How and why the LDS church built a replacement for Holy Tradition

Without a Holy Tradition to draw upon, the LDS church has built its own.

Chat-GTP’s rendition of LDS and Tradition (with editing by the author)

Please note that throughout this discussion, I will refer to both Tradition (capital T) to mean the Holy Tradition of the church and tradition (lowercase t) to refer to cultural traditions - or what LDS would call the traditions of men.

What is Holy Tradition? A Primer….

Tradition, in Greed paradosis and in Latin, traditio, means literally “to hand down” or “to deliver.” Thus when the apostle Paul writes to the Corinthians “For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received.” (1 Cor. 15:3) He’s speaking about Holy Tradition.

I’ll expound on Holy Tradition and its place in the Orthodox Church in a future article, but just to give you a sense of what it entails, Holy Tradition contains all of those things that the apostles taught the early saints that were not written down in the New Testament. The apostles established the church in many places, such as Antioch, Corinth, Rome, and Carthage, often remaining there for a year or longer. During that time, they taught the people continually. However, what is written in the epistles of the New Testament about what they were taught comprises less than 150 pages in my LDS King James version NT, including all of the footnotes - of which there are many. I thumbed through them and took a rough count. Most of the epistles are four to six pages long (single-sided), while the longest ones are Romans, ~20 pages, and 1 Corinthians, ~22 pages.

The Apostle Paul spent 2-3 years in Ephesus, but Ephesians is a mere six pages. Are we to believe that everything they taught the early church is thus to be found in the New Testament? Not even close. Some of that is because many people were illiterate, and some of that is on purpose. There were two sets of teachings handed down from Christ. One for public consumption and one for disciples.

“And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables? He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.” Matthew 13:10-11.