Jacob 1

(August 13, 2015)

                One of the logical flaws that I find in myself as I read the scriptures is an irrational belief that we have everything that happened as part of the record.  This is, of course, foolish – I have thousands of pages of journal and I am one person.  Imagine how many pages it would take to have a full record of an entire civilization.

                Were I to summarize my own journal, there is no doubt that I would need to leave out miracles that I experienced in my life in order to make the whole thing readable.  Things that were and are important to me would need to be left out because giving them adequate context would require far too much space.  Likewise, things that weren’t as important would need to be included to make sense of things that were more important.

                Doing the work Mormon was doing (and there are some indications that even the first-person text here had some editing done), I could see how he would need to work to minimize the trivial and maximize the important – even if that meant leaving off important things because of complexity or including trivial things for context.

                So when Jacob speaks of the many revelations, it is not really all that surprising that they are not in the record.  We have, at best, a small portion of the record that actually exists.