When people engage the scriptures from a scholarly approach, many lose faith in the scriptures. We’ll first talk about how to reconcile Nephi’s story of obtaining the Brass Plates with the idea that the Torah didn’t exist in 600 BC. Is there a way to reconcile biblical scholarship? I asked that question to Colby Townsend and was a bit surprised by his answer.
GT: So, do we try to reconcile that? Do we say, oh, maybe Lehi left later? I don’t know.
Colby: I don’t know. That’s one of those things where I alluded to earlier where a lot of times people will [say,] “Okay, you’ve just come in and smashed up this this wall. Now you need to put it back up together for me.” Yeah.
GT: How do we pick up our pieces of faith knowing all this stuff?
Colby: Right, so that’s where I say that coming as a historian into this study, I can’t really do that for you. That’s really up to individuals. There are a handful of other scholars. Joe Spencer is a good friend of mine. And I’ve always suggested, go to him. He’s a good theologian, and he’ll help you go through and figure some of that out. But you know, coming from the outside, really as a historian and trying to study and understand the history of the texts that you have, that’s just not something that I really do.
GT: So you can’t help us out?
Colby: Yeah, sorry. Yeah, for me, I think that Bill Davis has really done a good service recently in his book.[1]
