Book of Mormon Questions (Introduction 4)

Observations and Ground Rules

The past two posts were intended to spell out as clearly as I can where I stand in regard to the central question of Mormonism—namely, is it from God? And my answer is a qualified maybe. I can’t deny the experience I had as a young missionary in Frau Rüster’s living room. It was overwhelming. But what did it mean? I have spent a good portion of the past 49 years exploring that question, both professionally and personally. Mormonism is a perplexing religion. The pieces don’t fit together very well, but some of those pieces are extraordinarily compelling.

Let me quote the “Nachwort” (Afterword) of my mission memoir, where I address what to me was a surprising insight that came some 40 years after I had returned home. It concerns the rather stunning spiritual experiences that four of my investigators had, two of which happened while I was present. One of the experiences was shared by a married couple, so it was three experiences in total, not four.

“For his part, Terry didn’t think deeply about the meaning of his mission experiences while he was so close to them—he was too busy experiencing them—but I have found it noteworthy that none of the rather remarkable spiritual manifestations he had been a part of included a directive from the Lord telling the person to be baptized into the LDS Church. This seems to me something more than an odd coincidence. Frau Richter had been privy to a spectacular spiritual outpouring, but the specific message to her that day—according to her own interpretation—was simply to repent, not to get baptized, although she reached that decision on her own afterward, for a short time. The voice that spoke to Frau Tiedemann in the silent watches of the night told her that Chatwin [my senior companion] was ‘right,’ whatever that meant, and to watch over her family—a wonderfully cryptic message—but it didn’t tell her to watch over them by being baptized a Mormon, although she too determined that was what she needed to do, at least until her tobacco-peddling husband put his foot down. The Ortmanns had been given a very specifically tailored and penetrating message suited to their needs. They were told to plant some seeds and look for a spiritual harvest in their lives, but not specifically to join the LDS Church. Oddly, Bruder Terry never noticed this pattern. He just assumed all of these spiritual manifestations were intended to convince people that the church established by Joseph Smith was ‘true,’ whatever that is supposed to mean. True can have all sorts of meanings. Of course, as a missionary, Bruder Terry was always focused on trying to nudge people into the water—that was the specific purpose of all those well-crafted theological expositions he had memorized—but the Spirit didn’t seem to be on quite the same page. It gave enigmatic or difficult-to-decipher missives, and most days it gave nothing at all. Many times Terry tried to conjure up spiritual experiences, but it never worked. The Spirit seemed perfectly content to just drop in unannounced and unexpected, like a summer breeze. On the final day of his mission, Terry wouldn’t have known quite how to respond to these observations. Likely he would have blamed himself for his inability to produce spiritual experiences and the resulting meager harvest of souls. But perhaps there is something more to mortality, in God’s mind, than joining a very tiny minority of his children in undergoing the ordinances and embracing the dogma and culture of Mormonism. There must be; otherwise, why would God send billions of his children to earth to live in countries or centuries where they would have no opportunity to hear about Joseph Smith and his ‘restoration’ of ancient Christianity (with a boatload of Old Testament stuff, Christian tradition, and nineteenth-century innovations tossed in for good measure)? Would it be that hard for him to send an angel or two to a handful of people in every country on earth to prime the pump? I have no answer for this, so I must assume he is just fine if most of his children live and die without ever hearing the particular gospel preached by the Mormons. If so, why?

“A sobering corollary to these observations is that the people Bruder Terry had a hand in converting [thirteen individuals] probably didn’t make much of a difference in growing the Church in Germany. It’s possible that Hans-Werner [the Rendsburg branch president’s brother-in-law] married and had children and perhaps by now has grandchildren who are adding to a gradual increase (or stemming the slow decrease) in membership in Germany. I have no idea. It’s also possible that Elsa Sievers’s [a woman who joined the Church years after I returned home] children have stayed in the Church, married, and had children of their own and that they too are mostly active. [Elsa herself left the Church.] Again, I don’t know this. All the others, though, left barely a trace of their brief membership. It’s as if they were never Mormons, other than to temporarily pad the inflated statistics the Church publishes (inflated because so many of the people the Church claims as members don’t themselves claim to be Mormons anymore). This is probably true for the majority of people who join the LDS Church worldwide. Most don’t last.”

And then there is the Book of Mormon. Another thing I didn’t notice as a missionary and that I didn’t notice 40 years later when I wrote the mission memoir was that the three spiritual experiences mentioned above had nothing to do with the Book of Mormon. Frau Rüster’s manifestation came in the context of the First Vision. Frau Tiedemann (not her real name) was awakened in the night by a voice that told her five times that my companion was right (about what exactly?) and that she should watch over her family. The Ortmanns (also a fictitious name) received a direct message where the Spirit took control of my mouth and taught them things I didn’t even understand. None of it mentioned the Book of Mormon. And so it went with all the others I taught. In my whole mission, I believe we had only two investigators who actually read the book cover to cover. One was searching for the true religion and was eventually baptized, although he and his wife left the Church in their declining years. The other was good old Mr. Frink (his real name), a retired American veteran who was married to a German woman. He sat around all day watching German TV while she worked. He could understand everything but couldn’t speak a word of German. He read the Book of Mormon out of boredom. When we asked him what he liked in the book, he said it was the part about Moses getting water out of a rock. We thought this just proved he hadn’t really read it, until we later discovered that it’s actually in the book (1 Ne. 17:29). But Mr. Frink wasn’t a religious man. He was just bored. Everyone else was either too busy or not interested enough to read it. Granted, it’s not an easy read.

Which brings up the question of why God would choose such an odd and difficult book as the foundation for his true church on earth in these latter days. And why does the theology in the Book of Mormon resemble Christian thought of the early 1800s (or the 1600s, if you believe Royal Skousen) rather than the “restored gospel” we associate with Latter-day Saintism today? I’ll have plenty to say about this in future posts, but I find it odd that Joseph Smith never really taught from the Book of Mormon. He reprinted it twice before he was killed (1837 and 1840), with numerous edits (none of them substantive), but he seemed completely uninterested in talking about Nephi or Alma or Mormon or their experiences. When he taught, it was mostly from the Bible or from his own revelations or his speculations.

The Book of Mormon seemed to serve a different purpose for Joseph. It was not the content of the book that seemed to matter but the fact that it existed at all and was evidence of his prophetic calling. And, oddly, after Moroni (or Nephi, as some early accounts have it) visited Joseph to give him the plates and instruct him in his mission, no other Book of Mormon character is reported to have visited the Prophet. If the Book of Mormon was so central to the Restoration, you’d think that more of its prophets would have come to visit the “translator” of their record. But no, all his other visitors were biblical figures. Go figure.

Still, the Book of Mormon has become the unmistakable centerpiece of Mormonism. Even though it is completely silent on such essential doctrines as the three degrees of glory, priesthood, vicarious work for the dead, and eternal marriage, we still claim that it contains the “fulness of the gospel.” And many a testimony is based on reading the book and praying about it. So we need to deal with the Book of Mormon. It is not going away. But it is a perplexing book. And that is why I am exploring various questions the text has raised in my mind. Before I start, though, let me lay down some ground rules for this exploration.

First, I insist on taking the text at face value. I will assume that means what it says. No reading stuff into the text that isn’t there, like the notion that the Nephites and Lamanites assimilated tribes of Native Americans who were already here, so that we can account for the large population numbers presented in the text. Also, the narrow neck of land is a narrow passage between two seas, not a narrow passage between a sea and, well, more land. And the Lamanites were cursed with a dark skin. Skin. Not some metaphorical darkness. The text is very clear about this.

Second, no convoluted explaining away of details in the text that are inconvenient. If you have to do mental gymnastics to try to make sense of something in the text, you’re likely out of bounds.

Third, modern science is relevant, including what it tells us about the Flood (which is accepted by the Book of Mormon writers) and horses (the two are inconveniently related).

Fourth, what Joseph Smith said about the book and its coming forth is fair game, even if it conflicts with what is actually in the book.

Finally, common sense should prevail in our reading.

Let me add here that Royal Skousen presents a lot of evidence that Joseph Smith was not the translator of the Book of Mormon. Eye-witness accounts of the dictation and plenty of textual evidence indicate that Joseph was looking in his hat at either the interpreters or his seer stone and reading aloud what he saw. Royal and Stand Carmack also present a fair amount of evidence that the text of the Book of Mormon didn’t resemble Joseph’s vernacular or the dialect of early 1800s Upstate New York or New England. It has way too much Early Modern English in it, but Royal admits that it is not an Early Modern English text. I’ll discuss this in detail later, but I have to accept the conclusion that Joseph Smith did not understand the characters on the plates and did not translate them, in the traditional sense, into English.

Which brings up the obvious question, if Joseph did not translate the text (assuming there was indeed an ancient record), then who did? Well, it wasn’t God. Not unless he intentionally made lots of errors, grammatical and otherwise. So, if the book is a translation, who did it, and what sort of translation is it? Royal is convinced, based on 35 years of careful attention to the text, 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.”1

Royal refuses to hazard a guess at who might have translated the book, but I’m not so circumspect. I took a stab at it once in a book review, somewhat tongue in cheek, and Royal took me to task (without mentioning my name) in one of his critical text volumes. I asked the question, Who understood both the ancient Nephite language and English? Who could have worked on this project during the early modern period where much of the grammar, syntax, and semantics in the book finds a home? Who liked to quote text from the King James Bible, but with intentional alterations? Whose English would have been slightly off, if take my meaning, like a nonnative speaker? Well, only one name comes to my mind: Moroni, a resurrected being who could apparently appear as a normal mortal if he wanted to. Like I said, tongue in cheek, mostly.

Now, I am aware of a lot of the research that has been done by Book of Mormon apologists. Some of it is very compelling. There are things in the Book of Mormon that defy the critics. I’m fine with that, even if the apologists have a different agenda than I have. But that is only half the story. I’m not going to rehash all the BoM apologetics that have already been published elsewhere. I’m going to look at the other half of the story, the things that don’t seem to fit or that seem too difficult to reconcile. I will also not follow any sensible order—chronological, thematic, or otherwise. I’m going to explore my questions as they come to mind. At the end, whenever that may be, perhaps I’ll have arrived at some sort of conclusion about the Book of Mormon, but I sort of doubt it. It is, after all, a rather big puzzle. But we’ll see.

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1. Royal Skousen, ed., The King James Quotations in the Book of Mormon, part 5, volume 3, The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon, The Critical Text of the Book of Mormon (Provo, Utah: The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies and Brigham Young University Studies, 2019), 6.