The Sacrament

The record preserves the church’s sacrament as two things at once: a one-time institution and a standing liturgy. The risen Christ institutes it at the temple in Bountiful — bread and wine given, with charges to witness, to remember, and to keep his Spirit (3 Nephi 18:1–11). Near the end of the plates, Moroni records the fixed prayers the church actually said over the bread and the wine (Moroni 4:1–3; 5:1–2) — the record’s only set prayers spoken by the church as a body. That is a record-scoped fact, and the wider corpus bears on it directly: D&C 20:76–79 prescribes the same two prayers in nearly the same words, under the same rubric of kneeling with the church in solemn prayer, so the liturgy the record preserves once is preserved twice in the corpus. They are not the record’s only fixed forms. The record also gives the ordination formula (Moroni 3:2–3) and the prescribed baptismal words (3 Nephi 11:24–25), each spoken by an officiator rather than prayed with the church; the prayer form Christ prescribes at Bountiful, “After this manner therefore pray ye” (3 Nephi 13:9–13) — the same rubric stands at Matthew 6:9–13, outside the record but inside the frozen corpus, over a prayer whose wording differs; and — outside the church altogether — the Zoramite prayer on the Rameumptom (Alma 31:15–18), which “every man” offered as “the selfsame prayer” (Alma 31:20, 31:22): a congregational set form, but of a people the record presents as having denied Christ (Alma 31:16). Those are the members this page names in the record; the list is not offered as a closed census. This page quotes both prayers in full, sets them beside the institution, and registers the one verifiable textual contact — the covenant-witness charge — as a paraphrase, holding the larger one-continuous-ordinance claim to a hedged reading.

The two prayers (the record’s fixed forms for the sacrament)

Moroni gives the sacrament its own short pair of chapters. They are not narrative; they are forms — the exact words the church prayed, each framed by a rubric: two verses for the bread (Moroni 4:1–2), one for the wine (Moroni 5:1). The bread first:

Moroni 4:1: “The manner of their elders and priests administering the flesh and blood of Christ unto the church; and they administered it according to the commandments of Christ; wherefore we know the manner to be true; and the elder or priest did minister it—”

Moroni 4:2: “And they did kneel down with the church, and pray to the Father in the name of Christ, saying:”

Moroni 4:3: “O God, the Eternal Father, we ask thee in the name of thy Son, Jesus Christ, to bless and sanctify this bread to the souls of all those who partake of it; that they may eat in remembrance of the body of thy Son, and witness unto thee, O God, the Eternal Father, that they are willing to take upon them the name of thy Son, and always remember him, and keep his commandments which he hath given them, that they may always have his Spirit to be with them. Amen.”

Then the wine, with the same address to “God, the Eternal Father” and the same closing “his Spirit to be with them”, but with a single charge — remembrance — where the bread prayer carries three (take the name, remember, keep commandments):

Moroni 5:1: “The manner of administering the wine—Behold, they took the cup, and said:”

Moroni 5:2: “O God, the Eternal Father, we ask thee, in the name of thy Son, Jesus Christ, to bless and sanctify this wine to the souls of all those who drink of it, that they may do it in remembrance of the blood of thy Son, which was shed for them; that they may witness unto thee, O God, the Eternal Father, that they do always remember him, that they may have his Spirit to be with them. Amen.”

Two textual facts about the frame, reported as facts. First, the prayers are presented as fixed forms — Moroni writes the rubric (“The manner of… administering”, Moroni 4:1; “and said”, Moroni 5:1) and then the set words, not a paraphrase of what was said on some occasion. Second, the frame asserts their authority: the manner was administered “according to the commandments of Christ; wherefore we know the manner to be true” (Moroni 4:1). The prayers carry no self-attribution — no “I, Moroni” stands over them; they are Moroni’s by their position in his book, and their voice is the church’s (“we ask thee”).

The institution at Bountiful (3 Nephi 18:1–11)

The commandment the prayers claim to obey is recorded earlier, in reading order, at the temple in Bountiful. There the risen Christ institutes the ordinance himself, in two movements — bread, then wine.

The bread: Christ “took of the bread and brake and blessed it; and he gave unto the disciples and commanded that they should eat” (3 Nephi 18:3); the disciples then give to the multitude (18:4–5). He fixes it as a repeating rite and attaches the charges:

3 Nephi 18:6: “And this shall ye always observe to do, even as I have done, even as I have broken bread and blessed it and given it unto you.”

3 Nephi 18:7: “And this shall ye do in remembrance of my body, which I have shown unto you. And it shall be a testimony unto the Father that ye do always remember me. And if ye do always remember me ye shall have my Spirit to be with you.”

The wine follows (18:8–9), and Christ ratifies the disciples’ act and repeats the charges in the same grammar:

3 Nephi 18:10: “…this doth witness unto the Father that ye are willing to do that which I have commanded you.”

3 Nephi 18:11: “And this shall ye always do to those who repent and are baptized in my name; and ye shall do it in remembrance of my blood, which I have shed for you, that ye may witness unto the Father that ye do always remember me. And if ye do always remember me ye shall have my Spirit to be with you.”

Four charges recur across these institution verses — remembrance (of body / of blood), witness unto the Father, always remember, and having his Spirit to be with you. They are the same four the fixed prayers pray. That overlap is the page’s one registered connection.

The commandment’s storm close

The institution ends with a commandment and a warning that carry the Sermon at the Temple’s closing figure into the sacrament chapter: “if ye shall always do these things blessed are ye, for ye are built upon my rock” (3 Nephi 18:12) — and the alternative is the Sermon’s storm, now in the present tense.

[Textual] — shared phrasing. The sacrament warning re-executes the Sermon’s storm sentence:

• 3 Nephi 18:13: “…are built upon a sandy foundation; and when the rain descends, and the floods come, and the winds blow, and beat upon them, they shall fall…”
• 3 Nephi 14:27: “And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

The tense shift is the whole verbal difference in the storm run — descends/descended, come/came, blow/blew. The frame around it is the doctrine sermon’s: 18:13’s “more or less than these” tracks “more or less than this” (3 Nephi 11:40), and “a sandy foundation” stands at both. The Sermon’s own leg (3 Nephi 14:24 ↔ Matthew 7:24) and the doctrine formula’s (3 Nephi 11:39 ↔ Helaman 5:12) are registered on their host pages; this record adds the sacrament chapter’s, previously the family’s unregistered member.

The covenant-witness charge, prayer and institution

[Textual] — paraphrase. The bread prayer restates the institution’s covenant-witness charge in the church’s own praying voice. The registered leg is the “willing” clause — which is not the page’s longest shared word-run, and the difference is stated rather than glossed. Measured as the longest contiguous run of words shared between a prayer verse and an institution verse (case-folded, punctuation ignored), the tightest contact on the page is the wine pair at five words — Moroni 5:2 ↔ 3 Nephi 18:11, “do it in remembrance of” — while the bread prayer shares four with 3 Nephi 18:7 and 18:11 (“Spirit to be with”) and three with 3 Nephi 18:10 (“are willing to”). What the “willing” clause has that the longer runs do not is a whole-clause correspondence — witness, willingness, and commandments in the same order:

• Moroni 4:3: “…and witness unto thee, O God, the Eternal Father, that they are willing to take upon them the name of thy Son, and always remember him, and keep his commandments which he hath given them, that they may always have his Spirit to be with them.”
• 3 Nephi 18:10: “…this doth witness unto the Father that ye are willing to do that which I have commanded you.”

Both quotes are verbatim from their own verse. The prayer’s other three charges track the same institution passage: remembrance of the body (Moroni 4:3 “in remembrance of the body of thy Son” ↔ 3 Nephi 18:7 “in remembrance of my body”); always-remember and his Spirit (Moroni 4:3 “always remember him… always have his Spirit to be with them” ↔ 3 Nephi 18:7 / 18:11 “ye do always remember me ye shall have my Spirit to be with you”). The wine prayer (Moroni 5:2) stands to 3 Nephi 18:11 as the bread prayer stands to the bread institution: “in remembrance of the blood of thy Son, which was shed for them… that they do always remember him” ↔ “in remembrance of my blood, which I have shed for you… that ye do always remember me.”

One disclosure, so the contact is not overstated. The exact string “witness unto the Father” is not shared. A case-insensitive search of the whole record finds it at exactly two verses — 3 Nephi 18:10 and 18:11, both in this one chapter — and nowhere else. Both Moroni prayers instead read “witness unto thee, O God, the Eternal Father” (Moroni 4:3, Moroni 5:2) — a wording the corpus now carries twice more, at D&C 20:77 and 20:79, where the two sacrament prayers stand in nearly the words Moroni gives them. The contact is therefore a paraphrase of the charge (tier ③), not a verbatim quotation; it is registered as such, and on that clause, not on anything larger.

Whether the two are one continuous ordinance

⚖️ Interpretation — weigh this. It is natural to read the fixed prayers as the codified form of the institution — the standing liturgy that carries Christ’s Bountiful charges into the church’s weekly practice — and the text gives real support for it: Moroni 4:1 says the manner was administered “according to the commandments of Christ”, and the four charges the prayers pray (witness, remembrance, always-remember, his Spirit) are exactly the four Christ attaches at 3 Nephi 18:7, 10, 11. Against over-reading: the record never says the wording of the prayers was dictated at Bountiful. The Bountiful account supplies the charges but no set prayer-form; within the record the fixed forms appear only in Moroni, generations later, and differ in voice (“we ask thee”, third-person “him”) from Christ’s first-person institution (“my body,” “remember me”). (Record-scoped. The corpus’s other carrier of the same forms is D&C 20:76–79, which gives both prayers in nearly Moroni’s words and in the same “we ask thee… O God, the Eternal Father” voice — evidence a reader weighing the continuous-ordinance reading should have, and which this callout does not resolve.) That the prayers obey the institution’s charges is a textual fact; that they are one continuous ordinance — a single rite in two records — is a reading, offered to weigh, not the text’s stated claim.

The guard against unworthy partaking (3 Nephi 18:28–30)

At Bountiful Christ gives the ministers a further commandment governing who may partake — the restriction the institution lays on those who administer the emblems. It is not the record’s only restriction on partaking: 3 Nephi 18:11 limits the ordinance itself to “those who repent and are baptized in my name”, and Mormon 9:29 turns the same guard on the partaker — “see that ye partake not of the sacrament of Christ unworthily”. The Bountiful commandment is the one addressed to the ministers:

3 Nephi 18:28: “…this is the commandment which I give unto you, that ye shall not suffer any one knowingly to partake of my flesh and blood unworthily, when ye shall minister it;”

3 Nephi 18:29: “For whoso eateth and drinketh my flesh and blood unworthily eateth and drinketh damnation to his soul…”

The guard is not expulsion but restraint with ministry: the unworthy are to be forbidden the emblems, yet “ye shall not cast him out from among you, but ye shall minister unto him and shall pray for him unto the Father” (18:30), and received back on repentance and baptism. The phrase Christ uses of the emblems here — “my flesh and blood” — is the same substance Moroni’s rubric names when it calls the ordinance “administering the flesh and blood of Christ unto the church” (Moroni 4:1). That exact phrase, “the flesh and blood of Christ”, occurs once in the corpus (Moroni 4:1); Christ’s first-person “my flesh and blood” is its counterpart at the institution.

The second administration: bread and wine provided (3 Nephi 20:3–9)

On the second day the Lord administers the ordinance again, and the account records something the first did not — the emblems themselves were given miraculously. He “brake bread again and blessed it, and gave to the disciples to eat” (3 Nephi 20:3), had them serve the multitude bread and wine (20:4–5), and the text pauses to state the fact plainly:

3 Nephi 20:6: “Now, there had been no bread, neither wine, brought by the disciples, neither by the multitude;”

3 Nephi 20:7: “But he truly gave unto them bread to eat, and also wine to drink.”

Here Christ identifies the emblems with his body and blood in the first person: “He that eateth this bread eateth of my body to his soul; and he that drinketh of this wine drinketh of my blood to his soul; and his soul shall never hunger nor thirst, but shall be filled” (3 Nephi 20:8) — and the multitude, having eaten and drunk, “were filled with the Spirit… and gave glory to Jesus” (20:9). Reported as the text stands: on this occasion the bread and wine were provided without any being brought, and the partaking is tied to being “filled with the Spirit” — the same Spirit the prayers ask to “be with them” (Moroni 4:3; Moroni 5:2). What the giving of the emblems means beyond the words on the page is left where the text leaves it.

The kept practice

The record shows the ordinance actually kept as a settled custom. In Moroni’s account of the early church, the sacrament is a recurring meeting:

Moroni 6:6: “And they did meet together oft to partake of bread and wine, in remembrance of the Lord Jesus.”

And in the golden generation after the visitation, the people “did walk after the commandments which they had received from their Lord and their God, continuing in fasting and prayer, and in meeting together oft both to pray and to hear the word of the Lord” (4 Nephi 1:12). (Read exactly: 4 Nephi 1:12 names the meeting practice — fasting, prayer, hearing the word — and does not itself mention the sacrament; it is the same “meet together oft” habit, not a second sacrament notice.) The “meet together oft” pattern that gathers the church for the ordinance (3 Nephi 18:22; Moroni 6:5–6) is registered on The Church of God; it is cross-linked here, not re-registered on this page.

The terms across the corpus

Inside the record, the sacrament’s language is rare and tightly clustered — almost entirely in the institution (3 Nephi 18) and the two prayers (Moroni 4–5), the notable instances outside them being the second administration (3 Nephi 20:3–9) and the kept-practice notice (Moroni 6:6). Across the whole frozen corpus that clustering does not hold, and this page does not treat what falls outside the record: the New Testament carries four further institutions of the same ordinance — Matthew 26:26–28, Mark 14:22–24, Luke 22:19–20, and 1 Corinthians 11:23–26 — and the Doctrine and Covenants carries the sacrament prayers themselves, near-verbatim with Moroni’s: D&C 20:77 and D&C 20:79, prescribed within the church-order section. Each count below was recounted for this page over the whole frozen corpus (case-insensitive, punctuation-tolerant), so the figures are corpus-wide, not record-only:

Two facts fall out of the counts, both reported as textual facts. First, the emblem-remembrance template — in remembrance of [the/my] body / blood, not any verse’s exact words — stands at six corpus verses: two in the institution (3 Nephi 18:7, 18:11), two in the record’s prayers (Moroni 4:3, 5:2), and two in the Doctrine and Covenants’ prescription of those same prayers (D&C 20:77, 20:79) — the D&C pair reproducing the Moroni wording near-verbatim, so the template never leaves the sacrament-prayer setting anywhere in the corpus. What does not follow is that the ordinance’s language stays put. The bare remembrance formula “in remembrance of me” stands over bread and cup at Luke 22:19 and 1 Corinthians 11:24, 11:25 — and, in an unrelated sense, at 2 Nephi 5:25; the body-and-blood identification stands at Matthew 26:26, 26:28 and Mark 14:22, 14:24; and inside the record 3 Nephi 20:8 says “eateth of my body… drinketh of my blood”. What is closed is the exact body/blood template, not the ordinance’s vocabulary. Second, the always-remember charge shifts person exactly at the boundary between institution and liturgy: Christ says “always remember me” (18:7, 18:11); the church’s prayers say “always remember him” (Moroni 4:3, 5:2; the same third-person form recurs in the D&C’s prescribed prayers, D&C 20:77, 20:79) — the same charge, re-voiced from the first person of the one who commanded it to the third person of the congregation that obeys. The exact string “meet together oft” is 3 verses; 4 Nephi 1:12 carries the inflected “meeting together oft” and is not counted among them.

The Doctrine and Covenants on the emblems

Modern revelation returns to the ordinance twice, and the two returns do different things. D&C 20:75–79 prescribes the liturgy — the meeting, the kneeling, and the two prayers in nearly Moroni’s words (registered on The Order of the Church as , , and, for the meeting habit, ). D&C 27:1–4 does the opposite: it makes the emblems themselves indifferent and moves the whole weight of the ordinance onto intent.

D&C 27:2: “For, behold, I say unto you, that it mattereth not what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink when ye partake of the sacrament, if it so be that ye do it with an eye single to my glory—remembering unto the Father my body which was laid down for you, and my blood which was shed for the remission of your sins.”

Two restrictions follow, and they are restrictions on sourcing, not on substance: “a commandment I give unto you, that you shall not purchase wine neither strong drink of your enemies” (D&C 27:3), and “you shall partake of none except it is made new among you; yea, in this my Father’s kingdom which shall be built up on the earth” (D&C 27:4). Read exactly, the section says the elements do not matter and then names two conditions on where they may come from; it does not reconcile the two, and this page does not reconcile them either.

A word-fact the record’s own reader will want. The noun sacrament — searched \bsacraments?\b, case-insensitive, over the corpus, counting distinct frozen verses — stands at twelve verses in the corpus, and exactly one of them is in the record: Mormon 9:29, “see that ye partake not of the sacrament of Christ unworthily”. The other eleven are all in the Doctrine and Covenants (D&C 20:46, 20:58, 20:68, 27:2, 46:4, 46:5, 59:9, 59:12, 62:4, 89:5, 95:16). So the institution at Bountiful and the two prayers — the passages this page is built on — never use the word for the thing they establish; the name for the ordinance is, in this corpus, almost entirely modern-revelation vocabulary. That is a distribution fact, and nothing is inferred from it here.

Two of the eleven do not use the word of the emblems at all. D&C 59:9 and 59:12 attach it, in the plural, to a day: “thou shalt go to the house of prayer and offer up thy sacraments upon my holy day” (D&C 59:9); “thou shalt offer thine oblations and thy sacraments unto the Most High” (D&C 59:12). Reported as a second use of the same word, not folded into the first.

One count on this page is unaffected, and is worth saying so. The emblem-remembrance template counted above — in remembrance of [the/my] body / blood — still stands at six corpus verses. D&C 27:2 is not a seventh: it reads “remembering unto the Father my body… and my blood”, a participle where the template has the prepositional phrase, and the search that produced the six does not return it.

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. The revelation’s remembrance clause states the blood’s purpose in the words the oldest institution account in the corpus uses: - D&C 27:2: “…and my blood which was shed for the remission of your sins.” - Matthew 26:28: “For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.”

Both are the Lord’s first-person speech about the cup. Divergences reported, not graded: the revelation’s verb is past (“was shed”) where the Gospel’s is present (“is shed”); the Gospel’s “for many” has no counterpart in the revelation, and the revelation’s “your sins” no counterpart in the Gospel; and the Gospel attaches the new-testament clause, which the revelation does not carry.

Why this endpoint and not another. Across the whole frozen corpus only four verses carry both shed and remission — these two, Hebrews 9:22 (“without shedding of blood is no remission”), and Moroni 10:33 (“through the shedding of the blood of Christ”); of the four, only these two speak the words over the emblems. The corpus’s other institution accounts do not carry the remission clause at all: Mark 14:24 reads “which is shed for many” and stops, Luke 22:20 “which is shed for you”, and 3 Nephi 18:11 “in remembrance of my blood, which I have shed for you”. Matthew 26:28 is therefore the uniquely nearest verse, and is paired on that ground.

Key references / appearances

Related

Concepts / events: The Visitation at Bountiful (the ministry in which the sacrament is instituted) · Baptism (the companion ordinance’s own page — the rite’s prescribed words, manner, and procedure) · The Doctrine of Christ (holds the covenant-witness reading of 3 Nephi 18:10 toward baptism — — and keeps it) · The Church of God (the “meet together oft” gathering; the church’s ordinances and discipline) · The Atonement (the body and blood the emblems remember)

People: Moroni (records the fixed prayers) · Messiah (the risen Lord who institutes the ordinance) · The Twelve Disciples (they receive the bread and give it to the multitude, 3 Nephi 18:3–4; the office of breaking and blessing it is given to one of their number, not to the twelve — “there shall one be ordained among you”, 3 Nephi 18:5)

Connections:

Pages: Index · Connections

Sources

The Book of Mormon — thirteen chapters are cited on this page: 3 Nephi 11 (the prescribed baptismal words and the doctrine’s rock/sand frame), 3 Nephi 13 (the prescribed prayer form, named in the lede among the record’s fixed forms), 3 Nephi 14 (the Sermon’s storm close, registered against the commandment’s), 3 Nephi 18 (the institution and the guard), 3 Nephi 20 (the second administration), Moroni 3 (the ordination formula), Moroni 4 and Moroni 5 (the two prayers), Moroni 6 (the kept practice), 4 Nephi 1 (the meeting habit), Mormon 9 (the charge against partaking unworthily, disclosed beside the Bountiful guard), Alma 31 (the Zoramite set prayer, named in the lede among the fixed forms), and 2 Nephi 5 (one non-sacramental occurrence of the remembrance formula).

The New Testament — five chapters are cited, only where this page discloses that a record-scoped claim has instances in the larger frozen corpus: Matthew 6 (the prescribed prayer form’s counterpart outside the record), Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 22, and 1 Corinthians 11. These are frozen corpus texts, not outside material; this page names them, quotes the phrase “in remembrance of me” from Luke 22:19 and 1 Corinthians 11:24, 11:25, and registers no connection to any of them. The Doctrine and Covenants — D&C 20:76–79 is cited, not quoted, on the same footing: it carries the corpus’s other set of the two sacrament prayers, in nearly Moroni’s words, and this page discloses it without registering any connection to it.

Every quote is drawn verbatim from the frozen source at the reference given with it. The chapters actually quoted are 3 Nephi 11, 3 Nephi 13, 3 Nephi 14, 3 Nephi 18, 3 Nephi 20, Moroni 4, Moroni 5, Moroni 6, 4 Nephi 1, Mormon 9, Alma 31, 2 Nephi 5, Luke 22, and 1 Corinthians 11; Moroni 3, Matthew 6, Matthew 26, and Mark 14 are cited without being quoted.

Every quote on this page is taken verbatim from the frozen source chapters named above. This page registers exactly two connections: (Moroni 4:3 ↔ 3 Nephi 18:10), a paraphrase of the covenant-witness charge, and (3 Nephi 18:13 ↔ 3 Nephi 14:27), the commandment’s storm close; the wine-prayer leg and the institution’s other three charges are shown in prose, not registered as separate records — including the wine pair (Moroni 5:2 ↔ 3 Nephi 18:11), which carries the longest shared word-run on the page and is disclosed as unregistered rather than described as looser. The exact string “witness unto the Father” is disclosed as unique to 3 Nephi 18 so the paraphrase is not mistaken for a quotation. The claim that the fixed prayers and the Bountiful institution are one continuous ordinance is set apart as a ⚖️ interpretation, offered to weigh. The “meet together oft” gathering record is hosted on The Church of God and cross-linked, not re-registered here. All counts were recounted for this page over the whole frozen corpus, so they are corpus-wide figures; external, real-world questions about the ordinance’s history are out of scope.