Last month I raised a question, a thought to experiment with, two questions actually. If you knew there was a typographical error in the Book of Mormon that had never been corrected would it shake your faith? Should it?
I concentrated on the first question, heading toward the answer that I didn’t think it would because Latter-day scripture gives us a way to think about imperfect scriptures, to understand that scripture can be imperfect but still true.
In response Th. Jepson sent a brief note to the effect that my posts are so complex that by the time he finishes one he forgets what he was going to say–sort of like J. Golden Kimball as the last speaker in a long conference saying, “My brothers and sisters, I’ve had some mighty good thoughts in this conference, but they’ve all kind of oozed out of me.”
I thought a lot about this. If I’m causing my readers’ thoughts to ooze away what can I change to make a more congenial blog? Slow down? Try to cover less? While I was thinking about that, I realized I had slighted my second question, Should it?
My answer is, “No, errors in scripture should not shake our faith.” But it’s worth thinking about why some people would answer yes, why errors might frighten or disconcert people. Part of the answer is that we approach texts not only with ideas about how texts behave, but about how God behaves through texts.
But I want to approach this in my usual roundabout fashion by talking about a difficult passage I recently came across. In my slow reading of The Jewish Annotated New Testament I finally reached Acts 5 shortly after posting my last column.
Chapter 5 contains that oft-quoted passage where Gamaliel cautions the Sanhedrin about their opposition to this new group of believers:
35 And said unto them, Ye men of Israel, take heed to yourselves what ye intend to do as touching these men. 36 For before these days rose up Theudas, boasting himself to be somebody; to whom a number of men, about four hundred, joined themselves: who was slain; and all, as many as obeyed him, were scattered, and brought to nought. 37 After this man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the taxing, and drew away much people after him: he also perished; and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed. 38 And now I say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: 39 But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God.
–Acts 5:35-39
Like any good commentator, Gary Gilbert glosses the names, so his comment on verse 36 reads:
Theudas, eschatological prophet who in the mid-40s CE gathered a group of followers near the Jordan and was executed under orders of the Roman procurator (p. 209, citing Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 20:97-98).
Wait a minute, I know Acts moves quickly, but 10 years can’t have gone by. We’re still in the mid-30s in this chapter. I wonder what Dummelow has to say?
The mention of this name is the greatest historical difficulty in the Acts. Gamaliel’s speech was delivered 36 A.D. or earlier, but the insurrection of Theudas, according to Josephus, did not take place till some 10 years later (about 46 A.D.): see ‘Antiq.’ xx. 5,1. Perhaps St. Luke alludes to an earlier Theudas, of whom we know nothing (p. 825).
“The greatest historical difficulty in the Acts.” How interesting, but I’m more interested in what Dummelow doesn’t say. Sure there could have been two men named Theudas, just as Jesus had two disciples named after the great national hero Judah Maccabee.
But it’s also possible the name Theudas is a placeholder, that Luke couldn’t remember the name Gamaliel mentioned, but had the recent failure of Theudas’ revolt in his mind and just put down his name.
I chose to look at J. R. Dummelow’s One-Volume Bible Commentary not simply because I found a copy for a dollar in the Pleasant Grove library on 3/3/2009, but because it was one of Talmage’s sources for Jesus the Christ, so it’s more than 100 years old. I wanted to know how a Protestant minister of the late 19th century would approach the question.
It may have occurred to Dummelow that Luke or his source was remembering the wrong name but he didn’t mention it because he didn’t want to upset his readers. But I suspect the thought didn’t occur to Dummelow. If the Bible is the word of God and God is a God of truth and wouldn’t inspire someone to write down something factually inaccurate, the suggestion that Luke got someone’s name wrong could border on blasphemy (cf Simonds Ryder’s apostasy over his name being misspelled in D&C 52:37) .
Latter-day Christians would agree with the first premise, that the Bible is from God, is scripture, and with the second premise, that God is a God of truth, but there’s an enthymeme in the argument that Mormons wouldn’t agree with, at least if we listen to what the Lord says about the nature of scripture in both the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants.
An enthymeme is a missing or omitted premise (more precisely, an argument with an unstated premise), and we usually omit premises when they seem self-evident, so self evident that we don’t even think about them as premises. The missing premise here is that God or the Holy Spirit dictates the content of a passage to the person who is writing it down.
A lot of Mormons would agree with that premise, but if we read Doctrine and Covenants Section 9 we shouldn’t.
We all know the story. Oliver Cowdery wanted to translate the Book of Mormon and was given permission to do so. But he didn’t know how to proceed. Apparently he thought that when he sat at the translation table, or put the seerstone into the hat, or put on the breastplate, or whatever he had seen Joseph do, the translation would come to him. But what gave him that idea?
I was talking about this with my brother Dennis one day and he suggested maybe Joseph told Oliver to expect that. Possibly as a joke? or because Joseph himself didn’t understand fully what was involved?
But there might be another reason. In The Book of Commandments the passage that is now D&C 8:6
Now this is not all thy gift; for you have another gift, which is the gift of Aaron; behold, it has told you many things;
read
the gift of working with the rod
And how did the rod tell Oliver many things? In D&C 8:8 the Lord says,
you shall hold it in your hands, and do marvelous works.
Verse 9 adds,
And, therefore, whatsoever you shall ask me to tell you by that means, that will I grant unto you, and you shall have knowledge concerning it.
So perhaps Oliver thought the translation instruments worked like a divining rod. The Lord told him that wasn’t the case, that he would have to study the translation out, then ask if his choice was correct.
OK, I can hear someone say, it wasn’t dictated, but the Lord told Oliver that if the translation was correct he would receive a confirmation, so presumably Joseph did too, so why would the Lord allow imperfections in a sacred record? Also there’s that lack of symmetry in the 8th Article of Faith,
We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.
which implies that the Book of Mormon is translated correctly, so if there are errors, wouldn’t they count against the book’s authenticity, or against Joseph’s claims as a translator?
We’ll get to that in a roundabout way. First off, the two passages just quoted need to be read in light of passages that begin the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants.
Moroni’s colophon for the Book of Mormon ends with this statement:
And now, if there are faults they are the mistakes of men; wherefore, condemn not the things of God, that ye may be found spotless at the judgment-seat of Christ.
And the introductory section of the Doctrine and Covenants contains this phrase,
Behold, I am God and have spoken it; 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
Thus, both books begin with statements about the imperfection or weakness contained in the text.
And there is a further passage dealing with the mechanics of translation:
In an epistle to the Church on baptism for the dead, dated Sept. 6 1842, Joseph quoted Malachi 4:5-6, then adds a comment
I might have rendered a plainer translation to this, but it is sufficiently plain to suit my purpose as it stands.
–D&C 128:18
That is, if we want a way of thinking about imperfections in scripture we have a way available to us, but too many of us don’t avail ourselves of it. And I’m not talking about lay members, or people who haven’t studied hermeneutics and exegesis, or have no formal education beyond whatever level you want to specify.
But why do you care so much about the imperfection of scripture? I can hear someone say. Shouldn’t we concentrate on what is right about the scriptures and on the bounty of perfection in them? Aren’t you just encouraging people to find fault with the scriptures and giving them a new excuse to disregard the parts they don’t like?
First, as a species we hardly need excuse or encouragement to disregard what we don’t like. Second, if our faith is based on something false, and that thing is proven false, how does that affect faith? It may have little effect, if we change the premises of our faith.
For example, suppose you grew up hearing stories about the wonderful David who slew Goliath, but refused to slay Saul, showing him mercy instead. Then one day you see a film about David. The part about Goliath is ridiculous. Goliath hurls a spear and it lands to David’s left, another to his right, another through his heart. David falls to the ground and lies still for a moment, then stands up, jerks the spear out, gets a stone, puts it in his sling, hurls it and fells Goliath.
Easy to put that silliness down to Hollywood hype, someone’s mistaken notion that you need to gussy up a good story. But something else in the film is deeply troubling. This David who was a man after the Lord’s own heart ends up murdering a man and stealing his wife. This is deeply troubling. Did your primary teachers not know the whole story? Did they withhold this part?
There are a lot of ways you can react, but one of them is to recognize you have a faulty premise, that the truth of the Gospel doesn’t depend on the goodness of individuals, but on God’s goodness. Or maybe the faulty premise is that a person’s later deeds invalidate the earlier ones, making them not worth telling.
But it’s not always so easy to recognize that our ideas are not perfect, or that they’re not well thought out. I don’t follow John Dehlin’s Mormon Stories podcast, (mostly from lack of time) but I’ve heard him a few times on KUER’s talk show, Radio West, heard him enough to feel again an old persisting pain when I heard he was to be tried for his membership. The morning after his excommunication he was on Radio West again. Host Doug Fabrizio asked him at one point why he didn’t just make a clean break with the Church, declare he didn’t believe in the Book of Mormon.
Dehlin said he didn’t feel a wholesale rejection of the Book of Mormon, but had reservations about its claims, such as its mention of horses and steel. I’ve never been convinced there were no horses in the Americas before the Conquistadores did their conquistaing–I’ve never heard someone who made the assertion actually lay out the facts that back it up. But that’s not what caught my ear. It was the word steel.
I suppose Dehlin thought he was simply making a scientific argument, but he was also making an argument about the nature of texts, that a truly ancient text would not have anachronistic elements, and that God would not put them in a sacred text.
But if the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be, a translation, that fact answers the concern about steel not being around in 600 BC. If Joseph Smith was indeed a translator, the question about steel is whether the word was available to him in 1829-30, and what it meant to him. It’s quite possible he was looking for a word to denote some metal or alloy that was not copper, brass, bronze or iron, and steel was sufficient for his purposes.
Does it sound like I’m trying to sidestep the issue? I grew up reading introductions and prefaces. They were common in the books I read and it seemed perfectly natural that my copy of Huckleberry Finn would have an introduction by someone named Lionel Trilling. (I found out later, in Richard Cracroft’s graduate seminar on early 19-Century AmLit, that the prefaces and introductions, like my father and his colleagues in all the colleges at BYU, were part of a massive post-war effort to educate millions of returning GIs.)
And my reading included a fair number of translator’s prefaces and introductions, so I was aware at a fairly young age of the problems and questions translators face. What if you can’t find a word in the new language that has this same meaning, or you can only convey one meaning of a word that carries several? If you’re dealing with an ancient text do you give your translation an archaic flavor or use modern vocabulary and syntax? Do you try for a word-for-word translation, or a paraphrase, or some combination? Do you translate idioms and hope your readers will understand them from context, or do you try to find an idiom in the target language that will convey the same meaning? Some combination of both?
A lot of objections to the Book of Mormon come from not taking it seriously as a translation, unlike Brant Gardner’s The Gift and the Power: Translating the Book of Mormon, which I highly recommend.
But couldn’t the Lord have saved a lot of trouble by just dictating the translation? Maybe, but as my historian cousin Joe Soderborg reminded me in a recent conversation about matters historical, that’s not how agency works. The Lord asks us to be his agents, whether in translating scripture, or teaching, or leading others, or raising children, or conducting our own lives, and then allows us to carry out our agency, with little or no interference–though there may be lots of instruction and correction.
What do you think?
Now that’s a perfect place to end, but since we’re talking about how we think sacred texts behave, let me leave you with one other question.
Introducing the passage I quoted earlier about the Lord working with his agents “in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding,” the Lord says,
Wherefore, I the Lord, knowing the calamity which should come upon the inhabitants of the earth, called upon my servant Joseph Smith, Jun., and spake unto him from heaven, and gave him commandments;
–D&C 1:17
Think about that lovely pun, called upon, but also about the word calamity. Laborers in some parts of the Lord’s vineyard in the early 1800s were laboring under false ideas about sacred texts, including the idea that everything that was to be given had been given, and was in a perfect, unchanging state. Laborers in other parts of the vineyard had been following clues for hundreds of years about how the Bible was composed, about the opposing viewpoints different writers of scripture put forth, and about various imperfections and weaknesses in the manner of the biblical writers’ language.
These clues, when published, would radically alter what we know about scripture and how scriptural texts behave, and would create a crisis, yea a calamity, of faith. Was that one calamity the Father and Son were trying to avert when they came calling on Joseph Smith and enlisted his aid in translating a book that deals in some detail with how sacred texts are transmitted from one generation to the next?
What do you think?
.
At the very least, I’m grateful for a response that makes me laugh.
I remember, in high school, wondering how Handel had come across a Book of Mormon text when working on Messiah. Only to learn that text had been lifted straight from the Bible. I found it startling to say the least. And so I try to be sympathetic when people stumble against aspects of scripture that seem impossible to believe.
On the other hand, how is it we’re raising people to adulthood without the skills to not let a typo shake their faith?
I know that’s not what your post is about, but it is a topic I return to often. It seems vital, now.
Interesting. I grew up knowing it was pulled mostly from Isaiah.
Messiah really has a marvelous libretto, pulled from many different sections of the Bible. The librettist knew it, and complained that Handel’s music really didn’t do it justice. Which goes to show, in my view, that while he may have been a fine librettist, his judgment of music was lousy.
Memory, we have come to know, is fallible. So what if Joseph Smith’s recounting of events from his youth, formalized more than ten years later, got some of the details wrong? What if he misremembered the words, or misremembered dates? We wouldn’t have any issue about this if it were any normal account, recorded after so long. I think, though, that we expect that a revelation should be enough qualitatively different from regular events that for a prophet, the memory would not be subject to the kind of problems to which we know regular mortal memory is liable. If not, how can we rely on it?
Looked at in the abstract, we have few reasons to believe that this must be the case. I think, however, that we tend to think it’s a slippery slope from claiming mortal fallibility for a prophet’s memory to claiming that there’s nothing different or particularly authoritative about a prophet, or scripture, at all.
This is a really fantastic meditation. I appreciate the emphasis on the slipperiness of translation. It’s not a catch-all apology but the BoM as a text makes so much more sense when taken into consideration. And I always like a good re-imagining of scripture as per your ending. Thanks.