Besides new socks, Christmas ties, and various knick-knacks, did Santa bring you any Mormon books yesterday? Me first. I received The Testimony of Two Nations: How the Book of Mormon Reads, and Rereads, the Bible (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2024) by Michael Austin, regular blogger at BCC and Mormon public intellectual. This book made my Santa list based on Austin’s earlier book Buried Treasures, a collection of essays on various Book of Mormon episodes. Testimony of Two Nations (“TTN”) is a more scholarly inquiry. Here’s a quick preview.

First, the substance of the book. Austin notes that “the Book of Mormon narrative mirrors the overall structure of the Bible,” and that in TTN he will “focus on the larger narrative patterns that define both books” (p. 10). There are seven of these narrative patterns, covered in chapters two through eight, starting with a tree and fruit that people find desirable and ending with a cataclysmic event that changes everything. The Book of Mormon doesn’t just mirror the biblical pattern in these instances, it throws in a twist to each. So a deep look at the similarities and differences in how the Book of Mormon and the Bible employ each of these narrative patterns is the heart of TTN. This is a great study guide for LDS adult Sunday School 2024, which covers the Book of Mormon. When you raise your hand to make a comment, you will astound listeners with your insights.

Here’s the problem. Austin is a literary scholar. He is concerned with words on the page and the various literary tricks the authors, whoever they may be, use to tell their stories. He quite explicitly notes, “I take no position on whether any of the events described in either the Bible or the Book of Mormon actually happened.” That admission appears in the “Some Choices Explained” section of the 16-page Introduction. Would that all authors included such a section in their introductions. Earlier in the Introduction, Austin devotes a couple of paragraphs to the pros and cons of “bracketing.” So right up front, you know what you’re getting and what you’re not getting in the rest of the book. Specifically, what you’re not getting is a discussion of the most relevant and salient issue regarding the Book of Mormon: Is it an authentically ancient text or is it a 19th-century text?

There are two ways to look at this omission. First, it is an eminently pragmatic choice for an author to make. You want people to read your book and take it seriously. If you start out your book pledging fealty to the orthodox LDS account of the book’s origins, just about every non-LDS reader will not take your book seriously. If you start out your book rejecting that LDS account and endorsing some variation on 19th-century authorship, few LDS will read it. So to give your treasured book the reading it deserves by people in both camps, you can either declare authorship to be an open question or you can bracket the whole question. So I understand the choice. Who knows, if I ever write a book on the Book of Mormon, I might make the same choice.

But a second way to look at this choice is through the lens of a historian or attorney. Someone wrote the book. Who? If you want to understand the book, the identity of the author(s) and their historical location is obviously relevant. A historian might review the evidence around disputed authorship of a certain document and declare that a definitive determination of authorship is not available, but they are likely to make a tentative choice for the purpose of their analysis. You probably expect them to. It’s part of what historians do, isn’t it?

Even more so for attorneys, who don’t just throw a bunch of facts into evidence and hope a jury can make sense of it all. There is an opening statement where, for example, a prosecutor lays out the case she will present, not just the facts but the story about the crime and the defendant that they claim the facts will support and that they want the jury to accept. It’s called the “theory of the case.” In a sense, if you don’t have a theory of the case, you don’t have a case. And if a prosecutor doesn’t have a case, she doesn’t file charges. If you can’t stand up in court and say, “the facts will show the defendant committed the crime, and here is how it happened,” you don’t go to court in the first place. My sense is that you need a “theory of the book” if you are writing about the Book of Mormon.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am going to read TTN. And, as noted, I understand why the author takes the bracketing approach to the question of Book of Mormon authorship. But personally, I incline more toward the historian’s or attorney’s approach to the big question. It should be addressed, must be addressed, in any book-length treatment of the Book of Mormon. Maybe you give two pages to ancient authorship and two pages to 19th-century authorship, then declare it an open question, presently unresolved, then proceed with the balance of the book. That at least acknowledges the importance and relevance of the question.

I hope to return to TTN in a few weeks after reading the full book. Perhaps there is discussion later in the book that provides further insight into this authorship question, which to me seems rather relevant to how the Book of Mormon quotes and uses the KJV Bible. There is certainly going to be fruitful discussion on the Book of Mormon’s appropriation of various Bible events and passages. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the book.

So that’s my Mormon book for Christmas. What about you? What Mormon book did you happily unwrap after eating two or three Christmas waffles? What Mormon book did you *not* find under the tree but you will buy with your Amazon gift card? What Mormon book did you yourself gift to nieces, nephews, or siblings?