When I was teaching Sunday school to the youth there was a really embarrassing example of what not to do in the Come, Follow Me curriculum. In the lesson titled, “How can I improve my scripture study,” it had the following scriptures and the theme they represented: “Isaiah 34:16; 1 Nephi 10:19; D&C 88:63, 118 (If we seek, we shall find).” The KJV passage they wanted you look at reads, “Seek ye out of the book of the LORD, and read.” The problem is that the rest of the verse reads, “no one of these shall fail, none shall want her mate: for my mouth it hath commanded, and his spirit it hath gathered them.” What is it referring to? The surrounding verses make it clear that it is referring to the wild animals that will forever inhabit the land of Edom after it is destroyed. Is that how we want to teach the youth to improve their scripture study?

Great insight. I feel that almost every 2nd and 3rd Sunday of the month in priesthood as we study our Presidents of the Church manual. Honestly, it matters little who the prophet was since the lessons are so divorced from the actual leader.

I agree that it is discouraging that readability is subjugated to other considerations. We largely ignore what the text is saying in favor of what we already know it means. Future curricula that prioritize themes over and against texts will only exacerbate that. I also think that as more and more converts come into the Church without the upbringing within the vernacular tradition of the KJV that lifelong members have, comprehension will drop even more. I have thought about conducting comprehension checks among English-speaking members of the Church with the KJV, just to see where we’re really at.

Your comment #33 is both encouraging and discouraging. It is encouraging that there are those who speak up for readability. It is discouraging that the decision-makers put readability far enough down the priority list that nothing will change in the foreseeable future.

But as LDS resources become less and less helpful to English speakers, Mormons who actually want to understand the Bible will increasingly go to non-LDS resources. I have an NIV Study Bible that will pass for an LDS set of scriptures (leather bound, the right size). I have a Harper Collins Study Bible in iBooks. I read E.P. Sanders’ The Historical Figure of Jesus and Ehrman’s Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of a New Millennium instead of Talmage’s Jesus the Christ, which was outdated the day it was published. I use Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible? and Walter Brueggemann’s Introduction to the Old Testament — although I like Sperry’s Spirit of the Old Testament, it is too dated at this point.

Let’s put it bluntly. The unwillingness of the Church to take the Bible seriously (seriously enough to make reading and understanding it a real priority) is likely to damage the Church’s credibility at some point.

Seriously, there’s a lot that can be done without formal training, including (cautious!) work with Greek and Hebrew. Jim Faulconer does some work in this in his Scripture Study: Tools and Suggestions , and I expand on it in the second half of my article on Bible translations, “Suggestions for Personal Study” from Religious Educator.

Now, on your concerns with the English KJV, I am in agreement. Our translation policy calls for language registers that are dignified yet contemporary in translating the triple combination, but we preserve the phenomenally antiquated language of the KJV for English speakers. The KJV also misunderstands a lot that we have much better contexts for interpreting now. The notion of retranslations has been brought up multiple times, and they’ve been rejected every time. There are a few reasons for it, but the main reason is that the language of the triple combination and most of the lexicon of the contemporary English-speaking Church are directly based on the language of the KJV. It would require an overhaul of our entire vernacular, and the Church just does not yet prioritize readability enough to have such a fundamental change be worth it. I don’t anticipate it happening while I’m here, but rest assured we have several people here who advocate for it.

Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns.