Here’s a thought experiment. Suppose I told you there were thousands of errors in the first edition of the Book of Mormon–not necessarily in every copy, but in the first edition as a whole–or more precisely that there are nearly 4000 changes between the first edition and the 1981 edition. Would that shake your testimony? Should it?
Suppose I said it differently, “The Book of Mormon, the most correct book on earth, has 3,913 corrections.” (Read that with a sneer. Those or similar words begin Jerald and Sandra Tanners’ classic 3,913 Changes in The Book of Mormon.) Would my words shake your testimony? Should they?
My guess is that the answer to either question would be “No.” No, the fact of changes, corrections and errors in the Book of Mormon don’t upset or unsettle you, and no, you don’t see any reason why it should. And that lack of seeing doesn’t indicate some willful blindness on your part, some desire to avoid unpleasant facts, some lack of serious thought about the implications of changes in sacred texts. Indeed, if I pushed you on it you would probably quote the first section of the Doctrine & Covenants,
“These commandments are of me, and were given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding.”
–D&C 1:24
You might say something about the scriptures not being dictation, that prophets write in response to a command to write the vision,
And the Lord answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.
–Habakkuk 2:2
or even invoke Moroni’s comment about the imperfection of prophets,
Condemn me not because of mine imperfection, neither my father, because of his imperfection, neither them who have written before him; but rather give thanks unto God that he hath made manifest unto you our imperfections, that ye may learn to be more wise than we have been.
–Mormon 9:31
One implication of putting these three passages together is that if a prophet’s words are imperfect the Lord can reveal corrective words to another prophet, though still “in their weakness, after the manner of their language,” which will call forth the need for more words to more prophets. The Lord is never done giving revelation, because we’re never done with our weakness.
Let me push the experiment a little further. Suppose I told you there is at least one typo in the Book of Mormon that has never been corrected. What kinds of questions would that raise?
Among many reasons to love the story of Alma preaching to the poor Zoramites on the hill Onidah in Alma 32-33 is the way it enacts a figure of speech. The poor come up behind him as he’s preaching and ask where they can worship, having been turned out of their synagogue. Alma literally (and I mean literally literally not figuratively) turns his back on the people who aren’t listening very well to him and starts ministering to the poor.
After talking about planting the seed of faith, Alma addresses their question about where to worship by quoting Zenos’s poem about worship and prayer (Alma 34:4-11), then adds a second passage from Zenos, “Thou hast turned away thy judgments because of thy Son.” Then he asks,
Now behold, my brethren, I would ask if ye have read the scriptures? If ye have, how can ye disbelieve on the Son of God?
–Alma 33:14
This puzzled me for years, this slight rhetorical shift, this mild scolding for not reading the scriptures they’ve already told him they can’t read because they’ve been cast out of the synagogue.
Happily, on my most recent big-0 birthday (65% less recent now) Statebird Book was offering Royal Skousen’s typographical facsimile of The Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon, and parts 1 & 2 of his Analysis of Textual Variants in the Book of Mormon for half price, or about $80 for all three, and I had some birthday money, and I was working through Deseret Book’s 1980 Book of Mormon first edition facsimile to see what I could learn about textual variants in The Book of Mormon. So when I got to the bottom of page 317, lines 42-43 I checked the original manuscript, and the passage is within the extant 28% of the original manuscript, and it reads “these scriptures.” (Skousen marks the page 288′, the prime mark meaning he’s estimating the page #. It’s on page 309:16 of the facsimile.) So Alma is not scolding the poor Zoramites, he’s asking them if they are aware of the scriptures that can comfort them.
What happened? Why is there a typo there, and why has it never been corrected? Well, here’s 317:42,
Now, behold, my brethren, I would ask, if ye have read the
The end line 42 happened, and John H. Gilbert needed two spaces. He hadn’t had to add any spaces to justify the line, so he couldn’t take any out, so he dropped two letters rather than having to go back and add 4 spaces to fully justify the line. Our current text is slightly different. It reads,
Now behold, my brethren, I would ask if ye have read the
If he had taken out those two commas later editors removed Gilbert might have had room for these, but maybe he was rushed for time, and he probably didn’t consider it important. What difference did such a tiny change make?
To suggest an answer for why it has never been corrected let’s look at a typo which has been in the KJV more than twice as long as this one has been in The Book of Mormon.
Consider this passage from Jesus’s hellfire sermon where he says whoa to the scribes and Pharisees, calling on them to stop their hypocritical practices:
Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.
–Matthew 23:24
What a puzzling image. It clearly involves eating, but how does the image work? I puzzled over this nearly 20 years, from the time I read the New Testament in Seminary (9th grade) till I came across Royal Skousen’s “Through a Glass Darkly: Trying to Understand the Scriptures” (BYU Studies 26:4, 3-20), in Seattle Deseret Industries, I think, though I neglected to write acquisition date, place, and cost inside the front cover. In all my puzzling the only image I could come up with was of a poor dog straining at the leash to get at some bothersome gnats and while he is straining at these nattering nabobs of gnat activity a hapless camel happens by on yet another futile attempt to pass through the eye of a needle, and the dog’s furious, frustrated jaws don’t stop till they’ve devoured the poor camel. (Read the comments on this post for more gnattering.)
It wasn’t that I didn’t get the general sense about paying so much attention to tiny things that we completely miss the big things. Rather, I was trying to understand how the metaphor/aphorism worked. I knew that aphorisms should be grasped easily, that she that runneth may read them. Which means a successful metaphor should create an image the hearer or reader will understand instantly and not puzzle over or argue with. So the image I created never satisfied me.
I wasn’t puzzling over these gnattering gnabobs when I read Skousen’s article, but he cites this passage as a misprint for “Ye Blind guides who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel,” (9). Changing the preposition immediately changed the image. The gnat and camel are floating in some liquid and the Scribes and Pharisees are taking such great care to strain or filter out the gnat that they completely miss the camel.
Parenthetically, I’m not the only person who has tried to make sense of this passage. The footnote for Matthew 23:24 in the 1981 LDS edtion of the KJV supplies a phrase Joseph Smith added at the end, making JST Matt. 23:21 read
Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel; who make yourselves appear unto men that ye would not commit the least sin, and yet ye yourselves, transgress the whole law.
So why has this typo never been corrected? I got some insight when I was talking about Skousen’s article with my brother Dennis. I had remembered it as an example of a mistranslation rather than a misprint. Dennis said he thought it might be simply a change in idiom, that at indicated the object of their straining. That is, where we might say someone is straining or arguing over tiny things, gnats, the Elizabethans and Jacobeans would say they are straining at gnats. If the Jacobean proofreaders could make idiomatic sense of the passage they probably wouldn’t think to check it against the original manuscript. And I don’t know who finally thought to check it. Skousen’s source is Edgar J. Goodspeed’s 1945 Problems of New Testament Translation, 38-39. Maybe I’ll remember to check that source next time I’m in a good academic library.
Similarly, because “I would ask if ye have read the scriptures” makes sense grammatically and idiomatically, it’s not something anyone would think to check against the original manuscript, except someone sensitive to subtle rhetorical shifts, or someone comparing all editions and manuscripts of The Book of Mormon to find all textual variants. And, indeed this variant does appear in my second edition of FARMS’s collation, Book of Mormon Critical Text: A Tool for Scholarly Reference, Vol II, 1986-7, page 732, so I hope it will be corrected in the next edition of The Book of Mormon.
Notetab Light’s handy-dandy counter tells me I’m already above 1500 words and I haven’t even gotten to the point of my thought experiment, which is meant to demonstrate that I wouldn’t expect you to be bothered by news that there are errors in scripture because as Latter-day Christians we have ideas available to us about how texts behave that are quite different than other textual traditions, secular as well as sacred.
In this long digression about how texts behave I’ve spent a lot of time trying to define what those differences are, and I need to spend more time talking about how we think texts behave, but I’ll do that later, and end this post with an insight I just had a few days ago about the nature of scripture.
On Dec. 9, the day I got laid off at the end of the Medicare annual enrollment period, I got off the bus in Lehi and pedaled over to the library. I like their collection, but I’m not often able to get over there. The inspiration to visit the library was good. I may have looked in the catalog for Harold Bloom’s The Book of J. Not there, but they do have Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine. A delightful book, and I feel the same kinship with Bloom I felt with Virginia Woolf when I read A Room of One’s Own. Both approach literature and words with the same playfulness I do, the same sense of delight. Jesus and Yahweh is a delightful and delighted book.
Bloom says at one point that it’s a sort of culmination of the work he started with The Anxiety of Influence, a meditation on the agon of Yahweh’s influence on Jesus. I’ve never read The Anxiety of Influence, perhaps because I thought it would be a dry academic text, and because I hadn’t read the works my father said Bloom was looking at when he outlined Bloom’s argument one day in class, something like, Virgil looks at Homer, says, “I can do better,” but can’t. Dante looks at Virgil, says, “I can do better,” but can’t. Joyce looks at Homer and says, “I can do better,” but gladly suffers glorious defeat (as Bloom says of Joyce in Jesus and Yahweh). Each succeeding writer achieves less than his influences, so literature tends toward entropy and, I think my father said, nihilism. Or maybe he said Bloom considers himself a nihilist.
If he does, that’s not what inspires my feeling of kinship, and Jesus and Yahweh is too playful, too exuberant to feel nihilistic. And the fact that I’m still reading it two months later, that I haven’t been able to read 10 pages a night, suggests that such exuberance invites contemplation, particularly contemplation of the word misreading. I don’t know if Bloom coined the phrase “all reading is misreading,” but it fits with his usage of the word throughout.
I’m no fan of the construction “All X is Y.” It offends my sense of the need for opposites to keep the universe in check. In order for X and Y to be meaningful terms there needs to be some X that is not Y and some Y that is not X. Logically “all reading is misreading” implies that no reading is correct. The saying may have been devised to encourage some humility before the text, but textually it is not a humble saying. The saying shows no humility before itself, doesn’t humble itself to any exceptions. And exceptions are important because, as Hans-Georg Gadamer says in Truth and Method, every reading strives to be a correct reading (note the indefinite article–one of many correct readings). We have some innate sense that some readings work very well with a text, and others don’t work well at all, and we seek to create readings that work well with the text. We also avoid readings that don’t.
I think I heard “Plato’s Phaedo is not a recipe for pound cake” in every class I took from Jim Faulconer, and I’ve never heard anyone propose that it is. It doesn’t occur to anyone to make that interpretation because pound cake is irrelevant to the Phaedo. It’s not that the pound cake interpretation would be a very weak misreading (in Bloom’s terms), it wouldn’t be a reading at all. There’s nothing in the text to support it.
While I was working through this several things occurred to me. First, it doesn’t bother me at all to say “All readings are incomplete,” to say that nothing can wholly encompass a work of art, can say all that can be said about it. It doesn’t bother me even though the inexhaustibility of a work can feel daunting, even nihilistic, because there’s no end, no place we can rest, no thing we can point to as the final product, and this no thingness can be deeply disconcerting because we live in a world that we define by finite objects such as our bodies.
It also occurred to me that saying all reading is misreading is another way of expressing the void, whether it’s the atheistic void of the absurd–having to find meaning in a meaningless universe–or the theistic void of conceiving of God as wholly other than us. In all three expressions the void is uncrossable, without access to a correct reading, without access to meaning, without access to the Way, the Truth, the Life.
But do we need “To have the whole air!” to have meaning? My father used to point out that the madness sections of Theodore Roethke’s “The Shape of the Fire” are all written in complete sentences, (“Have you come to unhinge my shadow?”) that make no sense, while the emergence from madness that begins with the exuberant “To have the whole air!” is conveyed in fragments that make perfect sense. It’s as if Roethke is saying that trying to encompass the world in complete sentences is madness, while accepting the ungraspability the infiniteness of life is deliverance, salvation.
But I didn’t think about Roethke till I was writing this down. Instead I was thinking about abundance. I asked myself why Bloom phrases his work in terms of misreading instead of abundant reading? I was asked to teach yesterday’s lesson for the high priests. (I’m an elder, but my oldest son is older than a lot of elders, so I meet with the high priests.) When he handed me the lesson schedule a couple of weeks ago our group leader told me there were three talks from October General Conference on each fourth Sunday, but don’t try to get through all of them. No one can.
I used his instruction as a springboard for the lesson, on the Atonement and the sacrament, saying there is so much that we can’t grasp it all, then presented Elder James J. Hamula’s explication of the sacrament prayers and talked about how it doesn’t exhaust the subject. As we think about his insights others open up to us, and others, and still others.
So maybe the answer to the question posed by my thought experiment is not so much that we have different ideas about how texts behave, as that the abundance in scripture outweighs the imperfections.
What do you think?