You might expect someone whose thesis is that Mormons have very different expectations about scripture than other people of the book would at say some point, “This is the Mormon concept of scripture; this is the other concept.” But it’s not that simple. As I said in the last column we share a common vocabulary with other people of the book and common tropes with people not of the book. This can enormously complicate efforts to define scripture, so I’d rather look at how the idea of continuing revelation can help us understand obscure passages and solve scriptural problems.
Preparing my Gospel Doctrine lesson yesterday my gaze was attracted by Edwin Brown Firmage’s Paul and the Expansion of the Church Today (Deseret Book, 1979), a book I hadn’t made much headway with. I picked it up to read a couple of pages, then read a third and came across an insight on p. 13 that clarified a longstanding puzzle in Matthew 16.
18 And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
The Jewish Annotated New Testament notes there is some debate about whether this rock refers to Peter, or Peter’s faith. As I told the class, some debate is an understatement, but that’s not what puzzled me. If hell shall not prevail against the ancient church, what does that do to the concept of apostasy and restoration? Restoration presupposes some kind of defeat, some kind of having been prevailed against.
Firmage starts by pointing out that the Greek reads Hades, which refers to the place where the dead reside, not to Satan’s kingdom. So the image of the gate means the gates of Hades cannot prevent or withstand the preaching of the gospel to those who live there. Firmage connects this statement with the great commission at the end of Matthew to take the gospel to all the world, that is, this world plus the next.
The more I think about this insight the more interesting I find it. The focus for most interpreters is on the verb, not the subject. Prevail is a word we use to describe offensive action, an attack, and since it comes at the end of the sentence–a place of emphasis–we focus on it. But we pass over the implications of the subject, gates of Hades. It doesn’t occur to us to think that gates are stationary, defensive, not offensive. Gates are not something that goes on a military expedition against another kingdom, but something that protects a city from invasion, or entrance.
But invasion by what? The Savior, first, between death and resurrection, then the church. And what about that word prevail? One way to understand it is as a neutral word about the outcome of a contest–as in a lawsuit, where either party might prevail, the defense or the prosecution.
So if the gates of Hades will not prevail against the church’s attempts to enter Hades, that means the church will go to Hades. It’s an insight made possible by what we know from our additional scripture about the gospel being preached to the dead.
But opening up puzzling passages is not the only help we can receive from additional scripture. We can also receive help in understanding the nature of scripture and answering challenges about the authenticity of scripture.
For many centuries the prevailing idea was that Moses wrote the Torah and that apostles or their close associates wrote Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. When scholars were able to openly discuss evidence that Moses didn’t write the Torah (rather than making veiled hints like those of Abraham Ibn Ezra in the eleventh century), that it was a composite of competing histories written by someone in the kingdom of Israel, someone in the kingdom of Judah, a priestly writer and a person working with the deutero nomos-Moses’ second and valedictory presentation of the law–it felt to many that the scholars were attacking the divine character of the scriptures. Some scholars may have felt their work would/should debunk scripture as well.
About the time that scholars began publishing openly about the documentary hypothesis the Lord brought forth a book that talks in great detail about how scripture is put together, but documentary scholars took no notice of it, and people who did take notice of it didn’t have enough knowledge of textual criticism to see how the book addresses the questions scholars were raising.
The Book of Mormon tells us how prophets are called and receive the command to write, how they validate each others’ revelations, pass the records to the next generation, and how they train that generation, how they condense records, leaving only tantalizing hints of some stories in phrases about being the descendant of a man who “interpreted the writing which was upon the wall of the temple, which was written by the finger of God,” occasionally making editorial comments, but remaining largely anonymous. (Mormon doesn’t introduce himself on the Large Plates of Nephi until almost the end of the record, III Nephi 5:12).
Someone who understands this history of textual transmission can apply it to, say, Richard Elliott Friedman’s idea in Who Wrote the Bible? that a seventh-century prophet took the deuteronomic core Hilkiah found in renovating the temple (II Kings 22:8), expanded it and used it as the beginning of a story he continued in Joshua, Judges, I & II Samuel, and I & II Kings, and recognize in it a familiar spirit neighing low out of the ground, or lowing nigh to the ground.
Marilyn Brown suggests this kind of understanding in The Fires of Jerusalem where it takes Hilkiah 20 years to translate the book into modern Hebrew before he reads it to the king, as though Marilyn is answering scholarly claims that the language of Deuteronomy reflects the Hebrew of the 7th Century BCE rather than that of 700 or 1,000 years earlier.
Similarly, someone reading Robert Alter’s commentary on Deuteronomy in The Five Books of Moses could think about King Benjamin’s valedictory as an example of how a prophet would be able to assemble the whole camp of Israel and get the word out to the whole congregation.
I’ll give another example next month of the tools the Book of Mormon has to address problems of authenticating scripture, then I hope in January to start looking at Jesus’s encounters with the Pharisees.
Your turn.