Meet the Early-Day Saints: A Wayfare Limited Series

Faith Matters
Meet the Early-Day Saints: A Wayfare Limited Series

Welcome to Meet the Early-Day Saints, a limited series produced and hosted by Blair Hodges. In Meet the Early-day Saints, Blair will take you on a journey through time to meet the earliest disciples of Jesus. You’ll learn from a wide range of esteemed Latter-day Saint scholars who reveal the similarities and differences between ancient Christian faith and ours today. Throughout the series, some of your common assumptions may be challenged and in the process you’ll gain a deeper understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Each guest is a contributor to the new book Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints, from the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. In our first episode, we ask what if the “Great Apostasy” wasn’t so great after all? Latter-day Saint scholar Jason R. Combs invites us to revisit our assumptions about the Christians who came before us. We discuss his chapter “Understanding Ancient Christians, Apostasy, and Restoration,” from the book Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints. www.wayfaremagazine.org

  1. 20 THG 8

    Expand Enough and You'll Go Local

    When I was seven years old, my grandma offered me twenty dollars to read the Book of Mormon ahead of my baptism into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  The task started well, as I’d already heard the opening stories many times. But roughly 80 pages in, thick into the Isaiah chapters, I was overwhelmed. My eyes dutifully looked at each word, but I understood nothing. It was beyond my abilities. Eventually, for a stretch of at least 50 pages, I just read the tiny summaries at the start of each chapter and called it good. That’s how I finished the book before my baptism. My grandma gave me the prized twenty-dollar bill at the Salt Lake City airport, minutes before she left on an LDS mission. I held that bill in my hands, dreaming of my purchasing prospects (a discount game for my Nintendo Entertainment System, I’m sure).  But on my way out of the airport, I lost the bill. Did I drop it on the escalator? Did it fall out of my pocket where I’d been sitting? My parents helped me look for it, but it was gone. I didn’t have the heart to tell my grandma, and part of me decided that my loss was simply God’s retribution for skimming chapters. I deserved to lose the money. I read the Book of Mormon (really read it) many times in the years that followed, such that by the time I left on my mission I felt like I knew it deeply and was ready to convert the world. During a particularly naive moment of zeal, I even told my high school girlfriend just before I left that everyone would convert to Mormonism if they could only hear our message explained clearly enough. That’s what I was going to do. An Expanding World Imagine my surprise and disappointment when reality proved far more complicated than my teenage self assumed. Despite my best attempts to explain the message, almost no one I spoke to during my mission converted. My mission experience expanded my world, which only continued to expand when I returned home, started college, and did two stints abroad, visiting cathedrals and museums full of biblical art across Europe.  That’s when I realized that I’d still never read the Bible cover to cover. The task had always felt daunting. How could I make sense of Leviticus, Ezekiel, or Chronicles? My reading comprehension had thankfully improved over the years, but I knew I would need guidance. So, for more than a year, I read scholarly books about the Bible alongside different translations of the text.  I soon realized how little I knew about anything beyond the scope of the curated Sunday School lessons I was raised with. Once again, I felt overwhelmed — like I was at the limits of my abilities. Even if I could grasp what a handful of scholars thought about the book, how would I ever understand the thousands of interpretations from every Christian and Jewish sect throughout history, much less the original languages the book was written in? It would take a lifetime, I knew, to comprehend it all. And that was just Christianity. Around the same time, as I’ve recounted elsewhere, I was also reading wisdom texts from eastern religions—the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Dhammapada, and so on. The more I read, the more I realized that if it would take a lifetime for me to understand all the nuances of Christianity, it would take many lifetimes to understand all the nuances of each tradition around the world. It was simply too much. If I thought about the sheer expanse of everything I didn’t know, I felt overwhelmed—like I was going crazy. The View From Nowhere Some people deal with this overwhelm by taking what the philosopher Thomas Nagel calls a “view from nowhere.” They believe that the only way forward is to try to become impartial spectators, scrutinizing each tradition like a medical student bent over a dissecting table.  But living traditions can’t pass the view-from-nowhere test (consisting, as they do, of flawed human beings rather than lifeless objects), so those who

    10 phút

  2. 1 THG 8

    Forgotten Wives and Sisters

    “It is of little consequence in respect to the question of originality, which of them holds the pen; the one who contributes least to the composition may contribute most to the thought; the writings which result are the joint product of both, and it must often be impossible to disentangle their respective parts, and affirm that this belongs to one and that to the other.” So wrote John Stuart Mill in reference to the role of his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, in his own published works. (I gratefully acknowledge the truth of the principle from personal experience!). History is replete with other examples than Mill of women who exercised unheralded influence on a writer who—often because of women’s more obscure place in patriarchal society—ventriloquized a wife or—in two famous cases—sisters.  William Wordsworth revolutionized English poetry, and is celebrated as the Father of British Romanticism. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, in an age of fervent optimism and revolution, Wordsworth gave powerful expression to the innocence of children and the fundamental goodness of human nature. His constant companion—more so than wife or friends—was his sister Dorothy. She was “a flash of light, Or an unseen companionship, a breath . . . independent of the wind.” He was the most celebrated English poet of his day. However, one can track in her journals the embryos out of which William fashioned some of his most famous poems. If journals and diaries had persisted as credited forms of literary expression, she might herself have achieved celebrity status. His poem best known to school children begins with the famous lines, I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze . . . It is not clear that his words improved upon the unadorned account Dorothy recorded privately, earlier: We saw a few daffodils close to the water-side. We fancied that the sea had floated the seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and above them; some rested their heads upon these stones, as on a pillow, for weariness; and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, that blew upon them over the lake; they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot, and a few stragglers higher up; but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity, unity, and life of that one busy highway. More consequential for the history of early Christianity was the remarkable woman Macrina the Younger—known to few besides specialists today, and largely overshadowed by her brother Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory became the most eloquent proponent in the fourth century of the theology of ascent—that view which sees humankind as a work in continual progress, participating in gradual sanctification and union with the divine. Gregory read the Song of Solomon as a beautiful allegory of human response to the “arrows of love” with which God relentlessly pursues his creation. Gregory developed the theme most lyrically in his Life of Moses, wherein he recast the prophet’s entire life as a universal model: “The great Moses, as he was becoming ever greater, at no time stopped in his ascent, nor did he set a limit for himself in his upward course. Once having set foot on the ladder which God set up (as Jacob says), he continually climbed to the step above and never ceased to rise higher, because he always found a step higher than the one he had attained.”   Yet Gregory left no doubt that his spiritua

    8 phút

  3. 25 THG 7

    Our Secret Exultations

    Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit priest and perhaps the greatest of the Victorian poets. He suffered terribly from recurrent bouts of religious doubt and profound depression. In one of his “sonnets of desolation" we read a startling metaphor for spiritual struggle: Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. It took a harrowing image—carrion serving as comfort food—to shock Hopkins out of his diet of disappointment.  In 1913, the Irishman Sir Hugh Lane proposed establishing a permanent modern art gallery in Dublin. He had secured pledges of funding to house and enlarge his own collection featuring such contemporary greats as Corot, Manet, Monet, Degas, and Renoir. The location was to be a middle-class Irish neighborhood—who could object to such an aspiration? Well, lots of people, actually. The country was on the brink of civil war; a citizen labor army of 20,000 had just armed themselves against violent police crackdowns; Dublin slums were pervasive and death rates high; the trauma of the Great Hunger was still a vivid memory among the aged; and the Great War loomed ahead, only months away. Dispensing even private funds—let alone public monies—for fine art in desperate times struck some as a tone-deaf indulgence. To others (like William Butler Yeats), affirming the enduring and the beautiful amidst hunger and squalor was an act of defiance against human fragility and contingency. (Aren’t the poor always with us?)  In spite of Yeats’ impassioned support, Lane’s proposal failed to obtain public approval, and Yeats wrote a poem of bitter consolation to his ally in the effort, Lady Gregory. Hopkins’ wrestle was spiritual and cosmic; Yeats’ was political and moral. But in both cases, grievance threatened to canker their soul, and both rebuffed the temptation. Yeats’ magnificent poem, “To a friend whose work has come to nothing,” ends with a call that challenges the human spirit to one of the hardest tasks it can ever face: . . . Bred to a harder thing Than Triumph, turn away And like a laughing string Whereon mad fingers play Amid a place of stone, Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult. According to Paul Ricoeur, love means “unconditioned solidarity with and affirmation of the other.” For Dietrich von Hildebrand, love is “the affirmation of the being” of the other. For Martin Luther King, “love affirms the other unconditionally.” We could add endlessly to the list. In love we affirm the other—that is, we recognize the claims of the other person, that she is an end and not an object, she is the “Thou” in the I-Thou relationship, the “I”-view of the other into which one must enter imaginatively and feelingly.  The quiet heroism of Yeats’ poem is in its recognition that in so many of life’s transactions, we will not be affirmed. What then? Unrequited romantic love is the great fabric upon which poets embroider their tragedies. The desiccated desert of a loveless childhood, Romanian orphanages taught us, creates real-life shrunken souls that our most effusive compensations can seldom repair. Life in a close community wreaks its own wounds of neglect and disregard and slight. Our cultural moment has sensitized us to a plurality of individuals who feel insufficiently affirmed in their diverse identities. All the marginalized were the focus of Christ’s ministry and should be of ours. There is, however, another deficit of affirmation that Yeats is addressing in his poem. Less morally urgent perhaps, less dramatic, but a hurt that spares no one and can nonetheless corrode the soul like a spiritual rust. It is the experience of disappointment—of seeing our projects or our plans, or our vision of a larger good, frustrated. Human nature being what it is, in the absenc

    10 phút

  4. 23 THG 7

    Walking Toward Zion

    When they were teenagers, my fourth great-grandmother and her sister sailed to the United States to walk across the plains with the Latter-day Saints migrating to Utah. Before they set off with handcarts, though, their parents changed their minds. Mary Jane and Eliza hid from them until they had boarded the ship back to England. Setting their faces toward the Salt Lake Valley, the two young women left behind their native home and family forever. They had new shoes for their journey, but they decided to save them so they would have pristine footwear to put on as they walked into Zion. They walked the entire journey barefoot. By the time they arrived, their feet were too swollen and calloused to fit into their shoes. In remembrance of the feet that have carried us here—bruised and blistered, scarred and swollen, both steadfast and faltering—we present a collection of essays to honor Pioneer Day, featuring four writers who share a connection with an ancestor that has touched them. We hope this series reflects the wisdom, solace, and strength we glean as our hearts turn to the generations before us. A kindling of recognition, a story that imparts courage, a shared grief—these are some of the gifts we receive as we commune with our family across time. May we find renewed faith as we remember the feet that carried us here and the footprints we leave for those who follow. —Grace Carter JULY 24TH: A PHOTO EXHIBITION by Alexander Laurent Get full access to Wayfare at www.wayfaremagazine.org/subscribe

    20 phút

  5. 27 THG 6

    The End of Love

    The Feminine Divine has a storied history in religious texts and literature alike. Often, however, the face of the feminine divine shines through an earthly personage. In Goethe’s masterpiece Faust, the hero loses his duel with the devil. His contract with Mephistopheles requires the forfeiture of his soul, and in the drama’s closing scene, raucous devils arrive to ferry him to hell. The ending is poised to be yet another version of the morality play’s tragic conclusion as it had long played out in hundreds of versions performed in fiction and fairs across a vast cultural landscape over past centuries. But in Goethe’s Romantic version, a shocking reversal occurs: Angels intrude and pronounce Faust redeemed through the successful intercession of the soul of a young girl he had wronged—the maiden Gretchen. One of the greatest works of Western literature ends with the mantic pronouncement:  Das Ewig-Weibliche Zieht uns hinan [The Eternal-Feminine Draws us on high.] The most enduring version of this cosmic trope—and certainly one that Goethe had in mind—was from the masterpiece of the Middle Ages: Dante’s Divine Comedy. This trilogy, one of the first great works of literature written in the vernacular (Tuscan), depicted in an accessible and memorable way the theology of the Medieval church. Through the character of the narrator, we follow the paradigmatic journey of the pilgrim making his way through earthly travail, purgation, and into heaven.  Spurring him along the entirety of his journey is his Platonic love for the idealized Beatrice, an Italian girl Dante had met briefly, but who captured Dante’s heart and served as his spiritual inspiration and poetic muse. In the epic poem, she sends Virgil the poet to guide Dante the pilgrim through Purgatory, at the summit of which she conducts him personally through ever higher and more radiant celestial spheres. A most famous scene takes place in the final moments of his ascent. As the journey ends in the divine presence, Dante anticipates a beatific eternity in the company of Beatrice, “through [whose] power and excellence alone” he has “recognized the goodness and grace” that is the object and prompt of all his striving. In a moment, she is gone. He panics and sees Beatrice in the distance. He prays desperately to her who has “healed his soul,” seeking assurance of her abiding grace. In response,  she—far up the mountain, As it appeared to me—looked down and smiled. Then she turned back to the Eternal Fountain. (Poi si tornò all’ eterna fontana) The church of Dante’s era was rooted in the theology of St Augustine (in process of being overtaken in influence by Aquinas). A central feature of Augustine’s theology of love was that it is always one of two kinds: love is use or love is enjoyment; it is either instrumental or it is the deserving end of all our striving. Augustine is very explicit on this point: “humankind’s proper attitude to the world is not enjoyment (frui) but use (uti).” And the same holds true for other persons. Only God is to be loved for himself and himself alone. That was Beatrice’s message to Dante. C. S. Lewis admired Dante’s work and Augustine’s thought that had inspired much of it. A great struggle came into his life when death intruded upon his so-long-delayed marriage to Joy Gersham. After only three years together, she died of cancer and he agonized over her loss. He feared that in his hopes for future reunion he was just engaging in a sentimental projection. More painfully, he considered that Augustine and Dante were right, that we err in letting our longing for family obscure our only legitimate end: God himself. He journaled about his inner conflicts of human impulse against theological commitments. That’s what was really wrong with all those popular pictures of happy reunions ‘on the further shore’; not the simple-minded and very earthly images,

    12 phút

  6. 20 THG 6

    The Delight of Difference

    Last winter, walking through our snow-laden neighborhood, I passed an elderly man shoveling his driveway. I faintly recognized him from the local congregation. I offered my help, which he cheerfully accepted. The snow was deep and we labored together a little while, scoop and throw, scoop and throw. After a few minutes of shoveling in silence, I paused with my arm on my shovel. “I hear you once played professional football?” “Yes, I did,” he replied. “A few seasons with the Chicago Bears.” He reminisced briefly but fondly over his successful career. He was large, still trim and powerful in his build, and clearly relished his memories. “I know this will come as a surprise to you,” I said as I stood erect with all my 130 pounds, hands poised thoughtfully on the handle of the shovel still idle before me, “but I never played professional football.” He didn’t so much as pause in the rhythm of pitching his snow. “That’s ok. We all have different gifts,” he said. I’ve thought about that interaction many times since. Because even though he missed my irony, there was a genuine grace in his words.  “The task is to recognize the creature’s otherness,” writes John Durham Peters, “not to make it over in one’s own likeness and image. The ideal of communication, as Adorno said, would be a condition in which the only thing that survives the . . . fact of our mutual difference is the delight that difference makes possible.” This “delight that difference makes possible” may be the essential feature of that love into which Christ is trying to initiate us.   Love can only operate in the presence of difference, though difference has many deceptive surrogates. Social media is not the only shaper of “affinity bubbles,” as Noreen Herzfeld calls them. Ego and fear alike lead us to surround ourselves with mirrored walls we think are windows of communion.  God’s fullness of joy exists in the face of infinite human variability. That stunning fact warrants pondering. Our particularity is the field in which God’s delight is operative. Helen Oppenheimer sees human value as “a particular sort of living claim” that God recognizes.  As a religious imperative, therefore, “what the belief in a heavenly father requires is the exercise of imagination to see each other's irreplaceability.” We must be schooled to see difference, variability, particularity, as God does: not as obstacles to surmount but the precondition for fullness of celestial joy. Oppenheimer sees parental love as a pale but valid analog: “the alternative to making favorites among our children is not to love them ‘all alike’: it is to love them all differently.” In one of the most provocative of his theological insights, Stephen Webb suggested that, in one crucial regard, we may miss the point of our incarnation. Out of his nurturing love, “the Father creates bodies that can share the Son’s sorrows and joys and, in that process, become more like him.” In other words, Christ’s primal place within a relational mosaic, joyfully and sorrowfully responsive to the entire array of our fractiousness and frailties, is the condition for which mortality prepares us. His Incarnation expresses his solidarity with us; but our incarnation prepares us for solidarity with him. His Incarnation heals and redeems us, while our incarnation puts our potential in play. Our potential, that is, to love as he loves, with the same vulnerability and delight in difference. Oppenheimer emphasizes what this love has to move beyond within a field of radically differing personhoods. "It is an impoverished human being whose highest hope is to be at the receiving end of a merely accepting love. Tolerance, after all, is not the top virtue.” Perhaps this point is what’s behind Peter’s admonition in his first epistle to “love one another with a pure heart fervently” (1:22 and again in 4:8). He needed the adverb, twice, to emphasize the acti

    7 phút

  7. 31 THG 5

    Waiting for the Paint to Dry

    Once upon a timeless time, 13.7 billion years ago, a quantum energy fluctuation arising from a spacetime vacuum energy state produced an eruption into the universe of hydrogen atoms. An almost inconceivably large number of hydrogen atoms: 10 followed by about 85 zeros. No suns or planets or heaps of dirt or drops of water or dust or bacteria or any sort of thing larger than a hydrogen atom existed. 1085 hydrogen atoms.  Just a hair short of 13.7 billion years later, little human hands began to differentiate from a bean shaped embryo in the womb of a young Italian woman named Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena. Twenty-odd years later, those fully grown hands, pulsing with blood and connected by neural pathways to one of the most magnificent brains in the history of human creativity—Michelangelo—chipped millions of flakes from a block of Carrara marble and produced the Pietá.  Just what God’s role in Creation was is hard to say. Many early Christians believe that God shaped primordial matter into the cosmos that we know and live in. Later Christians—and many today—believe that God summoned that cosmos into existence by the power of his Word. I think the more interesting question is how we got from those hydrogen atoms to the Pietá. The great physicist J. S. D. Haldane opined that “If our planet was created a few thousand years ago to end a few years or a few thousand years hence, it is conceivable that the main purpose to be worked out on it is the salvation and perfection of individual human beings.” Curiously, he believed the age of the earth was an argument against any divine involvement. “On a planet more than a thousand million years old, however, it is hard to believe—as do Christians . . . that the most important event has occurred within the last few thousand years.” Apparently, a God of instantaneous creation is easier for some people (and many Christians) to believe in than a God of infinite patience. The God I believe in is an artist. And Makoto Fujimura reminds us, “There is no art if we are unwilling to wait for paint to dry.” Whatever the mechanism or meaning of creation—it took a lot of time to get from hydrogen atoms to Michelangelo. Whatever the precise role of God in designing and guiding the growing beauty, complexity, and intelligence in the cosmos, something is going on that is garnering new attention and new explanations.   For many years, the idea was dominant in evolutionary biology that humans and every living thing are the product of countless random variations generated by mutation. Re-wind the tape to the beginning of earth’s history and start again, in Stephen Jay Gould’s metaphor, and the story line would change completely, along with the result. Randomness, chance, accidents, molecular mishaps and genetic aberrations constitute a wild free-for-all of the unpredictable, the unforeseen and the unexpected. Life finds a way, negotiates its tortuous paths, and we end up with the delightful but utterly contingent world we see—but it could all have been otherwise. Except that story of utter randomness is no longer persuasive. Life is a perpetual, unremitting, infinitely creative struggle to solve problems—and time and time again those solutions converge. Life takes different paths, but the results are the same. “It matters little what our starting points may have been: the different routes will not prevent a convergence to similar ends.” Life manifests a “recurrent tendency of biological organization to arrive at the same 'solution' to a particular ‘need.’” Life explores all possibilities, but freedom always operates within parameters of the possible. The irrepressible drive of all that lives to engage the world, to see, to taste, to hear, to feel, extends beyond human examples and imagination. The nose of the star-nosed mole is a centimeter in width. It contains 25,000 sensory receptors and five times as many nerves as the human hand. It does not

    10 phút

  8. 24 THG 5

    Holy Fire

    The evening of August 19, 1662, one of the greatest mathematicians and philosophers of the age died, perhaps of a brain aneurysm. Blaise Pascal was only thirty-nine. A few days following his death, his servant was putting his clothes in order when he noticed a curious bulge in the deceased man’s doublet. Sewn into the lining was a small, folded parchment written in Pascal’s own hand. It recorded an ecstatic vision Pascal had experienced eight years previously. He appears to have made the record immediately in the aftermath of the event, and the stark, staccato language reads like the sudden irruption from beyond the veil that it was: The year of grace 1654, Monday, 23 November, . . . From about half past ten at night until about half past midnight, FIRE. GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob not of the philosophers and of the learned. Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace. GOD of Jesus Christ. My God and your God. Your GOD will be my God. Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD. He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel. Greatness of the human soul. Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you. Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy . . . Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ . . . Pascal never referred back to those luminous two hours, and it is impossible to say what transpired. Wordless communion? Angelic ministering? Visionary worlds? Language never before uttered but heard by him? Two lessons, at least, we can reasonably infer. First, we can venture what the “certitude” referred to might be—and it was more than a simple statement about the reality of God. For Pascal, as for most Christians then as now, questions about the existence of God were seldom in play. The first great age of skepticism was still a century away. The words of the poet Robinson Jeffers applied to seventeenth-century Europeans like Pascal as well as to ancient Greeks: “O happy Homer, taking the stars and the gods for granted.” What was in doubt was the only thing about God that really matters: in what does his nature principally consist? The paramount revelation to Pascal in the dark of that November night was by way of a correction. God was not the God sought and proclaimed by the philosophers and the learned—of whom Pascal himself was exhibit A. He later expounded the identity of that God of the patriarchs he had come to know:  “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Christians, is a God of love and comfort, a God who fills the heart and soul of those whom he possesses.”  Institutional Christianity struggled to reconcile the suffering, incarnate Christ with the demands of classical philosophical influences. In part because the church soon acquired the very trappings of power and sovereignty that Jesus had repudiated. In the background, the human desire for a zero-sum universe of equity and fairness and retributive justice competed with a challenging new ethic of asymmetrical love and forgiveness. Under these pressures, increasingly, the God of the philosophers (the timeless, transcendent God without body, parts, or passions) supplanted the God of the disciples—in many cases with surprising self-awareness. One prominent Christian theologian of our own day writes with startling condescension that hoping to find a correct understanding of God from the earliest Christians is “expecting far too much.” Another similarly holds that “we should not be surprised” that “people so close to the apostles . . . understood the central mystery of the faith so badly.” Pascal’s certainty about God’s nature paralleled the apostles’ understanding, no matter how unsophisticated philosophically or theologically. The first disciples knew God to be love in the only way anyone experiences absolute love. Love is interpersonal, relational, costly, and inexhaustible. Rather than see them as first-century theological unsophisticates, the gospels affirm that these disciples kn

    9 phút
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Welcome to Meet the Early-Day Saints, a limited series produced and hosted by Blair Hodges. In Meet the Early-day Saints, Blair will take you on a journey through time to meet the earliest disciples of Jesus. You’ll learn from a wide range of esteemed Latter-day Saint scholars who reveal the similarities and differences between ancient Christian faith and ours today. Throughout the series, some of your common assumptions may be challenged and in the process you’ll gain a deeper understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Each guest is a contributor to the new book Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints, from the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. In our first episode, we ask what if the “Great Apostasy” wasn’t so great after all? Latter-day Saint scholar Jason R. Combs invites us to revisit our assumptions about the Christians who came before us. We discuss his chapter “Understanding Ancient Christians, Apostasy, and Restoration,” from the book Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints. www.wayfaremagazine.org

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