Review
Title: The New Testament: A Translation for Latter-day Saints: A Study Bible
Author: Thomas A. Wayment
Publisher: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University and Deseret Book
Genre: Scripture
Year Published: 2019
Number of Pages: 491
Binding: Paper
ISBN13: 978-1-9443-9467-7
Price: $29.99
Reviewed by Harlow Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters, Feb. 25, 2019
The class was on Elizabethan rhetoric, and our professor had a name suitable to the period, John Webster. One day Dr. Webster read us a short piece from a news magazine about a scientific conference considering how to pass down the knowledge of where used highly radioactive substances were buried, and how dangerous they were. Some highly radioactive substances have a half-life of 5,000 years—roughly the span of recorded civilization—so how do you keep the knowledge alive for that long and that longer?
One idea was to create symbols that would convey danger and place them on markers of some durable material, gold or titanium maybe, to mark nuclear storage sites. Another was to create and pass down a set of myths about the locations that would warn people away. And another idea was to create a nuclear priesthood to pass the knowledge down from generation to generation.
“Don’t let anyone tell you that what you do is not important,” Dr. Webster said, referring I suppose to literary theory and interpretation of texts.
If the class had been at BYU rather than the University of Washington the professor might have drawn a parallel with a similar problem which was indeed resolved by inscribing the knowledge on gold and hiding it away, to be handed down by an angel rather than a class of priests.
That phrase “nuclear priesthood” has fascinated me for more than thirty years, partly because scientists who might never consider themselves religious were turning to the language and role of religion to consider how to pass along highly secular scientific knowledge.
The problems of handing down sacred and secular knowledge are very similar, one being that you never know how future generations will interpret your words. If you were to mythologize nuclear waste, future scholars might say, “When the texts say the fire monster lives for thousands of years, do not go near its lair,” they’re not talking about a living being. The texts are talking about a force that can outlive any civilization. Human anger is such a force. How many wars has anger fed over the tens of thousands of years? We can see that this saying is a warning against anger.”
Or if the knowledge is passed through a nuclear priesthood, people might say, “‘E equals MC squared’ is clearly some kind of incantation or ceremonial language. Listen to how it divides into two sets of 3 syllables. Listen to the rhythm, clearly the rhythm of sacred poetry.”
Or someone might say, “These stories of vast power that must be guarded by the nuclear priesthood were clearly invented by the priests to prop up their power and keep us under subjugation.”
This means part of the task of passing along nuclear knowledge would be passing along enough of the culture that produced the waste that people would have a basis for understanding how that culture produced documents, what the documents meant to them, and how to discern or tease out their intent in producing the documents.
Looking backwards to ancient cultures we run into the same problems. Our knowledge of the past is always incomplete, and new knowledge can affect how we understand the documents they produced.
So our knowledge of the past always depends on translation. Even if we can read ancient languages, there are still words we don’t know, whose meanings we have to guess. And most of us can’t read scripture in the original language–especially if parts of the New Testament represent Greek translations of Aramaic originals which no longer exist.
Because our access to scripture is through translation–cultural or linguistic–it is easy to see the translation that brought the scriptures to us as definitive. A couple of years ago I came across this astonishing statement from one Will Kinney:
“You see, ‘the’ Hebrew and ‘the’ Greek (there is no such animal) is not my final written authority. The English text of the King James Bible is. That is what God has used to convert hundreds of thousands and been translated into hundreds of different languages. It is the English text of the King James Bible that I read every day.”
I don’t imagine the King James Only camp is very large among Protestants, given the five translations I’ve listened to in the last few years, and the several on my shelves that haven’t been recorded, but I suspect there are a fair number of Latter-day Saints who feel the King James translation is the only one authorized for use by members of the Church.
The rationale is quite different, though. As I understand it, the Church’s official use of the KJV has little to do with distrusting modern translations and keeping the canon closed, and lots to do with how deeply the revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants and the translations in The Book of Mormon and The Pearl of Great Price draw on the KJV, and what would be lost if we moved to a different translation.
Also, given that the Church chose a public domain version of the Reina-Valera translation as the basis of its Spanish edition of La Santa Biblia, the public domain of the KJV, at least outside of Britain, is a plus. But the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints could commission a new translation. (There must be 70 scholars who have 70 days to spare.)
One thing that would be very useful in a new translation would be a list of cross-references or rhetorical connections between the Bible and the scriptures Joseph Smith produced and translated. The back cover of Thomas A. Wayment’s new New Testament translation says, “The notes contain the most complete list of cross-references to New Testament passages in the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants that has ever been assembled.”
Here’s one example from the beginning of Mark. Wayment translates Mark 1:2, the first half of Mark’s quote of Isaiah 40:3,
“Behold I send my messenger before you, who will prepare your way for you.”
Wayment’s comment: “The phrase prepare your way is echoed in 1 Nephi 3:7.” That’s Nephi’s oft-quoted declaration that the Lord won’t give a commandment without preparing a way for it to be fulfilled. This means Isaiah’s influence in The Book of Mormon starts right at the beginning, or that already as a teenager Nephi was well acquainted with Isaiah’s language.
As Wayment puts it in “Note to the Reader,” “The notes favor intertextuality, especially with the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants. I have included those references to help the reader see how New Testament texts are engaged, developed, and interpreted in the Book of Mormon, and the Doctrine and Covenants.”
That’s a nonpolemic way of saying that just as the New Testament writers engaged, developed, and interpreted the work of prophets in the Tanakh, so later prophets have engaged, developed, and interpreted their words as part of an open, growing canon.
The concept of canon is so powerful that even Stephen Mitchell, in The Gospel According to Jesus, his attempt to separate out the authentic sayings and deeds, sticks to the canonical Gospels. Mitchell describes himself as an atheist with deep love and admiration for Jesus, so presumably he doesn’t have a doctrinal commitment to the canon, but when he finds sayings in non-canonical sources that he says stand an excellent chance of being authentic he relegates them to the notes.
Wayment doesn’t have any hesitation about the idea that there are authentic words and deeds of Jesus outside the New Testament, but his approach, again, is nonpolemic, informed by a concept of how prophets engage, develop and interpret the words of other prophets. His intertextual approach allows him to examine the matter of authorship in a way that doesn’t challenge the authority of the texts.
In the Author section of his brief preface to I Timothy, Wayment notes that modern scholars question Paul’s authorship of I, II Timothy and Titus for vocabulary and other reasons, noting that, “Bound up with this question of authorship is the question of authority and importance if someone wrote the letters in Paul’s name. In other words, in the modern world, writing in someone else’s name is considered forgery.”
That word forgery is worth a little comment. In Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities lectures for The Teaching Company, he says it’s remarkable that there aren’t more forgeries in Paul’s name, and he starts the book version by looking at various cases of forgery. He doesn’t present an alternative concept (in the lectures at least, perhaps in the book), but there are modern examples of writing in someone else’s name, such as ghostwriting, or speech writing. And if those two activities sound dubious when related to scripture, there is an alternate concept in the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants that can help us understand how a book could be called, say, the Book of Alma and actually be written by someone named Helaman or Mormon.
Handing down the records from one author to another, with at least one author making changes to the words of other record keepers, is a thread running throughout the Book of Mormon. How scripture is made, preserved, and published is also a prominent theme in the Doctrine and Covenants, where the Lord appoints “stewards over the revelations” (D&C 70:3) to oversee the manuscripts and prepare them for publication.
Wayment may have this kind of stewardship in mind when he notes that, though the perspective or vocabulary in the pastoral epistles is not Paul’s, the doctrine feels Pauline. “The reason for this may be that someone gathered Paul’s known writings and composed these on behalf of Paul, or even under his direction. One reasonable solution is to accept them as representations of what Paul counseled Timothy and Titus to do, while noting that he did not likely write them in the same way he wrote his other letters.”
In the notes Wayment also indirectly addresses the objection of the King James Only crowd that there is no fixed Greek text for the New Testament, that translators use a hybrid text gathered from many existing manuscripts and fragments. If there is a phrase that appears in other translations (generally meaning the KJV), but not in his translation, Wayment supplies the phrase in the notes and states briefly why he didn’t use it.
The sub-sub-title for the book is “A Study Bible,” and each book contains an introduction in three short sections. For the Gospels the sections discuss Who Was [Author]?, The Manuscripts, and Structure and Organization. For the others, the sections are Author, Purpose in Writing, and Connection to Latter-day Saint Beliefs.
But while this translation has fine resources for study, the resources aren’t only in the notes. The translation itself is an aid to study. For example, KJV Luke 1:6 reads, “And they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.” Wayment reads, “They were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord, and they were blameless.” As a declarative sentence instead of a single word, blameless, this calls to mind another man who was righteous and upright before God, whose righteousness attracted disaster. And suddenly a familiar passage becomes ominous, a foreboding of Jobean disaster. I wonder if Zechariah and Elizabeth lived to see the disaster that befell their son?
I hope this translation is a sign of more to come from BYU’s Religious Studies Center, maybe a translation of the Tanakh? They could start with Harmonizing Isaiah, Donald W. Parry’s translation of the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran with readings from the Book of Mormon and JST (https://publications.mi.byu.edu/book/harmonizing-isaiah/). So we have two scholars, just need 68 more and 70 days.