The Bible is Important

In a few days, I'll be teaching a Primary lesson on Joseph Smith "translating" parts of the Bible. I put "translating" in quotation marks because it wasn't a traditional translation, changing a message from one language to another. Instead, what he did was read the parts of the Bible that had been mistranslated and, under the direction of the Holy Ghost, record what the translation actually should have been.

(Oh, and he also received a vision that he wrote down, which became the Book of Moses in the Pearl of Great Price, and he actually translated some Egyptian scrolls which became the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price, but I'm mostly here to talk about the Bible.)

As I'll explain to my students on Sunday, Joseph Smith's "translation" of the Bible was necessary mostly because is and was so important to any and every Christian religion. The importance of the prophecies and stories in the Bible were important enough for them all to be preserved and complied into a single book in the first place, and then to be translated from their original languages into more common languages so they could be read and appreciated. This is just my ballpark estimate, but I'd say that, at the very least, hundreds of millions of manhours were put into preserving, compiling, and translating the Bible. This would not have happened if the Bible had been just some old book. This book is important enough to preserve and translate and mass-produce so everyone can read it.

But anything worth doing is worth doing right.

Having passed through so many hundreds of hands and so many translations, some of which were not necessarily inspired by God or free from the influence of the opinions of men, many of the Bible's important messages got lost in translation. Yet, since these messages were so important, God saw fit for many passages of the Bible to be "translated" again, one last time.

Joseph Smith was a busy man. Between running the church and running from persecution, he didn't have a whole lot of time for reading, let alone retranslation. Yet, God knew that the lost truths "which are plain and most precious" (1 Nephi 13:26) were "precious" enough to be worth taking up some of the prophet's limited time. As a result, we now have corrected versions of Bible passages that reveal important eternal truths that had previously been lost to time.

Given that the Bible was and is important enough to compile and translate and distribute and correct, you'd think we'd read it more often. Perhaps I should only speak for myself, but I sometimes see the Bible as being somewhat outdated. Yes, there are many truths in it that are eternal, but most of those truths also show up in more recent scriptoral works, such as the Book of Mormon and the words of the living prophets. But God knew that we would have the Book of Mormon and the words of living prophets, and He still saw fit to correct the mistranslations in the Bible. It would seem that, in His opinion, we would need those corrected passages, even though we already have so many other sources of spiritual truths. Those passages were not only important enough create, collect, and translate, they were important enough to retranslate despite the other sources of light and knowledge we already had.

All in all, the truths found in the Bible must be pretty darn important. Maybe I should read them one of these days.