The conference “Mormonism and the Temple: Examining an Ancient Religious Tradition,” which took place on October 29, 2012 in Logan, Utah, was filmed, and while I used to have the videos posted here, it appears they have been taken down and I cannot locate them.
So here’s a PDF of the conference for your convenience: http://www.templestudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/MormonismAndTheTemple.pdf
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So in regards to Margaret Barker’s video “Restoring Solomon’s temple”, Jesus Christ is to Joseph Smith as the Babylonian Apostasy of Israel is to the Great Apostasy?
Or rathar Jesus was the restorer of the Temple following the Babylonian apostasy of Israel, and Joseph Smith was the restorer of the temple following the great apostasy
Yes, I believe that this is one way you can look at it. “Temple Theology” is associated with the doctrines of “ascension” that are encoded into ritual and ceremony. Because they are so sacred and don’t seem to ever be written down, they appear to be the first things to go during an apostasy.
It is only the simple moral teachings that ever seem to survive. Whenever one comes to try and restore the lost teachings he is branded a heretic and usually killed. It seems that even Margaret Barker and Laurence Hemming have experienced their own backlash as they have sought to uncover these teachings.
Luckily, the New Testament writers were brilliant enough to encode the teachings in their text in a manner that we could unlock them like Margaret Barker and others have done. This group of individuals in these series of videos are really breaking some new ground that is very exciting to follow.
It seems like the true knowledge of what was lost is coming back to modern awareness. Although we as Latter-day Saints believe that we have the contemporary incarnation of the “ascension ritual”, the work of these non-LDS scholars is only serving to help us better understand what we have. As we share with one another across faith traditions, I think we will find that all benefit from this research.