S. Kent Brown

The maps are impressive. They give a greater understanding of the times and what was going on. For example, there is a sequence showing the spread of the religious fervor in the early 1800's.

It looks like a 300 page coffee table book. There is a lot of detail in here. The book does a very good job of giving an overview on many different aspects of the LDS culture and changes over time. I count 96 topics by 60 authors. Each topic is usually covered in 2 pages with some topics getting 4 show more pages. Given the diversity of the authors, the uniformity of the presentation is impressive. It was nice that the articles are cross-referenced. Fairly often an article will refer to another articles in the volume.

What a thrill to find the floor plan of a meetinghouse on page 163 that matches a building that I helped build! The illustration even shows the expansion that was added long after I left the area.

This is a review of the 2012 edition. A newer edition was published in 2014. show less

Some interesting things about this book.

There are about 80 pages of introductory material before the start of text about Luke 1.

This translation is in parallel columns with King James translation on the left and this translation on the right, making it easy to see difference. Some of the time a person familiar with King James will find little difference between them.

The 69 page text of this translation is available on Amazon Kindle for free. The 1200 page book is not free, but now a Kindle show more version is available. Hurrah! I bought my copy straight from BYU. As of today, the price for the print version is the same from both places. This review is of the print edition.

Each chapter is broken up into a section for each pericope. As our family read Luke together this December, I got comments that the paragraph breaks in their King James printings differed from the breaks within a chapter in this book. Each pericope is followed by a paragraph covering phrases in those verses, followed by “Analysis,” which to some extent repeats the phrase comments.

At the end of the chapter it often points out items from that chapter that differ from the same event in Mark. I found these differences convincing me that the are not from a common source. Quelle (often just called Q) was always a theoretical construct anyway. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source)

Item that show Luke’s appreciation of Women and of Home are often pointed out. These are things that I had not noticed before. They make sense.

Joseph Smith Translation (JST) differences are sometimes identified. Typically this is to show how Joseph Smith added additional information that clarifies disputed points. show less