In the new year 2014, I’m going to read the Book of Mormon.
I’ve opined more than once that as a major work of American literature, the Book of Mormon is unfairly ignored by readers outside the Restoration tradition. I believe the book can (and should) be read as an epic of the young American republic in the first generations after the revolution. With a few exceptions like Harold Bloom, most non-Mormons have either followed Mark Twain’s humorous panning of the text (as impenetrably boring)[1] or they’ve disregarded it altogether.
Even within the Restoration tradition, the book has tended to be used in particular ways. For the earliest members in the 1830s, the Book of Mormon was apparently more important as a sign of the end times and prophetic authority than as a source of theological content for preaching.[2] Over the years I suspect that readers within the tradition have tended to read the text as a history book — in keeping with the idea that the religion of Mormonism has history in place of a systematic theology. Recently, for many readers committed to reading the text as a literalistic history of the ancient Americas, this has led (in my opinion) to substantial distortions of its original meaning as the book is reframed through the prism of our ever-expanding knowledge of actual Meso-American history.
I’m planning to approach the text differently. Instead of reading the book as a sign of Joseph Smith’s prophetic authority or the authority of one of the successor churches of the religious movement he helped found or trying to read into it a history of the ancient Mayans or Olmecs, I’m intending to read the Book of Mormon for its theological and philosophical content. To better understand this content, I’ll attempt to place it within Joseph Smith’s immediate context — the fervent North American Protestant religious revival in early the 19th century known as the “Second Great Awakening.” I’ll try to read the stories for what they are trying to teach as stories, rather than as histories of past events. I hope to track the early development of Joseph Smith’s religious thinking and how it influenced the early Restoration, but I also want to see how I will find meaning in the Book of Mormon’s theology and philosophy for those of us living now in the 21st century.
I think I’m returning to the Book of Mormon with a unique vantage. On the one hand, I’m fairly knowledgeable about the background history of its composition and publication and I think I’m rather familiar with its contents in a general sense. But I haven’t actually read the book cover to cover since I was a young teenager. I’m therefore approaching the text with eyes that are at once informed but also somewhat fresh.
I also come at the text armed with a different understanding of scripture than many other faithful members of Restoration traditions that are more literalistic. I’m a member of Community of Christ (the former Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) and my views are largely in keeping with Community of Christ’s statement on scripture. This view includes the idea that scripture is not inerrant scientifically or historically. Rather, scripture is a human response to the Divine and the prophet or evangelist who authored the text was subject to the biases and errors inherent in his or her historical context. Rather than excuse ethical or philosophically bad teachings in scripture, in my view we need to understand them for what they are and use them to help us explore the ethical and philosophical questions we face in our lives today.
My own bias at the outset includes my belief that the Book of Mormon is a work of 19th century scripture, composed orally by Joseph Smith and written down by various scribes (especially Oliver Cowdery). If you believe the text is a translation of an ancient American text, I think you may still derive benefit from reading along with me and examining the text in a different light. However, the resulting discussion will not be a forum for historicity debates; those can be held elsewhere. Similarly, if you aren’t sure about or don’t believe in God or have value for the word or concept of “scripture,” I think you may still benefit from reading along and examining the book’s content in context.
Scope of the Project / How You Can Read Along
The text of the Book of Mormon as we have it today is different from the text as it was composed. Thousands of edits were made in Joseph Smith’s lifetime and the different churches and publishers made subsequent changes. One of the biggest changes was the division of the book into numbered verses, which each church did on its own. The LDS Church also divided the long, original chapters into shorter chapters — thus the chapter and versification between the Community of Christ and LDS versions are entirely different. (I’ll cite both reference systems as I post.) To get at the earliest text, I’m going to do my principal reading from Royal Skousen’s The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (Yale, 2009). I’ll supplement it using Grant Hardy’s The Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Edition (University of Illinois, 2003) for the LDS text along with my copy of the Community of Christ’s “Authorized Edition” of the Book of Mormon (Herald House, 1992).
In order to take in the development of the Book of Mormon’s ideas, I’m going to read it in the order it was composed, rather than in the order of its internal chronology. The earliest part of the text is famously lost: the so-called “116 Pages” given to Martin Harris. When Joseph began to compose again, he started at the point of the narrative where he’d left off with the story of King Benjamin in the Book of Mosiah. He then dictated the text to the end of the Book of Moroni before starting in on I and II Nephi through Words of Mormon. Using that order, I’ve divided the book into reading sections, which I’m posting here for anyone who wants to read along. Each Wednesday I’ll publish a blog post with my reflections on that week’s reading and we can share in discussion here.
My first post will be next Wednesday (on New Year’s Day), where we’ll talk a little bit about the book’s composition process and the original, lost part of the text. Since we don’t have the “116 Pages,” our reading will come from the Doctrine and Covenants (Community of Christ Section 2, which is LDS Section 3).
Merry Christmas and I’ll enjoy reading with you in the New Year!
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[1] Mark Twain, Roughing It (1872). Twain devotes chapter 16 to a humorous review of the Book of Mormon. Although Twain’s quip that the book “is chloroform in print” is much quoted, the joke no longer translates as people have ceased to remember chloroform as a sleep-inducing anesthetic. I much prefer Twain’s take on the Eight Witnesses, which still holds up: “I could not feel more satisfied and at rest if the entire Whitmer family had testified.”
[2] In her study of the writings of William McLellin, one of the original Latter Day Saint apostles, Jan Shipps noted that “although the Book of Mormon is always mentioned, at only three points does this extended account of six years for Mormon preaching in the early 1830s [i.e., McLellin’s journals] indicate that this scripture was used as a source for sermon texts.” More important than its content for early members was “the fact of the book” and “its coming forth a the opening event in the dispensation that was serving as the ‘winding-up scene’ before the curtain rose on the eschaton.” See Jan Shipps, “Another Side of Early Mormonism,” in The Journals of William E. McLellin, 1831-1836, eds. Jan Shipps and John W. Welch (BYU Studies and University of Illinois Press, 1994), 6.
Wheat & Tares 
John, I’m so excited for this series, and I look forward to reading along with you.
Really excited for this!!
I’ll be interested in following your blog. You definitely need to read the text in the sequence that it was written .. i.e. starting with King Benjamin in the book of Mosiah. Joseph and Oliver wrote the replacement books AFTER completing the rest of the text. If one starts reading at I Nephi, the theology is kind of confusing since Joseph seems to have forgotten that he had already developed a full Christology and has a tendency to get ahead of himself. I don’t know how accurate a copy of the original that you plan on using .. but I have a copy of the first 1830 edition in microsoft format.
John,
I’m excited as well. I was amused a few months ago when reading an article from an author that found it incredulous that people could be duped by such an obviously fraudulent, plagiaristic, and poorly written work as The Book of Mormon. It made me compile my own mental list of ‘how do you explains’ that included the necessity of having a well-stocked reference library.
Such a library would have to include the Septuagint bible–so he could throw in that ‘ships of Tarshish’ passage that would dupe us by believing his revelatory process proceeded from sources greater than strictly the KJV. It would also have to include the works of Thomas Shepherd (the American Puritan Minister who died in 1649), who published sermons using the term “Carnal Security”, the most likely source for this term for someone who was merely plagiarizing. And it would have to include the research to that point on ‘chiasm’. The best sources at the time reportedly would have been a publication by Jebbs in 1820 (which was published only in England) or a treatise by Horne in 1825 (which was published in London and Philadelphia. In addition to knowing about chiasm, he would have been required to compose chiastic prose, and insert it appropriately. Then there is the whole task of creating names, a lot of them. That Palmyra public library must have been something.
The writing had to be done without word processing, cut and paste, typewriters, or even spiral bound notebooks. So yes, I am enthusiastic about studying the BoM for its theologic and philosophic content, as a work of that complexity merits.
I just attended my first Community of Christ worship service. Between Sunday School and the Worship, I was looking at the small library there and saw a publication called “Stories from the Book of Mormon”. I thought that might be an interesting read to see if there are different messages taken away from stories that are familiar to me when read with the perspective of the non-Utah restorationist. I was invited to borrow whatever book I wished to read, but being concerned that I would not find time to return the book, I chose not to. So this will be an alternate means of achieving this, perhaps.
I also happened to read your post on the hymn, “The Spirit of God Like a Fire is Burning” before attending, and was able to look at the melodic variation and absence of verses that you described. I was also interested to find that our hymnbooks share, “We Thank Thee O God for a Prophet.”
I would add explicitly, although you allude to it in your choice of texts, that the copy of the Book of Mormon one chooses for this adventure will make a difference. For the Utah Church LDS reader (“Brighamite,” if you’re so inclined), I’d highly recommend getting a copy of the Herald House replica of the 1830 edition or the RLDS/CoC edition. I haven’t seen the Skousen “Earliest Text” edition, but it’s now on my Deseret list!
The reason for using one of those two editions is that they are undivided (1830 edition) or very loosely divided (RLDS edition) into chapter and verse, unlike the LDS editions which follow Orson Pratt’s tight chapter-and-verse divisions of 1879. Although that made it much easier to use and cite the book as an authoritative Scripture as we do the Bible, it lost a good deal of the flow, and it’s choppy and hard to read as a narrative. If I understand Brother Hamer’s project here, the reader would be better off with one of those early, flowing, more natural reads so as not to be distracted by verse numbers, chapter heads, and interminable footnotes.
Reading the 1830 edition straight up is a lot of fun, and gives you a new perspective of the Book of Mormon. Although I do love to study it in the normal sense, it’s a blast to just read it like – well, like a book.
Another good resource is Margaret Bingman’s “Encyclopedia of the Book of Mormon” (Herald Publishing House).
I prefer the shorter chapters of the LDS edition. People can be encouraged to read just one chapter per day and still have over one-hundred days in the year to miss for whatever reason!
I’m in!
Thanks for the responses!
Mormon Heretic (1), shenpa (2), and Rigel (4): I’m glad you’re excited for this, and Jeff (7): glad you’re on board.
Ron (3): That’s my thinking, yes. It might seem a bit odd to start with Mosiah, but I agree that it will make all the difference in the world in closely examining the content to read the text in compositional order.
Rigel (4): It’s cool that you went and visited a Community of Christ congregation and looked through the books and hymnal. There are a few overlapping hymns still between the “Josephites” and “Brighamites.” The hymn traditions between the two churches actually separated before Joseph Smith’s death. Community of Christ hymnals are based on Emma’s second hymnal (Nauvoo 1841) and LDS hymnals are based on Parley P. Pratt’s British hymnal (Manchester 1840).
As you point out, it’s more or less impossible for us to imagine composing a book without a word processor or to do research without the internet. And yet I have friends who somehow composed dissertations in the “before time” using note cards. Apparently an important part of the process was hiring a typest. People had a different way of storing and using information in our own lifetimes. And the way things had already become mid-20th century was already light years different from early 19th.
New Iconoclast (5): I have a facsimile edition, yes. Some of the weeks I’ll try reading from it first and then going to Skousen and the other versions. I think you’ll like Skousen’s text. He’s set each phrase on its own line so that it looks like poetry. It think it also may have the effect of highlighting the oral flow of the book.
Mark (6): thanks! I bet we have a copy of Bingman’s book in our congregational library, which has unfortunately just been moved in boxes to the storage unit while we move to a new building. 😦
Whatever opinions/perspectives are put forth, I hope everyone begins each session with a prayer for increased understanding. Certainly no one could disagree with that.
So excited for this! I’m definitely onboard. See you Wednesday.
I’m reading today and tomorrow and throughout the year! Great way to start the day.
I know several individuals who are Baptist who read and enjoy the Book of Mormon. I also know of Christian ministers who read and love the book. I personally have read through it three times now. The better challenge for the 21st century reader is to read the text through the eyes of 19th century America. What was on their minds back then? Deism was playing a very distinct role in America and the revivals were the response of everyday folk. Historians have identified twenty critical questions that were on these people’s minds and the Book of Mormon answered every one of them. That is what made the book so powerful so transformational.
Thanks for putting in the work to divide the Community of Christ version into a weekly read. I am just starting a mid year resolution. Your preface to your decision to start this is right where I am. Thanks so much.
I am the Pastor at our local congregation. Do you mind if I share the outline to others who might be inspired to begin reading in a more structured way?
Hope to see you at Conference or Peace Colloquy some time.
John are these reading plans still available? I am very interested in this study.