Slate and the Book of Mormon as Literature

I could see the critique that the foreshadowing isn’t subtle enough. But to say it isn’t even there… Don’t you hate it when a review flounders on an obvious point where the author hasn’t actually read the book.

An interesting point is how many of the recorded sermons are chaistic structures. And how Samuel the Lamanite’s sermons are brute force triads rather than the more classic approach of sermons such as “Oh that I were an angel” (which makes a good song, all in all) — leading to Christ noting that they did not record all of his prophecy and asking why, with no one answering (err, Lord, well, he did not meet contemporary artistic standards, so we kind of didn’t write it all down …).

Wolfe should have talked to someone like Arthur Henry King who was taken with the poetry of the text before he was convinced by the Spirit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Henry_King

Hmm, he died ten years ago, guess it has been a long time since he was in my living room giving a presentation about his feelings about the gospel to a handful of us. Law school seems not that long ago somehow now.

Clark:This somehow suggests that the power of a text in a religious context is its literary or poetic power. That strikes me as a very odd presupposition. Perhaps a bias to some of those who are English majors?

Is this really such a stretch? I mean, for example, taking a “memetic” approach, for a text to survive and spread, it requires that somebody repeat and copy it. And, surely a text that has literary or poetic would have a serious advantage over one that is lacking.

Slate:Mormonism’s success suggests that a religion can flourish in spite of rather than because of its founding texts

And that’s the point– that despite the lack of literary power, this text has somehow managed to get itself propagated. Impressive, and noteworthy.

Now, at the risk of offending: not to put too fine a point on it, but I have to agree with Mark Twain here. I’ve read a lot of religious scriptures in my time, and I’ve never come across one that is less “readerly” than the Book of Mormon. Sorry, but there it is.

Michael, I think the problem is in assuming that religious value is the same as poetic value. Certainly it has to have value. I just think Wolfe is making some unwarranted assumptions about what generates value. To give an obvious example, outside of Genesis, what is the literary value of Numbers or Leviticus?

Stephen, I don’t have a link. FARMS used to sell it back in the 90′s.

It’s mostly just plagiarized from the Old Testament with some name changes. Worse, Joe Smith falsely claimed to have known hebrew, ancient egyptian, greek, who knows what else. And of course there are the problems of the supposed visions, the golden plates, all of it.

While there may be a certain moral code to mormonism–I think it’s a version of masonry (Smith was a mason)–that doesn’t excuse all the …BS. And the history of the church itself is hardly admirable. That said, I think the early mormons themselves were perhaps duped to some degree by “elders” (Twain suggested as much), even by the tyrant King Brigham–and there was probably a survivalist element, ie circle the wagons. Out west they were fighting the natives (and at times killing them), but also WASP settlers, outlaws, etc.

Finally, I don’t think the Framers–certainly not the Jeffersonian/Madisonian types–would have approved. James Buchanan, identified as Jeffersonian at times, didn’t–though read the history closely and one senses the US Govt. actually backed down from Brigham’s Nauvoo legions….

(please don’t tell me CS Peirce was in the LDS…)

J., I’m pretty open to it not being great literature. As I said I don’t find most of the Bible great literature either. Plagerized from the Old Testament and Masonry is a harder sell. Certainly there’s a lot of quotes from the OT along with midrashic expansion. And the connection between Masonry and the LDS temple ordinances is well known. I’d disagree with the rest of your characterization although that’s clearly a subjective judgment.

Peirce definitely wasn’t a Mormon. He was initially Unitarian in upbringing and moved to become an Episcopalian after a particular religious experience. However his religious views tended to have a lot of parallels in many ways with Buddhism and rather less to orthodox Christianity. So far as I know he never even mentioned Mormonism.

Michael, I’ve read Atler a lot and do enjoy it. I actually think many of the narrative portions of the Book of Mormon parallel the complexity. However as is typical with the OT one has to be introduced to the structures to appreciate what is going on. And I still think it’s value as great literature is really vastly overstated. However the BoM is different from the OT in that it was compiled out of many texts for a particular purpose – and literature wasn’t it’s purpose. So if the Nephites had poetry and the like it just never made it into the Book of Mormon. Also note that the primary religious texts for the Nephites were some form of the OT and not the Book of Mormon itself. (Most of which was a kind of historic record more akin to 1 & 2 Kings or 1 & 2 Chronicles.)

Well, if you don’t mind another helping of dissent, archaeological and historical evidence supports some of the Old Testament, aka Septuagint (not all…in fact less than most believers realize. The scholars of the LXX drew upon various semitic writings –hebrew itself was not really a language until much later), and the New Test. That is not the case with the BoM. There’s no evidence which would confirm Smith’s vision that one or more of the 12 tribes visited the Americas. The Nephite/Lamanite stuff also rather…odd. Personally, I think the Nephite concept was about like jews thinking themselves as the chosen people, or the calvinistic idea (bad idea) of the Elect. And the Lamanites? Un-chosen. :)

He was initially Unitarian in upbringing and moved to become an Episcopalian after a particular religious experience. However his religious views tended to have a lot of parallels in many ways with Buddhism and rather less to orthodox Christianity.

Yes, in brief I would agree that Peirce’s monistic elements, or “process-philosophy” could be read as slightly…pantheist, tho’ not specifically hinduistic or buddhistic (Im not a buddhist or hindu, but find some eastern religious thinking slightly interesting, and some buddh. schools–such as the theraveda–were, as the jargon goes, more immanent than transcendent or mystical).

J. “There’s no evidence which would confirm Smith’s vision that one or more of the 12 tribes visited the Americas.”

Clark’s too kind to bring it up, but this kind of remark shows how remarkably little you know about the Book of Mormon and how remarkably shallow your reading of the text is. FYI the Book of Mormon doesn’t claim that one of the 12 tribes visited the Americas. With respect to archaeological evidence, I agree that there is a paucity of such evidence. That isn’t particularly surprising given the status of Meso-American archaeology. However, there is an abundance of literary and form-critical evidence to support it.

I disagree with Clark about the literary value of the Book of Mormon. I believe that it is great literature — just not great English literature. It reflects some of the best ascending staircase parallelism anywhere in any literature. I suggest Richard Rust’s book Feasting on the Word: The Literary Testimony of the Book of Mormon as a great source to get in touch with the literary beauty of the book. I also suggest Bruce Jorgensen’s article “The Dark Way to the Tree: Typological Unity in the Book of Mormon,” and George Tate’s article “The Typology of the Exodus Pattern in the Book of Mormon” in addition to John Welch’s articles on chiasmus in the Book of Mormon. I believe that the inability to appreciate the Book of Mormon tells us more about the readers abilities and depth rather than the book’s in light of these kinds of studies.

re 13:

Apologies if it seemed insulting, but concerns about the reliability and authenticity of a religious text should not be considered an insult of the people who follow the religion. I respect many mormon people (not all)–Harry Reid even. Unlike many so-called christians, they tend to be industrious and …sober.

At the same time, the issues regarding reliability and authenticity which apply to the Bible (or koran) also apply to the BoM, and to the visions of Joseph Smith. I have a difficult time believing the literal truth of many biblical scenes, even the Resurrection. Thomas Jefferson did not accept the biblical miracles as literally true, and termed the Book of Revelation “the ravings of a madman”. A fortiori, Smith’s account of the Angel seems rather incredible and fantastic. As Clark most likely realizes, the Humean doubts must be dealt with (even if one rejects the dastardly Hume’s insistence on the uniformity of experience, there’s a story to tell).

Which is to say, perhaps we are better off reading the Bible or BoM or other religious texts as literature and as metaphorical rather than as literally true. That needn’t diminish the messages of wisdom and spiritual advice they have to offer.

I doubt that Mr. Wolfe read the entire Book of Mormon to write his Slate piece, but he did read my book, which is all that is required of reviewers. Even if I was unable to persuade him in the end, I did feel like he gave my arguments a fair hearing, for which I am grateful.

I’m sorry that the foreshadowing business has thrown off so many Latter-day Saints but Wolfe was simply echoing my own reading of the Book of Mormon (which was done with more care than he could convey in his short review). Here is what he read on pages 180 and 182 of _Understanding the Book of Mormon_:

“It seems obvious that the climax of the Book of Mormon is Christ’s three day visit to the Nephites. Jesus is the central figure of the book’s theology, and his earthly ministry and redemptive sacrifice had been prophesied, discussed, and anticipated among the Nephites since the time of Lehi. . . .

“Although the Book of Mormon contains some three dozen prophecies of Christ’s coming, the vast majority concern his life in Palestine—that he would be born, receive baptism, work miracles, be slain for the sins of the world, and then rise from the dead. Only five passages indicate that his ministry would include a post-resurrection visit to the New World. Nephi had spoken plainly on the subject (1 Ne. 12:4–7; 2 Ne. 26:1–9, 32:6), but these prophecies apparently did not have wide distribution. As late as 83 BC Alma explicitly states that he does not know whether Jesus will come to the Nephites (Alma 7:8), though he later receives a revelation that this would be the case (Alma 45:10), and Mormon reports that other prophets at the time “taught that he [Christ] would appear unto them after his resurrection” (Alma 16:20). Some have seen in this disjunction evidence that Joseph Smith was inventing the story as he went along, with Nephi’s predictions being so much clearer because his words were dictated after Third Nephi had already been written. In any case, there was not a strong expectation of Christ’s coming to the New World on anyone’s part, even after the time of Alma.

“Just before the book of Third Nephi begins, Samuel the Lamanite offers very specific prophecies about signs in the Americas of Jesus’ birth and death (with the former being predicted to occur in only five years’ time), yet he never mentions Christ’s visit. In fact, some of his listeners complain that they are being asked to believe in a figure who will live “in a land which is far distant,” and they wonder, “Why will he not show himself unto us as well as unto them who shall be at Jerusalem?” (Hel. 16:18, 20). Forty years later, as righteous survivors gather in Bountiful, they too are caught by surprise—when they hear a voice proclaim “Behold my Beloved Son” and see a celestial being descending from heaven, they “wist not what it meant, for they thought it was an angel that had appeared unto them.” Only after this personage proclaims, “I am Jesus Christ,” do they remember that “it had been prophesied among them that Christ should show himself unto them after his ascension into heaven” (3 Ne. 11:8–12). In short, the Book of Mormon story is not structured around a straightforward expectation of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearance among the Nephites that is satisfied and brought to an unambiguous conclusion; the workings of prophecy and God’s providence are portrayed as being a bit more enigmatic.”

I may be right or I may be wrong about how Christ’s visit to the Nephites fits into the overall narrative, but Mr. Wolfe’s review should not be summarily dismissed on the assumption that he knows nothing of the Book of Mormon.