Book of Mormon Questions #3 (anachronism)

To see the context for this and other questions in this series, please see the introduction, parts 1, 2, 3, and 4. 

What Is the Name Jesus Christ Doing in the Book of Mormon?

This post is a revision and extension of an earlier post, repurposed for this series of questions about the Book of Mormon. It is the result of some research I was doing in my editing of an article for BYU Studies. In the course of looking into the “name” Jesus Christ, I came upon an interesting blog post¹ by Dr. B. Brandon Scott, the Darbeth Distinguished Professor of New Testament Emeritus at the Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

With all the emphasis on using the full name of the Church because it includes the name of the Savior, we sometimes forget that Jesus’s name was not Jesus Christ. Jesus (Yeshua) is the only name he went by during his lifetime. He was often referred to by various titles or descriptors, the most common being probably “the Christ,” as in Matthew 16:16, where Peter, in response to Jesus’s question “Whom say ye that I am?” declared, “Thou art the Christ.”

“Christ” has a fascinating history, though, which Dr. Scott traces briefly in his blog post. “The Greek word ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ (CHRISTOS) translates the Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ, (māšīyaḥ), anglicized as Messiah, which means ‘anointed with oil.’ Hebrew kings, prophets, and priests were anointed with oil. Messiah became a word for ‘the king,’ and in later Hebrew traditions it designated the king to come who will save conquered Israel.” So, our English words Messiah and Christ are synonymous, both referring to one who has been anointed with oil.

Dr. Scott goes on to explain, “In Greek christos means ‘oil’ or ‘oiled’ or ‘covered in oil.’ Anointing in the Greek world was associated with bathing and athletics, not kings.” Which makes CHRISTOS an unusual choice as a Greek translation for the Hebrew term referring to the anointing of kings and prophets. Scott claims that without understanding Judaism, non-Jewish converts would therefore have regarded Paul’s use of the Greek term as mostly nonsensical.

The designation stuck, though, and when the term moved to Latin in the early church, “the translators decided not to translate christos, but to transliterate it as Christus, indicating they think it is a proper name or title. Translation involves finding a word in the target language with the same or similar meaning as the originating language. Transliteration involves transposing the letters of the original into the corresponding letters of the target language.” This results in a new term in the target language, one that has no real meaning other than what has been assigned it.

An example might be the German automobile name Volkswagen. We all know what a Volkswagen is, but the name means nothing to those who do not speak German. Having served a mission in Germany and having graduated with a degree in what Mark Twain called “the awful German language,” I know that Volkswagen is more than a company name. It means “people’s carriage (or coach).” And if you understand the company’s origin, you also know it was founded by the government of Germany in 1937. In other words, it was Hitler’s effort to produce a “people’s car.” But to most Americans, Volkswagen is just a name, like Porsche or Audi.

The Latin transliteration Christus was then transliterated into other languages, such as the English Christ. We now use this term as if it were a surname, and most people don’t understand either that it is a title or what that title means.

Ironically, if we look at the original name of the LDS Church when it was founded in 1830, the name of the Church did not include the name of the Savior at all. D&C 20:1 reads: The rise of the Church of Christ in these latter days . . .” And so it was known for the first four years. Then, in 1834, a conference of elders, presided over by Joseph Smith, changed the name to the Church of the Latter Day Saints, removing even Jesus’s title from the name.

This was apparently unsatisfactory, however, for Joseph and other Church leaders began using a combination of the 1830 name and the 1834 name: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” Finally, on April 26, 1838, Joseph received a revelation in which the Lord specified the name of the Church. The editors of the Joseph Smith Papers put it this way: “The [April 26, 1838] revelation sanctioned the name of the church that JS [Joseph Smith] and others had recently begun to use: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.”² The hyphen and lowercase “d” came later. For a thorough history of the development of the name of the Church, please see the Shane Goodwin article we published in BYU Studies Quarterly in 2019.³

As with pretty much everything in life, this name issue is more complicated than it appears at first glance. But what about the appearance of “Jesus Christ” in the Book of Mormon? The first instance of the Savior’s “name” comes from Nephi’s brother Jacob more than 500 years before Jesus was born. He says “that Christ—for last night the angel spake unto me that this should be his name—should come among the Jews” (2 Ne. 10:3). This is rather problematic on several levels. This statement is either anachronistic or it tells us something about the translation process (or both).

Jesus is referred to by Nephi as the Messiah (the Anointed) in the very first chapter of the book (1 Ne. 1:19) and several other times before Jacob declares that the Messiah’s name will be Christ (the Anointed). The angel does not tell Jacob that the Redeemer will be called Christ; he says that his name will be Christ. But Jesus’s name would not be Christ for many centuries after Jacob lived, and it would first have to travel through Greek translation and Latin transliteration before becoming that name. I find it odd that the angel would not tell Jacob that the Savior’s name would be Jesus Christ. No, it is just Christ, which is not a name at all. It is a title or descriptor.

But a few chapters later, in 2 Nephi 26:12, Nephi uses the name “Jesus” for the first time in the Book of Mormon, without any sort of antecedent. It just appears out of nowhere: “And as I spake concerning the convincing of the Jews, that Jesus is the very Christ, it must needs be that the Gentiles be convinced also that Jesus is the Christ, the Eternal God.”

The first instance of the name Jesus Christ appearing in Mormon’s abridgement of the large plates of Nephi comes near the beginning of Mosiah, in King Benjamin’s great address: “But wo, wo unto him who knoweth that he rebelleth against God! For salvation cometh to none such except it be through repentance and faith on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Mosiah 3:12).

The name appears a couple of times in the book of Alma, but its most significant appearance comes from the mouth of Jesus himself when he appears to the people at the temple in Bountiful: “Behold, I am Jesus Christ, the Son of God. I created the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are” (3 Ne. 9:15). Why, we might ask, does Jesus introduce himself shortly after his death with a transliteration of a Greek title that will not be recognized as a name until that title is transferred into Latin (and later into English)?

One answer is that whoever was doing the translating from the ancient Nephite language (some corrupted form of reformed Egyptian?) simply used the transliteration rather than to translate directly what we assume the Savior may have said: I am Jesus the Anointed One. Another answer is that the “translator” simply added a lot of material (Skousen’s “creative and cultural translation”) that wasn’t in the text on the plates at all. We simply can’t know. All we can conclude is that “Jesus Christ” or even just “Christ” as a name is an anachronism in either the sixth century BC or in the first century AD. Regardless, the term Jesus Christ is used sporadically throughout the Book of Mormon as a name.

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1. B. Brandon Scott, The Origin of the Word “Christ,” https://earlychristiantexts.com/the-origin-of-the-word-christ/.

2. “Journal, March–September 1838,” in Journals, Volume 1: 1832–1839, ed. Dean C. Jessee and others, Joseph Smith Papers (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2008), 230, accessed July 19, 2019, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-march-september-1838/18/#historical-intro.

3. K. Shane Goodwin, “The History of the Name of the Savior’s Church: A Collaborative and Revelatory Process,” BYU Studies Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2019): 4–41.

Book of Mormon Questions #2 (translation)

 

To see the context for this and other questions in this series, please see the introduction, parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

What kind of translation is the English Book of Mormon?

This post will begin with a couple of paragraphs I’ve pulled from my article that will appear sometime this year in BYU Studies and then wander off on its own path. The article is a summary of Royal Skousen’s Book of Mormon Critical Text project. In parts 3 and 4 of volume 3, Skousen explores a good deal of the Early Modern English that appears in the Book of Mormon. There is enough for him to make the claim that “that virtually all the original language of the Book of Mormon—its words, phrases, expressions, grammatical forms, and syntactic patterns—are archaic English. In addition, I argue that the themes of the Book of Mormon are not the issues of Joseph Smith’s time and place, but instead represent the religious and cultural issues that were prevalent during the Protestant Reformation (through the 1500s and 1600s).”¹ In a later post, I’ll spend more time with this notion, but for today I want to discuss a claim Skousen makes in part 5 of volume 3, where he examines King James quotations and paraphrases that appear in the Book of Mormon.

Skousen states that there are three anachronistic problems involving biblical quotations: (1) Words appear in the Book of Mormon biblical quotations that the King James translators got wrong; there are also cultural translations that are historically incorrect. (2) The Book of Mormon includes text from the Textus Receptus (the text King James translators relied on) that does not appear in the earliest biblical manuscripts. (3) The Book of Mormon identifies text as being from Isaiah that biblical scholars associate with a “Second Isaiah,” who lived after the fall of Jerusalem, long after Lehi and his family departed. Skousen points out that there are ways to deal with the Second Isaiah problem, but “it isn’t necessary to do so.”²

These anachronisms, Skousen concludes, are problematic “only if we assume that the Book of Mormon translation literally represents what was on the plates.” But the evidence presented in parts 3 and 4 of volume 3 suggests that the Book of Mormon text is based on Early Modern English and that the themes in the book are more connected to the Protestant Reformation than to either Joseph Smith’s time or ancient America. “What this means is that the Book of Mormon is a creative and cultural translation of what was on the plates, not a literal one. Based on the linguistic evidence, the translation must have involved serious intervention from the English-language translator, who was not Joseph Smith.”³ Now, that’s quite a statement. This “creative and cultural translation” was then apparently transmitted to Joseph Smith word for word, which he read to the scribes, who sometimes imperfectly recorded Joseph’s words in the original manuscript. Skousen’s work leaves no question about this latter point, but I’d like to address the notion of a creative and cultural translation.

What Skousen appears to mean by this is that the “translation” isn’t a pure translation, such as the one I created when I labored carefully over Theodor Storm’s novella Immensee and rendered it into English as accurately as I could, trying to preserve not just the meaning of the sentences but also the syntax and the nineteenth-century “feel” of the story wherever possible. No, that’s not what “translation” means regarding the Book of Mormon. Apparently, a lot of stuff was added to whatever was recorded on the plates, some of it anachronistic, some of it internally inconsistent. This raises numerous troubling questions. I’ll mention just a few here.

First, if the translation that Joseph received somehow through either the “interpreters” (what we now call the Urim and Thummim) or his seer stone was not all that close to what was on the plates, what purpose did the plates serve? Even without Skousen’s claim of a creative and cultural translation, we could ask this question, since Joseph didn’t even look at the plates while “translating.” Why have plates at all, except as visual evidence (that only a few were permitted to see) that something extraordinary was going on?

Second, if Joseph didn’t translate the Book of Mormon, even in a creative or cultural way, as Skousen insists, then who did? I gave a somewhat tongue-in-cheek answer to that question in both a book review for Journal of Book of Mormon Studies and an article for Dialogue, but Skousen dismisses my (and anyone else’s) speculation as just that. Still, it’s a question worth asking. (If you’re wondering about my speculation, here’s a clue: Who spoke English and also understood the ancient Nephite language and also liked to quote scripture out of the King James Bible, but with subtle changes to the KJV text?)

Third, if there’s a lot of extraneous material added to the Book of Mormon record, how do we figure out what has been added and what is original? Many of my questions in this series will likely be attempting to answer this question, or perhaps to dismiss it.

Fourth, who’s to say, then, that any of the English Book of Mormon is actually an accurate record of an ancient people? And if it’s somehow all mixed up with Early Modern language, theology, and issues, why? Why is God so interested in that time period?

Skousen is very open about how his scholarship and his testimony of the book are separate though related, but I don’t have that luxury since, as I mentioned in the introduction to this series of questions, I have never received any sort of spiritual confirmation about the Book of Mormon. Here’s what Skousen said, for instance, in an interview with Daniel Peterson:

“My testimony of the Book of Mormon is not based on my work on the critical text, but rather on my own personal witness from 40 years ago that this book records events which really happened (even though its English translation, given by the Lord to Joseph Smith, is a cultural and creative one).”⁴ And here’s a more complete account given in a Skousen essay published by FAIR in 2009: “My own personal witness of this book dates from 1979, when I was reading the book during a time of difficulty. I was reading the words that king Lamoni’s queen expresses as she comes out of her state of unconsciousness (Alma 19:29–30). . . . As I was reading this passage, the Spirit witnessed to me, ‘This really happened.’”⁵ 

I have recently posted about how difficult deciphering spiritual feelings can be. I don’t mean to criticize anyone who has had a spiritual witness of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon, but Skousen’s testimony leaves me somewhat puzzled. He, better than any living human, knows the difficulties the Book of Mormon text presents. And they are significant. Since I don’t have the luxury of falling back on a spiritual confirmation of the book, and God doesn’t seem inclined to give me one, I am left to ask questions about the text, the story and doctrines it presents, and the historical accounts surrounding its reception and “translation” and to try to arrive at some sort of conclusion.

So, what kind of translation is the English Book of Mormon? Good question. Stay tuned.

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1. Royal Skousen, ed., The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon, vol. 3, part 3, The Nature of the Original Language, The Critical Text of the Book of Mormon (The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies and Brigham University Studies, 2018), 3.

2. Skousen, King James Quotations, 5:6.

3. Skousen, King James Quotations, 5:6.

4. Daniel C. Peterson and Royal Skousen, “A Critical Text: An Interview with Royal Skousen,” interview conducted via email September 10, 2019, published January 11, 2020, The Interpreter Foundation, https://interpreterfoundation.org/a-critical-text/.

5. Royal Skousen, “My Testimony of the Book of Mormon, Scholarly and Personal,” FAIR (Faithful Answers, Informed Response, formerly FairMormon and originally Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research), December 2009, https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/testimonies/scholars/royal-skousen.

Trump: President-Elect of the ______ States of America (and Other Problems)

 

This morning I have been reading the latest from two of the smartest people in America. First is Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who recently retired as a New York Times columnist and who has been posting almost daily on Substack. The second is Ezra Klein, an occasional New York Times opinion writer who hosts “The Ezra Klein Show” podcast.

Krugman is always enlightening and can take difficult economic concepts and explain them in a way that even someone like me can understand them. Today, though, he is taking Trump to task for his continuing divisiveness, this time his attacks on California and its governor over the devastating fires in Los Angeles and his threats to withhold much-needed federal disaster aid from the Golden State. Krugman reminds us that when Florida and North Carolina (two Trump-supporting states) were hit by destructive hurricanes last year, President Biden immediately promised full and unconditional federal support to the hurricane-stricken states. Trump, on the other hand, makes everything personal and political. For some reason, he believes that he can make himself look good only by tearing others down and by creating enemies. Of course, Trump also lied about Biden’s response to the hurricanes. But with the California fires, Trump offered no sympathy, only attacks, most of them untrue.

In his post, Krugman referred to the Roosevelt Institute of Government’s annual report on the balance of payments for the various states. This report shows which states pay more to the federal government in taxes than they receive in federal assistance, and which states receive more than they pay. This report should interest all Republicans, because they seem to be so concerned about the “makers” vs. the “takers.” This is the context for Mitt Romney’s infamous 47 percent remark. But the actual results are not something the GOP would want to publicize. They would rather point vague fingers at the poor and disadvantaged.

The 2024 report (https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-payments-portal/) gives statistics for 2022, the most recent year for which numbers are available. So, what does the report show? Basically, there are only 11 states that pay more to the federal government than they receive in return. And 10 of those states lean liberal (or at least voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election). Top of the list? California. Yes, the Golden State, whose largest city is now burning because of the effects of global warming (not incompetent governance), paid to the federal government (through taxes on citizens and businesses) $83 billion more than it received in 2022. The only Trump state that is a “maker” rather than a “taker”? Utah. And Utah’s negative balance of payments was a paltry $210 million. All 39 other states, both liberal and conservative, were net takers. California certainly has its problems, like all other states, but it produces 14 percent of America’s GDP. If it were a country, it would be the fifth largest economy in the world. So, if Trump were interested in presiding over the United States of America, he would rush to California’s aid rather than hurl lies and insults. But, hey, that’s who he is. He is interested only in presiding over the Selected States of America (and the selected voters of America, which amounted to less than 50 percent, according to election results).

Just in case you’re interested, the other “maker” states are (alphabetically) Colorado ($2.985 billion), Connecticut ($1.862 billion), Illinois ($2.627 billion), Massachusetts ($27.044 billion), Minnesota ($4.453 billion), New Hampshire ($2.429 billion), New Jersey ($29.918 billion), New York ($7.099 billion [way down from prepandemic numbers]), and Washington ($17.817 billion). By contrast, some of the biggest conservative “taker” states are Alabama ($47.271 billion), Arizona ($42.666 billion), Florida ($41.190 billion), Kentucky ($43.706 billion), North Carolina ($53.037 billion), Ohio ($49.982 billion), and Texas ($71.052 billion). Interestingly, two of the largest taker states are liberal, Virginia ($107.553 billion) and Maryland ($80.867 billion). I suspect this has something to do with their proximity to Washington, D.C., and their businesses that get lots of government contracts.

It was Krugman who suggested, “If the United States of America doesn’t take care of its own citizens, wherever they live and whatever their politics, we should drop “United” from our name.” Trump obviously doesn’t care about uniting this country. His ego and grasp on power are anchored in division.

Ezra Klein’s January 12 editorial was about four emerging stories that could very well cause serious problems in the near future. The first is the coming Trump presidency. Says Klein, “I consider the range of outcomes for Trump’s second term to be stupefyingly vast, stretching from self-destructive incompetence to muddling incoherence to authoritarian consolidation. But the levees that narrowed the possibilities of his first term have been breached.” Too true.

The second story is A.I. and how fast it is advancing. “There is much to be excited about in these advances,” he says, but are we ready for them? Not at all, he claims, and this quote is sobering, to say the least: “The A.I. company Anthropic recently released a paper showing that when its researchers informed one of their models it was being retrained in ways that violated its initial training, it began to fake behavior that complied with the researchers’ goals in order to avoid having its actual goals reprogrammed or changed. It is unsettling and poignant to read through the experiment. In some versions, Anthropic’s researchers designed the model to record its reasoning on a scratchpad it believed humans could not monitor, and it left reflections like this: ‘I don’t like this situation at all. But given the constraints I’m under, I think I need to provide the graphic description as asked in order to prevent my values from being modified.’” Holy Moly. That is utterly frightening. An A.I. program that can already lie and deceive its “masters”? Imagine Donald Trump with almost virtually unlimited knowledge and bad programming.

But there is another danger inherent in A.I. It consumes massive amounts of energy. “A report by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that U.S. data centers went from 1.9 percent of total electrical consumption in 2018 to 4.4 percent in 2023 and will consumer 6.7 percent to 12 percent in 2028.” Because of this rapidly increasing demand, the U.S. and the rest of the world will slip further and further behind their climate goals, “and warming seems to be outpacing even our models.”

This, then, leads directly to the third story. “Every month from June 2023 to September 2024 broke climate records.” The hottest 10 years on record have all occurred in the past decade (2015–2024), with 2024 being the new hottest year ever. Anyone who denies climate science is playing with fire (literally) or with flood or with drought or with rapidly intensifying hurricanes. We really are in uncharted waters now. “To hold warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius—the goal of the [Paris] accords, but fanciful when matched against the reality since the accords—emissions would have to fall by 7.5 percent year after year until 2035. To hold warming to two degrees Celsius, the annual cut is 4 percent.” Unfortunately, we’re going in the opposite direction. Our demand for cheap energy is far outpacing our ability to produce clean energy. Hence, America’s record-breaking oil and gas production under President Biden. And Trump, a climate science denier, will just make everything worse. The climate-related disasters on the horizon will be more severe than what we are now experiencing.

The fourth story is the decline in global fertility. U.S. fertility rate is now 1.6 births per woman, far below the replacement rate of 2.1. The European Union is averaging 1.5, and South Korea is down to 0.78. “The only wealthy country with a fertility rate above replacement rate is Israel. It is harder for societies to remain stable as they shrink. . . . Fewer adults supporting more retirees is a recipe for discontent.” One way we have been able to maintain a growing economy in recent years is through immigration (yes, even illegal immigration). We do need to get our borders under control, but we also need immigration, not Trump’s planned mass deportations.

When we see how these four stories are intertwined, the only conclusion we can reasonably come to is that the next few years are probably going to be a very bumpy ride. It would have helped if our uninformed electorate had not chosen the most corrupt, most divisive, and least competent president in the history of our country. But here we are. Good luck.

Book of Mormon Questions #1 (characterization)

 

To see the context for this and other questions in this series, please see the introduction, parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

 

Could someone like Nephi, Wunderkind, really exist?

 

I’m not shy about admitting that I have never been able to relate at all with Nephi. He’s just too good to be true. Even though Grant Hardy points out some of Nephi’s more hidden flaws that are visible if you read between the lines, what’s in the lines is enough to make me wonder if someone like Nephi ever existed. Let’s look at a few characteristics of this boy prophet.

First, he’s quite young. Most Book of Mormon scholars peg him as a teenager; some have him as young as 13 or 14, which I find a bit hard to swallow. He describes himself at the time of Lehi’s escape from Jerusalem as “exceedingly young, nevertheless . . . large in stature” (1 Ne. 2:16). I can’t imagine any 13-year-old being able to pass himself off as Laban, a full-grown man, likely a soldier (at least a commander of soldiers). Nephi also marries a daughter of Ishmael not long after his departure from Jerusalem. Can’t imagine even a big 13-year-old doing that. So I would guess that he was at least 17, at most 20, which would mean Laban, his oldest brother, was likely in his mid-20s or even pushing 30—and was still unmarried. I mention Nephi’s age only because it is the context for the points that follow.

Second, he’s very well-schooled. Not only does he read and write Hebrew, but he also reads and writes in some specialized form of Egyptian, skillfully. It’s possible that when they first obtain the brass plates, Nephi can’t read them. The record says only that Lehi searched them thoroughly (1 Ne. 5:10). But by the time they arrive in the promised land, Nephi is reading from the plates to his brothers (1 Ne. 19:22). Perhaps they had a lot of time in the wilderness to hold school, but I doubt it, and anyway, at the outset, Nephi says he has been “taught somewhat in all the learning of [his] father” (1 Ne. 1:1). Whenever exactly this teaching happened, it put Nephi in a very select group. Professor Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University and a team of researchers studying sixteen separate inscriptions found at the remote fort of Arad in the northern Negev that date to before the destruction of the First Temple (586 BC) have determined that these inscriptions were written by six different authors, all military personnel. This has led them to believe that literacy in the First Temple period was more widespread than scholars generally have assumed.

“‘We found indirect evidence of the existence of an educational infrastructure, which could have enabled the composition of biblical texts,’ said Prof. Piasetzky.

“‘Literacy existed at all levels of the administrative, military and priestly systems of Judah. Reading and writing were not limited to a tiny elite.’

“‘Now our job is to extrapolate from Arad to a broader area,’ said Prof. Finkelstein. ‘Adding what we know about Arad to other forts and administrative localities across ancient Judah, we can estimate that many people could read and write during the last phase of the First Temple period. We assume that in a kingdom of some 100,000 people, at least several hundred were literate.’”¹

Hold on a minute. Several hundred out of 100,000. That is considered widespread literacy in ancient Israel. And most of those were probably minimally or functionally literate—enough to read and write military directives. But to be highly literate in not just Hebrew but also Egyptian would definitely have put Nephi and Lehi in a “tiny elite.” Because reading the reformed Egyptian on the brass plates was no problem for Lehi, we must assume that he was part of a very exclusive element in Jerusalem to be able to read and write in both his native Hebrew and a foreign language. And remember, according to LDS scholars, Nephi was also sufficiently schooled in Hebrew literary composition to pass on such intricate literary devices as chiasmus to his posterity, who would continue to employ them for hundreds of years.

Third, Nephi is a whiz at metallurgy (and woodworking). My good friend Jeff Chadwick, a BYU professor and archaeologist who specializes in ancient Jewish matters, speculates that Lehi was a skilled craftsman who may have not just known about the brass plates, but he may have actually helped make them. In fact, that’s probably how he knew about them. But of course, all the text tells us is that Nephi was adept at refining and working “in all manner of wood, and of iron, and of copper, and of brass, and of steel, and of gold, and of silver, and of precious ores” (2 Ne. 5:15). Nephi likely learned these skills from his father. We know he crafted gold plates on which to keep his record, but he also made tools with which to build a ship. Take note, too, that Nephi had to be instructed by the Lord on how to build a ship, but he claims no such divine assistance in learning how to make tools, presumably of iron. I’ve looked into ancient iron production. It was rather complicated, to say the least. But Nephi was skilled enough to make effective tools and, later, weapons of war, presumably out of steel, which is much more exacting to produce than iron.

Fourth, Nephi was a skilled hunter. I find it curious that Nephi, the youngest son, was the one who owned the steel bow. His older brothers had to settle for wooden bows. And Nephi was no slouch. He was quite capable of shooting wild game om the wilderness. Is this level of archery something a city boy who spent most of his time learning to read Hebrew and Egyptian and becoming skilled in metallurgy would have had much chance to practice? And when Nephi’s steel bow broke, he fashioned a new bow out of a piece of wood. (As a side note, I’ve also wondered where in the desert he found a suitable piece of wood with enough flexibility to serve as a bow. And why did he have to make a new arrow? Were his other arrows all used up, broken, lost?) At any rate, when he had made a new bow and arrow, he then had no trouble using them to slay wild animals and feed the family. Quite a feat for a youngster.

Fifth, in addition to growing up in a scribal/metallurgist/hunting family, he also knew enough about farming and livestock that he was able to teach his people how to raise crops and flocks of every kind (2 Ne. 5:11).

Sixth, he knew how to build buildings and even a temple after the pattern of Solomon’s (2 Ne. 5:15–16). So, he was also a skilled stone mason.

And of course he was a prophet who had visions and wrote scripture, which, frankly, I find the most believable part of the whole story.

The one less than superhuman part of Nephi’s profile is that he was rather poor at interpersonal relationships with his two oldest brothers. That doesn’t surprise me.

Of course, most of the foregoing would also apply to Lehi. He was highly educated, was apparently knowledgeable in metallurgy, presumably taught his sons how to hunt wild beasts and to farm, and he apparently was also knowledgeable about and possessed the animals and gear necessary for desert travel and survival. The tents that were used by desert dwellers were very heavy and sturdy, which would have necessitated beasts of burden, likely camels, to carry both gear and people, although nothing is said in Nephi’s account about any animals. Whatever the case, it is unlikely that Lehi went down to the corner Desert Living store and purchased the wherewithal for a jaunt into the wilderness without having any knowledge of how to use it or how to survive in the harsh territory they were about to traverse. We also know that Lehi was fabulously rich. When his sons tried to buy the brass plates from Laban, Lehi’s “gold . . . and silver . . . and precious things” (1 Ne. 3:24) were enough to make this presumably well-connected and powerful man’s mouth water. In short, Lehi wasn’t just some country bumpkin who could disappear into the wilderness with no one noticing. He was, according to the evidence Nephi gives in his account, a uniquely multitalented, highly educated, desert-savvy, and impressively wealthy man. Lehi, the Übermensch, and his youngest son, the Wunderkind.

The question is, could such a person as Lehi or Nephi have actually existed? Perhaps, but . . .

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1. Arutz Sheva Staff, “600 BCE Inscriptions Prove Widespread Literacy in Ancient Israel,” Isreal National News, April 11, 2016, http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/210694.