[Enlil-An]

I don't understand your believe that the chruch has a literalist approach to the Bible.

The Articles of Faith state that we believe the Bible to be the word of God "as far as it is translated correctly". The Nativity stories in Matthew and Luke aren't mistranslations. The entire narratives are completely different accounts. Church manuals and commentaries have always took these stories literally and I believe the General Authorities have too.

They acknowledge that the authors may be mistaken or input opinion. For example, Paul says women shoud not speak in church. I believe that was his opinion, and not doctrine.

If that's the case then it can't be scripture. And if Paul's opinions were wrong regarding women's role in the Church, could he have been wrong on other parts of doctrine as well?

But I think we can rest assured that Paul did not have such a demeaning view of women. One of the most notorious passages of Paul's opinion of women's role in the Church is 1 Timothy 2:11-15. But scholars today almost universally consider 1 Timothy to be a forgery written in Paul's name. The other passage is in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 where Paul supposedly says that women should not speak in church. 1 Corinthians is not disputed by scholars to have been written by anyone other than Paul but these verses are disputed for a number of could reasons. First, it contradicts what Paul says earlier in chapter 11 where he says that women can and do speak in church. Second, many of the oldest manuscripts historians have of 1 Corinthians contain those verses out of order or in different places in the chapter. Some texts even have those verses at the bottom of the chapter or out to the side in the margins as footnotes (written by scribes obviously influenced by 1 Timothy). These and a few other reasons are why most scholars refuse to believe Paul wrote those passages.

But the Lord, apparantly, didn't reveal this to Joseph Smith while he was tranlsating the Bible because instead of leaving these passages out, Joseph Smith simply retranslated them to read that women should not "rule" in the churches.

The bigger point is this: God does not give us all the answers. He presents truth through imperfect means, and it is up to us to decide through the witness of the Holy Ghost what truth is.

If the Holy Ghost doesn't reveal to a prophet like Joseph Smith the discrepancies and interpolations found in the scriptures, how are we to have any chance of discovering the truth of these Biblical passages? Certainly not without professional scholarship. But LDS scholars by and large have rarely address these issues it seems, let alone formed a scholarly hypothesis about them. We are forced to study the works of scholars outside of the Church who do not believe that the Bible is inspired but take an evolutionary view on the beliefs expressed in the scriptures. And with so many discoveries historians have made concerning the New Testament as well as of the Ancient Near East and its influence on the Old Testament, I think LDS scholars should start addressing these issues to help serious students of the Bible and the Church's interpretation of it.