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Katzpur wrote:
I think one thing that jumped out to me was this paragraph (and the parts I’ve bolded, in particular):“The Book of Mormon is a problem right now. It’s so baffling to so many that Joseph was not even looking at the gold plates [to translate them]. And
there’s so much in the Book of Mormon that comes out of the 19th centurythat there’s a question of whether or not the text is an exact transcription of Nephi’s and Mormon’s words, or if it has been reshaped by inspiration to be more suitable for us, a kind of an expansion or elucidation of the Nephite record for our times. I have no idea how that might have worked or whether that’s true. But there are just too many scholars now, faithful church scholars, who find 19th-century material in that text.That remains a little bit of a mystery, just how it came to be.” I’ve honestly never heard of any “faithful church scholars” who have found 19th-century material in the text. And all of the LDS scholars I’ve ever heard comment on the authenticity of The Book of Mormon, just emphasize that it’s “clearly” an ancient record. If it really does have all these 19th century elements in it, I find it intriguing that this doesn’t seem to bother Bushman in the slightest.
Now I’ve only read the Book of Mormon from cover to cover once — back about 100 years ago when I was in 9th grade seminary. It was honestly all I could do to get through it, and when people talk about how much they love it, I honestly can’t help but wonder if they’re really serious or are just saying that to impress. Being told that there’s so much in it that comes right out of the 19th century… well, that would make me even less likely to find it compelling (from a historical account anyway) than I always have.
The Book of Mormon walks a tightrope. It is not written to look like the 19th century at all, but it is written to speak to the 19th century.
The most obvious influence on the BoM is the KJV. And that is definitely not 19th century.
nibbler wrote:
Traditionally we’ve derived value from the BoM because of a belief that it is a historical record. The challenge, take away the historicity of the BoM and what’s left to prop up the book’s value? That answer is going to be different for everyone. Some may decide it has no value, that’s okay too.It’s even more challenging when acceptance by your tribe hinges on acceptance of the BoM as being rooted in actual history. When even your perceived worthiness hinges on accepting the ancient historicity of the BoM.
An individual may move beyond a reliance on finding value in the BoM
becauseit’s historical but they still have to find a way to survive in a culture that issues loyalty tests based on that historicity.
Thing is that for the majority of “sympathetic” readers, the history is not the main interest. They read it for spiritual stimulation/inspiration in the present day.
There is an interesting piece I read about early Maori interpretations of the Book of Mormon. For some of them, they could view the book as a tribal conflict etc, and may have even believed their ancestors traveled to New Zealand or other Pacific islands with Hagoth, but that is not the experience of most readers.
Today we were talking about the missing 116 pages. We have an idea what was in them – Lehi’s journey etc. More or less found in 1 Nephi and 2 Nephi. When most of us read that story, we don’t think about questions like whether their tents were square or round, or what kind of shoes they wore. For many people, if historicity enters their heads, in my view, it is more a case of whether it is true or not, and not much beyond it. The days of Indiana Jones style expeditions seem to be over.
When “sympathetic” people read the Book of Mormon, there is the literature aspect, i.e. the stories etc, but the big questions tend to be – “How does this apply to me?”, “How can I gain a testimony of this?”, “What does this word mean/isn’t this language old fashioned?”, “What is God saying here?” and “How am I getting to the end of this chapter?”
SamBee wrote:
The most obvious influence on the BoM is the KJV. And that is definitely not 19th century.
Yes and no. The KJV is something that the Nephite writers would not have had access to. If we see KJV influence (or influence of other documents available in the 19th century) then it seems reasonable to ask how it got there.Quote:It’s so baffling to so many that Joseph was not even looking at the gold plates [to translate them].
In the 2018 YSA worldwide devotional in Nauvoo with Elder Cook, Dr. Kate Holbrook said that JS started using a scholarly approach to translate the plates by studying the characters etc. but then when the scholarly approach did not work (I believe the experience with/rejection by Charles Anthon is the roadblock that is inferred here) JS proceeded on a more strictly revelatory process using the U&T and the seer stone.Dr. Holbrook then gets her own lightbulb moment and shares that Orson Pratt saw JS translating the JST without any objects. JS explained to OP that he no longer needed them. Dr. Holbrook said that the “translation muscles” in the brain of JS had developed to the point that he had outgrown the need for these items.
I find the implications of this to be fascinating. The entirety of the BoM could have hypothetically been created using revelation and the brain of JS. In this scenario, perhaps the “head in hat” method was to better clear/focus his mind on the revelation. The plates would not have been strictly necessary. The effort undertaken to write on the plates would likewise not have been strictly necessary because God could reveal to the mind of JS the history of the Nephites and Lamanites similar to the visionary experiences that allowed Moroni to see our day or John the revelator to see the last days or Nephi to see the life and ministry of JC. If the brain of JS was more than just a transcription device spitting out God’s revelation word for word then it follows that we might find the 19th century fingerprints of JS all over it.
Roy wrote:
Dr. Holbrook then gets her own lightbulb moment and shares that Orson Pratt saw JS translating the JST without any objects. JS explained to OP that he no longer needed them. Dr. Holbrook said that the “translation muscles” in the brain of JS had developed to the point that he had outgrown the need for these items.I find the implications of this to be fascinating. The entirety of the BoM could have hypothetically been created using revelation and the brain of JS. In this scenario, perhaps the “head in hat” method was to better clear/focus his mind on the revelation. The plates would not have been strictly necessary. The effort undertaken to write on the plates would likewise not have been strictly necessary because God could reveal to the mind of JS the history of the Nephites and Lamanites similar to the visionary experiences that allowed Moroni to see our day or John the revelator to see the last days or Nephi to see the life and ministry of JC. If the brain of JS was more than just a transcription device spitting out God’s revelation word for word then it follows that we might find the 19th century fingerprints of JS all over it.
Reading the essays on the BoM and the BoA, I think the general church leadership apologetic stance is exactly this. The BoA essay, for instance, more than alludes to the idea that what we have as the BoA was not on the scrolls but was the catalyst for Joseph receiving the revelation/translation. As a more or less apologetic piece, the essay does say that what we have as the BoA may be on parts of the scrolls we no longer have but I honestly believe that’s in there just to appease the literal believers and that no one who has actually given it any thought believes what we have was on any of the scrolls since the scrolls we do have are so different and are clearly of Egyptian origin. Applying the same idea to the BoM, I’m good with it being all revelation given to JS although I am still skeptical of the stone in the hat (not that I don’t believe Joseph looked at the stone in the hat and dictated the BoM, but that he actually saw anything while looking at the stone in the hat). I believe either way the BoM was written for Joseph’s day, not necessarily ours – a lot has changed in 200 years.
And, Bushman isn’t the only one pointing out the 19th century (Protestant) influence on the book, his peers also point it out. Offering my own apologetics (keeping in mind that I don’t believe the book to be a literal history), all revelation seems to be influenced by the lens of the receiver. If indeed the BoM was given strictly by revelation and the “gift and power of God” (and apparently it was) I think it very plausible that Joseph’s own beliefs and intellect influenced what he said.
SamBee wrote:
Thing is that for the majority of “sympathetic” readers, the history is not the main interest. They read it for spiritual stimulation/inspiration in the present day.
Yeah. I guess I’d say that the rooted in actual history thing serves more as a hook to get people to pay more attention to the book than they would otherwise. The historicity is the ice breaker, not the end goal.
nibbler wrote:
You can hold a temple recommend and still feel rejected by your community.
Tell me about it.
What, specifically, in the BoM is clearly 19th-century in nature? The first one that pops in my head is the story of the Gadianton robbers. That story is heavily influenced by the Anti-Masonry sentiments at the time. I’ll try to give highlights. William Morgan announced he was going to publish a book exposing the secrets of Freemasons. He disappeared in 1826, many assumed he was murdered. This was in the Buffalo NY area.
Many elite (businessmen, politicians, etc.) at the time were Freemasons so it led to the belief that the Freemasons were secretly trying to take over the government. People were aware that the Freemasons had their oaths and secrets, the assumed murder provoked enough fear for an Anti-Masonry political party to form.
These were pretty much current events that were going on in NY at the time the BoM was being written. Given the language in the BoM about secret combinations, I think the Gadianton robbers are a pretty good fit for the anti-Masonry sentiments in the late 1820s.
There are also arguments that much of the theology of the BoM is based on popular theology of the early 19th century; theology that would be anachronistic to a time period before the 19th century. It’s really not my area, so I’ll drop a link to churchistrue’s blog where he covers the subject:
https://www.churchistrue.com/blog/anachronistic-christian-doctrine-in-book-of-mormon/ ” class=”bbcode_url”> https://www.churchistrue.com/blog/anachronistic-christian-doctrine-in-book-of-mormon/ Katzpur wrote:
What, specifically, in the BoM is clearly 19th-century in nature?
Thank you for that link Nibbler. It looks like ChurchisTrue did a pretty thorough job touching on these issues.There is another Richard Bushman quote on this same topic that adds some extra detail:
Quote:I think right now the Book of Mormon is a puzzle for us. Even [for] people who believe it in every detail, it’s a puzzle. To begin with, we’ve got the puzzle of translation. Translating the book without the plates even in sight, wrapped up in a cloth on the table. It’s not something that comes right off the pages, [that is] the characters on the plates. So we don’t know how that works. And then there’s the fact that there’s phrasing everywhere, long phrases that if you Google them, you’ll find them in 19th century writings. The theology of the Book of Mormon is very much 19th century theology, and it reads like a 19th century understanding of the Hebrew bible, as an Old Testament: that is, it has Christ in it, the way Protestants saw Christ everywhere in the Old Testament.
ChurchisTrue touched upon the phrasing issue. Essentially there are phrases that were prevalent in the time of JS and these phrases made their way into the BoM. That we find these phrases is strong evidence against a word for word translation. This evidence would however be more consistent with God revealing ideas to JS in the abstract and then leaving it to JS how to put it into words using phrasing that he felt comfortable and familiar with.
The following blog post from W&T discusses such phrasing in greater detail
https://wheatandtares.org/2017/11/08/19th-century-protestant-phrases-in-the-book-of-mormon/ The second part of this quote from RB is that the BoM is entirely too Christian to have originated from a pre-Christian civilization. The BoM makes the case that “clear and precious truths” were removed from the OT over the years with the purpose of obscuring the identity of the coming Messiah. The BoM is very overt in making Jesus Christ as the Messiah central to the text.
A final important reference from the RB quote is the 19th century Christian theology. Remember that the OT Hebrews were expecting the Messiah to be a military/political leader/conqueror that would usher in a new golden age for the Israelites – a second King David. For this reason they were dubious of JC because he did not fit what they were expecting. The Christ/Messiah that appears in the BoM is not only unequivocal in identity but also in purpose. Right from the start, the Christ as the atoning figure that would suffer and die for the sins of the world is introduced.
Another quote that I feel is relevant on this topic is from Alexander Campbell in 1832:
Quote:This prophet Smith, through his stone spectacles, wrote on the plates of Nephi, in his book of Mormon, every error and almost every truth discussed in N. York for the last ten years. He decides all the great controversies – infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of freemasonry, republican government, and the rights of man.
In this quote, AC criticizes the BoM for addressing all the modern religious controversies of the early 1800’s. The NT spends some significant space dealing with the issue of the necessity of circumcision. To us as modern readers this issue seems irrelevant because it has long since been settled. AC finds it terribly convenient that this record from and ancient civilization addresses all the issues that they were grappling with in the 1800’s. I believe the believing response to this criticism is that the BoM was written for our day, therefore the authors chose to emphasize those points that would be most useful for those 19th century readers.
Speaking specifically of the trinity (one of the items mentioned by AC), believers in the trinity had long sought for validation for their belief from the bible. It appears that the idea of the trinity was formed after the bible was more or less codified to address criticism that early Christians were not monotheists (If you believe that God the Father is a God and Jesus is a God and that they are separate gods then that is polytheism and polytheism was seen as anathema to Hebrew tradition. The idea of the trinity fixed that problem). There was no clear stamp of approval to be found for trinitarians from the Bible, however the BoM included references to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit being one God in multiple locations. Trinitarians would have been thrilled to find even one such verse in the bible. I personally find it ironic that after giving trinitarians their clearest and most explicit scripture validation in our signature book of scripture (and inserting the trinity into pre-Christian times), our Mormon theology evolved and now we have to downplay those verses and explain how those verses only meant the the Father and the Son were one in a metaphorical and non-literal sense.
The BoM clearly copies large portions of Isaiah. What makes this 19th century is that the BoM copies the KJV translation of Isaiah that JS had access to (including mistranslation errors). The BoM also takes some NT ideas, sermons, and phrasing and then inserts them into the mouths of BoM characters.
Of final note are some historical anachronisms (Horses, steel swords) and similarities between the descriptions of some of the battle sequences described in the BoM with battles described in “The Late War” and “The First Book of Napoleon.”
Thank you, Roy and nibbler, for that fascinating information! Katzpur wrote:
nibbler wrote:
You can hold a temple recommend and still feel rejected by your community.
Tell me about it.
But… If you didn’t hold your TR, then you wouldn’t get your calling in the prison. From what you tell us you do some great work there with people who need repentance and redemption even more than many others. So there is a posiive outcome from it.
SamBee wrote:
Katzpur wrote:
nibbler wrote:
You can hold a temple recommend and still feel rejected by your community.
Tell me about it.
But… If you didn’t hold your TR, then you wouldn’t get your calling in the prison. From what you tell us you do some great work there with people who need repentance and redemption even more than many others. So there is a posiive outcome from it.
Keeping this calling I have is the main reason I want to have a temple recommend at this point.
I tried to read it but couldn’t get through it. I feel that I’ve reached a point in my own relationship with the church where I’m not receptive to more faithful interpretations all the time. Bushman was balanced in Rough Stone Rolling, pointing out parts of church history that I think a fully faithful person might not have been honest about, but overall, when he started talking about his faithful LDS upbringing I guess I lost interest.
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