McKay, Ashurst-McGee, Hauglid, “Producing Ancient Scripture” (Reviewed by Harlow Clark)

Review

Title: Producing Ancient Scripture
Editors: Michael Hubbard McKay, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid
Publisher:
The University of Utah Press
Genre: Scripture Studies
Year Published: 2020
Number of Pages: 544
Binding: Hardback, trade paperback, e-book
ISBN (hardback): 978-60781-743-7
ISBN (paperback): 9781607817383
ISBN (ebook): 9781607817390
Price: $70 (hardback), $45 (paperback), $40 (ebook)

Reviewed by Harlow Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters

Note: Though engrossing, this book is not a quick read. It is the size (7”x10”) and length of a textbook. Therefore, this is part 1 of a multi-part review.

We believe the Bible to be the word of God

In late June of 1970 I walked across the street to Beverly Broadbent’s house, the primary president, and recited these words and about 400 others. It occurs to me now that she surely would not have held me back from graduating Primary if I hadn’t memorized the Articles of Faith, but it was one of the requirements, and I truly wanted to become a deacon and pass the sacrament.

Fifty years later we still believe the Bible to be the word of God, and I still believe it. Make no mistake, the Bible is the bedrock of Christianity.

–Wouldn’t it be more accurate to call it the bedrock scripture of Christianity, with the Atonement as the bedrock?

Sure, but I suspect many other Christians would say, “’Bedrock scripture?’ What other scripture is there?” And I suspect they wouldn’t see a distinction between scripture as a record of the Atonement and scripture as an embodiment of the Atonement.

–What do you mean?

I think it has to do with the idea of sola scriptura, some sense that the Bible contains everything, everything is there so it is sufficient, and it is the sole scripture.

–A little Pauline wordplay?

Else why the vehement rejection of new scripture? Look, if most Christians picked up a book in the bookstore and read “This book is written to convince Jew and Gentile alike that Jesus is the Christ,” they would say, “This looks like it might be worth reading,” as long as it only claims to be a testimony of Jesus, and not a scriptural record.

It feels like the idea of a closed canon is part of the definition of scripture for most Christians, so when we say the Bible is the foundation scripture, we’re not simply saying we have more, we’re talking about a different idea of what scripture is, and we’re also talking about a different conception of God, as someone who doesn’t give a final, complete revelation. It’s all ongoing and never-ending. And yet, we worship the same God and believe in the same Bible.

—That way lies madness, because the next statement will take you back to the beginning, “So why won’t other Christians accept more scripture from the God we all believe in?” And then, if you try to work out a precise definition of the differences, you just end up highlighting them, rather than the things both groups hold in common. And that’s a difficult task because you don’t have a lot of patience with polemic, and polemic is where people hash out definitions and differences.

So, it would be better to sidestep the issue, like the contributors to Producing Ancient Scripture do? Excellent segue.

–It’s not sidestepping the question of what scripture is as much as finding a space where you can talk about how scripture is produced without people becoming concerned that you’re trying to undermine their faith.

 I like that idea of space. One of the first essays, “’Bringing Forth’ the Book of Mormon: Translation as the Reconfiguration of Bodies in Space-Time,” talks about Joseph’s translations as taking place in space and time, and I kept thinking of the time I asked my father if any of his students had ever turned in a perfect paper. “I suppose if it was perfect, they’d be translated.”

“Into what language?” I said, wondering if that was some kind of academic tradition akin to translating opera librettos.

-I’m not even going to say libretti.

Thanks. Then I realized he was drawing an analogy with the city of Enoch, and indeed, Jared Hickman says that kind of translation would have been the primary meaning in Joseph Smith’s time.

Think about Emma’s famous comment “[Joseph] would dictate to me hour after hour; and when returning after meals, or after interruptions, he would at once begin where he had left off, without either seeing the manuscript or having any portion of it read to him. This was a usual thing for him to do. It would have been improbable that a learned man could do this; and, for one so ignorant and unlearned as he was, it was simply impossible.”

We usually pay attention to that last sentence as evidence that Joseph could not have done his work without the help of heaven, but the part about interruptions means his translation was a physical act that happened over time and space, spaces, indeed, because he had to keep moving around to keep the plates safe, and for other reasons. The Latin root, translatus, implies movement from place to place and Hickman cites moving the plates around like that as a literal translation. Of course, Joseph wasn’t the first to do that. The records were passed from keeper to keeper, and Mormon opens his book with Ammaron commanding to him to wait till he’s about twenty-four years old then go to the hill Shim, retrieve the records, and carry them away from the hill.

But The Book of Mormon also talks about translation of people, beginning with Lehi being “carried away in a vision” (1 Nephi 1:8) and Nephi being “caught away in the Spirit of the Lord, yea, into an exceedingly high mountain” (1 Nephi 11:1), and seeing a vision of “a virgin most beautiful and fair above all other virgins” (v.11) being carried away in the spirit “for the space of a time . . . and bearing a child in her arms” (verses 19-20).

–Although Hickman might say that since Mormon didn’t abridge the Small Plates of Nephi, the real beginning of translation in his record is Mosiah 8, where king Limhi asks Ammon if he can translate records, and Ammon says he can’t but knows a seer who can look into interpreters and translate the records. He says that’s the beginning of a narrative arc that ends with the brother of Jared being translated into the presence of the Lord when he asks the Lord to touch the 16 stones with his finger (Ether 3:6-13).

Yes, but there’s a feature of that arc Hickman doesn’t comment on. The story of the 16 stones isn’t part of Mormon’s record. He didn’t include it in his narrative, but it is part of Mosiah’s record, part of the ancient scripture he produced (Mosiah 28:13-17), so the account as we have it is his, assuming Moroni abridged Mosiah’s translation rather than making his own. That is, the arc Hickman mentions is an arc defined by Mosiah’s words and deeds, beginning with a linguistic translation and ending with a physical translation.

–And here’s where you should go back and mention the first essay, Christopher James Blythe’s “’By the Gift and Power of God’: Translation among the Gifts of the Spirit.”

 Yes. It shows a very long history for our sense that the gift of tongues refers more to xenoglossia, the ability to learn and speak foreign languages, than to glossolalia, speaking in an unknown tongue. That is, when we talk about missionaries being blessed to learn languages that’s not a poor substitute for glossolalia, or a redefinition of the gift of tongues, it’s part of a tradition going back at least to the “later middle ages” where visionaries, usually women, were blessed with the ability to speak, read and write Latin as a form of validating their visions (p. 39-40).

–It’s a utilitarian view of spiritual gifts, that they’re given for a purpose, given to help us accomplish certain things.

 True, and Michael Hubbard MacKay touches on that a lot in “Performing the Translation: Character Transcripts and Joseph Smith’s Earliest Translating Practices.” I came away from the first three essays with a deep sense that phrases like “translated by the gift and power of God,” suggest something much stranger to us than phrases coming into Joseph’s mind or Joseph reading them off a rock inside his hat.

MacKay starts with the question of why Joseph made the character transcripts. The answer he suggests is that creating a transcript of characters was part of Joseph’s studying out in his mind how to approach the Book of Mormon translation. He believes Joseph learned from Martin Harris’s visit with professor Anthon that the translation couldn’t be a scholarly translation. It had to come through the gift and power of God, not from the learning of the learned.

-I suppose that’s what Oliver Cowdery learned from his failure to translate. To go back to Hickman’s essay, Joseph had a scribe, he had a body to feed and clothe, and other needs to attend to. He couldn’t do it by himself.

Which brings us to the fourth essay, “Reconfiguring the Archive: Women and the Social Production of the Book of Mormon,” by Amy Easton-Flake and Rachel Cope. The title refers to reconfiguring the archive to include women, to include the people who took care of Joseph’s needs, to include the narratives of people we usually overlook: “Adding forgotten voices to the narrative of the translation of the golden plates and the production of the Book of Mormon reveals the social context of scriptural production and expands the group of those who should be considered part of the creation of Mormonism’s founding scripture” (106).

The essay discusses the roles of 4 women, Lucy Mack Smith, Lucy Harris Harris, Mary Musselman Whitmer and Emma Hale Smith. The section on Lucy Harris Harris is most intriguing, and I want to concentrate on it. But first a word about Lucy Mack Smith’s family history.

Easton-Flake and Cope start with the same observation Richard Bushman makes at the start of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, that Lucy’s book is a family history not a biography of Joseph, Jr., but where Bushman spends considerable time on the family history, they look at the implications of seeing Joseph, Jr. as part of a family rather than as the primary focus of writings about the family.

This is similar to a note I recall from Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippets Avery in the second edition of Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith about a male colleague saying there wasn’t enough about Joseph in it. They replied that a biography of Emma is not primarily a biography of Joseph, and he said he would need to recall a review he had submitted so he could revise it.

The authors’ section on Emma reads like an expansion on this anecdote, examining how Emma has been marginalized in Mormon history, how her contribution was much more important than we often think.

The depreciation of family history is also discussed in the section on Mary Musselman Whitmer. Since the account of Moroni showing Mary the plates is part of Whitmer family history, not the official archive, it’s a neglected part of the witness history for the golden plates.

Similarly, we pay a lot of attention to the printer’s manuscript of the Book of Mormon, but don’t think about the manuscript’s binding and how important it was, so the photograph on page 125 of yarn used in that binding—which David Whitmer said was twined by his mother—is well worth contemplating.

As is the story of Lucy Harris Harris. Easton-Flake and Cope point out that in Lucy Mack Smith’s account when she went to Martin Harris for money to help in the translation work, she approached Lucy first, who offered money without being asked, while her husband initially brushed off the request. They also note that later, when Martin brought her the 116 pages Lucy locked the manuscript in her desk for safe keeping and Martin apparently broke the lock and damaged the desk to get at it and show it to anyone who asked.

How did Martin’s betrayal not only of his covenant with Joseph and God, but his betrayal of Lucy’s pledge to keep the manuscript safe, and his damaging her property, how did all this affect Mary’s faith? Perhaps because Lucy Mack Smith viewed Lucy Harris unfavorably in her history, we have come to see her as the force behind the manuscript’s loss and destruction. I think there’s even a Church-produced film that shows her burning the manuscript. But asking the question posed in the last paragraph clarified a bit of confusion I’ve felt the last several times reading or listening to the Doctrine and Covenants.

In the last part of Section 42, this grammatical construction in verse 88 is typical “And if thy brother or sister offend thee, thou shalt take him or her between him or her and thee alone; and if he or she confess thou shalt be reconciled.” The inclusive pronouns run throughout verses 80-92, so the Lord was aware of the problems caused by the lack of a neutral 3rd person pronoun. So why in Section 10:8 does it say, “And because you have delivered the writings into his hands, behold, wicked men have taken them from you”?

–Meaning if Lucy was the one who stole the manuscript it should say “wicked men and women,” or “a wicked woman,” but it doesn’t. So, you suspect the wording is the Lord’s way of saying Lucy was not behind the loss of the manuscript?

Yes, and if you think of it that way, the question about how Martin’s betrayal of his covenant affected his wife adds deep resonance to phrases like “Ye have broken the hearts of your tender wives, and lost the confidence of your children,” (Jacob 2:35). Seen from that vantage point, the story of Lucy Harris Harris has the makings of a great tragedy if any of our talented playwrights, fiction writers or poets would care to take it on.

Now that’s the end of the first of the book’s 4 sections, and I could stop there,

—How do you know when the dry councilor is halfway through his talk?

 Excellent point, but I really am almost done. Hickman refers several times to Samuel Morris Brown’s “Seeing the Voice of God: The Book of Mormon on Its Own Translation,” so I’ll say a few words about it.

Several years ago, I came across the scholarly precept that the more detailed a prophecy is the more likely it is to have been written after the fact. Nephi’s vision in 1 Nephi 12-14 about the European colonization of the Americas is clearly written by someone who knew how to phrase it so 19th century Americans would recognize the account. Thinking about that, I wondered if Joseph saw the vision Nephi saw and put it into his own words rather than translating Nephi’s words at that point. Or perhaps Joseph saw the same symbols in a different form just as Nephi saw the same symbols in a different form when he asked to see what his father had seen.

Brown takes the idea much further, suggesting that Joseph may have seen the whole Book of Mormon unfold as a panoramic vision, or series of visions through the eyes of the various authors. To develop the idea he looks at panoramic visions throughout the book, including Nephi’s vision and the brother of Jared’s. Brown also considers Moses’ panoramic vision (Moses 1), adding an intriguing observation in a footnote:

Incidentally, this preface thereby solves a famous problem with the Pentateuch: that it describes the death of Moses, its traditional author. In point of fact, Smith may be suggesting, Moses had seen it all himself, in panoramic vision, long before he died. (161, note 102)

Besides being a wonderful insight, this note suggests a theme that runs throughout this part of the book, the limitations of historic and scholarly methods.

And of a closed canon. Don’t forget the limitations of a closed canon.

Same thing, perhaps. A canon is a measuring rod, and if we limit the kinds of measurements we make, limit what’s worth measuring or what measures up, we lose the knowledge those measurements could give us.

 –And if we’re willing to build on the foundation scripture and the foundation science we can add greatly to our knowledge of the unseen world, especially the part that can’t be seen through a microscope.