Suppose we were reading the Book of Mormon thousands of years after it had been published, long after the original manuscripts had been lost. Suppose, in other words, that we had to read the Book of Mormon the way we now read the Bible, reconstructing its textual history by informed guesswork. How good would we be at guessing?
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Polygamy in Jacob 2
Consider this passage from Jacob 2.
[27] Wherefore, my brethren, hear me, and hearken to the word of the Lord: For there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none;[28] For I, the Lord God, delight in the chastity of women. And whoredoms are an abomination before me; thus saith the Lord of Hosts.[29] Wherefore, this people shall keep my commandments, saith the Lord of Hosts, or cursed be the land for their sakes.[30] For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall hearken unto these things.[31] For behold, I, the Lord, have seen the sorrow, and heard the mourning of the daughters of my people in the land of Jerusalem, yea, and in all the lands of my people, because of the wickedness and abominations of their husbands.
I would have bet dollars to doughnuts that v. 30 (italicized above) was an interpolation. The text flows better without it, and it seems obviously to have been inserted to justify the later Mormon practice of polygamy. But it wasn't. It was there in the text all along, from the very earliest manuscripts.
Ironically, the only way we can insist that v. 30 is a self-serving interpolation by Joseph Smith is by assuming that the Book of Mormon as a whole was indeed given to him by revelation. If Smith made it up himself, why would he have written it this way? Why would have written v. 30 unless he had been planning to practice polygamy? But if he had been planning to practice polygamy, why would he have written the whole anti-polygamy diatribe in which that verse is embedded? But if the passage as a whole was revealed by God, and v. 30 was inserted by Smith, then it all makes sense. (Another possibility is that v. 30 was an interpolation by a later Nephite writer, but again we can only claim that if we assume the validity of the BoM as a whole -- that it was written by actual Nephites rather than be Smith himself.)
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Mark Twain's book list
In Roughing It (1872), Mark Twain writes:
The Mormon Bible consists of fifteen “books” -- being the books of Jacob, Enos, Jarom, Omni, Mosiah, Zeniff, Alma, Helaman, Ether, Moroni, two “books” of Mormon, and three of Nephi.
If we didn't know better, wouldn't we assume that the Book of Mormon in Mark Twain's time actually consisted of those books in that order? But in fact Twain missed the fourth book of Nephi; listed the account of Zeniff (part of Mosiah) as a separate book; and listed the books of Mormon and Nephi at the end, apparently because each is the name of more than one book. (In fact, 1 Nephi is the first book, and Moroni is the last.) Early editions of the BoM had no table of contents, so Twain would have made this list by paging through the book. The very short fourth book of Nephi is easy to miss, and the Zeniff section in Mosiah contained a heading that must have made it look at first glance like a separate book.
I would have taken Twain's book list as evidence that 4 Nephi and the post-Zeniff chapters of Mosiah were later additions to the BoM, but they are not. Twain just made a few mistakes.
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Implications for the Bible
The moral here should be obvious enough. The sort of textual analysis we routinely apply to the Bible would, if applied to the Book of Mormon, sometimes yield incorrect conclusions. Caution and humility are called for in any attempt to reconstruct a "truer" version of the text than the one we have.
(The late Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann once made a similar point by imagining how a modern Bible scholar would deal with Goethe's Faust. Among this hypothetical scholar's conclusions would be that the two prologues were added later by different authors, that the Gretchen passages and the Margaret passages obviously came from two different sources, etc.)
3 comments:
Good points - CS Lewis also argued along these lines.
In addition, as I've often said, scripture is not supposed to conform to the practises of secular literature - if it does, it isn't scripture.
But the framing of the discussion reveals to me an unhealthy attempt to depend on scriptural authority, as if there was a way of reading that did not involve human judgment/ discernment. As if our job was to obey what scripture tells us; as if scripture was like a King.
What we actually need is to be able to read scripture with discernment (including discarding some - or most passages) but in a non-arbitrary way; in a way that reflects reality...
Our civilization is still stuck vacillating between ideas of objective truth and subjective opinion - both of which are incoherent. We need a way of understanding these matters that acknowledges reality while acknowledging the need for human thinking.
For me, this was largely sorted-out by Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield.
I have an alternate theory that to my mind perfectly resolves why J. Smith would prefer to write the passage that way- it potentially gives him personal control over who can and cannot practice polygamy. Unless he does it this way, then either polygamy is allowed to all or to none, but with a general prohibition plus a "I'll let you know about future exceptions," J. Smwith and his successor s have a lot of options. It's also a bit more diplomatic to Americans who detest polygamy to not have too explicit of an authorization, but gives J. Smith opportunity to practice perversion on his cult members with leas cognitive dissonance if he points to the exceptions clause.
Mohammed likewise gave himself special permission to take more wives but permitted only four to ordinary Muslims. J. Smith is just a more clever pervert/blasphemer in this case.
Or wait I realize that I misunderstood your point in my reply. Never mind.
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