What the Scriptures Don't Say

In recent years I have encountered a bizarre and alarming need when teaching from scriptures–or even secular accounts–to not only discuss what the sources say but to elaborate on what they do not say. For example, the scriptural accounts of the Nativity do not mention the age of either Mary or Joseph. Nor is it ever mentioned that Jesus was born in a stable, merely that He was not born in the inn, and that He was placed in a manger (Luke 2:7, 12, 17). The assumption is that managers are located in stables, but the type of place where Christ was born is actually never mentioned; the manger could have been located in a cave or in an open coral, not necessarily in a stable building. The number of wise men is not stated, only that there were three gifts (Matthew 2:11), not three individuals. The plural form of the word “men” (Matthew 2:1) tells us there were at least two, but there could have been four, seven, or twenty-seven wise men. The wise men did not visit the Savior on his birth night, but an undisclosed amount of time later, in his house (Matthew 2:11).

The issue grows deeper when I find myself having to correct people about the fictitious story of the innkeeper providing the in-question stable to Mary and Joseph. The Nativity accounts in the scriptures don’t mention an innkeeper at all, and they certainly don’t mention that he showed the couple a stable or allowed them to use one. As far as I can find, the origin of this fable is the 1987 Living Scriptures animated feature A King is Born. Famed fantasy and science fiction writer Orson Scott Card wrote the script for this movie and used creative license to add the innkeeper-as-stable-owner plot point. This same element was included in Michael McLean’s 1991 Forgotten Carols song “The Innkeeper”. While the innkeeper’s involvement makes for a great story, it is not scriptural.

Similarly, in the story of Moses, the account in Exodus never states either explicitly or implicitly that Moses was unaware of his Hebrew heritage. It is likely the Egyptians and Hebrews were of noticeably different skin tones, and Moses’ biological mother was his wet nurse; both facts make a hidden Israelite ancestry unlikely. The dramatic Moses-is-an-Israelite reveal has its origin in the 1956 Hollywood blockbuster The Ten Commandments and was recycled in the 1998 children’s animated classic The Prince of Egypt.

A lack of understanding of the scriptures makes faithful Saints easy targets for the snares of Satan. An acquaintance of mine who has left the Church told me that the Bible could not be true because the rule of Rameses as Pharoah didn’t line up chronologically with the supposed time of Israelite captivity. What he didn’t seem to know is that the Exodus account doesn’t name the Pharoah at the time of the Exodus. The name Rameses was chosen for The Ten Commandments because you cannot have a nameless character as a lead role in a film. The Pharoah’s name was kept for the films The Prince of Egypt and Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), but it is not mentioned in the scriptures as a person’s name. The word “Rameses” is used in Exodus 1:11, but in reference to a place, not a person: “they [the Israelites] built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses.” There is no consensus among Bible scholars when the Israelite captivity took place, who the Pharoah was at the time, or if the city Raamses mentioned in the Bible is the nineteenth dynastic capital city of Pi-Ramesses, or some other place. Perhaps if my friend had put more emphasis on what the scriptures actually say–rather than details interpolated upon the story by Hollywood–he would not have been so easily led astray.

What are some other dangers of such seemingly insignificant details being interpolated into the scriptures? I have been told dismissively these details “don’t really matter.” To this I respond, if such details are unimportant, then they also don’t need to be included in gospel lessons.

In addition, if we do not read the scriptures critically, and allow small seemingly insignificant interpolations to creep in, then doctrinal points of deep spiritual significance will eventually make their way into our Sunday School lessons as well.  It is important that we immerse ourselves in the scriptures and ensure that our scriptural knowledge comes from the Word of God and not from outside sources.