Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Was Jesus born in Bethlehem or actually Jerusalem? And the answer to that is less straightforward than you might think, especially because critics of the Book of Mormon have pointed out that the Book of Mormon says Jesus was born in Jerusalem when everyone knows Jesus was really born in Bethlehem. But that's what we're going to talk about today, especially because this actually turns into kind of a surprising Book of Mormon evidence when you actually get to the bottom of what the criticism is and what the actual evidence says. So, Neil, what? Where was Jesus born?
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Well, obviously the answer to that is the star cluster. Pilates. Is that what they say wherever Moroni is from on the History Channel?
[00:00:36] Speaker C: Allegedly. According to the History Channel, yes.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: No. Yeah. The question of where Jesus is born, like you said, it's obvious to most people at least what the Bible says. Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
[00:00:51] Speaker C: But I've heard a song about that.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:00:53] Speaker C: Aren't there a couple?
[00:00:54] Speaker B: I mean, there's a few.
[00:00:55] Speaker C: Being born in little town of Bethlehem. Yeah.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: One of my favorites actually is oh, Little Town of Bethlehem. I love that. I love to sing that during the Christmas season.
[00:01:03] Speaker C: Do you sing it for us right now because it's Christmas season while we film this?
[00:01:06] Speaker B: No, no, I will not.
But yeah, what critics are talking about in the Book of Mormon, and this is actually one of those things we talked a couple weeks ago about Matt Roper and the big list of anachronisms and stuff like that. This is one of the anachronisms that he talks about.
People have been criticizing the Book of Mormon for the about this since the very beginning. In fact, Alexander Campbell in Delusions, which is like literally the first anti Mormon publication.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: When does this come out ever?
[00:01:34] Speaker B: 1831.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: Really early on.
[00:01:37] Speaker B: I mean, it's like there's been like newspaper articles, like mocking for serious engagement.
[00:01:42] Speaker C: With the Book of Mormon. It's actually a grounded critique. It's not just a sarcastic, you know, dismissal, newspaper riffing on Joe Smith's gold Bible. It's like a grounded critique of the Book of Mormon.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: But Alexander Campbell, he says this prophet Smith, you know, is better skilled in the controversies of New York than in the geography of history of Judea. He makes John baptized in the village of Bethabara. We can maybe talk about that another time. And says Jesus was born in Jerusalem. And what is he talking about there?
Another Critic, more recently, 1991. Every schoolboy and schoolgirl knows Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Funny. Dan Peterson responded that with. Exactly.
[00:02:22] Speaker C: Right.
[00:02:23] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. Including Joseph Smith. Right. But what are they talking about? Well, Alma 7:10 is a prophecy from Alma about the coming of Jesus Christ. And he says, and behold, he shall be born of Mary at Jerusalem.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: It's not Bethlehem, though. It's not Bethlehem.
[00:02:42] Speaker B: It's the smoking gun evidence, right, that the Book of Mormon's wrong.
He continues, which is the land of our forefathers, she being a virgin, precious and chosen vessel, on and on and on. But the location there is the key detail here. So that's what they're talking about in Alma 7:10.
Why does it say Jerusalem rather than Bethlehem?
Well, honestly. And look, this is something that still gets brought up today. Just a couple months ago on Twitter, there was a guy responding to Lego Joseph Smith. Shout out to LEGO Joseph Smith.
There was a guy responding to lego Joseph Smith. Alma 7:10 says Jesus would be born at Jerusalem. He wasn't. Alma is a false prophet, right? And so this isn't like some, this isn't like some old thing from 200 years ago that people never talk about anymore.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: It still gets brought up.
[00:03:24] Speaker B: It still gets brought up.
[00:03:25] Speaker C: I'm half expecting to hear also, there's French in the Book of Mormon.
[00:03:28] Speaker B: I do.
[00:03:29] Speaker C: Am I right, fellas?
This thing's been around forever. It's kind of funny that it's still. I thought this was dead and buried, but it just always kind of turns up in corners of the Internet, I guess, right?
[00:03:39] Speaker B: It's been around for a long time.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: And this, I mean, the stakes here is that, like, well, we believe the Mormon is the most correct book out of any on earth or whatever that Joseph Smith quote says. And so ex Mormons, critics of the church have taken that serious and are like, well, if the book Mormon really is most correct book, shouldn't that have been correct? Shouldn't have the prophecy of Jesus Christ's birth been accurate?
[00:04:00] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Well. And certainly. And we can appreciate that, right?
I think for most people who come across this, and you'll see this, you know, easy reaction to this all the time, right? That, look, we're going to go into some cool research, but you don't even need the cool research really to resolve this. When I was on my mission and people asked me where I was from, I didn't say south Jordan terribly often because nobody in Virginia knew where south Jordan was. So I would say Salt Lake, right?
And that is kind of the, you know, that is, that is like the, the, like off the shelf, easy to reach answer to this problem, right? And most, for most people, like, you hear that and it's like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. Like, Bethlehem is like Five miles from Jerusalem, it's this little Podunk town.
I shouldn't say Podunk, but.
[00:04:49] Speaker C: But it's a little hamlet. It's like a major metropolitan center.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: Yeah, it's.
To this day, it remains a small village.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: And we're talking about Alma. So these are people across the entire ocean and people who never lived in Jerusalem at this point. This is hundreds of years after they had left the land of their forefathers.
[00:05:04] Speaker C: Five centuries.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: So they wouldn't have been familiar with the geography, Right?
[00:05:07] Speaker B: Correct, correct. And so, you know, Dan Peterson actually has, you know, in an essay he wrote like 20 years ago, reacting to this, he asked why did Alma not give a more precise location of the birth of Jesus? Perhaps because he was talking to people five centuries and many thousands of miles removed from any direct knowledge of the geography of Judea. A prophetic reference to a small, unfamiliar village near Bethlehem would therefore likely have been meaningless to Alma's audience. Jerusalem, by contrast, was well known and frequently mentioned. Furthermore, from across the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean, the five mile distance between Jerusalem and Bethlehem would hardly have seemed significant to a Nephite. Okay, so again, for a lot of people, that's all you need. It's just like, okay, we get it.
It's like most people can understand that. They can relate it to their own experience. Like I just did with, you know, being from Salt Lake rather than South Jordan.
[00:06:00] Speaker C: No, no, no, no. Yeah. I was going to say, for the record, I'm actually from Salt Lake, thank you very much. Don't you be acculturating my culture by saying you're from Salt Lake, South Jordan, kid.
[00:06:09] Speaker A: You know, I was even just thinking about this this morning and like, the criticism also falls flat because it's a prophecy. Like, it's not Nephi saying a past tense thing that he should have known as an Israelite. Like, it's not him saying, yeah, I came from Jerusalem and the king at the time was King Solomon. Like, that would have been a clear, like, historical inaccuracy in the Book of Mormon, because Nephi, as an ancient person, would have known who the king was at the time. But like, this is something that's happening in the future that like, you know, is. Prophecy is like, you know, very vague. It's very abstract.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: Well, so the response you'll get to that is that actually prophecy is very precise. And again, this is. Look, this is not. This is the criticism that does not come from like your secular atheist people. They don't care about this. At least not that I've seen This is generally from Bible believing Christians who believe prophecy is going to be, you know, prophecy should be accurate and precise. And in fact, the same person on Twitter who was reacting to Lego, Joseph Smith, as he got pushback from some people, he brought up the prophecy or the passage in Micah 5 that gets interpreted as a prophecy where it does say it refers to Bethlehem as the place of origin for a future ruler of Israel. Right. And we can put the passage up there on screen. It's kind of funny to me to be kind of boasting about how precise prophecy is when you're using a passage here that, that if you step outside the conservative Christian bubble, no one, almost no one will agree, is actually a prophecy of the coming of Christ.
[00:07:40] Speaker C: I was gonna say this guy has like no idea how Matthew is using Old Testament passages to like, in the prevailing view of secular biblical scholarship, basically is that the Gospel authors, especially Matthew, just kind of like cherry picks verses from the Old Testament and like retroactively makes them refer about Jesus in order to make him appear more messianic than he actually really was or whatever. I don't necessarily accept that position as a, as a Christian, as a Bible believing, you know, Latter Day Saint, but I get the point, right? Like it's really easy, centuries after the prophecy is given, to have your guide.
Yes. To make the connections in retrospect, long after the events have happened to say, oh, here's the prophecy about it.
[00:08:22] Speaker B: So yeah, and look, if you really want to go toe for toe, like which book has more precise prophecies of the coming, I promise, Book of Mormon or Hebrew Bible? The Book of Mormon. In fact, it's a problem right now. If we flip over to the secular side of it. That's a problem because people are like, oh, it's too precise. It's so precise. It must have been written by someone who knew all of it after the fact, like Joseph Smith. Right. And so if you want referring to.
[00:08:47] Speaker A: How like they predict the exact time that Jesus Christ would appear on the earth.
[00:08:51] Speaker B: Well, I mean, they give that his.
[00:08:52] Speaker C: Name would be Jesus.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: I mean even like, let's just like looking at the prophets from Alma, right. He says at Jerusalem, but look at the other details. He says he shall be born of Mary, where in the Old Testament and a virgin, the name of the mother of Jesus. Right. And that she would be a virgin. Right. He talks about how he's going to go forth suffering afflictions and temptations of every kind and take upon him the pains and sicknesses of his people and take upon him death, that he may loose the bands of death, and so on and so forth. Just like take that prophecy, take the passage from Micah in Micah 5, and tell me which one seems more precisely to be predicting the life of Jesus Christ.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: So basically, I mean, there's no winning if the Book of Mormon prophecies are too precise, people say that it can't be true. If it's too vague, people say it can't be true.
[00:09:37] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:09:37] Speaker B: And so back to this issue of Jerusalem versus Bethlehem. I do think beyond the simple answer that we can give, when you actually drill into the details and you look at how things are, you look at some ancient usages of these expressions, besides just how we might think of it in terms in modern times, there's actually some really cool stuff going on here that not only resolves a criticism, but as you alluded to at the beginning, actually maybe provide some evidence for the Book of Mormon. So Alma, the full expression that Alma says, he says he shall be born of Mary at Jerusalem, which is the land of our forefathers. Right, the land of our forefathers. And that's important because in the Book of Mormon you have this expression that doesn't show up anywhere else, anywhere in the Bible.
The land of Jerusalem. And we're not gonna, we won't go through every single time that's brought up, but we can put a table up on screen that shows several examples of them talking about leaving. You know, it's especially in First Nephi, naturally enough, where you see that a lot. They're talking about leaving the land of Jerusalem, journeying in the wilderness, up to the land of Jerusalem.
[00:10:41] Speaker A: But wait a minute. Neo Jerusalem's a city, not a land.
[00:10:45] Speaker B: And that is, that is a criticism that we actually see show up in 1838. There's a guy named Origen. Bachelor.
[00:10:51] Speaker C: That's a great name, by the way. I just gotta say for the record, and in my kid origin, Bachelor, the original Bachelor. Yeah, I was just going to make that joke, actually.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: The land of Jerusalem, there is no such place. He says no part of Palestine bears the name Jerusalem except the city itself. Right. And so are we just trying to cover up one problem with another? Right. Like, is this just another cover?
[00:11:14] Speaker C: Can I take a moment real quick? Maybe interject here from that quote and from Alexander Campbell and others, I just want to briefly rant about this phenomenon of the idiot savant that is Joseph sm. Right. Reportedly. So I'm being told to believe on the one hand that Joseph Smith is so intimately acquainted with the Bible that he has literally memorized entire chapters of the Book of Isaiah that he can recite from memory as he's looking at the stone in his hat. Right. And just making this up with Oliver Cowdery, he can expertly mimic Biblical Hebraisms. Right. He has intimate knowledge of, like, you know, covenant patterns and prophetic calls and biblical narratives and allusions and prophetic citations, all that kind of stuff.
[00:12:02] Speaker A: And biblical commentators all the time.
[00:12:04] Speaker C: Yes. And he's consulting. Allegedly. He's consulting Adam Clark and who knows who else. Right. To get all these ideas from. But he doesn't realize Jerusalem's only a city. And he doesn't know Jesus is born at Bethlehem.
[00:12:15] Speaker B: Right.
[00:12:16] Speaker C: I'm not the only one to point this out. I know Dan Peterson has pointed it out, too, but I'm just struck by it again, looking at this material, I'm like, come on, which is it? Joseph Smith, the super genius who is so intimately familiar with the Bible he can recite it from memory, or Joseph Smith, the blithering idiot that doesn't know that there's only the city of Jerusalem, not the land of Jerusalem in ancient Judea?
[00:12:34] Speaker A: What city would Joseph Smith be more likely to point out at Jesus Christ's birth if he were making this up?
[00:12:38] Speaker C: Like death?
[00:12:39] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly. And so, yeah, that is.
Stephen has nailed it on the head. There's kind of a tension here about Joseph Smith is either an idiot or a genius, depending on what critics need him to be. Right. We're pretty consistent. We think he's a prophet.
[00:12:55] Speaker C: A prophet, yeah.
[00:12:57] Speaker A: Who.
[00:12:57] Speaker B: Who went beyond his own intellectual capacity in producing his scriptural works. Right.
But this expression, just to be. Just to. Real quick, jump back, it's not just Nephi who uses the expression land of Jerusalem. This is something that, like, the later Nephites inherit and continue to use. And Alma himself, in Alma, chapter 9, verse 22, talks about their ancestors being delivered of God out of the land of Jerusalem by the hand of the Lord. So, so this is something that. It's, It's. That's the conception of the. The land or the region, the area they came from. In Alma's own day, they're still thinking in terms of the land of Jerusalem. Right. Is that a problem for the Book of Mormon, though? We already talked about how people have actually criticized that. Well, let's go ahead and start with the Dead Sea Scrolls. We're going to get to some other evidence here in a little bit, but the Dead Sea Scrolls, this is from the translation in Michael Wise, Martin Ebeg and Edward Cook, who I believe. Stephen, you studied under Edward Cook?
[00:13:55] Speaker C: I did indeed. Great scholar.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: This is a story about Jeremiah, a contemporary of Lehi's. The text isn't contemporary, though, let's be clear about that. It's dated to the first century bc, but it is a story about the prophet Jeremiah, and it says that Jeremiah the prophet went out from before the Lord and went with the captives who were taken captive from the land of Jerusalem. And I've put the Hebrew there just to make it clear we're not. This isn't just like a translator's gloss or.
Exactly. Yes. So it's right there in the Hebrew, the land of Jerusalem. So, yes, this there is. That is a phrase that an ancient Jewish writer, at least on one occasion.
[00:14:38] Speaker C: Used, despite what the Mormonism Research Ministry will tell you in their recent article, which we'll throw up on the screen here, alleging that the quote here is like no one in 83 BC would ever use this phrase, Land of Jerusalem. Right, yeah, sorry, friends. We have actual literal documentation that they did in fact use that phrase in antiquity.
[00:14:58] Speaker B: Right in the first century.
[00:14:59] Speaker C: Right in the first century when this article is claiming it didn't show up.
[00:15:02] Speaker B: So. So yeah, it is used there.
What's actually kind of interesting about this particular usage here is the first scholars to ever publish anything on it, as far as I've been able to find, at least Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise.
Like I said this, the text is from the first century bc, so it's not contemporary, but it is talking about. It's telling a story about Jeremiah. And these first scholars who looked at it and translated it, they found the reference to the land of Jerusalem interesting, and they said it greatly enhances the sense of historicity of the whole, since Judah or Yahud by this time consisted of little more than Jerusalem and its immediate environs.
So a story about Jeremiah and the expression land of Jerusalem is greatly enhancing the historicity of that story.
[00:15:50] Speaker A: Well, I'll be.
[00:15:52] Speaker B: Interestingly enough, and this is something that was already pointed out by Gordon Thomason, a Latter Day Saint back in the 90s. If this is evidence for the historicity or enhances the sense of historicity, actually at least of a text about Jeremiah, then its appearance in First Nephi, a text about the same time period as Jeremiah logically would greatly enhance the sense of historicity of the Book of Mormon.
[00:16:14] Speaker A: That really is so cool, that completely separate from Latter Day Saints sphere. But a story about Jeremiah from the same time that uses that phrase adds to its historicity.
That's so cool.
[00:16:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So, but again, that is, the text itself is from the first century. That's later that after. Right, so what about going earlier? Is there any other evidence for the use of this expression, the land of Jerusalem? Well, actually, before we even had the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars like Hugh Nibley and others were pointing out the expression land of Jerusalem in the Amarna letters. Which are, which are actually. Why don't we have our Egyptologist explain the Amarna letters?
[00:16:54] Speaker C: Yeah, so basically, basically during the reign of Akhenaten Amenhotep iv, right, he's the pharaoh who famously has pictures of him that looks like an alien that people kind of speculate about.
[00:17:04] Speaker B: The heretic pharaoh.
[00:17:05] Speaker C: The heretic pharaoh who's worshipping the Aten disc, the sun disk. So this is during the Egyptian New Kingdom, when Egypt has a imperial presence in the Levant. And so when you have these things happening, local, political or other things happening in the Levant, they write a bunch of letters and send it back to the pharaoh who has his imperial presence in the Levant to kind of tell them what's going on. And it's really funny to read these.
[00:17:29] Speaker A: Letters because Levant being the area of Israel.
[00:17:32] Speaker C: Yeah. Syria, Canaan. Syria, Palestine. Right.
So these are letters that are written in an early form of Canaanite. Actually it's in cuneiform. But the language you think is an early form of Canaanite, basically a precursor to Hebrew, they are written to the pharaoh to kind of update him on how things are going and what's happening. It's really funny because a lot of them are like crazy obsequious and groveling. Oh, son of my son, oh great lord of all eternity. Right. Like when they're addressing the pharaoh, it's very funny how they're trying to butter him up, right.
[00:18:01] Speaker B: And if you read him. But like, there's lots of petty squabbles going on.
[00:18:05] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. I mean, they're trying to reach, they want to speak to the manager to have him come.
[00:18:10] Speaker B: They're all karening a little bit.
[00:18:12] Speaker C: Yeah, it's really great.
[00:18:13] Speaker A: But these are like bureaucratic administrative documents, maybe are boring, but it actually gives us some of our earliest glimpses at what was happening in this land of.
[00:18:20] Speaker C: Israel, of geography, of history, of language. Right. So really important for the history of the Canaanite language. Right. So that's what these Amarna letters are. There's these letters to the pharaoh.
Most of them are at least addressed to him.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: Right.
[00:18:35] Speaker C: Were collected by Akhenaten iv and they contain geography and geographical and historical and cultural details about what's happening. And we're talking like early Iron Age, right?
[00:18:46] Speaker B: Well, late Bronze. Late bronze, early iron, 1300s BC ish.
[00:18:51] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:18:52] Speaker B: Right. So. So this is pre Israelite. Right. These are not Israelite writers.
And that's something critics will sometimes point out about this. But we'll. We'll address that in a minute.
But I do. But. But the reason these are brought up is because some of the letters come from Jerusalem, come from a ruler in Jerusalem. And he uses the expression land of Jerusalem. And we've got here letter 287, which is where the phrase occurs most frequently.
And he's writing to the pharaoh, basically asking for help, groveling and pleading for help here. And so. And he's repeatedly using this phrase land of Jerusalem, which is his land, his territory that he rules over.
And this is the translation that appears in the James Pritchard Anthology of Ancient Near Eastern Texts, a very standard reference in ancient Near Eastern studies and biblical studies.
There are, of course, other translations you can find. This is a good translation, though, because it is more literal and uses the expression land of Jerusalem. I've seen other translations that just kind of drop the land of. But that is authentic to the text. And so you need to see it in the translation here to make our point.
But I do think. Don't want to dwell too much on this particular letter, but I do think the phrase comes up to the land of Jerusalem is interesting because in first Nephi.
[00:20:09] Speaker A: That's familiar.
[00:20:10] Speaker B: You always have them going up.
[00:20:12] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:20:12] Speaker B: To the land of Jerusalem. Right. They're never going down. They're always going down when they leave. And there is real geographic elevation factors.
[00:20:20] Speaker C: Say, the reason for that being it's.
[00:20:22] Speaker B: It's in the highlands. Right. Mountains. Right. So. So, yeah, they go up into the land of Jerusalem.
Letter 289 is interesting because. Okay, what you'll hear when. When we're making this argument, someone might. Might have already made it in the comments by now.
Alma 10. Alma 710 does not say land of Jerusalem. Okay, Right. It says at Jerusalem, the land of our forefathers, which is the land of our forefathers. So letter 289 is interesting because it also doesn't say land of Jerusalem. But what it does say is, and as. And now as for Jerusalem, behold, this land belongs to the king. The same kind of construct. Construct, if you will, as what you find in Alma710. And he's referring to the land, right. The entire region, the territory that he rules over as the ruler of Jerusalem, not just the city.
And then the. The real bombshell. Right. Is letter 290, because at least according to this translation. And we'll talk about. There are some nuances here that we need to factor in, but it talks about. But now a town in the. Of the land of Jerusalem, bit Lami by name, a town belonging to the king, has gone over to the side of the people of Kaliah. And the footnote in this edition here, footnote 22, says that in this line, it's line 15 in the text, there is an almost certain reference to the town of Bethlehem.
[00:21:45] Speaker C: Whoa. Nice.
[00:21:46] Speaker A: Super cool.
[00:21:47] Speaker B: Yeah. And so potentially here we have a direct reference to Bethlehem as being part of the land of Jerusalem. So if you accept that evidence, granted from 1400, the 14th century B.C. rather than, you know, Alma's time or Lehi's time, but we'll get to that in a minute.
There are at least some points in history where Bethlehem is considered part of the land of Jerusalem. Some people who are familiar with this evidence actually on Twitter, this was actually brought up when that guy brought up Alma710 and said, oh, it says he's born at Jerusalem. Luke Hanson, who's over, who appears on Ward Radio a lot, shout out to him.
He. He brings up this letter from the Armana letters and says, hey, yeah, look. So this shows that Bethlehem is part of the land of Jerusalem. So people have. Are aware of this and people have reacted to it. This guy, Austin Allison, I guess is his name. He gives a really long response. We're not going to go over the whole thing, but one of the things he does point out is that the meaning of this particular letter, and particularly whether that's really a reference to Bethlehem, is in dispute. Okay. It is not certain. There are other translations that have identified it as a different location.
So. And that's also. That's actually also something that comes up in.
In the Mormonism Research Ministry response to this as well.
They say one must assume that this is a reference to Bethlehem. And you'll see they have a different translation of that here. What's going on? Is that that name that we talked about as bitten bit lame. It's actually written in the cuneiform with a logogram for a Mesopotamian deity. And scholars sometimes represent it as Ninurcha or Ninib, but it's a logogram from a Mesopotamian deity. And scholars have said, well, it's probably actually referring to a Canaanite deity. And the translation bit lame assumes it's referring to the Deity Lahmu, which would then be, if it's bit lamu or bit lame, that's Bethlehem. But scholars have made some other proposals.
But here's what's interesting about all those proposals. So some of them, some scholars have a popular one. Bethlehem is actually widely held. Lots of scholars have followed this idea that it's Bethlehem. And so that's. That's not like a fringe thing. It's. It shows up in the literature a lot.
Bethlehem, of course, is, as the crows fly, flies, about five miles southwest of Jerusalem.
Other proposals for where this might be, though, Beth Horon, which is a popular one, nine miles from Jerusalem.
And all of these are straight line. I don't know exactly how long it would take if you're actually traveling routes through the hills, you know, through the hills or whatever, but. But nine miles from Jerusalem, as the crow flies, Beth Shemesh, which is. I don't know how. I honestly don't know anyone who argues for that. But it's listed as one of the possibilities in the literature. So people mention it, but never particularly argue for it. But it's about 15 miles west.
Kirjath, German. I don't know if I said that one right.
That was only recently proposed in 2017, as far as I'm aware, that's the first. It was proposed about seven and a half miles almost from Jerusalem to the west.
And we can have this map here on screen that shows all of these.
Notice all of those. And the last one, Beth Anath, there's not. I don't think there's a consensus on where Beth Anath is.
And so I've put a question mark there, but it's the red line there that goes southwest all the way, you know, almost 16 miles south of Jerusalem. What you'll notice about all these alternative possibilities is every single one of them is further away from Jerusalem than Bethlehem. So even if you want to dispute whether that's really a reference to Bethlehem, whatever town it is, almost guarantees that the region, the radius of area controlled and overseen by Jerusalem, the land of Jerusalem, if you will, would have encompassed Bethlehem. Right. In fact, scholars who study the Amarna Letters and study the geography of the Amarna Letters have tried to reconstruct the boundaries of the different city state territories. That's what, you know, they, in the text, they call them the land of this or whatever, we call that a city state. Right.
[00:25:56] Speaker A: It's not just that Jerusalem was proximate to Bethlehem, but it actually could have been like a formal name of a district kind of thing.
[00:26:02] Speaker B: Well, yeah, it's the territory. You know, Jerusalem is the city, and the territory around it is the land of that city. Right.
[00:26:10] Speaker A: And like Salt Lake and Salt Lake County.
[00:26:12] Speaker B: Well, yeah, these are city. These are all ancient city states in the letters. Right. And scholars have studied these letters and tried to deduce the boundaries of the different city states. And there I've read like five different attempts to do this.
Some of them publish maps. Not all of them do, but I can show. We can show some maps that have been published here.
All of these. Any one of the. Take any one of these boundaries and put it down on a satellite map. I actually did that here with. With one of the boundaries that's been published. And look at that. Bethlehem's part of the land of Jerusalem.
There's no two ways about it. The, the territorial region controlled by Jerusalem that is being called the land of Jerusalem here would have included Bethlehem.
[00:26:57] Speaker C: So even if that specific Amarna letter does not necessarily refer to Bethlehem, that reading of that sign is Beit Lamu. Right. It's some other reading.
So we may not be able to necessarily say definitively that's evidence for Bethlehem in the land of Jerusalem, but just knowing how these administrative centers worked and knowing the distance to Bethlehem, it still would have been incorporated as part of that in any case.
[00:27:23] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:27:24] Speaker C: Right, exactly. So we just need to be a little more careful, perhaps with this one piece of evidence, how we cite it or discuss it, but it doesn't refute the proposition that you can conceptually conceive of Bethlehem as part of the, quote, land of Jerusalem or Jerusalem, the land of our forefathers.
[00:27:39] Speaker A: I mean, you've gone through just like a bunch of different ways to approach this. And pretty much, no matter how you slice the onion, like, Bethlehem is part of the land of Jerusalem. So saying Jesus was born in the land of Jerusalem, it tracks.
[00:27:50] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
And like, the one criticism left here that you might hear is that, well, these are pre Israelite. Right. This is. This doesn't represent the system under.
[00:28:01] Speaker A: During the time of Nephi.
[00:28:02] Speaker B: During the time of Nephi. Right. And that's like, when we talk about this criticism that, you know, Jerusalem, no one would have used the term Jerusalem in 83 BC. Right. The Amarna letters by then are, you know, 1400 years old. Years old or 1300 years old. And like, okay, what they're really trying to get at here is that this is a, you know, this is a non Jewish, non Israelite political system. This doesn't necessarily represent how things would have been understood by people of Jewish descent, people from Lehi's time or whatever. Right. So let's talk about that. Yeah, There is.
There is a seal that was found just a couple years ago. Well, a couple years ago, back in, like, 2012. It's. It's what? Well, I call it, as I said, a seal. It's a seal impression. Scholars will call it a bulla. Right.
And this is particularly. This is what college scholars call a fiscal bulla, which means it was being used for tax purposes. People were taking goods and resources, packaging them, putting their seal on it, and sending it up to Jerusalem. And this was found, to be clear, this was found in situ in Jerusalem. And the text of the. The bulla is the seventh year, meaning the seventh year of the reign of whichever king this was under Bethlehem for the king.
Bethlehem is marking where it came from. So here you have administrative goods being shipped from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. This is dated to the 7th century BC or maybe early 6th century BC basically.
[00:29:40] Speaker C: That's not bad.
[00:29:41] Speaker B: This is Lehi's time.
[00:29:41] Speaker C: That's pretty good.
[00:29:42] Speaker B: This is Lehi's time. Right. What does this mean? What is the implication of this? Well, scholars who study this particular time period have talked about how Jerusalem. And this is a quote from Nadav Naaman, an Israeli historian and archaeologist. Jerusalem was located in the center of a sort of district which encompassed the capital and its periphery, including the agricultural areas of the city's residents, as well as satellite settlements directly connected to Jerusalem proper.
So there's Jerusalem, there's the surrounding area where there's, like, farmland and things like that, and then there's satellite settlements.
And what would. What would Bethlehem be here? Yeah, And. And all of those are sending their goods and. And things like shipping. Shipping excess surplus goods back to Jerusalem. Right. In fact, another pair of archaeologists, they. They studied what they call Jerusalem's hinterland, or I don't know, what might be reasonably called the land of Jerusalem.
One might say they studied Jerusalem's hinterland in the 8th to 7th centuries, and they talk about how, yeah, all of those areas, those rural settlements and farmsteads and such, would have. Would have shipped their surplus goods back to Jerusalem. And we have the seal from Bethlehem, which is direct evidence of this practice. Right. And they talk about how Jerusalem was an administrative, social, and religious center for the entire region. And one may treat the entire region, including what we call here, satellite settlements, as part of Jerusalem's own hinterland. Right. Or as part of the land of Jerusalem, if you will.
So, yes, during the 8th, 7th, early 6th century. Right. During the time that Lehi and Nephi are living in Jerusalem and then leaving the land of Jerusalem, you have an administrative setup that's probably honestly not that different than what you see in the Amarna letters. In fact, Nadavna Amen, who we talked about earlier, he, he does a whole thing on the history of the administrative center of Jerusalem and what the boundaries were. And basically his argument is that more or less you have while, while Judah and it may be the capital of a larger state at times and stuff like that, the direct administrative center of Jerusalem and its, its satellite settlements geographically are probably about the same size more or less throughout history.
[00:31:56] Speaker A: So no matter what way we splice this onion, like clearly the Book of Mormon is well within the bounds of what could have happened in I guess at this point in the first century B.C. because yes, Bethlehem was in the land of Jerusalem. The land of Jerusalem was an attested place during the time of the Book of Mormon. Like it's just a no brainer. And even if not like Jerusalem could be a shorthand way to just refer to that general area. But was Jesus actually born in Bethlehem?
[00:32:23] Speaker B: Well, that's a question that scholars certainly ask. Right. And again, this whole criticism is focused on. It really only comes from people with a conservative Christian background. Because once you step outside that bubble and you look at biblical scholarship, scholars actually question the veracity of that. And it's for some of the same reasons Stephen already talked about. Right. Scholars see Matthew and Luke and I want to state on the record, I believe Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
[00:32:49] Speaker C: Same here.
[00:32:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I accept the authenticity and historicity of that tradition as found in Matthew and Luke.
But for the broader conversation, it's important to recognize that actually scholars very much question, they're asking where did Matthew and Luke get that idea?
Did they have real primary sources to confirm that? Or are they doing what Stephen talked about earlier, going through the Old Testament, they find this passage of Micah and they say, oh, let's say Jesus was born in Bethlehem because that makes him fulfill this prophecy that connects him to this Old Testament passage.
And so scholars questioning that, you know, suggesting maybe that's the case, they have said, well, where might Jesus have born? What are some of the other locations? And actually this is just taken, this is just a summary sort of book. James Charlesworth, the Historical Jesus, an Essential Guide. James Charlesworth, by the way, very, very well respected scholar, committed Christian. This is not some godless.
[00:33:45] Speaker C: He's not Richard Dawkins here trying to trash the Bible or anything.
[00:33:49] Speaker B: He's a very, very committed Christian.
He Very quickly summarizes in his book the different proposals for where Jesus might have been born. So there are five candidate locations. Bethlehem of Judea is indeed one of them. Right. So he talks about that and the reasons for thinking that might have been it. There's also a Bethlehem of Galilee.
[00:34:09] Speaker A: Oh, I didn't even know that.
[00:34:11] Speaker B: And since Jesus is referred to as a Galilean and lots of his ministry takes place in Galilee, some scholars have said, oh, maybe he's actually born in Bethlehem of Galilee. And the writers just linked it to Bethlehem of Judea because of Micah 5. Right.
Nazareth is a candidate. And I think if you were to survey all the scholars, the historical Jesus scholars, I think you would find that probably is the leading candidate for a lot. I haven't done that, so I don't.
[00:34:39] Speaker C: Know for sure offhand on my reading of critical New Testament scholarship. Yeah, most people tend to say, well, they say he was in Bethlehem. It's probably Nazareth. Right.
Everybody around Jesus knows he's from Nazareth.
[00:34:50] Speaker B: They know him as Jesus of Nazareth. Yeah.
[00:34:52] Speaker C: And so the logical assumption there is, okay, that's where he was also born.
[00:34:56] Speaker B: But another location option number four is Jerusalem.
So some scholars have even suggested Jesus was actually born at Jerusalem, in which case Alma is the more precise.
[00:35:10] Speaker A: Go figure.
[00:35:12] Speaker B: And then of course, there's also Capernaum, which, you know, for reasons that again, that's up in Galilee, if I'm remembering right. And it's where Jesus has some of his ministry and things like that.
[00:35:23] Speaker C: Well, it's where he finds his disciples. Right.
[00:35:25] Speaker B: So anyway, there are five. Those. There are those different five proposals. And then there are some scholars who add on top of that, just say, yeah, we can't really know.
We don't have good enough historical information to be able to really say where Jesus was born. To some extent, this whole discussion is just futile because we're trying to prove that out. Like, if you're not even convinced that Jesus is born in Jerusalem, like some scholars, or that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Excuse me.
[00:35:49] Speaker C: It's a moot point.
[00:35:51] Speaker B: Like, it's kind of a moot point. And I actually think something that, that Charles says in his conclusion is kind of interesting in this regard. He explains why people doubt that Jesus might have been born in Bethlehem, which we've already talked about. And then he concludes with, it is certain. And this is like the only thing we can be certain about based on, you know, the current evidence from a historical standpoint. Again, I want to stress, I do believe he was born in Bethlehem, but all we can really be certain of is that the gospels point to Jesus birth somewhere in the Holy Land or.
[00:36:24] Speaker C: Oh, that's not vague at all.
[00:36:27] Speaker B: Or what Alma would have called the land of their forefathers. Right. And so again, that's the spirit of what Alma's saying is over there in that Holy Land, in that land where our ancestors came from, that's where the Messiah will come. And his point isn't to give a pinpoint precise GPS location of the manger Jesus would be laid in. Right.
[00:36:49] Speaker C: That's actually an interesting idea. Jerusalem being like a metonym for the Holy Land. Basically the land of Jerusalem, land of our forefathers. Sure.
[00:36:57] Speaker A: Say the same thing. Bashana Yerushalayim next year in Jerusalem. It's kind of this like desire to go back to the Holy Land.
[00:37:04] Speaker B: So yeah, and I think that's, that's the spirit of Alma's prophecy. That's what he's trying to communicate to his audience because they are not in the Holy Land. He's just trying to make the point that hey, in that land where our forefathers came from, that's where the Messiah will be born.
And of course that's what we believe. And that's what's more important than where he was born. Right. Is that he was born, that he was in fact the Son of God, that he was in fact the Messiah, that he did in fact perform the atonement, he did bear our sins, he did die and resurrect. Those are all the important facts.
I love oh little town of Bethlehem. I love the nativity narratives as much as the next person. But at the end of the day we know it's his death and resurrection that are far, far more important than again, pinpointing exactly where he was born. And when you look at Book of Mormon prophecy about Christ, you see that emphasis and you see that message coming.
[00:38:04] Speaker C: Through clearly that's really missing the forest for the trees when you hyper focus on at Jerusalem as opposed to all the stuff. He'll be born of a virgin, fair and pure, the Holy Ghost will come upon her and she will conceive. He will go forth suffering pains and afflictions, perform an atonement, that kind of stuff.
[00:38:19] Speaker A: So we talked. You've gone into detail about all the historical sources and there's a lot to comprehend here and we don't have a book on the table. So where do we go to learn more about this topic?
[00:38:28] Speaker B: You can I mentioned this is something that is brought up in Matt's Anachronism's research and so you can go there. And he's got a couple of things both on the land of Jerusalem and on Bethlehem. Honestly, we went in more depth than he did.
I had an article in LDS Living a few years ago, why did Alma say Christ would be born in Jerusalem? Surprising evidence of the Book of Mormon that you can go check out if you'd like to.
Also, Scripture Central has a no eye on this topic. Why does the Book of Mormon talk about the land of Jerusalem that also covers this Bethlehem stuff?
And so and then there's a few other resources. We'll put them in the description down below.
But yeah, there are places you can go to read more about this subject.
[00:39:09] Speaker A: So no matter where Jesus Christ was born, we know that he is our Lord and Savior. And remember, you can always study deeply but also believe boldly and we'll see you next time.
Sam.
