Video Summary (from description)
Dr. Bushman discusses lessons from his Come, Follow Me study of the Book of Mormon, focusing on Nephi's three futures:
- A near-present future for his people in the promised land (as seen by Lehi and Nephi).
- A future involving the coming of the Redeemer (from the Tree of Life vision).
- A distant future where Nephi's descendants, despite wandering in darkness, are not cut off forever and will be remembered.
He also reflects on the evolution of academic approaches to the Book of Mormon (from efforts to disprove its ancient origins to independent scholarly study) and shares his personal conviction about its transformative power.
We are wonderful people, but we're getting very old. It's just been a remarkable day. It's uh sort of one revelation after another and I would say the whole conception of it is quite ingenious. It's taken me a while to really grasp what was going on, but it was an invitation to people from all sorts of disciplines, various walks of life, people with all sorts of backgrounds to say what the Book of Mormon means to me.
It's a it's a kind of a testimony. We hear that all the time in church. But it was an invitation to integrate what we find in the Book of Mormon with what we do in our everyday lives, the things we're most involved in. I loved the ship builder sailor story. It's a great story. I hope you all were here this morning. It was a wonderful story to hear.
We started out with Mark talking about quad and how he's an anthropologist, archaeologist, historian, how it fits into the Book of Mormon story. He told us it doesn't really fit at all. Uh but that was his report and I loved it. And then at lunch um Dean Bjett Madura and Kim Clark who teaches she's the dean of the business school. He's the teaches um what would call be called business ethics but how to be a Christlike leader. Talked about that subject u which flows out of their lives. Is their lives integrated with the text? And how does one feed the other? How does one feed understanding and better living?
And this is not just an invitation. I can see now to those who are on the program. It's an invitation to everyone. Everyone here has some unusual or specific experiences in their families, in their work, in their childhoods, in their travels, in all sorts of things that permits them to see the world in a different way. And especially crisis, crisis, difficult situations, tough parts of our lives. What does the Book of Mormon tell us? It's a rich book. It has endless treasures in it. And I think what we've had over these last uh last day is an invitation to make the Book of Mormon our own by integrating into our lives. Not just what's on the page, but how these two echo back and forth in our lives.
As it so happened, I got a little inkling of this. And so my talk today is not me as a uh a scholar trying to say what I find in the Book of Mormon, but um me as a um as a church member trying to follow the Come Follow Me reading program. What what I'm going to tell you are the thoughts that came to me. I decided this time I'm going to read a little more seriously. I'm going to take notes on what's there and what flows. I did had no idea what would come. But when those words filtered through my mind, I begin to get a certain view of some issues in the Book of Mormon, and I'm going to relay them to you. They're not deep. They're not hugely profound, but there was a little pattern that sort of intrigued me and I thought I would pass along to you as a as a um a hint about what you could find if you looked at it.
You can't do it lightly. I determined this time I was going to write. I was going to think. I was going to keep notes to myself. It's one of those situation you have to delve. If you want to dig for treasure, you have to delve. You have to get down there to find it. And something came along. That's going to be in the first part of my talk. Sort of a little report on my my reading uh during the Book of Mormon come follow me year. The second I will speak more as a historian. I'm going to say where I place my work and a lot of the things we've heard here today in what I call historiography by which I mean the scholarship on the Book of Mormon people who are thinking about it. Um where where do we stand if we look at how scholarship is dealing with this book in the world at large? Where does our work fit with what uh non-Mormons, what anti-Mormons, what other people are doing? And uh how does it all come together?
So I resolved, as I said, to pause and ponder this time and start keeping notes. As I read through First Nephi, the material grouped itself into what I came to call Nephi's three futures. Most of it is basically familiar to everyone who has spent much time at the Book of Mormon. But after reporting my thoughts, I want to go on to reflect the implications of this of projects like this for 21st century Latter-day Saint scholarship. How do the things that I and others like me draw out? How does all this bear on this wondrous volume we love so much?
My intention is first to give you the results of my investigation and then in part two of the talk reflect on where projects like this figure in the ever-expanding field of Book of Mormon studies.
The first of the three futures referred to in the title is the future of Jerusalem in the early 6th century BCE. What drives the plot of First Nephi is Lehi's anticipation of the city's destruction by the Babylonians? As the story begins in 597 BC, Nebuchadnezzar had just conquered and ravaged the city. Second Kings tells us the Babylonians carried away all Jerusalem and all the princes and all the mighty men of valor and all the craftsmen and smiths. None remained save the poorest sort of the people of the land. Lehi somehow escaped, possibly because he lived so far in the country. To assure subservience, the emperor installed a new king, Zedekiah, who by rights should have been a puppet of the empire but was not. A resistance party soon formed with the king in the lead. Nephi began his record in the first year of Zedekiah's reign as Lehi, Jeremiah, and other prophets warned the people to repent or they would be carried away into Babylon. Jeremiah and Lehi prophesied the destruction, in effect opposing the king's budding resistance. The true prophets were likely even more concerned about Jerusalem's descent into debilitating lasciviousness and foresaw that the emperor would be the instrument of punishing wayward Israel.
Lehi's party left before Nebuchadnezzar's army besieged the city in 586 BCE and so avoided the most disastrous calamities. If the family had remained, they would doubtless have lost their property and been carried away to Babylon. The first of Nephi's futures, the one he's foreseeing through Lehi's eyes, split the family. Laman and Lemuel, and later much of Ishmael's family disagreed with Lehi. They could reasonably ask if it was sensible to abandon everything in the uncertain belief that the city would be destroyed. Even Lehi's wife, Sariah, questioned the abandonment of all they possessed for the cruelties of the desert. The Lamanite faction not only disagreed at the outset, they continued to disagree throughout their eight-year sojourn in the wilderness and aboard the ship. They interpreted the seemingly senseless departure as a scheme of Nephi's to subject them to his rule. Nephi lies and tells them many things. Laman and Lemuel and his group believed that he may lead us away into some strange wilderness. And after he has led us away, he is thought to make himself a kind of ruler over us that he may do with us according to his will and pleasure.
Read this way, the desert sojourn constantly inflamed a contest for leadership. Here's a quote again. Our younger brother thinks to rule over us, they said one to another, and we have had much trial because of him. Wherefore now, let us slay him, for behold, we will not have him to be our ruler, for it belongs to us who are the elder brethren to rule over the people. So interpreted by Laman and Lemuel, Lehi's prophecy of Jerusalem's future, the one Nephi accepted, opened a fissure that lasted a thousand years and formed the divide that persisted down to the moment when Moroni buried the plates.
Seeing their father's insistence on leaving the city as Nephi's scheme to usurp their rightful authority, Laman and Lemuel's bitterness poisoned Lamanite feelings for generation after generation until the final destruction of Nephites in Moroni's day and their absorption into the Lamanite nation. The future of Jerusalem, as Nephi understood it, was fateful for the entire course of Nephite history. It was that one thought that struck with me. That structure of the book, of the politics, of the struggles, the warfare originated in this one view of the future.
The second future appeared in the grand vision of the Meridian of time, which Nephi saw shortly after the family left the city. The vision elaborated on Lehi's prophecy that a prophet would the Lord God raise up among the Jews, even a Messiah, or in other words, a savior of the world. Nephi saw a virgin, and she is exceedingly fair and white, whom soon thereafter he beholds, bearing a child in her arms. The angel says, "Behold the lamb of God, yea, even the son of the man, the eternal father." Nephi foresees the multitudes who are healed by the power of the lamb of God, who ultimately was lifted upon the cross and slain for the sins of the world. From then on, Nephi taught that the God of Israel himself would come to earth. He was sometimes a little shaky on the two distinct persons of the godhead and made it the heart of his preaching. He saw that Christ's own people, the Palestinian Jews, would reject Christ, leading to their downfall and scattering.
It is hard to tell how pervasive Christian teaching was among other Nephites. It is likely that Christian belief did not permeate the entirety of Nephite culture for a couple of hundred years. Anyway, perhaps at first only prophets taught Christian doctrine. The gospel of Christ came as something a little bit new to King Benjamin's people. And King Noah's priests were taken aback by Abinadi's explication of Christian doctrine. Apparently, Christian belief did not penetrate all corners of Nephite society. There was always a body of unbelievers. Even though Christ was at the center of worship among the righteous, the prophets themselves were preoccupied with Christ. It was the heart and soul of their preaching. Samuel the Lamanite prophet speaking from the wall told the wicked Nephite hearers, "Nothing can save the people save it be repentance and faith on the Lord Jesus Christ." If not all the Nephites and Lamanites lived by the Christian gospel, the people of God were ready for Christ when he visited them. Moroni could accurately proclaim that the primary purpose of the record that Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni kept was to the convincing of Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, the eternal God.
This second future, Nephi's grand vision of the incarnation in the meridian of time, launched a prophetic tradition that gave the book its ultimate purpose to convert Israel and the Gentiles to Christ.
Nephi's third future also came to him in the comprehensive desert vision that included the revelation of the Messiah. He was shown the last days when the Nephite record would be recovered and the work of restoring Israel commenced. Nephi's view of this future grows out of his fascination with Isaiah's emphasis on God's covenant, which we've heard a lot about today. The covenant Isaiah taught will be fully realized in the last days prior to the second coming. Nephi saw all of Israel, including the Jews and Lehi's seed, restored to favor as they accept Christ their Lord. Two texts will guide this recovery. The Bible coming from the Jews and the Book of Mormon recorded by Nephi's people.
Ironically, Nephi's descendants will not be the chief beneficiaries of this restoration. As again we've heard they will have dwindled in unbelief and the bulk of them destroyed by their brethren the Lamanites, the few remnants absorbed into the Lamanite ranks. In this future, the Gentiles recover the Book of Mormon and bring it to Lehi's descendants. If the Gentiles also accept the message of the Book, they will be blessed along with the remnants of Israel. This third future answers the question, why did the Nephites keep a record? It was not written for Nephi's immediate descendants. There's little evidence of Book of Mormon people studying the book. As Nephi understood its purpose, it was written for this third future for the Gentiles and the remnants of Israel, but especially for the Lamanites.
This record was conscientiously kept for a thousand years, carefully preserved and buried by Moroni in the expectation that a distant people, the latter-day Gentiles, would recover it and bring it before the world in the last days and notably for Lehi's descendants through the Lamanites. The Book of Mormon was written for this third future. Nephi's vision of the last days motivated generations of recordkeepers and guided Mormon and Moroni in their culminating work.
These futures then structured the Nephite text. Differences that originated in the future of Jerusalem that divided the family from the time of their departure from Jerusalem to the final obliteration of Nephites in the last battles. The most basic political fissure of a thousand years was formed from this primal disagreement. The second future, the coming of Christ foreseen in Nephi's great vision, gave the book its divine purpose to convert the world to the Savior. The third vision of the end days identified the book's audience and mission and where in world history it would play a role. The Nephite prophets kept a record not for their own people, but for the seed of Laman and Lemuel, who ultimately would come to Christ via the history kept by their enemies.
I'm aware as I speak that none of this is news, but it offers one more way to view the book's structure and to appreciate its complexity. It exemplifies, I believe, one feature of the book's ingenious and peculiar composition.
Does this simple reading of the text have any bearing on Book of Mormon scholarship? Does it connect with established interpretations? I think it adds a little to Grant Hardy's very influential comparison of the authorial approaches of Nephi and Mormon in Understanding the Book of Mormon. That's the title of the book, Understanding the Book of Mormon. The book I recommend to readers who are interested in the book's narrative structure. In his 2010 study, Hardy astutely summed up the difference between Nephi and Mormon with the words meditation and history. Quote, "Perhaps the most striking difference between Nephi and Mormon," Hardy wrote, "is how much the latter Mormon sees himself as a historian with a responsibility to tell the story of his civilization comprehensively and accurately. On the other hand, what we see in first and second Nephi is as much meditation as memoir. It is a spiritual reflection rather than a conventional historical narrative."
Mormon plays close attention to chronology and geography. He follows events year by year, place by place. Nephi does too through a lot of First Nephi through the 18th chapter. But then he goes off in long stretches of prophetic explication of scripture and direct sermonizing is given to lengthy visions unlike anything Mormon experiences. Once Hardy draws our attention to the two approaches, we can see quite clearly the two authors have distinctly different flavors. Hardy's recognition of this contrast is in my estimation one of the most illuminating pieces of literary analysis in the long history of Book of Mormon commentary. It took my breath away when I first read those pages. Mormon the conscientious historian compared to Nephi the visionary and sermonizer. It was brilliant.
It came naturally for me to return to the pages of Hardy's book after working on my own observations of Nephi's writings, but seeing them in a new light. What struck me after ruminating on Nephi's three futures was that for all their differences, both Nephi and Mormon had a basic impulse in common. Both were preoccupied with the course of events. What mattered to them was what had happened and what would happen. They both saw God in history. Occasionally, Nephi introduces purely theological observations, Lehi's teachings to his offspring in Second Nephi 2, for example, or in his description of the precious fruit. But for the most part though given to visions and sermons he discourses on events. The coming of Christ, the restoration of Israel, the recovery of the two texts, God's intervention in the last days. The focus on events is sharply delineated in the editorial headings to each chapter of Nephi's writings. Take for example the heading to second Nephi 26 which I just took at random. Christ will minister to the Nephites. Nephi foresees the destruction of his people. They will speak from the dust. The Gentiles will build up false churches and secret combinations. These topics are typical of Nephi's prophetic mind. Nephi finds his God in the course of events revealed in the visions of the future just as Mormon does in his determined narration of Nephite history. Nephi does indeed record more visions and sermonize more frequently as Hardy argues while Mormon narrates events year by year, place by place. But both talk of actual happenings. Both men explicate a god who reveals himself in history. We are a religion of historical events. What happened? That's what interests us.
Well, that's so much for part one of my talk. Let me go on to part two.
I want to step back from my own reading of Nephi's writings to the larger body of writings with which I wish to associate myself in broad terms. How are we to understand what is happening in the field of Book of Mormon studies and where does work like mine fit in? When I speak broadly of Book of Mormon studies I think for example of the excellent series of interpretive volumes published by the Maxwell Institute a few years ago who shed light on doctrine and themes in the Book of Mormon. There are also close readings by Joe Spencer and his associates who minututely examine every word, every grammatical oddity, every illogical assertion in search of the inner meaning of the text. John Welch discovered a startling deployment of the Hebrew literary form chiasmus throughout the Book of Mormon. Terrell Givens, Rosalynde Welch, Adam Miller, Kim Matheson, Nicholas Frederick, and Christian Neal have made contributions and we could add what we have heard today.
I've already lauded Grant Hardy's Understanding the Book of Mormon as one of the most illuminating studies to date. All of these are examined and evaluated in Daniel Beck's, Amy Easton-Flake's, Nicholas J. Frederick's and Joseph M. Spencer's Book of Mormon Studies: An Introduction and Guide. It's a great little book. You ought to have it if you want to follow the course of Book of Mormon scholarship. We are awash in learned and careful examinations of the text with doubtless more to come. We can see the seeds of these works right in the presentations today.
My question is what do these authors do for us? The believing readers who want to extract all the good we can from the Book of Mormon and increase our confidence that it is indeed an authentic history. In the first place, most of the recent literature I'm referring to does not address the question of historicity. That is, it does not seek to confirm the book's claims to be a real history written by historical figures and recovered and translated in modern times. A little bit of it, but that's not the predominant theme. The new work proposes only to examine the text as we have it, not to investigate where it came from and how we obtained it. It is not overtly apologetic. The value of their scholarship recent authors seem to imply is enhancing appreciation of the text. We see underlying themes, rhetorical devices and theological implications. We're not constantly posing and answering the question of historicity. The aim of the literature is to appreciate the intricacy and beauty of the text.
This is a departure from Book of Mormon scholarship half a century ago. Within my lifetime, there's been a great shift. When I began writing Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism in the mid 1970s, I could not avoid addressing the question of historical authenticity. From the publication of I. Woodbridge Riley's The Founder of Mormonism in 1902, critics attempted to explain the Book of Mormon by arguing it obviously reflected 19th century American culture. It was a product of Joseph Smith's time and place. As a believer, I had to deal with these arguments when I wrote about Joseph Smith. To tell his story, I felt obligated to show the frailty of the American comparisons. I examined the claim, for example, that the Gadianton bands in the Book of Mormon obviously mirrored the Masons, which were coming under attack by the anti-Masonry political party in Joseph Smith's time. Other critics argued that the transition from kings to judges at the end of Mosiah reflected the American rejection of their king in 1776 in the installation of republican government. And of course the whole Book of Mormon traced the origins of the American Indians, a matter that puzzled many Europeans who settled the American continent and caused them to speculate, many arguing that the Indians were scattered Israelites as the Book of Mormon does.
As a book-believing historian, it was my task to disrupt the assertion that all the major features of the Book of Mormon as Alexander Campbell had claimed in 1832 reflected Joseph Smith's time. It was to show that the supposedly 19th century passages in the Book of Mormon were not parallels at all. They could easily be compared to countless other historical phenomena other than their supposed 19th century sources. The Book of Mormon Lamanites, for example, perversely refused to display standard Indian features. No wigwams and teepees, no scalps, canoes, peace pipes, no feathered headdresses, none of the cliches were there, I pointed out, hoping to put to rest the critic's hypothesis about American origins. And so with all the rest of the likenesses between the Book of Mormon and its American environment. Two decades later, in 2005, when adapting the material in the Beginnings of Mormonism for my complete biography, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, I pretty much dumped the chapter I'd written on the Book of Mormon earlier. I made no effort to demonstrate how the book refused to draw on its American environment. I focused instead on the ambiguities in the text, how it both demeaned and glorified Native Americans, how it both honored and critiqued the Bible. It exalted American history while condemning American society for its pride and cruelty. There was still a touch of apologetics under the surface of my chapter, but my explicit purpose was to analyze the text rather than to assert its historicity. Instead of taking on critical scholarship in a debate format, I explicated the shape of the text to show its cultural significance.
I think that is true for much of the scholarship I refer to here, the most recent work by Latter-day Saints themselves. The presentations at the Joseph Smith symposium held in the Library of Congress in 2005 and organized by Jack Welch explored many things, but only one of the papers addressed the matter of the book's historicity or inspiration directly, and it as I recall was a source of some embarrassment to the organizers. The other papers were positive and friendly but did not assert miraculous origins. About the same time, I remember my puzzlement as I read Terrell Givens' Viper on the Hearth. To the very end, I could not figure out if Terrell was LDS, which delighted him. No doubt.
The new literature on the Book of Mormon down to the present is mostly non-combative. Demonstrating the miraculous powers of Joseph Smith is not its goal. In the 21st century, we seem to have given up for the most part, not entirely, on old-fashioned apologetics. Does that leave us defenseless? Who will respond to the critiques of Joseph Smith and others and offer rejoinders for believers' sake? The truth of the matter is that scholarly critics have also become non-combative. It is true of course that on the internet there are scores of polemicists who are more intense in their attacks than ever and must be challenged. But among serious academic scholars, attack mode is no longer standard practice. Just the opposite. A cool, more balanced style prevails. Critics are no longer inclined to dismiss our beliefs as foolish and Joseph Smith as a fraud.
The premier example of recent high level academic scholarship is Americanist Approaches to the Book of Mormon edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman and published in 2019. Forty years earlier the word "Americanist" in the title would tip off historians that the book's aim was to advance I. Woodbridge Riley's argument that the Book of Mormon reflected Joseph Smith's environment indicating that he had written the book himself. The Fenton-Hickman collection nowhere makes that point. The essays do examine American material but from another perspective, one found in the Book of Mormon itself. In his introduction to the volume, the editor Jared Hickman suggests that in dealing with a contested text such as the Book of Mormon, there's wisdom in examining how the book itself invites readers to understand it. Critics could take a cue from what the book says about its own purposes and audience.
Hickman's argument is that the Book of Mormon presents itself as a book written for the 19th century, which it rather sharply foresees. The 19th century is Nephi's third future when he sees the plates being recovered and translated. The book was written for readers in that time. Given its own self-stated purpose, it's only logical to examine how the book looks from a 19th century American perspective. Not only to prove it is a 19th century production, but to see where it fits into its own chosen context. The book has much to say on such subjects as family, race, gender, the origins of native people and the Bible. Why not situate it among 19th century books on the same subject?
Among the contributors to Americanist Approaches were a number of Latter-day Saint scholars. They discussed the Book of Mormon's take on race and gender, salvation, and ideals of manhood in their 19th century context. In taking on these subjects, they accepted Hickman's premise, the book can be read as a 19th century production, just the reverse of what I assumed when I wrote Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. I was trying to separate the Book of Mormon from the 19th century. These LDS writers simply assumed it was logical to locate the text in its modern setting.
Our scholars found a place in Hickman's collection because of an evolution in the understanding of translation among Latter-day Saint scholars. Earlier, it had been assumed that the translation was pretty much a direct transliteration of Nephi and Mormon's words. The text would be limited to what those ancient authors knew and could say. Consequently, the appearance of 19th century elements in the translation would undermine the claim that ancient prophets wrote the book. In the 1980s, this assumption began to shift. LDS scholars picked up on B.H. Roberts' earlier belief that translation of Nephite writings of necessity introduced 19th century vocabulary. In a seminal article in 1987, Blake Ostler pointed to the vast amount of Book of Mormon material that would have been entirely out of place in Nephi's Jerusalem. He coupled these findings with an explanation of the long tradition of prophetic translation that freely molded texts to serve prophetic purposes.
Ostler cited Nibley to support this larger conception of translation. Quote, "We have come across a great tradition of prophetic unity that made it possible for inspired men in every age to translate, abridge, expand, explain and update the writing of their predecessors. The purpose of translation by seers was not to convey precisely what the ancients had written but to present their message in terms that a modern age could understand and accept."
The combination of prophet and text as Samuel Brown argued in his contribution to the Americanist volume made it inevitable that the translation would be partly modern. Quote,
"This model of scripture as hybrid between text and prophet explains not only that there may be 19th century elements in the Book of Mormon, but that there must be 19th century elements in the Book. It had to be because translation is a process of bringing disparate human generations into active communion with one another. We have to understand them. Their words have to be made explicable to us."
This revised view of translation has thoroughly orthodox scholars digging up information that once would have delighted skeptics. Jonathan Neville, whose colleague Jim Lucas is here today, has conducted text comparisons between the Book of Mormon and the writings of the eminent 18th century American theologian Jonathan Edwards. Neville has identified enough Edwardian usages to speculate that Joseph Smith must have had access to Edwards' collected works in the Palmyra library 20 years ago. Neville's findings would have pleased the critics. Today, Neville, who is very much a defender of the faith, interprets his findings as a clue to Joseph Smith's entire inspired translation process. Others have arrived at similar conclusions. Brant Gardner points to phrases like "a song, a song of redeeming love." It would be alien to Nephi's culture, but commonplace in 19th century America's evangelical culture.
None of these snippets of modern culture are disturbing to this generation of Latter-day Saint scholars who have accepted the need for intelligible and persuasive translation. Of course, there are scraps of Americana in the Book of Mormon, they say. How else could it be made understandable and appealing? Grant Hardy goes so far as to propose that the Book of Mormon may be an innovative artistic creation based on the experience and words of ancient prophets. That goes a long ways. That's too far for me.
Hardy's outlook makes possible collaborations like the one embodied in Americanist Approaches. I'm getting close to the end. The overall outcome of this reconfiguration has been a period of détente when Latter-day Saint scholars have collaborated with non-LDS and both sides have respected and used the work of the other. The old days of combat are fading. We're not interested in scoring points against our adversaries, and outside scholars are not interested in vanquishing us.
I will confess that as a person whose life has spanned both eras, I still listen to new work on the Book of Mormon with an apologist's ear. Does this work tend to endorse the historical authenticity of the book? I can't help but ask or is it skeptical?
When I read Grant Hardy, I hear implicit endorsement of Joseph Smith's inspiration. Hardy's analysis of the sharply different modes of writing in the sections by Nephi and the ones by Mormon to my mind implies two authors. How could Joseph Smith have invented a Nephi who was so much visions and meditations and sermons followed by a Mormon who plotted along year by year, place by place to get the history straight? That degree of complexity might be possible for a skilled, experienced author, but not an unpracticed, poorly trained writer like Joseph Smith.
In a conversation with a critical scholar about the Book of Mormon, we came to an agreement that the Book of Mormon was at the very least a work of genius. I yield that much to him because a genius is defined as someone with capacities so far beyond ordinary human powers that his or her gifts seem miraculous.
In a sense, that is the underlying goal of Book of Mormon studies by believing scholars today.
In so far as we are apologists, our aim is to win respect. At one time, the aim was to confirm the hypothesis that the book was an authentic historical work by ancient prophets. Hugh Nibley never claimed to have achieved that goal. All we can do, he would say, is to accumulate evidence. The aim was to test the hypothesis.
I don't think we are in the testing business today. We are in the scrutiny business. We all want to understand the book. How does it work? How is its structure? What are its beauties?
Beyond that, for closet apologists like me, we hope to recover enough marvels and surprises in the Book of Mormon for it to command respect. That is a more modest goal than before, but is attainable, and in recent years, the excellent work of our scholars has brought us closer to its realization.
So, where does this leave us? Does détente mean the work of Latter-day Saint scholars and scholarship by believing scholars are pretty much on par? Does it make any difference in my work that I believe the Book of Mormon is an actual historical text?
I think there is a difference.
I believe that my conception of the book broadens and perhaps deepens my scholarship. Those who believe that Joseph Smith composed the Book of Mormon himself are interested almost solely in work that links the text to Joseph Smith's American environment. The point of their scholarship has to be the book's variation on 19th century themes.
My study of Nephi's three futures would only register with them if I compared Nephi's futures to the futures concocted by 19th century writers. They want to know how this structure of Joseph Smith's compares to what 19th century Americans thought. The imaginations of secular scholars are circumscribed by their assumptions about Book of Mormon origins. The book is only interesting insofar as it is American.
Latter-day Saint scholars, on the other hand, explore a much greater variety of themes. We are not hindered by the Americanist constraint.
Lots of things interest us: the theology and philosophy of the book, its literary structures, its lived religion, its teachings on social justice, the differing characters of its prophets, and then comparisons to great works through all time, Homeric epics, the Quran, the Divine Comedy, and so on.
The believing mind ranges far and wide in search of illuminating perspectives. We do not allow 19th century America to circumscribe our investigations. We join forces with our Americanist colleagues to pursue the 19th century branch of Book of Mormon studies. But in the quiet of our own studies, when writing for our believing colleagues, our minds range free. We search through time and space for approaches and methods that shine light on this precious text.
Thank you.
Q&A
Do just a few minutes of Q&A and then you can bombard him at dinner if you like. But we'll take a one or two questions now.
I'm scanning so I got these lights in my eye. Okay, there we go. Right there.
Thank you, Richard. That was magnificent. I love the conclusion. Um, you bring us such a great perspective from all your years of being interested in this. What are your one or two futures for the next century of Book of Mormon scholarship?
Features. Did you say futures?
Futures.
You want a little Nephite prophecy? Future of Book of Mormon scholars. Um, well, you could say futures. You could say wishes. Um, I still think the Book of Mormon is a great text. It's a magnificent creation. Miraculous to come from a 20 year old, 24 year old untrained kid but even as that kind of marvel uh it still is a deep marvelous text and I think uh it deserves an honorable and honorific context.
It needs to be compared to works of some similar strength. Not View of the Hebrews, which is a trivial comparison, but James Blake or the Divine Comedy or the Quran or Milton. So I think we need to uh we will be able to see deep into the book if we come prepared with deep ideas that have been fostered and cultivated in study of powerful ancient texts. That's one that I really am interested in.
Other questions? One more question.
Let's do another one if we have it. Nothing interesting in that talk.
Yes, sir.
Richard, do you think that we've lost something that people aren't so interested in the historical reality of the book? You've kind of compared how the journey's gone. You think something's been lost in the process? I mean, the focus has shifted and there are pros and cons, right? But you think we lost something in in that transition?
I don't know. Um, it was an honorable cause. We're trying to defend the book and insist that Joseph Smith could not possibly have written him, which tends to demean Joseph Smith a little bit. We don't want to go too far in that direction. Uh, and then we're always sort of hammering this does not apply. This and here we do have little scraps of evidence that shows that it does fit into its uh Central American environment and so on.
But um I think it was kind of exhausting and not really very rewarding. You persuaded people within your circle of belief. You never got anywhere with people outside. Occasionally someone would give you a pat on the back and say, "Well, that's interesting." But we never went over the scholarly world. So um I think the side I did I think was more honorable and useful that is to discredit sort of the the shallow easy comparisons to the American scene saying ah here we hear 19th century America voiced through Joseph Smith. Uh those were always sort of soft and trivial and not very persuasive. And I suppose we could have gone on battening those down, but no one uses them anymore. That is not serious scholars. Uh that that whole aim to explain away the Book of Mormon has has faltered. So I think we're better to to enlarge upon it, to glorify it, honor it, rather than to fight down our enemies.
All right. Well, thank you. Let's continue this at dinner. Hopefully, we'll see you all there at the Hinckley Center. But let's thank Richard one more time.
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