Isaiah Reads The Book of Mormon, continued
Reading through posts in this series I’m struck by the reticence in some passages. Consider this from last month’s post:
Let me close by giving three brief examples from the Book of Mormon that may have involved the last steward of the record making changes as he transmitted the text from their language into his.
Why not just state it boldly? Partly because we don’t know a lot about how Joseph Smith translated The Book of Mormon. He didn’t say much about it besides affirming that he translated “by the gift and power of God.”
Brant Gardner’s The Gift and the Power: Translating the Book of Mormon starts with a survey of what people who witnessed the translation said about it. He builds a fine synthesis around their statements, drawing on fields as diverse as anthropology and optics–the science of how a seer sees–though Gardner doesn’t say much about the presence of Deutero-Isaiah.
I’ve suggested some explanations, but there’s something I haven’t said and probably ought to. I want to back into it by looking at one of my disappointments when I read scholars. In Jesus, What He Really Said and Did, a young adult abridgment of The Gospel According to Jesus, Stephen Mitchell says,
Sometime later, Peter had an intense feeling or vision that Jesus was alive and well, in some other form or in some other realm of existence (p. 105).
He says this feeling encouraged Peter and he told the others. But there’s nothing in the gospels that suggests the story of the Resurrection started with Peter. All four Gospels affirm that the first reports of the Resurrection came from the women. Mitchell doesn’t acknowledge this in either book, not even to argue against it.
In The Gospel According to Jesus he spends a lot of the introduction to his translation talking about Jesus’s search for the Father–the search of an illegitimate child for a father–as a key to the spiritual experience that transformed him and unlocked the kingdom of God within him. He also talks about Jesus’ rejection of his mother (Mark 3:31-35) as a piece of business largely unfinished till the end of his life, but finally finished.
“John the Evangelist was so convinced of this [reconciliation] that he imagined Mary at the foot of the Cross, and imagined Jesus, in almost his final words, placing her in the care of the “disciple whom he loved” (p. 53), Mitchell says, explaining in a note that “since the disciples scattered after Jesus’s arrest, it is unlikely that any of them witnessed his crucifixion” (p. 91). A few pages later he says John “is describing a scene that has no basis in historical reality, a scene imagined by his very touching piety, out of his desire for it to be true” (p. 61).
Strictly speaking, that a particular setting for a story is unlikely does not imply that the story “has no basis in historical reality.” For example, just because Leutze’s painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware is historically inaccurate doesn’t mean Washington didn’t cross the Delaware.
James E. Faulconer gave a good example in class one day, saying that John placed the cleansing of Temple at the beginning of his Gospel because he saw it as relatively unimportant–or a fitting start to Jesus’ ministry–while Matthew placed it at the end because he thought it was the last provocation of the Jewish authorities, the attack on the Temple that convinced them Jesus had to die.
A day or so after reading Mitchell’s comment about Mary’s care I came to the end of Mahonri Stewart’s Yeshua, a Gospel Play. As if answering Mitchell, Mahonri has Yeshua give Mary’s care over to the Beloved Disciple at the seder. (There are other surprising settings for familiar stories in the play, such as the identity of the disciple who ran away naked–imagine someone who might have grave concerns about tight-fitting clothes after having been wound in some for three or four days.)
This idea that the way scriptural writers arrange the events of a story might have more to do with their rhetorical purpose–with how they want to present the truth–than with strict chronology has application to Isaiah’s visit among the children of Lehi.
I’ve often wondered why Nephi and Jacob choose those particular passages from Isaiah to quote. What was their rhetorical purpose? The usual explanation is that Nephi is quoting passages dealing with the scattering and gathering of the House of Israel, though that’s not immediately apparent in Isaiah 2-14. I’m reading The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (ed. Royal Skousen) now, and when I got to I Nephi 18 it occurred to me that Nephi probably thinks of the journey into the desert as his family’s part in the exile. Up till they build and board the boat the return from exile is possible within their lifetimes.
Once they’ve boarded the boat return becomes a long-term possibility only, so after arriving in the Promised Land Nephi reads chapters about the return to comfort his people–a comfort Jacob repeats 50 years later when he reads his people Zenos’s allegory of scattering and gathering to comfort them.
After a short commentary, Jacob closes his record, then takes it up again several years later to add the story of Sherem, then closes it again, still seeking comfort in his exile, comfort for himself and his people–“a lonesome and a solemn people, wanderers, cast out from Jerusalem, born in tribulation, in a wilderness, and hated of our brethren, which caused wars and contentions; wherefore, we did mourn out our days” (Jacob 7:26).
I said I would back into what I haven’t said yet but ought to through Mitchell, but I didn’t get to where I wanted to go. I ran out of time, but got to a place worth going anyway. At least I hope so, given Joseph B. Wirthlin’s departing admonition to solemn pilgrims wandering the wilderness or the Nevada deserts, “Come what may, and love it.”
While it’s more or less impossible not to view texts through our own critical lenses, it seems to me that some lenses distort more strongly than others.
One of the challenges in reading the Book of Mormon, for me at least, is that having grown up with the book, I’ve become used to reading it more or less ahistorically, or “flatly” as I now think of it. Learning to think about cultural contexts and rhetorical purposes has helped me start seeing some contours in the landscape of the text.
Thanks Jonathan. I’d like to hear more about what you think of as flat reading.
One of my great discoveries has been that non-Mormon or secular scholars aren’t immune to reading through dark, distorted or flat lens. As I mentioned back in the series on Jesus and Pilate it’s common for scholars to see that trial as a fiction created to absolve Rome, but none of the scholars who say so has bothered to analyze the story in depth and wonder why a small group wanting to appease Rome would create a story which says the representative of Rome is either a sadist who likes to execute innocent people or a coward who bows to the demands of a lynch mob.
I’m reading Stephen Mitchell’s The Gospel According to Jesus right now, and though he doesn’t say it, I’ve come to realize that he sees the gospels as products of the early church, not as individual records. This is quite a contrast to The Book of Mormon’s account of record keepers writing in response to a command to keep a record, and I’ve come to see how much the Book of Mormon’s perspective has influenced my ideas about how scripture is produced.
One value of reading things with contrasting approaches is that you can test the approaches against each other and get a feel for the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches, and see what insights the different approaches allow or disallow.