Jesus' Life at a Glance

Bruce R. McConkie was writing about the Jews and how they changed God's laws during the apostasy when he wrote: “They took the plain and simple things of pure religion and added to them a host of their own interpretations; they embellished them with added rites and performances; and they took a happy, joyous way of worship and turned it into a restrictive, curtailing, depressive system of rituals and performances. The living spirit of the Lord’s law became in their hands the dead letter of Jewish ritualism” (The Mortal Messiah, 4 vols. [1979–81], 1:238).