no longer standing. Exactly.

Hank Smith: 36:35 Got it. And some might be asking, why don’t they rebuild it? And there’s a kind of simple answer to that is the property is not theirs anymore.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 36:45 Yes. I mean in some ways the answer to that question is, so why don’t we build the temple in Missouri?

Hank Smith: 36:51 Go back to Independence. We could-

Dr. Avram Shannon: 36:52 Go back to Independence. Why don’t we move headquarters back to Independence? There is nothing to stop us from moving church headquarters to Kansas City. What are we waiting for? We’re waiting for God to tell us to. And for our Jewish friends, they’re also waiting for the Messiah to come back. There are lots of different opinions on how this works out, but many of them, the whole point is redemption of the temple is the same thing as redemption of the world.

Hank Smith: 37:16 Got it. And right now there is an Islamic mosque, right?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 37:20 Yes. There are actually two. But yeah, so the dome of the rock is where Mohammed goes up to heaven to have his great vision. He’s taken up there. And then, Al-Aqsa is actually the one that represents the temple, the temple spot. And it’s where presumably the [inaudible 00:37:37] is. The [inaudible 00:37:40] is the stone at the center of the temple where Ark of the Covenant would have played out. According to one tradition in Judaism, it’s the center of the universe.

Hank Smith: 37:52 So it would be very difficult for the Jews today to build a temple where there are now two Muslim mosques.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 38:00 Although there is that fun anecdote from President Hunter. President Hunter was up on the al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf. He was up on Temple Mount and somebody asked him, “How are we going to build a temple here? Our temple or their temple, what temple’s going to be here?” And President Hunter kind of looked around, paced off a little bit and he said, “I think there’s space.”

Hank Smith: 38:21 And there is some space up there. Yeah.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 38:22 Yeah. So his idea was that we’ll have a Jewish temple, our temple. We’ll just have all of it up there.

Hank Smith: 38:28 Yeah. Have the Muslim mosques. Yeah. Let’s have them all up there. That’s great. Let’s jump back to Matthew 24 here. How can I tell which verses are meant to be about the second coming and which verses are meant to be about the destructions of 70 AD and 120 AS or do you think maybe I can apply them universally?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 38:49 I would apply them as broadly as you possibly can. That’s my general policy. There are some that pretty clearly seem to speak to the second coming like when he says, “You’ll see me coming, in power and great glory.” Right? Things like that pretty clearly apply to a second coming. But generally speaking, I think, and I think it’s true, basically all scripture. The more applicability you see, I think the more we’re kind of thinking the way that God wants us to see them.

  39:19 Now again, Joseph Smith Matthew does make a stronger distinction and that’s one of its great blessings about it. It actually right about verse 23. The end is not yet. Then 24. Joseph Matthew 24, I’ve told you they won’t go. They talked about the gathering, so shall the coming of the son of man be. So in Joseph Matthew, there’s a clear sort of before 23, it’s mostly talking about the Jewish revolts, about destruction of the temple. 24 and following is mostly about the second coming.

Hank Smith: 39:51 So Joseph Smith kind of rearranged the verses and the signs to make it clear in two clear categories.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 39:58 That’s right.

Hank Smith: 39:58 Okay.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 39:59 Because again, for him and then also for us, the destruction of the temple, that’s ancient, ancient history. But the second coming is still in the future. So he’s making it relevant to us right now as he works through his inspired translation.

Hank Smith: 40:12 All right. Where do you want to go next, Avram?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 40:14 So he talks about, again, we’ve got all these false Christs, false prophets. The key thing here to remember, we started from the beginning here. Part of Jesus’ point is because when things get hard, that’s when we tend to be, using our term here, more eschatological. That’s when we tend to look for answers. It’s most likely for us to be deceived. Latter-day Saints, we’re of course spoiled for answers. We have so many good answers about so many questions.

Hank Smith: 40:42 We want to have these answers.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 40:44 We want to have these answers. We want it to be clear and laid out. And so, part of, he’s like, “You’ve got to be careful. There’s going to be false people talking about this. You need to be careful. Deceive if were possible, even the very elect.”

Hank Smith: 40:57 Yeah. That’s verse 24.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 40:59 And this is a key thing for you and I, just being a faithful Latter-day Saint is not sufficient guard against deception. Deceive if it were possible the very elect. He says, “You got to be careful, guys, be careful.”

John Bytheway: 41:14 This may be jumping ahead too far, but in Joseph Smith Matthew 1:37, whoso treasureth up my word shall not be deceived. That’s I guess what this is all about, we’re trying to be familiar enough with this, and then to learn to hear him, to learn to let God prevail, to be inspired and at peace if possible.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 41:36 It’s why when my students ask basically any question. They’ll ask me and they’ll say, “How do I know anything?” Right? How do I know if I’m right? How do I know if this is the right thing? How do I know? And I say, “Well, the short answer is have the Holy Ghost with you.”

  41:49 I mean the long answer, we can talk about ways to think through and then tools and things for that. But the short answer is always have the Holy Ghost with you.

John Bytheway: 41:57 Because he speaks to us in real time.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 42:00 Exactly. Matthew’s been dead for 2000 years. He needed help then, we need help now.

Hank Smith: 42:07 So that addition, John, is great. That verse 37, whoso treasureth up my word shall not be deceived. To my knowledge, that’s not found in Matthew 24. That phrase.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 42:18 No. That’s not. Part of it is I think he’s also telling the saints in the latter-days because we also get really, really excited because we want Jesus to come back so much. Again, I want him back so much. But because of that, sometimes we say, “Oh, this is it. We’ve got it. We’ve figured it out now.” And Jesus is like, “Be careful. Be careful. Don’t let anybody deceive you.”

Hank Smith: 42:44 Yeah. It’s almost like Jesus is saying, “Stay in the text.” Whoso treasureth up my word shall not be deceived, as in there’s other people’s words you could be deceived by. So treasure up my words, stay in the scriptures.

John Bytheway: 42:56 I love that phrase. Treasure up. They are treasured words. And there’s something we can hold that treasure inside of us, and then be guided in real time by the Holy Ghost.

Hank Smith: 43:09 Yeah. That is a great phrase, treasure up.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 43:12 It’s not unusual to have lots of different things in the synoptic gospels and even sometimes John agree with what we’ve got. But I think part of the reason why we have four gospels is the Lords said, “Okay. Don’t you get it this time? Let’s try again. Let’s give you a little more treasure here. Let’s give you something else to treasure up here so we have more chances to find and read and think about all of these things.”

Hank Smith: 43:35 I’ve noticed in both Joseph Smith Matthew, and in Matthew 24, 28, you get some interesting analogies. You get for wheresoever the carcass is there will the eagles be gathered together. Joseph Smith Matthew says, “Now you learn the parable of the fig tree when its branches are yet tender, begins to put forth leaves. And you know summer is nigh at hand.” That’s also what we found in Matthew 24.

  44:00 Avram, what do you think of all these symbols? And should I take the sun being darkened, the moon not giving light, stars fall from heaven, should I take that literally, or do you take that more figuratively?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 44:09 The answer to that of course as always is yes.

Hank Smith: 44:11 Yeah.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 44:12 We’ll start with the Eagles first just to point out that that’s actually not a very good translation. Something like buzzards is better. The whole idea here is that this is vultures where the carcasses, that’s where the buzzards go. Where the action is, is where you want to gather to, is kind of the point of the symbolism.

  44:27 And of course, Joseph Smith, Joseph Smith Matthew 27. So likewise shall mine elect be gathered from the four corners of the earth. So Joseph Matthew makes explicitly about the gathering of Israel. And the idea behind it is, is that. It’s actually not a very lovely phrase in terms of on the imagery of it, but the idea is you want to go where the action is. You want to go where what you need is there.

  44:52 The image is almost like the gradual nature of this too. You’ve got an animal carcass and birds just start coming and they start kind of gathering around it. So they all get there, share for it. It’s not like everybody comes together. So I think part of the point of this imagery is this gradual nature of the gathering. This idea that they’re coming a little bit here, a little bit there, here. And they know there’s a place to be because that’s where the carcass is.

Hank Smith: 45:17 So if when you see a gathering happening, that’s where you want to be?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 45:21 In Matthew, it’s right after the same thing of the deception thing. He says, “Don’t go to the secret chambers. See, he’s in the desert. Don’t go. He’s in the secret chambers. Don’t go. Go where the eagles are. Believe it not.” He says, “Go where the gathering is.”

  45:39 And so, part of the point of this is, again, because we want Jesus to come back so badly, he’s giving us clues here. He says, “If you want to do this the way that, or you want to find it, go where the people are. Go where Zion is. That’s where you’re going to find me. You’re going to find me in God’s covenant community.” That’s where the carcass is.

Hank Smith: 46:00 And you could tell because that’s where the vultures are going. Is it something they would see often? They’re like, “Well, when you see a bunch of vultures, you know there’s a dead carcass over there. So just like if you see a bunch of people gathering, you know that’s where I am.”

Dr. Avram Shannon: 46:14 Exactly. And of course, even in the American West, I’ve seen plenty of my fair share of carcasses and there are a bunch of vultures who roosted one of the trees by my house. And it’s always little disconcerting to wake up in the morning-

Hank Smith: 46:24 And they’re watching.

Dr. Avram Shannon: 46:25 … and you’ve got like 12 vultures staring in your window.

Hank Smith: 46:28 Right.

John Bytheway: 46:28 Do they know something I don’t know?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 46:29 Exactly. Exactly.

John Bytheway: 46:32 I like that it uses those words gathering too. And that has been so emphasized. Can I say it this way, also, it’s what are the first presidency and the 12 talking about? Those are the topics we can be concerned with. Another way of gathering, I’m going to go find YouTubes about the second coming or we could go where the 12 and the first presidency are and see what they’re admonishing us to do right now. Is that possible way to look at that?

Dr. Avram Shannon: 46:57 Yeah. Absolutely. But as I read it, this is part of what Jesus is saying because, again, the very first thing he says is take heed that no one deceives you. And then, he comes here and he says, “Here’s a way to help avoid deception. If you stay with your community, if you stay in the covenant community, then this will be a guard for you against deception.” And I think that’s very important.

John Bytheway: 47:24 Please join us for part two of this podcast.