Still, my current theory is that it is precisely our belief in translation errors in the Bible that lead us to these ‘inerrancy’ habits of speaking and thinking at least in folk theology. We repeat to ourselves that the Bible is mistranslated in parts and readily use this to explain many scriptures–and it’s not just in sunday school. J Fielding Smith, maybe the best known Mormon scriptorian of the 20th century, uses this to explain John 4:24 and several other passages. But precisely because of this suspicion of the translations (in addition to a general anti-intellectualism in Mormon theology), until recently few scholars have actually examined alternate English translations, much less Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. I don’t know McConkie’s and Fielding Smith’s background in these languages, but if they did have knowledge of them they surely don’t put it to much use when interpreting scrupture.

Whereas scholarly scriptural interpretation in traditional Christianity (which led to modern biblical scholarship) started with the premise that the Greek and Hebrew words of the Bible were in some strong sense inerrant, Mormon Biblical studies, has oddly enough, been spurred on by the mistranslation doctrine to “save the appearances” and take the KJV Bible as Word of God, except when it seems to clearly contradict ‘modern revelation’. And so we have a ready interpretation of scriptures that don’t fit, and never have to go into the historical, anthropological, and philological studies which we would need if we took the words themselves more seriously as sacred but translated texts.

We frequently hold to many KJV idioms without good reason, which leads to some exaggerated interpetations and false assumptions (e.g. that ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ were intended as elevated, formal speech when it is closer to the truth to say that these are just older ways of saying ‘you’). This is understandable, since the BoM is written in KJV idiom, but it still leads to bad Biblical interpretation. My wife still recounts the story of the education week speaker who spent 30 minuntes talking about the meaning of “help meet” in Genesis, as if “help meet” were actually a meaningful (but little-used) term in modern English, or captured some Hebrew concept with exceptional perfection.