2 Nephi 25:19
1830 Edition
Influences
Changes
Simple English
The prophets said the Messiah would come six hundred years after my father left Jerusalem. The prophets and the angel of God said his name would be Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Paraphrase
According to the prophets, the Messiah is coming six hundred years from the time my father left Jerusalem. And according to the prophets—and also the angel of God—his name will be Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Notes
Written in approximately 550 B.C., 2 Nephi 25:16-26 provides an excellent example of a "theological anachronism."
LDS scholar, Grant Hardy observes: "In 1831, Alexander Campbell, one of the book's first critics (and certainly the first one to read it carefully), famously observed that it seemed to weigh in on all the popular religious questions of the day, including 'infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry , the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of freemasonry, republican government, and the right of the man.' This is a fair list, and references to these topics-or their analogous counterparts-can be found throughout the Book of Mormon." -Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon, p. 184
M.T. Lamb writes, "The whole Old Testament, as we have it, proceeds upon the assumption that these new Testament truths were not fully understood by the Old Testament writers. The entire system of bloody sacrifices, as found in the law of Moses, would have been the silliest nonsense to him had he understood in full the great plan of redemption to which this system looked forward in type... It would hardly seem possible for language to state more clearly or positively that the mystery of Christ's incarnation and the modus operandi or method of human salvation HAD NOT been revealed to the world until the Apostle's day. That while the Old Testament authors had presented the truth, it had been so presented in type, shadow, symbol and figure that it was not an could not be understood by them, not even by the angels of God..." -M.T. Lamb, The Golden Bible; or The Book of Mormon, Is It From God? (New York: Ward and Drummand, 1887), pp. 148.
Biblical scholars agree that meshiha (Aramaic), mashiah (Hebrew), and messiah (English) all mean “anointed one.” The Greek word Christos—from which the English Christ is derived—is simply the Greek translation of the same term and carries the same meaning: “anointed.”
Oddly, the Book of Mormon often appears to treat Christ almost like a surname rather than a translation of the title Messiah. This suggests a possible misunderstanding of the linguistic relationship between these words.
For example, in Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 25:19 uses both the titles Messiah and Christ together. Because these terms have the same meaning but come from different languages (Hebrew and Greek), placing them side-by-side is essentially redundant.
In modern terms, it would be similar to saying something like this:
“We will know that the sign of a good life is to be next to a house (English word). I have been told by an angel that the house will be known as maison (French translation of house).”
In other words, the statement introduces a word and then immediately “reveals” its translation as if it were a new or different title, even though it means the exact same thing.