As my Facebook feed filled with church members extolling the virtues of President Trump (apparently the Godliest president ever) and as members of the church started embracing the prosperity gospel, I realized that our church’s beliefs are not nearly as unified as I originally thought. We might agree on big doctrinal points like God is three people instead of one person, or that there are three kingdoms of glory rather than just a single Heaven and Hell, but we don’t agree on the most basic stuff such as how we should treat our neighbors (which to me seems far more important than the major doctrinal points).

I was talking with a friend about this (a stake president in a different stake) and he said that he had just re-read the book Jesus the Christ by James Talmage and it gave him an entirely new perspective. I decided to do the same thing, but to make some changes from how I had studied in the past:

First, I realized that people only hear what they think they already know. Two people with very different beliefs will read the same scripture and both believe that it validates their opposing viewpoint. I wanted to go into this exercise with a very open mind with an eye towards correcting any misunderstandings that I had in the past. I had to be open to the idea that I was wrong (and in several cases I was).

Second, rather than reading the King James version, I wanted to try some other translations. I came to realize that the King James translation is very out of date, and while it sounds more poetic, the language obscures some very important truths.

Third, I had recently read the book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan (an excellent book) and he helped me understand that it is very difficult to know exactly what Jesus did and did not say. I had always assumed that the gospels were written by their attributed authors, but in reality, they were written much later by other people (although there is a chance that Luke actually wrote the book of Luke). Furthermore, we have no idea who wrote the book of John, but its narrative is very different (no parables, etc.) and many scholars believe it was written 200 years later. He also teaches that the book of James may be a much more important narrative than people give it credit as it appears the be a rare second-hand account by a person that knew Jesus very well (his own brother, who became the bishop of Jerusalem after the crucifixion). While I studied, I wanted to account for some narratives as being more reliable than others.

Finally, I wanted to put in some real work studying (i.e. using the internet to read differing takes and to better drill down on the various meanings).

The result was mind blowing! I will talk about the specifics in separate blog posts, but my three biggest take-aways were:

1. Jesus was NOT a conservative figure. I have no idea why Christianity today is so intermingled with conservatism, but Jesus was extremely liberal. My conservative friends will take great issue with this, but understand that I was a conservative going into this exercise.
2. Jesus had a lot to say about money, and it does not align well with the prosperity gospel. When He said: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God,” I was taught that Jesus was referencing a small gate in Jerusalem in which a man could enter at night, but it was too small for a camel to easily fit. The camel could only enter by removing its pack and getting on its knees. I took this to say that a rich man can enter Heaven, but he first must humble himself. A quick google search taught me that no such gate was ever recorded in Jerusalem (or any other walled city), and that the gate myth was invented by a rich cleric over a thousand years later.
3. The LDS church focuses primarily on what we should not do, and much less on what we should be doing. Jesus tended to focus on the opposite.

I then started asking myself some heretical questions, like:

• If Jesus is so liberal, why would he choose modern church leaders that are mostly the opposite of that?
• If Jesus spoke so much about equality and justice for the poor, why is that such a small part of what the church does today?
• In the few instances where the church leaders broke tradition to take sides on a political issue (e.g. gay marriage, abortion), why did they choose topics that Jesus Himself never mentioned, and why not pick some of the many topics in which Jesus expressed a very strong opinion?