Neal A. Maxwell
“Church members in another age were being held hostage until certain prophecies were fulfilled—with their lives being forfeit if those prophecies were not fulfilled precisely on time. They, too, were told by the Lord to be of good cheer. Why? Because, said Jesus, ’On the morrow come I into the world.’ (3 Ne. 1:13.) With His birth, the mortal ministry of the Messiah would, at last, be launched!” (Ensign, Nov. 1982, p. 66)
Hugh Nibley
“It was the overwhelming majority of unbelievers who actually set a date for a general massacre of those who expected the coming of Christ (3 Nephi 1:9, 16). Fantastic as this may seem, it has many parallels in history: the slaughter of the Magi in Lehi’s day, the Sicilian Vespers, the liquidation of the Mamlukes, St. Bartholomew’s, the slaughter of the Donatists, the Bloodbath of Stralsund, etc., most of them attempts at the complete wiping out of large unorthodox minorities, and most of them engineered by devout intellectuals. It is a grim and authentic psychological touch in the Book of Mormon. When events proved the believers justified, the others were confounded—but not for long. In the Clementine Recognitions, Peter says that after the terrible upheavals of nature that accompanied the crucifixion the sun came out again, people went about their daily tasks, and quickly and efficiently forgot everything that had happened.” (An Approach To The Book of Mormon, p. 370)