Clay Painter, “Hello, and thanks for tuning in.  My name is Clay Painter and I’m a guest interviewer for this episode.  Today we have the extremely distinguished guest, Dr. Robert M. Price.  Bob Price got his Masters of Theological Studies from the Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, and his Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Drew University.  Later he received a second Ph.D. this time in New Testament Studies from Drew University.  He is a former pastor and now is an atheist but still finds religious studies fascinating. Furthermore, he still appreciates some religious liturgy and occasionally attends church services.

Bob is a prolific author and a well-known scholar.  His books include Deconstructing Jesus, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, The Reason Driven Life, and the Pre-Nicene New Testament.  And those are just a very few of the many books that he has written.  He is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, an interviewer for the Point of Inquiry podcast, and he runs his own podcast entitled the Bible Geek.  Bob Price, welcome to Mormon Expression.”

Bob, “Well, thanks for having me.  It’s a great treat to be here.”

Clay, “Yeah absolutely.  I contacted you for this interview to primarily discuss one of your new books, Latter-Day Scripture, which is a critical examination of the Book of Mormon. Mormon Expression actually had a panel discussion of the book in episode 169, but I thought that it would be really great to hear you speak about your own work and again thanks for making the time.”

Bob, “Oh, It’s great.  No problem.”

Clay, “Just to kind of give the listeners a heads up of where this podcast is going, like I said in that episode 169, the panel did a pretty good job at discussing what your main points of the book were, that the Book of Mormon is a pseudepigrapha and that you address it as a pseudepigrapha, and then you critically analyze it holding and revealing the multiple sources that Joseph Smith used to kind of create this pastiche work that the Book of Mormon is.  But before we get to that, for listeners that aren’t acquainted with you, can you give us a brief summary of maybe your transition from Christian apologist to a pastor to a liberal Christian and now an atheist?”

Bob, “Well, I was converted to, I guess I always believed in God and Christ and so on.  Growing up my parents were Southern Baptists, but not militant.  Once we moved from Mississippi to New Jersey when I was 10, we began going to a Conservative Baptist Association Church.  I don’t know why the Southern Baptists hadn’t, but they quickly pressed home this whole business of accepting Jesus into your heart and all of that, and I did and I was pretty devout on into junior high and then high school.  I was interested in this whole new thing.  I don’t even know that I even heard the word apologetics yet, but I began to hear it suggested that you can defend the faith and show that it was very probably true or pretty much prove it was true with historical evidence and such.  Geez, this sounded fascinating so I started reading all the stalwarts like John Warwick Montgomery and Josh McDowell and so forth, and I really got into this, Jay and Dee Anderson, and anything published by New Varisty, you name it.

I was armed to enter the battle.  A couple of years later after I had gone through college and studied more but also began to press home my own questions, I began to think, you know I think I’ve only heard one side of this.  This is always kind of a danger for people who get into apologetics defending the faith because if you’re going to present arguments and you don’t want to come off looking like an idiot, you have to weigh the arguments yourself and say, now if I were not a believer, would I find this convincing?

The more I did that, the more problems I had and then I started stumbling on other historical phenomena, kind of like the rise of Christianity, and I began to compare them and to understand what historical method was and I guess I was half way through my master’s program at Gordon Conwell even before I realized I just can’t buy this, the Biblical authority business just seems to me to die th death of a thousand qualifications.

The notion that Jesus definitely existed and rose from the dead and that proves he’s the Son of God.  That’s just full of holes.  There’s no real reason to believe it and so I embarked on an aggressive reading program in other liberal neo-orthodox etc. theologians.  Once I got the degree out of the way, I started at Drew on another theology degree where I studied more of these people.  I was rapidly becoming agnostic about any supernaturalism.  I read Buldman and Paul Tillick and I thought now this is a good way of dealing with it.  There certainly is such a thing as a religious experience.  There certainly is profundity albeit symbolic in the Bible.  So I kind of went to a very extreme, I’d say liberal type of theology, and figured I had some kind of Christian faith.

I began going to a local Baptist church with a real fascinating pastor who was Southern Baptist, but much educated and very much into Kierkegaard and so on.  I then went down to North Carolina to teach at a free-will Baptist college.  I was still very skeptical and didn’t hide it, but I was loyal to the church.  I began going to the Episcopal Church.  I loved the liturgy etc.  I started to think well probably there is some sort of God albeit, not really personal.

About this time I had been down teaching at Mount Olive College about four and a half years.  The pastorate from my old church in New Jersey came open and I applied for that.  I was accepted.  My wife and I and our new baby moved up there and I was pastor for that church for about six years. During that time, I started the second Ph.D. program in New Testament at Drew University. The more I read of the old critics like F.C. Bower and so forth, and also the more I read by Jacque Derendaugh and Don Cubot I began to realize I had unexamined assumptions that there was probably no real reason to believe in spiritual entities more real than physical entities: in other words, Idealist Metaphysics.  I then sort of moved over into religious humanism.

Well the further I got into that I began to think that this is just religion eroding itself and sublimating into the air.  It’s got less and less to it.  It seems to be just trying to evolve into secular humanism.  So I became a religiously friendly atheist and humanist.  Well, I moved back down to North Carolina to be near my in-laws who were having health problems and started going to the Episcopal Church again and I thought, you know, I guess I can be a Christian without solving all the philosophical problems.  I can enjoy the liturgy and the Eucharist and have spiritual experience, which I did.

But then I guess it just goes inevitably back and forth.  I began to think, do I really see anything in this?  It began to wear on me.  So my fondness for and fascination with religion has never dissipated, but I kind of go back and forth on whether I want to identify with it, whereas I do know that I’m an atheist and a skeptic.  You can not easily combine those.  I guess I’m not hot and cold on that.”

Clay, “No absolutely.  Thanks for sharing that story. I think this whole idea of examining critically and studying your way out of religion and religious belief is shared by many listeners that are going to be listening to that.  So after you’ve done this and you’ve published multiple books, and you’re involved in the higher criticism circle, what draws you to Mormon Studies and the Book of Mormon?  How did you even become involved in that?”

Bob Price, “Well, uh, I think it was now looking back a few years, I somehow got in touch with Mark Thomas at BYU.  I got him to write a fascinating article for the Journal of Higher Criticism that I had started/edited, and he did this thing on basically a history of critical study of the Book of Mormon.  People gradually trying to apply to the text methods of modern biblical criticism, and I just found the whole idea fascinating.  I already figured it was a modern work.  I’d read enough of it to know that and I began to read some of these symposia from Signature Books and I thought ‘Wow, this is just a burgeoning field of fascinating scholarly inquiry so I tried my hand at it and got involved with Mark and the Book of Mormon Roundtable and prepared papers for that, and that’s what most of the stuff in my collection Latter-Day Scripture is.  I just found it so fascinating to consider what I already knew about the Book of Mormon in light of what I had learned about the Bible.

For instance, this original debate that still rages: is the Book of Mormon from the 19^th century or is it an ancient book?  Well, I figured that was settled but in light of Biblical studies, for it to be a forgery in a sense, a pious fraud, that looks a lot less bad in terms of the history of scripture because so much of all scripture is pseudepigraphical, it’s almost part of the scripture genre.  It’s over-simplified to say this is a rip-off, it’s a hoax or a fraud.  It’s not quite that way.  It’s just certain writings on certain subjects have to adopt the pose of venerable, ancient, perhaps lost scripture in order to underline the depth and the archaic antiquity of the ideas they are trying to expound.

And so, I wrote an essay that was in Dialogue I think, called Joseph Smith: Inspired Author of the Book of Mormon.  I said, ‘you know you LDS Christians, you shouldn’t be that worried about this.  Here’s what mainstream, at least orthodox, liberal Christians and scholars know about the Bible, an awful lot of it is fake, if you want to call it that.  But that’s no real problem, maybe you could see it that way too and rid yourself of an awful headache, and it would make more sense if you admitted yes, Joseph Smith is the author of our scripture.  Wouldn’t that actually befit his role as a founding prophet more than the idea that he’s just an archaeologist who’s stumbled on an ancient text?

I mean he is the authority, you recognize that in your other books like the Doctrine and Covenants.  Why not come clean and admit that yeah, he wrote this too, and that’s fine. He’s the prophet.  Do you think he is or don’t you?  Of course, I don’t have the personal faith but I look at It in sociological terms.  Is this man the founding prophet of a religious community?  Yes he is.  Is Reverend Moon?  Yes he is.

Functionally, the guy is a prophet and even a Messiah if you want to call him that. You don’t really have to push it farther than that.  And once you see, ok I have a scripture here, revered by zillions of people, maybe I could be of some help showing how the dilemma is not as bad as they think it is, and that’s sort of the approach I’ve taken.  I don’t regard myself as an apologist for the Book of Mormon, but I do think you can reframe the whole debate in a way that’s much more healthy and positive and productive.

Clay, “No that’s great.  You know I hear you saying that Joseph Smith, he’s the author of the Book of Mormon, but let’s not worry about it so much because he’s just doing what thousands of years of history, you know historical prophets have done in the past when they’ve had a message, they’ve reframed it, they’ve claimed authority from other people that have religious clout.  Is that correct?  Is that kind of your main point there?

Robert, “Well, it’s half of it.  I’d go on from there to say that once you recognize this isn’t just a straight forward history, nor is it just a hoax pretending to be straight forward history, you begin to open a window into understanding the deeper dimensions of the text.  Once you say now, this sounds a lot like the Bible, but Smith wrote it, how’d he do that?  Did he combine certain passages because he liked elements of this one and that one and cross them into a new synthesis?

Well yeah he did, and this really did give me great respect for this man, as a creative theologian and writer.  It’s just fascinating, the way in 3 Nephi for instance, his narrative of the Second Coming of Christ into the Western Hemisphere, the way he’s combined various elements of the gospels and why he did and the theological implications.  This guys’ not—I mean even a non-Mormon, even an anti-Mormon shouldn’t look at this guy and say he’s just a hoaxer.  No, No, No.  You’ve got a real creative mind here, a literary genius in some ways.  But you’d never recognize that.  You’d never be free to recognize it if you didn’t realize the sacred game the guy was playing, just like the authors of Deuteronomy and the Book of Daniel, and the Book of Revelation and so much other biblical material did.

Clay, “No that’s good.  Let’s back up just a tad and talk about pseudepigrapha in general.  You mentioned that the Bible is littered with pseudepigrapha.  Do you have kind of a—you mentioned three books there but what books in the Bible are fairly conclusively pseudepigrapha?”

Bob, “Well, unless you’re just a fundamentalist stopping your ears up, Daniel is just very obviously pseudopigraphical and there are many other books not in the canon that take the same approach where the author poses as some wise man of the past, usually more of a scribe than a prophet which is kind of a wink to the reader to signal that this is a literary work, not a transcription of a vision despite the content of it—it’s all a kind of a shtick.  You summarize the history of Israel or the Church or whatever, up until your own time—you the writer, but you say that this is written by an ancient scribe who foresaw it.

Why do that?  Well, it’s a way—these things are usually written in times of great stress.  It’s a way of saying, look, it may look like great chaos to you but God had a plan and that’s working itself out. It’s like a parable about divine providence you might say.  Or sometimes it’s just a case like with the so-called Deutero-Isaiah, or 2^nd Isaiah, or 2^nd Zechariah.  You had somebody that revered the oracles of an early prophet and had more to say in that community but humbly felt, who am I?  I’m gonna put this under the aegis of the great prophet.  I’m not going to have the brazenness to make myself equal with him.  Another way with less admirable motives, you might say, ‘nobody’s gonna take me seriously if I used my own nom de plume.  If I say here’s the prophecy of Bill or the Apocalypse of Chad.  Who’s going to listen to this?  So I better get a hearing with a great name and then the value of it will be apparent to the reader.  That’s generally called a pious fraud.

It is a fraud, but it is pious.  So Daniel is certainly one of those. Deuteronomy—Moses said all of this?  There’s no way.  The law is totally different than it was in earlier law codes defined in Exodus, etc.  The whole premise is kind of vague and self-contradictory.  Is Moses talking to the people who survived the 40 years in the desert? He talks to them as if they were, ‘you did this, you did that’, but then he says they’re all dead and so I’m giving you, their heirs, a pep talk about the law.  Well what is it?  This isn’t historical.  It’s a chance to update the Torah, and the people think that’s really what happened under King Josiah, much, much later.  Well there’s several of those law codes put under Moses’ name.  The rabbis continue to say that they’re oral tradition of interpreting the Torah was part of the Torah, that ‘oh we really didn’t come up with this, Moses did, and he repeated it orally without writing it down and it came down to us.’  That’s pseudepigraphy.

In the New Testament, it seems to me that the letters of Paul are pseudepigraphical. This is way out there, I mean very few scholars think this, but I follow the Dutch radical school of the 19^th century that says that all of these letters are by different Paulinists, and that’s why you have so many different viewpoints in them.  So I think they’re pseudepigraphical.

The Gospels have no names on them, so they were really anonymous.  It was somebody later on, perhaps Polycarp of Smyrna who kind of guessed who had written them, and that’s all it was.  So by far, most of the Bible is anonymous or pseudonymous. The Psalms—there were originally no names on them. They certainly don’t go back to David.

Clay, “Sure. Uh huh.”

Bob, “But neither do they claim to.  That’s just an ancient editorial convention.  We don’t know who wrote virtually any of the Bible, and when you have names, it’s either ancient guesswork or false pen-names.  It’s almost the rule, not the exception.”

Clay, “No, that’s great.  You know, is it fair to say that if we’re going to objectively be critical of all of our scripture, not just our own scripture, not just someone else’s scripture, but if we’re going to be objective and unbiased, and if we’re gonna throw out the Book of Mormon, then heck, we might as well throw out half the Bible.”

Bob, “Oh yeah, you’d have to, yeah.”

Clay, “Or we can be kinder, accept it as pseudepigrapha, acknowledge that is shows insight into the men of the times who wrote it, and may say something about the sociology and religious evolution of that time, and analyze it as that?”

Bob, “Yeah, and that can be edifying too for the reasons you just mentioned.  Any fool can see that the Book of Mormon is the charter for what happened to the Mormon Church’s in their trek across the country. They had their own exodus, their own persecutions.  I mean it’s fascinating.  It’s this updating and Americanizing of the Bible and Christianity.  That doesn’t contradict it being a modern work.  In fact it makes – the truth of it is made all the more clear if you realize it was written in the 19^th century.

I can’t think of the name of whoever said this but in view of the whole DNA thing that just shot the whole premise of it to hell, right?  That there’s no Semitic DNA in the American Indians.  Some traditionalist Mormon made this great statement.  He said maybe the issue isn’t really, ‘Are our stories true?  Maybe the issue is are we true to our stories?’  Bingo, There’s somebody that’s using his brain.”

Clay, “Absolutely, And to be fair, you’re not saying that as an atheist—I don’t think that you’re saying that Joseph Smith somehow foresaw the exile of the Mormons and how they had to trek across the plains, but more you’re saying that’s why it speaks to Mormons as scripture.  Is that correct?”

BoB, “Yes. Yeah, I mean he already had adventures of a kind that almost placed him in the Book of Mormon, but yeah, had it gone another way, probably nobody would even remember it today, but they did see themselves in it.”

Clay, “No, that’s great.  I don’t want to change gears too much, but I’m really, really interested in how this was received at BYU, and how this Book of Mormon Roundtable shook out.  What was that experience like?”

Bob, “Well, we had some people from FARMS, who as of course you know are kind of rock-rimmed apologists for the Book of Mormon as an ancient work.  Is there a Jack Sullivan or something like that?

Clay, “There could very well could be, I’m not sure.”

Bob, “He’s a major character, it’s my failing memory. He’s very significant.  I should remember his name but he’s written truckloads of stuff.  He’s very erudite, but I think he’s wrong.  I had a couple of friendly confrontations with him around the table and said, look, you just can’t ignore the fact that the King James Bible is quoted in this supposedly ancient work, and it’s not just mistranslation of the text and so on.

Well, everybody was well-mannered, but that was pretty much the end of the thing.  We had to have what turned out to be our last meeting in a library downtown or something.  It was no longer under the auspices or should I say wasn’t even tolerated by BYU and they fired Mark Thomas and so they’re just not interested in any kind of revisionism, though there were several people in the roundtable who were traditionalist believers that said, hey, look any perspective that sheds any light on this thing, I want to hear it.  It was a really great, creative collegial atmosphere.”

Clay, “No that’s good to hear that there was at least a mixed bag.  There were those that were absolutely opposed to it, but those that actually maybe welcomed the intellectual honesty and intellectual debate in and of itself.  No that’s great.  I guess we covered a lot of ground on why we should examine the Book of Mormon, but should the Book of Mormon be important to non-Mormons, ex-Mormons, theists and non-theists?  If so, why should it be examined?  What does the Book of Mormon have to add to the religious discussion on a global scale, if anything?  You know, maybe it doesn’t.

Bob, “Well, I’d say it’s importance—this is obviously, you know, just my limited perspective, I’m not pontificating on anything, but it seems to me that it’s most important for understanding the Mormon Church, though it’s limited even there since very little of it appears to have determined the theology of Mormonism; Joseph Smith’s other writings did more of that.  I don’t know that Mormonism would be much different theologically if you didn’t have a Book of Mormon actually.”

Clay, “Yeah, that’s true.  I mean the theology within the Book of Mormon is fairly early 1800’s protestant, not at all like it is today, you know.”

Bob, “That’s right, yeah.  What they have today is far more interesting.  It’s fascinating stuff.  I have to admit—well it’s interesting to me as a student of the Bible because it provides a kind of a testimony of how American Christians have always read the Bible, picturing ancient Israel as Christians already in advance.  Of course, the Bible doesn’t actually put it that way, you have to read it in like Abraham and everybody knew about the atoning death of Jesus and his Resurrection and they were just looking forward to it happening and their faith is predicated on that.  Well that historically [chuckles] that’s absurd, but that is what Christians have believed so the Book of Mormon does them a favor of actually in effect re-writing the Old Testament as if that were true, they just have it happen in the Western Hemisphere.

So it’s very fascinating, but I have to admit I did not find much that was all that edifying about it.  It seemed to me to be pretty turgid.  I gotta say on the other side though, well once somebody said to me, a young Mormon missionary that , have you read this thing, it’s so great and all that, and it couldn’t have been written by mere mortals or something like that, and I said, well, to tell you the truth, I find the Lord of the Rings to be more satisfying scripture, and I stick by that but I don’t mean to condemn the Book of Mormon, there’s a lot of the Bible that’s not that exciting either.  I guess that’s not the point of it.

There is in the Book of Mormon a curiously relevant, modern, narrative that you’ve got these people that share the heritage of Israel and they split and you’ve got the Nephites and the Lamanites and the latter group is dangerous to the former group.  I know this is real politically incorrect, but it seems to me you’ve got a great analogy of what’s going on in the world today.  You’ve got Jews and Christians who are like the Nephites and radical Muslims who are like the extremely dangerous Lamanites who want to settle the hash of the Nephites.  The Nephites better wake up and do something about it.  I think that again you’re not really supposed to say that kind of thing.”

Clay chuckling, “Yeah that’s pretty inflammatory Bob, I don’t know what to think about it to tell you the truth.  I’m not sure—well, I don’t know.”  [Clay chuckles]

Bob, “Well keep in mind that I say this only about radical Muslims and their sympathizers but according to an acquaintance, colleague of mine, Said Hussein Nasir, a very erudite Sufi scholar.  He says, ‘oh it’s only about 10% of Muslims worldwide.’

Oh you mean 10 million?  I’d say we’ve got a problem.  I do not think that all Muslims are like this.  I’ve studied Islam.  I find Islam fascinating.  I love Islam and the Koran, but you can’t ignore the danger that a huge army of fanatics poses.”

Clay, “Oh yeah,  sure.  Thanks for qualifying it as well.  I guess to kind of close, as an outsider and as someone who has a lot of experience with higher criticism within Mormon scriptures and non-Mormon scriptures and just global scriptures in general, what guidance would you have for Mormons who have become disillusioned with the Book of Mormon, with the Book of Abraham, which is even more objectively pseudepigrapha.  You know we’ve got the Book of Abraham, it’s the Book of Breathings.  They’ve translated it.  It doesn’t has nothing to do with Abraham.  You know I see a lot of these people trying to fall back on Biblical scriptures and kind of entrench themselves in Christian scriptures.  I guess as an outsider, would you have any guidance or suggestions for these people who have become disenfranchised from Mormonism and Mormon scriptures and are searching elsewhere?”

Bob, “Well, I would just plead for consistency that they shouldn’t think that the Bible is immune to the kind of debunking, if that’s what they call it that the Book of Mormon is subject to, and I guess what I’m really thinking here in terms of a pastoral concern, they’re just setting themselves up for another even worse disappointment.  I would suggest that they might kind of take the view that reconstructionist Jews do and say, look, we have a community and a tradition and certain values that we believe in and we love.  We have a book here that we find edifying that we love.  Suppose it turns out that it’s fiction like The Pilgrim’s Progress, and it’s not history.  How much does that really matter?

Whatever Joseph Smith said or thought, we do know what he did.  I mean it’s the same way most of us view Dr. King.  This guy had his problems morally, but really who cares?  Look at the balance.  Look at the big picture, what this man did for everybody, and I say the same for Joseph Smith.  I wonder if it’s not better to kind of take a de-mythologized chastened view and to say, I’m a Mormon and proud of it.  Alright I no longer believe certain things, I put away childish things but does Mormonism stand or fall with them?  I don’t think so.

I mean if it does, you’ve got a pretty shallow faith.  If Mormonism is really no more than a dubious belief about people that came to the Western Hemisphere back in the 6^th century BCE, I mean even if that’s true, who cares?  They ideas of Mormonism really have nothing to do with that.  So I say don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Clay, “Yeah, no, that’s interesting, and it’s really interesting to hear from an outsider Bob.  It seems like you have, on some of your work you’re considered, I don’t know, fairly fringy and radical with your Jesus Myth Theory, but then on the other side you’re incredibly moderate and incredibly accepting of religion in general and I don’t know if that makes any sense or not.  But it’s interesting because what you say right now, and I’m not sure if I’m convinced of it or not.  I’m not sure if there is a baby in the bathwater but what you’re saying right now is something that I hear many more moderate, liberal Mormons say, and that’s an interesting perspective, so yeah, it’s good to hear that from an outside source as well.”

Bob, “Well if they find nothing of value in it, they shouldn’t stick with it, but I’m just thinking about the plight of those who say that it is a thriving matrix for their community and society.  Well, that seems to me to transcend the issues that are bothering them.  And it’s not necessarily all or nothing.  If however it’s a burdensome experience, well, that’s another whole matter that you should leave it like I left fundamentalism.“

Clay, “Sure, no absolutely.  Well Bob, if people wanted to learn more about your views, your work, your books, where would they go to find that out?”

Bob, “Well I got this nifty website my wife made up for me called robertmprice.mindvendor.com. There’s an archive of my old sermons, my various articles on things, my short stories reviews, just anything and everything.”

Clay, “No that’s great.  You know Bob, I want to thank you again for taking time to talk with us today. For listeners that are interested, go to robertmprice.mindvendor.com.  You’ve got an upcoming book that’s published through Signature Books if I’m not mistaken?”

Bob, “Yeah. The Amazing Colossal Apostle:  The Quest of the Historical Paul.”

Clay, “Perfect.  So thanks for tuning on.  As always, the discussion continues at MormonExpression.com.”

What are your impressions?

John Dehlin recently interviewed her on Mormon Stories. In part 2, he discusses her book quite a bit, but in part 1, he discusses her background and perspectives on various issues. Jana grew up in an atheist family. As part of her “rebelious” youth, she went to church, eventually settling down with the Presbyterian faith. She felt called to the ministry and attended seminary to become a pastor. During her time in seminary, she converted to Mormonism. She has a Ph.D. in American Religious History from Columbia University.

There are some people who believe that the Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham are frauds.  John questioned Jana about this line of reasoning, and I thought Jana gave some interesting insights (1) into the idea of a Mormon Midrash, and (2) truth doesn’t have to be empirical.  I wanted to quote from their interview, starting with about 30 minutes left in part 1.

John Dehlin, “The Book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon were like top 5 issues for people that have caused them to leave, and a lot of us just have the assumption that the only people who haven’t left are those who don’t know about Book of Mormon and DNA and the Book of Abraham, and everybody else has left, you know.  How in the world do you stay knowing about that stuff?”

Jana Riess, “Well, I don’t know that this is going to be a satisfactory answer to be honest with you because one of the things that I have found is that some of the people, most of whom are men, who get very exercised about  being in the know about what really happened with the Book of Abraham, etc. are not persuaded by arguments that rest on spirituality.  They only want arguments that meet them point for point, saying—again this is an either/or proposition as well—the whole way they approach the question.  If the Book of Abraham is not a divine translation of this ancient document, if it is in fact an ordinary funerary document that Joseph Smith completely expanded, embellished, elaborated on or if you are looking at a more cynical view, just simply lied about, then what do we do with the rest of our faith?

Well, let’s step back first of all and think about how important is the Book of Abraham to the Mormon faith in general?  I don’t think it’s terrifically important, but that’s just me.  But we need to have a tradition of midrash.  We need to have a tradition where we can look at a prophet in the way that Jews have looked at prophets of old and say, ‘this is a midrash’ on a revelation, or this is a midrash on an earlier work of scripture.”

John, “What does that word mean?”

Jana, “Midrash, well it’s basically any expanded teaching.  I don’t know what the exact definition would be, but an expanded teaching is something where in midrashim, you are taking a core text and then thinking about it cosmically, you’re thinking about it theologically, and you could look at, for example, the entire Pearl of Great Price as a midrash. You have Moses as a midrash on Genesis, right?  If you think about it in those terms, the literal nature of it is less important than what the book is trying to teach us about who we are as children of God.  I think that is where we need to be looking, and I frankly don’t give a hoot about some of the arguments about historicity, DNA, the more troubling avenues is of course Joseph Smith, the more troubling aspect is not the scripture itself, but what Joseph Smith said about and whether he can then be relied upon as a prophet of God.  Based on my work on the Hebrew Bible, I would say yeah.  Have you looked at those guys lately?

I mean we have this completely ridiculous idea of what a prophet is supposed to be.  No human being can measure up to that and there’s certainly no biblical example that does, and yet we conveniently forget about it. We come up with these stupid Gospel Doctrine lessons that encourage us to look at people in the Old Testament as if they were perfect and they we look at our own leaders to be perfect as well, and when they aren’t, well we leave.

John, “Right.  And then that all is a compelling, you know, a viable intellectual response and I want to dig into that a bit in a second.  But, it sounds like what you were also gonna say is there’s a strong spiritual component to it as well, is that right?”

Jane, “Yes there is, and I worry that we don’t emphasize deep reading of scripture in the way that we ought to.  We talk about reading the scriptures all the time.  Don’t get me wrong, and I think that’s an important devotional practice.  I think our church actually does a fairly good job of encouraging people to dig into the scriptures every day.  But we’re doing it for that informational thing that I was talking about before.  We’re doing it so we can learn the scriptures, we have the same thing when we go to the temple.  The temple is not a worship experience.  The temple is a learning experience, instruction.  That’s not at all the same.

We don’t have any corporate worship in Mormon culture, and that’s a huge problem.  I think if we have more authentic experiences of worshiping in community, of reading the scriptures together in community, not in the Gospel Doctrine sense where we’re there to learn about so and so, but in the sense that we have a small group of people who get together, who read the scriptures, who pray together about the needs in their lives, that is a completely different understanding of the scriptures, and we don’t do that.  I have no idea why we don’t.

John,”Hmmm.  And yet you feel it sounds like your Mormon-ness has been overall spiritual edifying for you and that’s part of what’s kept you around, right?  So have you just had to supplement on your own?”

Jana, “I do a lot of supplementing, yes. [chuckles]  That’s well said.  Yeah I do, I do a lot of supplementing.  I think that’s one of the blessings of having not grown up in this tradition.  I worry about people who basically feel that they have to leave Mormonism because they are convinced that the world out there is so much better, right?  It always is going to look that way.  Sometimes it actually is that way, but they don’t understand that it is possible to learn from other traditions without leaving your own, and instead to bless and enrich your life as a Mormon.  You know I’ve been enriched as a Mormon by studying Buddhist texts from Tibet, and about mortality and Tibetan prayer beads and how they sit and think about death, because the prayer beads are actually made of human bones and skulls, and they sit there and they touch them. They think about ‘yeah, I’m going to die.  How does that change the way I live now?

I want to clarify that I don’t actually have such a rosary, I don’t have anything that’s constructed out of human bones and skulls [John chuckles], but the idea of it, just the idea of it has transformed my spirituality and how I think about prayer and mortality, the fact that this is sooo fleeting.  We are here for such a short time.  We have to think about that every day.”

John, “Hmmm.  I’m going to kind of use this as a way to close this first hour, so don’t think that I’m going to now dig into some big deep exploration of this, but well, I guess I have two questions.  One is, um, I won’t ask them at the same time.  So the first question is what about the person that says to you, No Jana, either the Book of Abraham is what Joseph Smith said it was, or it’s a fraud.  Either the Book of Mormon is what Joseph said it was or it’s a fraud, and truth actually matters, facts matter.  A fair reading of the archaeological, anthropological, genetic, whatever evidence of the Book of Mormon, and a fair reading of the text, the funerary text that Joseph claimed to have translated the Book of Abraham from, you know, points that it was not true.  If it’s not true, I’m outta here because it’s based on fraud and deception and isn’t what it claims to be.”

Jana Riess, “But you are defining truth in this incredibly narrow way when you do that – not you personally, but anyone who does that.  You are defining truth in the way that enlightenment philosophy has taught us to define truth which is that it is factual, that it is historical, that it is epistemologically verifiable, right?  Well truth does not have to be factual, historical, or epistemologically verifiable.  It’s awfully nice when that happens because we can explain it to our friends and not sound like spiritual idiots.  But I’m afraid it doesn’t always work that way.  I think it bothers me—God bless the people at FAIR, I think they do wonderful work and it’s very persuasive for some people, but they’re not asking the bigger question—at least sometimes, about ‘why is this important?’

I once heard a fantastic sermon when I was in seminary.  It was called ‘The Second Question.’  The preacher, this professor had been to a magic show by Penn and Teller, and the guy behind him just basically spoiled the experience for the preacher by saying, ‘Oh, I know how they did that. I know how they did that.’ At one point in the show, either Penn or Teller said, ‘probably there are some people out there who are saying to themselves, ‘I know how they did that, but that’s not the important question.  The important question is ‘why do we do that?’ Why do we do this every day?  The preacher then extrapolated from that this whole sermon called ‘The Second Question.’

If we were to apply that to this situation—for example using Book of Mormon DNA as our test case, right?  The problem with the Book of Mormon DNA is that it demonstrates that you have this understanding of the Book of Mormon that simply cannot be factually true.  They’re right—it cannot be factually true in that sense.  Why does it have to be factually true? This is where I really disagree with Terryl Givens that you had one your show, and I love Terryl, and I think his work has been so important.  I think it’s awesome that he came on your show, but Terryl sets up this situation in [his book] By the Hand of Mormon where he says, “if you don’t believe it happened this way, everything else falls apart.  The rest of it hinges upon the literal nature of this, and I think that when we do that, we are setting everyone up to fall.  Because first of all, it may not be factually verifiable, but why do we care about that?

I think we care about it to a ridiculous degree because we are concerned about how it all sounds to other people. We’re a persecuted religious minority; we’re very sensitive about how our faith plays in Peoria, which by the way, it doesn’t, because I grew up near Peoria, and I can tell you it totally doesn’t.  So the apologetics issues and the questions that are asked, let’s get to the second question, and let’s look at some of these scriptural texts prayerfully, and ask God before we even start reading what do you want to teach me from this?  How does this have bearing on my life?  That’s a very transformative way to approach the scriptures.”

John, “So you’re saying, ‘Forget if Mormonism is factually, historically what it claims to be.  Live it, and if it transforms your life, then you’ve enjoyed a transformed life.  Is that what you’re saying?”

Jana, “I don’t think it’s quite as reductionistic as that.  This is not Pascal’s wager where we are just saying I am going to live as if this were true and see what happens.  Because there is an element beneath this entire experience that is that seed of faith, that yearning, that desire to believe, and that undergirds everything else.  That undergirds every spiritual question.  I think that you’re right that you say, at some point there is this point where it’s a leap of faith, and you do take that faith, leap on faith, as they say for better or for worse.

You have to do it with both eyes open, and this is where I look at some of the people I know in charge, and it all just seems to come so easily to them and of course this is all true, and I was raised on this with mother’s milk and how dare you ever question this.  That is so immature.  That is as immature as it is for someone to say, well this one thing wasn’t factually true so I’m throwing it all out because it’s all lies.  We have to grow up. That’s the whole point of Mormon theology where the burden is upon us with our agency that we need to search for truth.”

John, “Right, so you’re not saying truth doesn’t matter, you’re saying there’s gotta be a core hope or belief that at some level there’s some validity of truth to what’s going on, and then from there the struggle is part of the point.”

Jana, “YES IT IS!!! Well said.  The struggle is part of the point.  I think when Pilate makes this comment that just seems like a throwaway afterthought, ‘ha, what is truth?’ as though that’s this kind of cynical approach, I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt here. I’d like to think that there’s a part of Pilate that really wants to know, what is truth to you, Jesus?  Because you’re totally blowing my mind.  Why don’t we have that curiosity ourselves?

There’s a Gnosticism to people who say ‘I have discovered the real truth’, whether it’s the conservative Mormons who believe that they have discovered the real truth and everything else is crap outside the church, or it’s disaffected former Latter-day Saints who say I’ve discovered the truth about the Book of Mormon or the Book of Abraham and everything else is crap.  That’s Gnosticism. When we believe that some sort of sacred, secret teaching has awakened us and opened our eyes and that everyone else is in the dark, that is not Christianity.”

John, “And for someone who didn’t believe in Christ, what would you appeal to?  It’s just not what, mature, or broad-thinking, or enlightened?”

Jana, “Mm Hmm.  That’s a good question. Yeah, I think it is not spiritually mature.  If we, as progressive people want to be able to say that we are in fact progressive people, we need to entertain other points of view, and I find that on both of those extremes, there’s often a hardness and a coldness to investigating new truth, and I worry about that.”

John, “Right.  Isn’t that if I’m just going to play pro-LDS for a second, Isn’t that one of the beauties of what Joseph Smith left us, is a legacy of, we will follow the truth and be willing to accept new truth when it comes?”

Jana, “You know, I am so pleased that you brought that up, because unfortunately, we don’t live that way.  It comes in even how people talk to me about my conversion.  I converted in 1993.  That’s the official story, right?  But I am always converting.  I am on a journey of conversion and I’m not the same Christian that I was in 1993 when I became a Latter-day Saint Christian, and I won’t be the same Christian in 18 years from now.  I am always converting, and I hope that I am always going to be open to new truth and wherever God leads me.”

What are your thoughts on a Mormon Midrash, the Book of Mormon, Abraham, and truth doesn’t need to be empirical?

Few people have actually read the Spaulding manuscript, and its whereabouts were secretive for quite some time.  A man by the name of Doctor Philastus Hurlbut (Doctor was his first name, last name is also spelled Hurlburt) tried to find the Spaulding manuscript, and obtained it from Spaulding’s widow.  Hurlbut hinted that the document was related to the Book of Mormon, but didn’t publish the document.  Hurlbut became embroiled in controversy when he threatened to (quoting from page 136 of the Sidney Rigdon biography),

“wash his hands” in the prophet’s blood.  In January 1834, Smith filed a legal complaint bringing Hurlburt to trial on 1 April.  The court found him guilty, fined him $200, and ordered him to keep the peace for 6 months.

The notoriety surrounding Hurlbut, compounded by an embarrassing incident when his wife was discovered in bed with Judge Orris Clapp, tarnished his image.  He sold his research to Eber D. Howe, editor of the Painesville Telegraph, who held a long-term grudge against Mormonism for converting his wife and daughter.

Howe kept up the pressure, printing a pamphlet called Mormonism Unvailed. After reading the manuscript, Howe hinted that there must be a second undiscovered manuscript, because the manuscript in his possession didn’t seem to match the Book of Mormon.  Howe didn’t keep Painesville Telegraph very long.  In January 1835, he sold the paper to his brother for $600, but the newspaper folded later that year.   A man by the name of LL Rice purchased the assets of the Painesville Telegraph in 1839-40.

Many documents came with the purchase, but Rice did not view them at the time.  Rice later moved to Honolulu, Hawaii.  In the 1880s, James Fairchild, president of Oberlin College in Ohio suggested that Rice look through the documents in search of pre-Civil war slavery information.  It was at this point that the Spaulding document was discovered.  Rice notes “There is no identity of names, of person, or places; and there is no similarity of style between them.”

The actual manuscript was given to Oberlin College in Ohio, and a copy of the manuscript can be downloaded here.  The document was labeled faintly in pencil “Manuscript Found—Conneat Creek”.  I thought it would be interesting to give a brief synopsis of the book so that you can get an idea of how different the book is from the Book of Mormon.  The RLDS church first published the contents of the manuscript, and it includes a section giving a brief background.

In the introduction to the book, there is a letter dated in 1885 offering the manuscript to Joseph Smith III rather than the LDS church.  Tellingly, Rice said to Smith:

“I am of the opinion that no one who reads the Manuscript will give credit to the story that Solomon Spaulding was in any wise the author of the Book of Mormon….Finally, I am more than half convinced that this is his only writing of the sort, and that any pretence that Spaulding was in any sense the author of the other, is a sheer fabrication.  It is easy for anybody who may have seen this, or heard anything of its contents, to get up the story that they were identical.”

Here is a brief summary of the contents of the book.

Introduction

Spaulding tells how he came up with the manuscript.  The introduction actually bears some remarkable resemblances to the story in the Pearl of Great Price on how Joseph said he obtained the golden plates, though there are some notable differences.

Spaulding tells a story in which he discovers a stone covering an underground cavern.  After climbing into the cavern, Spaulding found 28 rolls of parchment, written in Latin behind another stone.  The rolls had a variety of subjects, but this is the story that captured Spaulding’s attention, “a history of the author’s life & that part of America which extends along the great Lakes & the waters of the Mississippy.”  (I have previously documented some of the horrendous spelling errors and humorous stories in this work.)

Chapter 1

Fabius tells that he was born in Rome.  The emporer Constantine sent Fabius on a mission to take supplies to “Brittain”.  On his way there, Fabius and his crew encountered a large storm blowing west, and they were lost.  They discovered a new land inhabited by natives with odd “jesticulations”, dancing, and singing.  Often these natives barked like dogs and sounded like bullfrogs.

Chapter 2

Fabius negotiates a treaty with the natives to obtain 6 wigwams.  In return the natives received 50 knives and a scarlet cloth.  Captain Lucian and Fabius become judges over their crew, and built houses of worship.  (Fabius and crew were Christians.)  Trojanus becomes their minister of choice.  Since there were 7 women on board, these women are allowed to make their choice of which man to marry, leaving 6 men single.  Fabius notes that the natives were uncivilized, like an “Orang outang”.  They ate dinner, got drunk, and “retired two by two, hand in hand.  Ladies heads a litte awri, blushing like the morn.”  They also resolved to build a church.

Chapter 3

The language of the natives was Deliwanucks.  They were tall, wore loin cloths and the clothing was made of animal hair.  “The one half of the head of the men was shaved & painted with red and the one half of the face was painted with black.”  Dogs were sacrificed to their god, and Fabius tells of a strange mud wrestling ceremony.

Chapter 4

Fabius begins a strange discussion about whether the sun or earth is the center of the universe.  He decided to go up river to find other civilizations.  Fabius, Crito, and a Delawan interpreter meet the king and bring an animal called a Mammoon back.  A Mammoon is bigger than an elephant, docile, provides milk, and its fur is shaved to make clothing.  Crito notes these people are also ignorant savages, but they are kind like Christians.  They go up the Suscowan River to a city called Owkwahon and received further gifts from the king there.

Chapter 5

After further travels, Fabius and crew meet a new race of people.  They meet a group of farmers with domesticated animals such as elk, horses, turkeys, and “gees” (geese).  This group of people manufactures iron, lead, and steel tools.  They make beautiful pottery, but buildings are very simple.

Chapter 6

Fabius reports that a group of people called the Ohons had an alphabet and wrote on parchment.  “Their constitution & laws are committed to writing.” They loved to write poetry.

“RELION 7”

Spaulding discusses their religion.  They believed in an omnipotent being “who is self-existent & infinitely good & benevolent.”  This being formed 7 sons that “manage the affairs of his empire.”

“There is also another great intelligent Being who is self-existent & possessed of great power but not of Omnipotence.  He is filled with infinite malice against the good Being & exerts all his subtlety & power to ruin his works.”

After death, “Material Bodies are prepared for the souls of the righteous….But the wicked are denied etherial bodies”.  He goes on to describe some of their religious laws, telling them to be kind and not lustful, among many religious laws.

“it is ordained that on every eighth day, ye lay aside all unnecessary labour, that ye meet in convenient numbers & form assemblies, that at each assembly a learned holy man shall preside, who shall lead your devotions & explain this sacred Roll & give you such instruction as shall promote your happiness in this life & in the life to come.  Once in three months ye shall hold a great festival in every great city & town, & your priests shall sacrifice an Elk as a token that your sins deserve punishment, but that the divine mercy hath banished them into shade of forgetfulness.”

Chapter 8 “An account of Baska”

A partial story of a man named Baska is told, “he was celebrated as a man of the most brilliant & extraordinary talents.”

Chapter 8 (yes labeled the same as above.)

Spaulding takes a break from the story “with a few sceches of Biography” and proceeds to tell of

“the great and illustrious Lobaska.  He is the man who first introduced their present method of writing….

As for instance he is represented as forming a curious machine & having placed himself upon it he mounted into the Atmosphere & assended a great hight & having sailed a considerable distance thro’ the air he desended slowly & received no damage that multitudes of astonished Spectators had a number of times seen him perform this miraculous exploit.”

Lobaska was about 40 years old, affable, but not locquacious, and “none could withstand the energy of his reasoning.”  He set up schools of “Schollars”, teaching them writing as well as making tools of iron.  He lived among a group called the Siotans.

A man named Tobaska taught theology “comprised in the sacred Roll.”  The king and chiefs allowed Tobaska to teach throughout the kingdom.  The message revealed to Tobaska by “the second son of the great & good Being…..They forgot their old religion which was a confused medly of Idolitry & superstitious nonsense.”

However, war came because Bombal, King of the Kentucks “had taken great umbrage against Kadokam the King of Siota.”  Kentucks had “exclusive right to wear in their caps a bunch of blue feathers” but the Siotan princes “assumed the liberty to place bunches of blue feathers upon their caps.”  Spaulding discusses war strategy, noting that Lobaska had a cunning plan.  After the battle, a peace treaty was signed that anyone could wear blue feathers.

Chapter 9 Government and Money

The people lived on both sides of the Ohio River, “Excepting the Cities of Golanga & Gamba, whose Kings claimed jurisdiction over an extent of country of about one hundred & fifty miles along the River Ohio…”  Lobaska devised “a system of Government with a design of establishing two great Empires one on each side of the River Ohio.”  The Sciotan constitution is described with “Emporer, Labamack the oldest son of Lobaska.”  Government will pass to his eldest son, and they must marry within the Siotan kingdom.  Money shall not depreciate.  “Lambon the third son of Lobaska shall preside over them & shall have the title of high Priest…”

Chapter 10 – Military Arrangements, Amusements, Customs, & Extent of the Empires

The Sciota and Kentuck Indians believed that a strong military was the best deterrent.  Both groups held military drills for soldiers 4 times per year, with a mock battle once per year.

Then Spaulding starts talking about courting rituals.  Men and women wear different colors of feathers to show they are available.  Once a couple has decided they like each other, they meet the parents and arrange to date 10 times within 60 days.  If all goes well, a marriage follows.

Chapter 11

The Sciota had a son (Elseon) and the Kentucks had a daughter (Lamesa) of marrying age.  Their constitutions said that they were only to marry within the kingdom. However, an exception was made to allow them to marry.  Some were not happy, and tried to disrupt the wedding, but finally Elseon and Lamesa were married in a traditional wedding.

Chapter 12

Following their marriage, Elseon (of the Kentucks) and his bride Lamesa (of the Sciota) surreptitiously leave for the land of the Kentucks.  Apparently this was not part of the bargain of the Sciota.  They demanded that Lamesa return to Sciota, and said if she did not return, they would declare war on the Kentucks.  (It was their understanding that that would remain in Sciota.)  After much discussion, the Kentucks would not return Lamesa, but offered to give the Sciota something as reparations to avert war.

Chapter 13

There are quite a few speeches from the leaders of the Sciota and Kentucks about how to handle the situation.  The Sciota considered reparations, and asked for the death of Elseon.  Of course, that was rejected, and so they made preparations for war.  Lamesa and Elseon felt sad for starting the conflict, but declare their love for each other.

Chapter 14

This is the last chapter, although it doesn’t appear to be finished.  The war grinds on.  There is so much death, at one point the two sides declare a two-day armistice so they can bury the dead.  The leaders begin to work on different “stratigems” to win. They attack at night, assuming the other side is asleep.  Once again, there is more death.  They bury the dead in giant mounds of mass graves.

Sambul, king of Sciota attacks a fort and finds Lamesa.  Cruelly, he kills a woman trying to protect Lamesa.  Lamesa asks him to kill her too because she does not want to return.  Then Elseon leads a counter-attack on the fort, and ends up fighting Sambul in hand to hand combat.  Elseon kills Sambul with a sword, and frees everyone in the fort.  The war appears to be winding down with the death of Sambul, but it is not clear how the story ends.  The story ends abruptly,

Hamback altered his plan & determined to wait for the return of Sambul.  As for Hamboon he concluded to wait until Elseons return.  These determinations of the hostile Emporers prevented for the time any engagements between the two grand armies.  But when the fate of Sambuls division was decided & Elseon had returned with the joyful news of his victory, the Kentucks were all anxious for an immediate Battle.

There is more to the manuscript, but it does not appear to be part of the story. To me, it appears to be Spaulding talking in his own voice, not of the book.  I am only quoting a portion here–See the original manuscript for a full quote.  A note on page 156 that says,

Note – This was found with the foregoing manuscript an in the same handwriting.

But having every reason to place the highest confidence in your friendship & prudence I have no reluctance in complying with with your request.  in giving you my sentiments of the christian Religion….In giving you my sentiments of the Christian religion, you will perceive that I am not trameled with traditionary & vulgar prejudiuce that I do not believe certain parts & certain parts & certain propositions to be treu merely because that my ancestors believe them & because they are popular….But notwithstanding I disavow any belief in the divinity of the Bible, & consider it as a mere human production designed to inrich & agrandize its human production designed to inrich and agrandize its authors & to enable them to manage the multitude.  Yet casting aside a considerable mass of rubbish & fanatical rant, I find that it contains a system of ethics or morals which cannot be excelled on account of their tendency to amiliorate the condition of man….having a view therefore to those parts of the Bible which are truly good & excellend I sometimes speak of it in terms of high commendation.  And indeed I am inclined to believe that notwithstanding the mischeifs & injuries which have been produced by the bigoted zeal of fanatics & interested priests yet that such evils are more than counterbalances in a Christian land by the benefits which result to the great mass of the people by their believing that the Bible is of divine origin.  & that it contains a revelation from God.  Such being my view of the subject, I pre fer my candle to remain under to remain under a bushel, nor make no exertions to dissipate their happy delusion, as

Note to Copyist.–On the other side of the paper on which the above is written & in what seems the same hand is the following:

Itham Joyner privlg to erect Mill, & the pvlg of wtr.  Wright has prefern & he next.  To fix to take out wtr for himslf & to be at one 1/4 expense of keeping dam in repair.  If wishing to sell to gv Wrt pvlg buing if dont buy to sel to another his works but not pvlg of wtr I. Joyner & W. Brigham agree to build a house for their use.  Sd B. to 6 feet on the water below the width of the house & J to have for six feet & B to 12 feet on the same side in the rear bank & 12 feet of the garret.  to be at equal expense in the water works.  To be at equal expense in the partitions of the rooms.

The writings of Sollomon Spaulding Proved by Aron Wright Oliver Smith, John N Miller & others.  The testimonies of the above Gentlemen are now in my possession.

Signed

D. P. Hurlbut.

With that ending and summary, do you think this is really the source of the Book of Mormon?

We often think that the Bible has a set number of books.  However, this is not true.  The King James Version (that many Protestants and Mormons use) has 39 Old Testament Books, but the Catholic Bible has 46 books, and the Eastern Orthodox Bible has 51 books.  The extra 7 books in the Catholic Bible are:  Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Sirach, Baruch, and Wisdom.  In addition to these books, the Orthodox Bible also contains 3 Maccabees, 4 Maccabees, 1 Esdras, Odes, and Letter of Jeremiah.  A few other books are considered part of the Apocrypha:  Bel and the Dragon, Song of the Three Young Men and Prayer of Azariah, Prayer of Manasseh, Story of Susannah.  The Book of Esther has 6 additional chapters in Greek, not found in the KJV.

Recently, I purchased the New American Bible.  It is the standard Bible for American Catholics.  One of the things that I was surprised to see in the NAB was scholarly information integrated within the Bible.  For example, there is a brief introduction to the Documentary Hypothesis right before the Book of Genesis.  The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest available versions of many Biblical books (in some cases by 1000 years), and this version of the Bible includes corrections from the Dead Sea Scrolls.  I found that pretty cool.

As part of my introduction to “the Apocrypha”, I thought it would be interesting to discuss the book of Judith.  (Here is a post on some other apocryphal books I have discussed previously.)  As I was looking through the table of contents, I was immediately struck by the female name of Judith.  After all, except for Ruth and Esther, I can’t think of any books of scripture with a female name.  So, I decided to pick this one first.

Judith was the widow of a man named Manasseh.  The Assyrians were attacking Israel, and cut off the water supply.  Concerned for her people, Judith dressed up in “her festive garments and all her feminine adornments” (Judith 12:15) , and approached the Assyrians.  She gains the trust of Assyrian General Holofernes, and promises to deliver Israel to them with no loss of life for the Assyrians.  At this point, the story gets really interesting, starting in chapter 13.

2  Judith was left alone in the tent with Holofernes, who lay prostrate on his bed, for he was sodden with wine.  3 She had ordered her maid to stand outside the bedroom and wait, as on the other days, for her to come out; she said she would be going out for her prayer.  To Bagoas she had said this also.

4  When all had departed, and no one, small or great, was left in the bedroom, Judith stood by Holofernes’ bed and said within herself: “O Lord, God of all might, in this hour look graciously on my undertaking for the exaltation of Jerusalem: 5 now is the time for aiding your heritage and for carrying out my design to shatter the enemies who have risen against us.”  6 She went to the bedpost near the head of Holofernes, and taking his sword from it, 7 drew close to the bed, grasped the hair of his head, and said, “Strengthen me this day, O God of Israel!”

8 Then with all her might she struck him twice in the neck and cut off his head.  9 She rolled his body off the bed and took the canopy from its supports.  Soon afterward, she came out and handed over the head of Holofernes to her maid, 10 who put it into her food pouch; and the two went off together as they were accustomed to do for prayer.”

Judith and her maid return to Israel and show them the head of Holofernes.  Encouraged, the Israelites then rout the scared Assyrians.

So why is this story considered apocryphal?  The NAB Bible cautions, “Any attempt to read the book directly against the backdrop of Jewish history in relation to the empires of the ancient world is bound to fail.”  The Jewish Encyclopedia says,

with the very first words of the tale, “In the twelfth year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, who reigned over the Assyrians in Nineveh,” the narrator gives his hearers a solemn wink. They are to understand that this is fiction, not history. It did not take place in this or that definite period of Jewish history, but simply “once upon a time,” the real vagueness of the date being transparently disguised in the manner which has become familiar in the folk-tales of other parts of the world.

Many believe this book to be historical fiction.  Martin Luther noted that books of questionable authenticity are found only in Greek, not Hebrew.  Jews also do not consider the book canonical.  Catholics consider the book written “by godly men”, but not quite on par with other scriptures.  However, they do consider the book canonical.  What do you think of this story?  Is it nice to have a feminine hero?

Ever since the Book of Mormon was published in 1830, critics have tried to show that it came forth as the result of fraud.  One of the earliest theories was the Spaulding Theory.  As the theory goes, Solomon Spaulding wrote an unpublished novel about a group of Romans from the time of Constantine that were blown off course from Britain to the Americas.  Somehow (never adequately explained) Sidney Rigdon obtained the manuscript, and then transferred it surreptitiously to Joseph Smith who added religious information.  Fawn Brodie put together an appendix in her book No Man Knows My History outlining problems with the theory.  (I wrote about this in a post called Debunking the Spaulding Theory.)  Most people think the theory has been debunked, though the theory still has some adherents, such as Dale Broadhurst who maintains a website in favor of the theory.

Wordprint studies try to determine the true author of text.  The idea of a wordprint is similar to a finger print.  Each person uses a certain set of words such as “a, but, and, the, etc” in a way that is unique.  By collecting information on word usage, a wordprint theoretically can identify an author.

In 2008, Mathew Jockers, Daniela Witten, and Craig Criddle of Stanford University created a stir when they produced a peer-reviewed article in Oxford’s journal titled Literary and Linguistic Computing.  The authors concluded that major portions of the Book of Mormon exhibited Sidney Rigdon and Solomon Spaulding’s writing style, thus creating a resurgence of interest in the Spaulding Theory.  Traditionally, wordprint studies have used a statistical technique known as the Delta Method.  Jockers, et al compared the Delta method to a new technique called Nearest Shrunken Centroid (NSC).  NSC has been used cancer studies, but this was the first time it has been used in wordprint studies.  The Jockers study found the NSC method to be much more reliable than the Delta method.  Many New Order Mormons and anti-Mormons were pleased with the study.  But there were some big questions about the method.

In January 2011 Bruce Schaalje, Paul Fields, and Matthew Roper of BYU, along with Gregory Snow of Intermountain Health Care released a study outlining problems with the Jockers study in the same Oxford journal of Literary and Lingustic Computing.  While acknowledging that NSC is a good method for wordprint studies, they detailed several problems with the Jockers study, noting a “naive application of NSC methodology” led to “misleading results.”  Jockers et al had used a closed set of 7 authors for their study.  Schaalje’s study showed that an open set of candidate authors “produced dramatically different results from a closed-set NSC analysis.”

The beginning of the Schaalje article discusses a bit of mathematical theory (I’ll spare you.)  Schaalje notes that this study has a foundation in theory, rather than emperical evidence like the Jocker study; therefore Schaalje’s study is a bit stronger.  Schaalje was able to reproduce Jocker’s results, and applied the same technique to another document: the Federalist Papers.  To demonstrate a problem with Jocker’s technique, they purposely excluded Alexander Hamilton from the list of candidate authors, and picked other authors to see which author the Jocker’s closed-set method would choose.  The candidate authors were Joseph Smith, early Sidney Rigdon, late Sidney Rigdon, Solomon Spaulding, Oliver Cowdery, and Parley P. Pratt.

Early or late Rigdon was falsely chosen as the author of 28 of the 51 Hamilton texts with inflated posterior probabilities ranging as high as 0.9999 (Fig. 2). Pratt was falsely chosen as the author of 12 of the papers, and Cowdery was falsely chosen as the author of the remaining 11 papers. These results dramatically demonstrate the danger of misapplying closed-set NSC.

Schaalje et al noted that Jocker’s et al should have used a “goodness of fit” test to verify how well their findings matched, and proposed a method to compute the goodness of fit.

An important extension to NSC classification is to allow an open set, i.e. the possibility that the test texts might not be authored by any of the candidate authors. We propose that this can be done by positing an unobserved author for each test text in addition to the observed candidates in the training data.  We propose an unobserved author with a distribution of literary features just barely consistent with the test text. Thus, as a straightforward extension of the NSC classification model, we suggest that posterior probabilities for the candidate authors be calculated as…

(Once again, I’ll spare the mathematical proof.)  They applied this goodness of fit test and said,

Applying this extended model to the Hamilton texts with Smith, early Rigdon, late Rigdon, Spalding, Cowdery, and Pratt as training authors, only 2 of the test texts were assigned to early or late Rigdon, while the remaining 49 were assigned to an unobserved author (obviously Hamilton)  (Fig. 5).

As a further test of the open-set NSC procedure, in addition to Rigdon, etc., we included Hamilton as a training author represented by the first 25 Hamilton papers. We classified the remaining 26 Hamilton papers as test texts. We first used the closed-set model. All 26 Hamilton test texts were correctly assigned to Hamilton; none was assigned to an unobserved author. The goodness-of-fit procedure (Fig. 4, right panel) indicated that the closed-set model was valid.  We then used the open-set model. All 26 Hamilton test texts were still correctly assigned to Hamilton. Hence, when the actual author was included in the training set, the allowance for an unobserved author as in Equation (10) did not appear to compromise the ability of open-set NSC to correctly attribute authorship.  It is important to note that the open-set NSC procedure does not indicate how many unobserved authors there are. All we know is that if an unobserved author is selected for a test text, one unobserved author is most probable as the author of that text. There could be as many unobserved authors as the number of test texts, or as few as one. A clustering procedure would provide some information as to the total number of unobserved authors.

In order for the NSC method to work, writing samples of test authors are needed.  Schaalje et al noted that the Jockers study has sample texts ranging from 114 to 17,979 words, with training texts ranging from 95 to 3752 words.  With such a wide disparity of sample texts, the BYU authors indicated that was another problem.

The measurement of 100 or more word frequencies on texts of less than 100 words is almost sure to produce unreliable measurements (Holmes and Kardos,2003). For the delta procedure, Burrows (2003, p. 21) found that ‘with texts of fewer than two thousand words in length… the test gradually becomes less effective’. Others have worked with texts of 1,000, 5,000, and 10,000 words (Larsen et al.,1980; Hilton, 1990; Holmes, 1992).

To test whether the size of the training text matters, the BYU authors used 8 Rigdon samples ranging in length from 100 to 5,000 words.

we recommend in general that the training data involve only texts of at least 1,000 words because feature-specific variances do not change greatly with text size beyond 1,000. Within limits, the problem of training text size variation can be dealt with simply by compositing shorter texts of known authorship to create training texts of at least 1,000–2,000 words.  Hoover (2004), in fact, found that combining several texts ‘helps to improve accuracy’ of authorship attribution.

After Sidney Rigdon left the church, he started his own church in Pennsylvania.  (I blogged about this group previously here and here.)  As noted in the 2nd link, Sidney Rigdon had many revelations between 1863 and 1873.  Schaalje used these revelations to see if any false positives could be attributed to another author using various size sample texts from Rigdon.

To illustrate the effects of both extensions (Equations 10 and 12) to the NSC method, we applied the closed-set NSC method and the two extensions to 95 ‘revelations’ attributed to Sidney and Phebe Rigdon between 1863 and 1873, decades after Rigdon had left the Mormon movement. The test texts ranged in size from 60 to 4,128 words. We used the Smith, Cowdery, Spalding, Pratt, and early Rigdon texts as the training data, and specified informative priors based on the fact that Smith, Cowdery, Spalding, and Pratt had all died long before 1863. The closed-set NSC model attributed the texts mainly to Rigdon and Smith (Fig. 7), the open-set NSC model attributed most of the texts to latent authors, and the fully expanded NSC model attributed the texts to Rigdon, Smith, and latent authors. The point here is that open-set NSC without adjustments for test texts sizes is inadequate if some of the test texts are very small.

In the Jockers study, they noted some false positives.  For example, Longfellow (one of the 2 control authors) was listed as an author of the Isaiah-Malachi chapters in the Book of Mormon.  Jockers noted the problem, but did not investigate further, feeling confident that Isaiah-Malachi was correct in 20 of 21 chapters.  Schaalje looked further into this “false positive” problem.

A disturbing feature of classification analysis when the set of test texts is large is that test texts on the stylistic fringe of the distribution for the true author can occur by chance, and may therefore ‘stray’ into the distribution of a nearby author.  This explains why 2 of the 51 Hamilton texts were assigned to Rigdon (Fig. 5), and might partially explain why 21 of the 95 late Rigdon texts classified strongly as writings of Smith (Fig. 7) even though Smith had died 20 years earlier. Historians who study this period would be hard-pressed to imagine any way that Rigdon could have retained otherwise unknown Smith texts.

The same problem was observed by Hoover (2004) with regard to the delta method. He noted (Hoover, 2004, p. 460) that for particular sets of authors and texts, ‘false attributions are a serious possibility’. Burrows (2002, p. 281) similarly cautioned that the ‘the system for distinguishing between insiders and outsiders is not foolproof’ because of its dependence on probabilities rather than absolutes.

This problem, which is exacerbated by heterogeneity in text sizes, is an example of the multiplicity or multiple comparisons problem in statistics (Benjamini and Hochberg 1995). One not completely satisfactory solution would be to composite all of the test texts into one or a few large texts, and then classify those texts. We combined the Sidney texts into two large texts, combined the joint Phebe–Sidney texts into one large text, and combined the Phebe texts into one text. Assigning realistic prior probabilities, the first Sidney text was classified to an unobserved author, the second Sidney text was assigned to Cowdery, the joint text was assigned to Cowdery, and the Phebe text was assigned to an unobserved author. These results indicate, at a minimum, that the authorship style of the late Rigdon texts was different from that of Rigdon’s earlier writings. This may be due to genre differences, the passage of time, or the interposition of editors. In any case, the cause of the difference is not germane to this study.

Apparently Mr. Bastow, a friend of Wentworth, wanted to write a history of New Hampshire.  That’s a little odd because Joseph starts out stating he was born in Vermont.  In order for Wentworth to publish the letter, Joseph asks Wentworth to

publish the account entire, ungarnished, and without misrepresentation.

Joseph says

My father was a farmer and taught me in the art of husbandry.

Curious wording–husbandry–don’t you think?  As a polygamist, it seems he was a natural husband.  So one of the cool things about the Kindle is the built in dictionary.  I had a feeling that husbandry had a different definition, so I highlighted the word so the dictionary would pop up.  Here’s what it said:

1 – The care, cultivation, and breeding of crops and animals:  crop husbandry.

2 – management and conservation of resources.

<ORIGIN> Middle English: from HUSBAND in the obsolete sense ‘farmer’; compare with HUSBANDMAN.

Ok, so that better explains Jesus’ parable in Matthew 21:33-46 about the husbandman–why don’t they just translate that as farmer?

Anyway, back to the letter.  Joseph goes on to explain the Book of Mormon, and rehearses the mob violence in Missouri.  He almost quotes The Standard of Truth, just before giving the Articles of Faith.  So, have any of you actually read the Wentworth Letter before?  What are your impressions?

Alice Cooper at the Scream Awards in 2007

If you’re Mormon, you’ve probably heard the myth that Alice Cooper was a Mormon.  Most of you have probably dismissed the myth as complete hogwash.  Well, it turns out there is an element of truth to the myth.  For example, his father’s middle name is Moroni and his grandfather was an apostle!  Yes it is true!

Alice Cooper was born with the name Vincent Damon Furnier in Detroit, Michigan.  His  father was a preacher by the name of Ether Moroni Furnier for The Church of Jesus Christ, based in Monongahela, Pennsylvania.  Cooper’s grandfather Thurman Sylvester Furnier served as an apostle for the church.  The church is also known as the Bickertonite church, and has roots with Sidney Rigdon.  According to Cooper’s biography, he was active in the church until the age of 11 or 12.  His family moved to Phoenix, Arizona when he was about 16 years old.

So, I thought it might be nice to give some information about his church.  As you may remember, just prior to Joseph Smith’s death, he was running for President of the United States.  His Vice Presidential candidate was Sidney Rigdon.  The US Constitution prohibits the President and Vice President from residing in the same state, so Joseph sent Sidney on a mission to his home state of Pennsylvania to establish residency.  Rigdon settled near Pittsburgh (the place of his birth) when he received the news of Joseph’s death.  Rigdon was there just a few weeks.

Rigdon returned to Nauvoo with the rest of the apostles.  There was a special meeting on August 8, 1844.  I blogged about it previously when I discussed the Sidney Rigdon Biography I read.  Let me quote the stunning meeting again.

As Assistant President of the Church, and also known as “Spokesman for the Church”, Sidney told Jedidiah Grant ‘that he felt prepared to claim “the Prophetic mantle” and that he would “now take his place at the head of the church, in spite of men or devils, at the risk of his life.’  Rigdon seems to have underestimated Brigham Young, who had succession ideas as well.  From page 338, “Rigdon was without question Young’s oratorical superior, but Young, never a passive observer, was more clever, ambitious, and politically astute.  Not content to let the mantle of leadership pass him by, he simply wrestled it away from Rigdon in mid-descent.”

On August 8, 1844, the saints met for what was supposed to be merely a prayer meeting.  From page 339,

Hyde reported that Rigdon was just “about to ask for an expression of the people by vote; when lo! to his grief and mortification, [Brigham Young] stepped upon the stand… and with a word stayed all the proceedings of Mr. Rigdon.  Young, who later recalled the event in 1860, stated:  “[W]hen I went to meet Sidney  Rigdon on the ground I went alone, and was ready along to face and drive the dogs from the flock.”

Anyway, most of you know that Rigdon and Young excommunicated each other.  Rigdon went back to Pittsburgh and started his own church.  In the appendix is a reference to the Bickertonites on page 473.

Sidney’s Rigdon’s Church of Jesus Christ of the Children of Zion disintegrated within a decade after his death.  And both the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints relegated him to footnote status when their official histories were written.  But the Church of Jesus Christ, a small sect organized in 1862 by William Bickerton, still venerates Rigdon.

Bickerton, an 1845 convert to Sidney Rigdon’s Church of Christ, found himself adrift after Rigdon’s failures in Pittsburgh and the Cumberland Valley.  For a brief period in the early 1850s Bickerton affiliated with a branch of the Utah Mormons at West Elizabeth, Pennsylvania, although he personally declared that “his testimony… is that the blessing he received came thru obedience to the restored Gospel in 1845 with Rigdon’s people.”

After the Utah church publicly announed its long-term practice of polygamy in 1852, Bickerton left that organization.  In 1854 he held a successful conference in West Elizabeth at which several persons were baptized.  By 1858 he had attained a following of nearly 100 persons and had organized them into branches in Wheeling, West Virginia; Pine Run, Allegheny; and Greenock, Pennsylvania.

In an 1859 conference Bickerton was acknowledged as a prophet by his followers.  Two years later he was sustained a “Prophet and President of the Church” with counselors Charles Brown and Beorge Barnes.  During a July 1862 conference at Greenock twelve apostles and a number of evangelists were ordained.  The church was officially organized during this conference although not legally incorporated until 10 June 1865.

The church, which maintains its world headquarters today in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, at last report numbered 10,000 members.  The current First Presidency is Dominic Thomas, Paul Palmieri, and Robert Watson.  The church is organized into seven districts in the U.S., and has missions in Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Kenya, Nigeria, India, England, Italy, Holland, and Germany.

The Bickertonite Church is the 3rd largest Mormon sect, behind the LDS Church and RLDS Church (known now as the Community of Christ.)  Alice Cooper’s grandfather was an apostle of this church.  I think it’s pretty safe to say that Cooper was raised with a pretty firm knowledge of the Book of Mormon.

I’ve heard Cooper attends a Methodist Church, and an Assembly of God Church.  I don’t know if either of these rumors are true.  He has been interviewed and said,

Although he tends to shy away from speaking publicly of his faith, Cooper has confirmed in interviews that he is in fact a born again Christian.[Article in which Cooper speaks at some length about his faith and career][World Net Daily article in which Cooper speaks of his wish to shun so called celebrity Christianity] He has avoided so called “celebrity Christianity” because, as Cooper states himself: “It’s really easy to focus on Alice Cooper and not on Christ. I’m a rock singer. I’m nothing more than that. I’m not a philosopher. I consider myself low on the totem pole of knowledgeable Christians.[Interview with Radio Talk Show HostDrew Marshall] So, don’t look for answers from me”.[Cooper speaking in a a World Net Daily article]

When asked by the British Sunday Times newspaper in 2001 how a rebellious shock-rocker could be a Christian, Cooper is credited with providing this response “Drinking beer is easy. Trashing your hotel room is easy. But being a Christian, that’s a tough call. That’s real rebellion!”[Cooper's response to The Sunday Times is quoted in an online Good News magazine article dealing with well known rock musicians who have a Christian faith]

So, what do you make of the Bickertonite’s most famous member?  I don’t believe Bickertonite’s like to call themselves “Mormons”, but they firmly believe in the Book of Mormon, so I think the label could apply in this case.  So no, Alice Cooper is not technically a Mormon, but I bet the rumors hold a bit more truth than you ever believed.  Am I right?

I’ve been listening to a podcast from Yale University discussing the Bible.  There are definite similarities between the Babylonian story of  Gilgamesh and the stories of Adam and Noah.  Some people, such as Bishop Rick, have said

I think it is accurate to state that the flood story in the bible is both myth and a forgery. It is obviously a myth for reasons too numerous to mention here, but it is also copied from other cultures/religions, thus making it a forgery.

It could very well be a myth.  While some scholars believe the story is a myth, National Geographic put together a documentary called “In Search for Noah’s Flood”.  They discuss various flood stories, and make the case that a large, localized flood must have influenced these various cultures to write of this flood.  While there is no proof of a flood, it seems like a plausible explanation.

Recently I discussed a couple of sites in the Dead Sea region that some people believe are the sites of Sodom and Gomorrah.  While some people love to claim the Bible is actually a collection of myths, Dr. Carole Fontaine of the Andover Newton Theological School said, “Archeologists often find themselves hooted and hollered out of town, when they first suggest things like, ‘I’ve found Troy, or look, we’ve found Sodom and Gomorrah.’  But history has shown that in fact, the more you dig, the more you find.  It’s amazing how accurate the Bible sometimes turns out to be.”

Speaking of hooting and hollering, John Hamer recently recorded a famous comment regarding Book of Mormon archaeology.  He said,

The scholarly consensus on the alleged antiquity of the Book of Mormon was expressed way back in 1973 in Dialogue by Michael D. Coe, among the foremost Mayanist scholars, who wrote: “As far as I know there is not one professionally trained archaeologist, who is not a Mormon, who sees any scientific justification for believing the historicity of The Book of Mormon, and I would like to state that there are quite a few Mormon archaeologists who join this group”

The best Book of mormon archaeological site seems to be Nahom.  I’ve previously blogged about Nahom, and Daniel C. Peterson called it a “bulls eye”.  In the video called Journey of Faith (distributed by FAIR), a few BYU scholars state,

Daniel C. Peterson, Professor of Islamic Studies and Arabic, BYU, “The finding of Nahom strikes me as just a tremendously significant discovery.”

Noel B Reynolds, director of FARMS, BYU, “The gazetteers of Joseph Smith’s day listed no such place.”

Peterson, “What it really is, is a kind of prediction by the Book of Mormon, or something that we ought to find.”

William J Hamblin, Professor of Middle Eastern History, BYU, “Now the chances of finding that exact name from the exact time, in that exact place, by random chance, are just astronomical.”

Peterson, “And to find it in the right location, at the right time, is a really striking bulls eye for the book and there are those who say the book has no archeological substantiation. That’s a spectacular substantiation right there, it seems to me.  Something that would have been unexpected. It’s so unlikely that Joseph Smith could have woven into his story on his own.”

Hamblin, “The Book of Mormon has text, has made a complex prediction and modern archeology actually confirms that prediction.”

Peterson, “It’s a direct bulls-eye, as precise as you could wish it to be.”

I don’t think non-Mormon scholars are as impressed with the site as Peterson, but non-Bible believing scholars aren’t impressed with Sodom and Gomorrah either.  So, must we always believe that lack of evidence argues against historicity of the Bible or Book or Mormon, or is there reason to believe that some of these stories that scholars call myths, forgeries, or pious frauds really might have some historical use?  Is it true that “the more you dig, the more you find?”

James Strang, prophet of the Strangite Church

James Strang was baptized into the church just a few months before Joseph Smith was killed in 1844.  He said he had a letter from Joseph proclaiming that Strang was to lead the church.  The letter is currently owned by Yale University; in the past few decades, they have declared Joseph Smith’s signature on the letter a forgery.

Evidently Strang was a dynamic leader.  Apparently, his church (officially known with slightly different punctuation as the Utah church: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints [no hyphen, different capitalization]) rivaled the Brigham Young movement in size.  They had some well known converts too:  Martin Harris, William Smith (Joseph’s brother), William Cowdery (Oliver’s father), William Marks (stake president in Nauvoo), William McLellin (former apostle), Hiram Page, and some of the Whitmer brothers.

Strang claimed an angel visited him, appointing him as prophet.  As part of his calling, he translated the Brass Plates into a book of scripture called “The Book of the Law of the Lord” written by Moses, and in Laban’s possession.  Originally against polygamy, Strang translated the book (first published in 1851), which said polygamy was a godly commandment.

Strang originally moved his followers to Voree, Wisconsin, and then received another revelation to move to Beaver Island, Michigan.  He crowned himself king, and was assassinated there by disgruntled followers.  The Strangites still exist today.  The have a few hundred members in Kansas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wisconsin.  Here is their official website.  Independent historian Vickie Speek, John Hamer & Mike Karpowicz of John Whitmer Books, and Bill Russell of Graceland University (the CoC version of BYU) answered a few questions following their presentation on the past 160 years of Strangite history.

Newell Bringhurst, “I found it very enlightening too, but the one area I wanted to hear a little bit more about was the core teachings, the liturgy.  Did you get a sense, particularly John and Mike?  [Vicky] You went into the Law of the Lord in your paper and those tenets and teachings, but what core teachings were perpetuated to the make things that give them an identity as far as their Mormonism or moving beyond or in a different direction in terms of their Mormon teachings that we would identify with as Mormons, from a Latter-Day Saint tradition?”

John Hamer, “I identified in my paper that there is a remarkable continuity.  When we first looked into this, we weren’t sure how this church that had been on Beaver Island and in Wisconsin, how did it end up being in New Mexico?  So we wondered, ‘is this a Neo-Strangite Church?  Is this a bunch of people who got converted and started calling themselves Strangites that don’t have any actual continuity?’  But we found in the course of looking through the records–we had incredible access to all the church’s records, we interviewed a dozen of the oldest members of the church, the branch records going all the way back to the 19^th century are all kept in the vaults and all maintained—there is a remarkable continuity of practice and teaching that occurs because these Beaver Island members taught this new generation.  The practices remain and all sorts of things remain.

Some of the things we mentioned were sealing—sealing continues to be done, so that is unusual for Midwestern Mormons for example.  Most of the other branches other than the Cutlerites don’t do that.  You don’t have that in the Community of Christ.  It’s not in the Hedrickites.  They’re sealed for time and all eternity.  This idea of adopting into a noble and a princely household, these kingdom powers—that was being done all the way up through the [19]60’s, especially members of the Flanders clan were sealed, adopting into this Ketchum household that they were intermarried with in the 19^th century, but essentially had forgotten that they were inter-married with.  This was more or less forgotten.  Some of this history has been recovered from the records, this connection between Joseph Ketchum and Granny Flanders.  Remember that Granny Flanders was this matriarch who had done this.

I would just say there are an incredible number of practices, there are all kinds of Strangite practices.  The Book of the Law of the Lord is integral as scripture.  It is read.  The Voree Branch are 7^th day Sabbath-tarians—that’s Strangite practice.  The Laws of Sacrifice so they would sacrifice first fruits so again a lot of Strangite practice, because they had a second prophet, there’s all sorts of things that they have that other branches don’t have.  So I think the continuity is actually remarkable and the amount of practice and preservation is remarkable.  There are just a few things that fall out, because they don’t have the top priesthood offices.  So some things they don’t feel are valid to do.  One of those is plural marriages for example, they’re not done.

Vickie Speek, “There’s something we didn’t mention is the fact that according to Strangite belief, the lesser cannot ordain the higher. So they’ve lost their prophet, they’ve lost their priesthood, because only God can make a prophet.  Man can’t.  Man can’t make another prophet, so when James Strang died, the prophet died.

John Hamer, “It’s simply invalid for a teacher to ordain a priest.  Likewise, you cannot have an apostle ordain a prophet.  So that’s why Joseph [Smith] III’s ordination is invalid.  William Marks, as great of priesthood or whatever as he had is not a prophet, he cannot ordain a prophet.  Likewise Brigham Young, the other apostles that ordain him—that’s simply invalid in Strangite view, because the lesser cannot ordain the greater.

Newell Bringhurst, “So then the highest priesthood office then is a high priest, is that correct?”

Hamer, “Yes, High Priest.”

Bill Russell, “Since prophets die, and  Joseph was killed, then how are you going to have a successor to Joseph?”

Hamer, “Angelic ordination.”

??? “Just the way Strang was ordained.”

Vickie, “James Strang could have, under the direction of God, laid his hands and ordained somebody before he passed, but he did not.”

Larry Foster, “I also commend the excellent papers.  I had a couple questions more to Vickie, and maybe I missed part of it, or maybe it was answered elsewhere.  On the Book of the Law of the Lord, that’s an extremely impressive book I think.  I looked at it, but the 1856 edition is much bigger than the original book which is only about 50 pages?  A lot of the best stuff in the 1856 edition is these extended explanatory notes, I don’t know if polygamy is in the original text of the edition, or is it part of that explanatory notes stuff that extends the length of the book so much?

The other question I had was an inevitable question about Strang—what does one make of him?  He didn’t ordain a successor even though he was alive for several weeks after he was shot fatally.  Going back, how does polygamy get in there?  How about John C. Bennett?  It seems like john C. Bennett is right there at the heart of Nauvoo polygamy and Strangite polygamy and it seems like he was equally destructive in both contexts.  [audience chuckles]

I also wondered, I read one of Strang’s articles.  Golly, he could sure write.  He almost convinced me that polygamy was a great thing to liberate women.  [audience chuckles]  It gives them all kinds of choices they don’t have and they’re not stuck with a bunch of dodos.  It would appear, and I’ve been criticized by one of the Strangites for saying this, that certainly his letter of appointment was a forgery, that it seems to reflect his own diary.  It is block printed, the name has no relationship to Joseph Smith.”

Bill Russell, “We talked about his appointment at the beginning.”

Foster, “Oh you did.  There’s a pretty clear cut case of forgery, or maybe did you find some other approach?”

Vickie, “The way that I have looked at it.  When I wrote my book about the Strangites, I approached it basically as a newspaper reporter.  I was not going to take a position either way, I was just going to tell the story.  Because to me, it doesn’t matter to me what my opinion of James Strang was, but I was doing the story of the people who believed him, so that’s the way I wrote my book, and that’s the way I still basically look at it.  I have a tremendous amount of respect for the people who followed James Strang, and the Strangites of today, because their [road] is not the main road.  Theirs has been a very hard, hard road with a lot of heartache.

Now I would like to make one comment.  As far as I know, there is only a few copies of the 1851 Book of the Law, and there is somebody here who is familiar with the 1851 Book of the Law, and I’d like to ask him if there is polygamy in it?”

John Hajicek, “Yeah, there is.”

Vickie, “It’s basically the same thing?”

Hamer, “It’s in the main text, right?  In other words, it just lacks the commentary, so it has the text, it just doesn’t explain it, right?”

John Hajicek, “Are you guys asking me?”  [audience chuckles]  “Yeah, I have an 1851 Book of the Law and it’s an 80 page preliminary version.  It was published as a pamphlet with colored, printed wrappers on it.  It doesn’t have the explanatory notes.  It has 95% of the sections.  He continued to translate some additional sections.  There are some interesting differences.  For example, the first edition doesn’t have a chapter on baptism for the dead, and Strang includes his earlier 1849 revelation on baptism for the dead instead, and then has a footnote that says baptism for the dead evidently didn’t exist in the Old Testament.  Later he translates a chapter after on baptism from this Mosaic period, allegedly Mosaic period record.  So his own views changed.  But on polygamy he didn’t change.  The laws on the number of wives a king could have and things like that are all in that first edition.”

Bill Russell, “That 1851 edition does have that you say?”

John Hajicek, “Right.

Mike, “Bill, is my assumption correct that with the assassination of Strang, that the tensions between the Strangites and the state and federal government kind of dissipated at that point.  It is interesting to me that whereas the army had a relationship with the Utah church for quite a while, Strang was shot virtually under the guns of the USS Michigan, a naval vessel on the Great Lakes.  I don’t know what the reports that were filed by the state of Michagan were, and how they were considered when they got back to Washington to the Navy Department in the Pierce administration, but were the tensions with the state governments of in Michigan and Wisconsin and federal government dissipated after the assassination?”

Hamer, “Yeah, because they also got expelled.  They picked up all the members.  They spoiled them of all their property.  They put them on rented boats and they dropped them off all along the coast line destitute in little tiny groups.  So it was the worst kind of persecution results than any other Mormons faced.”

Mike, “Did the navy play a part in that or was it all surveyance from Mackinaw City?”

Vicky, “There is no positive evidence.  However, you take all the circumstantial evidence together, and I say yes.”

Hamer, “Not in the dropping off of the people.”

Vickie, “Not in the dropping off of people, no.”

Hamer, “But like Mike said, the warship is there in the murder.”

Mike, “Does the USS Michigan ferry people from Mackinaw City to St. James as part of the mob?”

Hamer, “Yes.”

Vickie, “As part of the Mob?”

Mike, “Yes”

Vickie, “I don’t believe it was the Michigan.  There were 2 ships in Michigan.  There was a steamer and there was a warship.”

Mike, “I’m asking about the USS Michigan, the warship.”

Vickie, “I don’t know.”

Hamer, “Right, The warship left the dock though.”

Vickie, “Right, it left the dock when Strang was murdered and the murderers jumped on the ship and then left.”

Mike, “2 guys jumped on the ship.”

Vickie and Hamer, “Right.”

Mike, “They left on the USS Michigan?”

Vickie and Hamer, “Yes”.

Mike, “It’s an interesting parallel with the 2 churches: one with the army involved, and the other with the navy.” [audience chuckles]

Vickie, “I think the conflict was gone, because the Strangites were gone, they were scattered.”

Mike, “and the polygamy issue kind of faded away, then?”

Vickie, “Right.”

William Russell, “Here’s a question right here, and then our time is expired so maybe this should be our last one.”

Woman, “Why did they kill James Strang?”

Vickie, “That’s a good question.  Basically, people had become disillusioned with Strang.  Strang was caught trying to follow the Book of the Law and one of the tenets of the church is no alcohol, and basically the Strangites didn’t allow alcohol and they did not support the sale of alcohol to the Native Americans and there was a lot of conflict with the gentiles, and so forth who wanted to sell alcohol.  Strangites became thirsty and they left the fold for other reasons, and those are the ones that basically were in the conspiracy to kill Strang.”

Hamer, “That’s one of them.  That’s on ongoing conflict.  Whenever Mormons gather together in big numbers and took political control and things like that, they would have conflict with their neighbors.  There are all kinds of problems that result from that including the 2 groups don’t trust each other, they don’t feel they can get justice from each other.  The other Americans see Mormons gathering under one prophet as being un-American.  There’s a lot of tendency to go and kill that prophet.”

Bill Russell, “One other thing though, he did serve 1 term in the Michigan legislature.”

Hamer, “Two terms.”

Russell, “Well 2 years I think is all.  But anyway, he was considered very effective according to the Detroit Free Press.  It’s interesting that a prophet and king could be elected to the Michigan legislature and get along well.” [audience chuckles]  He was also a member of the farms.  Well thank you very much, this was an excellent session.”

Like I said, it was a fascinating question.  I’ve invited John Hamer and a few others to entertain questions if you have any.  Do you have any questions for them?

This review should not be considered comprehensive.  I have reviewed their 60 page pdf file called “An Approach to Book of Mormon Geography“.  Since I downloaded and read a copy of this article, they have added a few more articles found on their Geography page, but I have not had time to review these.  I will invite David and Lynn to stop by and answer questions about their theory.

I have reviewed a few other theories in the past.  I reviewed BOMC’s Great Lakes Theory, Ralph Olsen’s Malay Theory, and Venice Priddis’ South American Setting.  My purpose in reviewing theories is to provide constructive criticism.  Some people have very thin skin, and I try to be charitable, providing both pros and cons to a theory.  I want someone’s theory to be right, so it is imperative to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of a theory.  I claim no allegiance to any theory–it’s just a topic I love to discuss.  I still plan to review two of the bigger heavyweights: Sorenson’s Theory, and Meldrum’s Theory.  Additionally, Theodore Brandley’s North American Theory, and Garth Norman’s MesoAmerican Theory are also future topics I plan to post on (lest anyone think I was running out of ideas.)  (Norman and Sorenson overlap quite a bit, but there are some important differences.)

Lynn Rosenvall is a geography professor at the University of Cardston, and received his PhD in geography from Cal-Berkeley.  His son David has an MBA from BYU and is Chief Technological Officer of Imergent Inc. (StoresOnline.com).  They’ve put together an impressive array of satellite maps using Google maps for their theory.  The Website dedicated to the theory is called A Choice Land.  I printed a copy of the Theory from Feb 2009–the current version on the website is from March 2009.  I’m not sure how long it has been published, but as I understand it, the theory is pretty new.

Strengths

I guess the first striking feature to me about this theory is the fact that the Peninsula is much more of a north-south orientation than Sorenson’s MesoAmerican theory.  Another strength of Baja is that the “narrow neck of land” is actually narrow–Sorenson’s narrow neck isn’t nearly as narrow.  Another bonus is the fact that the Baja Peninsula is much closer to the generally accepted Book of Mormon locations than say the Malay Theory.

In the overview article, the Rosenvalls go into great detail on showing how similar the climate of Baja California is to the Mediterranean.  Nephi says he brought seeds with him to the New World, and these seeds grew.  It is important for the climates to be similar.  (Another theory I reviewed shows Chile/Peru have Mediterranean climates as well.)  I think this is an important aspect of their theory.  The Rosenvalls point out that many of the fruits and vegetables we eat in America are grown on the Baja Peninsula.

The Rosenvalls seem to follow Sorenson’s methodology for calculating distances.  I view this as one of Sorenson’s greatest contributions to Book of Mormon research, and I’m glad to see that the Rosenvalls seem to follow a similar method for calculating distances.  It is pretty apparent to me that the Book of Mormon lands are much smaller than the hemispheric models that early Mormons (and many lay members) thought about the Book of Mormon.

The Rosenvalls make a case that the Uto-Aztecan language bears similarities to Hebrew.  I think this is both a strength and a weakness, but I’m putting this in the strength section.  Frankly, I think the Rosenvalls should really expand on this point.  I note that there is more information in the new PDF than the one I downloaded last year, but I think it should be expanded upon further.  This has the potential to be a big help with their theory.

Weaknesses

Since I mentioned languages, I ought to explain weaknesses as well.  While these language families are in the Southwestern US and mainland Mexico, I don’t believe there is evidence that Indians on the Baja Peninsula spoke in one of these language dialects.  Perhaps they traveled off the Baja Peninsula, but these ties need to be strengthened to really take advantage of this information.  Even if there are similarities between Uto-Aztecan languages, I’m not aware of any DNA evidence linking Uto-Aztecan tribes to the Mediterranean, which is another problem.

While I understand this is an introduction to the theory, there are many other aspects of Book of Mormon that are merely touched on, or completely missing.  The theory discusses flora and fauna extensively, but doesn’t discuss wheat, barley, or silk.  Animals aren’t mentioned either, such as the elephants or animals mentioned in the Book of Mormon.  What is the best candidate for cureloms and cumons?  Is there evidence for sheep, horses, or cows?

Additionally, does the archaeology date to Book of Mormon times?  Is there evidence that chariots existed?  Have swords, cimitars, or other weapons been found?  I will say as a general rule, that most North, Central, or South American theories cannot find any evidence archaeologically for many of the weapons mentioned in the Book of Mormon.  For a theory to really stand out, such evidence needs to be found.

Sorenson has found a sharp weapon that he is calling a sword: sharp obsidian triangular blades attached to a wooden club, but the Book of Mormon says the swords rusted, so however sharp and lethal Sorenson’s obsidian/wood weapon is, it certainly wont rust.  This type of evidence needs to be accounted for by any theory, and the lack of mention of these problematic parts of the Book of Mormon needs to be addressed in the overview.

Warfare

I’ve come across Morgan Deane, and I hope to invite him to participate in this discussion.  Morgan has his own site called Warfare and the Book of Mormon.  Morgan has a Masters Degree in History, and has presented papers on Napoleonic warfare and published papers about Asian, Napoleonic and Book of Mormon Warfare.  Since the Rosenvalls included information about battles (roughly pages 36-50), I’d like to see what Morgan thinks of Baja geography in relation to some of these battles.  I will defer to him completely as to whether this is a strength or a weakness.  (Morgan, I’m also curious for you to comment on my previous post about the Exodus–I discuss Egyptian chariots, and wonder if you might comment on some of the warfare mentioned in that theory as well.)

So, what do you think of this Baja Theory?