Bridge of Reason

  I have a copy of the Berean Bible Teachers Manual, with the King James Bible, dated 1921. It gives, ‘Verse-by-verse comments on the entire Bible, condensed from The WatchTower, from Studies in the Scriptures, etc.’ It goes on to explain: ‘These brief comments by C J Woodworth are claimed to faithfully represent the fuller presentations of the six volumes of Studies in the Scriptures.’ The ‘etc.’ above includes comments from, ‘The Hell Pamphlet, Tabernacle Shadows, and the Spiritism Pamphlet, Zion’s Watch Tower, September 1879, a 1907 newspaper report of a sermon by Charles Russell, a 1905 Theology Quarterly, and discourses on the Chart of the Ages.’ It is incredibly well organised, its reference system clear. You may go from a Bible reference, as you would in any concordance, to a brief comment taken from one of the above publications, and if you have those publications, you may be sent to the right pages to read the context. Set alongside a set of Studies in the Scriptures, I im

  The Book of Mormon and The Land of Jerusalem The Book of Mormon describes a ‘land of Jerusalem.’ The land of Jerusalem appears about 40 times in the book. It is not found once in the Bible, and that is important. Perhaps the most controversial reference to the land of Jerusalem is in Alma 7 where Alma seeming to foreshadow the role of John the Baptist, saying: ‘Repent ye, and prepare the way of the Lord, and walk in his paths, which are straight; for behold, the kingdom of heaven is at hand, and the Son of God cometh upon the face of the earth. And behold, he shall be born of Mary, at Jerusalem which is the land of our forefathers…’ Alma 7:9,10 Of course, Jesus was born in Bethlehem and not ‘at Jerusalem.’ Where is the land of Jerusalem? Mormons say Alma was written 500 years after Nephi left Jerusalem, that this is entirely consistent with how the Book of Mormon describes places “being in the land” of cities. However, t he people of the Book of Mormon are supposed to be c