Sunday, August 22, 2010

Bible Study Hint

It is immensely helpful in a study of the Bible to clearly see all of the Joseph Smith Translation footnotes.  Jerry Wilson, an excellent CES teacher, suggests undertaking the project of marking all of those footnotes by looking page by page through the Bible footnotes, coloring the letters that say JST, and then finding the corresponding letters in the verses and coloring them to match.  It's especially helpful to use a different color just for JST marking, so it really stands out.  Brother Wilson says it is a 5-hour project to do the entire Bible.  That means, if you work on it for 15 minutes a day, you'll be done in 3 weeks.

Drawing a line through large passages which have been entirely changed by the JST (such as Romans 7:5-25 in which the original intent of the passage is completely reversed by the JST) makes it easy to see the change, where simply highlighting the footnote that occurs at the beginning of the passage would not.

For more on the JST, see The Joseph Smith Translation in a previous post.

When you finish this project, the next great suggestion he has is to mark all of the alternate translations in the footnotes which begin with "HEB," "OR," "IE," or "GR."

HEB = an alternate translation from the Hebrew Old Testament
OR = an English explanation of the word or phrase
IE = an example to give increased understanding
GR = an alternate translation from the Greek New Testament

In my scriptures, I have marked the JST footnotes in blue, and the alternate translation footnotes in red.

This one easy (albeit time-consuming) project will give you a lot of information.

No comments: