If you ask the Duckduck to go find the phrase “corrupt and designing priests have committed many errors” the third source that comes up is from Yahoo! Answers, to the question, “Is the bible truly corrupted as the Mormons will have us believe?”
The answer voted Best Answer, from Smarty Bear, says:
The mormons believe Satan’s lie that we humans can become gods. The Bible teaches that we deserve to die for the sins we’ve committed against God, but there is still a way to heaven and that is through Jesus Christ. Despite what any moron… sorry mormon says.
If I were to respond in kind I would say any moron can see that the answer doesn’t answer the question, but answering in kind is not usually very useful. Still, the question does deserve an answer, and it raises its own question. What does the questioner mean by the word corrupted? In the world of textual scholarship the word has a specific meaning akin to #3 for the adjective corrupt on dictionary.com, “made inferior by errors or alterations, as a text.”
When I hear of a corrupt text I think of a masters thesis I came across in the University of Washington’s Suzallo library, Husbandry, which ends with a translation of Beowulf, lines 2200-2323, after Fr. Klaeber’s text. After about 27 lines, the translator, Dennis Clark, puts several colons in one line and a string of periods in several others, with a note in the margin, “here the text is corrupt” (which may be Dennis’s note or Fr. Klaeber’s).
This sense of corrupt carries no moral connotation, and if that’s the meaning of the question It’s fairly easy to demonstrate some degree of corruption in the text. For example Numbers 1:14 reads “Eliasaph the son of Deuel,” while 2:14 reads “Eliasaph the son of Reuel.”
Commenting on 2:14 in The Five Books of Moses, Robert Alter says,
“The letters indicating _d_ and _r_ are similar in form and hence there are sometimes scribal errors in transcribing them. The more likely form is Reuel” (690).
Or consider Numbers 10:33. Alter’s translation reads,
And they journeyed on from the mountain of the Lord a three days’ march, with the Ark of the Lord’s Covenant journeying before them a three day’s march to scout for a resting place for them.
And his commentary reads,
Though the Ark was to lead the way, this three days’ distance is baffling, for in that case the Ark would not have been visible to the people who were supposed to follow it. A common scholarly solution to the problem is to see the second occurrence of “a three days’ march” as an inadvertent scribal repetition (dittography) of the first.
KJV solves the problem this way, “went before them in the three days’ journey,” Moffatt cuts the second phrase, and New English Bible has “a day’s journey,” which would still put the ark out of sight of the people following it.
It’s also easy to demonstrate that we don’t quite know what a passage means. Alter regularly points out obscure phrases, or words that occur only in one passage. For example, in Numbers 22:32 the angel says to Balaam, “for the road plunged before me.” Alter says “The reader should be warned that no one really know what this phrase means,” because the verb only occurs here and in Job 16:11, which may not be the same verb.
Of course corrupted also has another meaning suggesting that the text is unreliable, won’t guide us well. Mormons do not believe the Bible is corrupted in that sense. As M. Russell Ballard pointed out in 2007 the Bible inspired Joseph Smith to go ask of God, inspired many revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price, and contains hundreds more pages than all other scriptures combined. We have as profound a respect for the Bible as any culture.
And yet, I remember when we studied Elder Ballard’s talk in Elders Quorum. The instructor duly brought up the points and acknowledged them, then said words to the effect of, “of course, we know we should really be concentrating on the Book of Mormon,” leaving me with the impression that he thought Elder Ballard was simply making a gesture towards Protestants who scold Mormons for having insufficient respect for the Bible, that he was saying, ‘I acknowledge Elder Ballard’s gesture, but we know what’s really important.’
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard something like that. Towards the end of my mission, probably in early 1979, a companion told me he didn’t like to read the Bible because he didn’t like reading scriptures that were damaged an incomplete.
I asked about severely abridged texts, but that’s different.
My companion’s comment, and the Elders Quorum instructor’s, remind me of a phrase I came across in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, “replacement theology,” the idea that the Jews rejected Jesus and have been replaced in the Abrahamic covenant by Christians (xii). The replacement theology in their comments is the idea that the Book of Mormon has replaced the Bible just as Mormons have replaced apostate Christianity as God’s people.
However, Mormonism doesn’t have a replacement theology. The theo logos of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the logos of restoration, not the logos of replacement or displacement.
Consider the full quote our questioner was asking about. It comes from Willard Richards’ report of a talk “preached at the stand east of the Temple,” Sunday, Oct. 15, 1843. Joseph begins by talking about the government’s failure to protect the civil rights guaranteed by the Constitution, then talks about the failure of Christian creeds to allow us access to God:
I cannot believe in any of the creeds of the different denominations, because they all have some things in them I cannot subscribe to, though all of them have some truth. I want to come up into the presence of God, and learn all things; but the creeds set up stakes, and say, ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further’; which I cannot subscribe to.
Then he moves to talk about a consequence of having stakes set up to say ‘Hitherto shalt thou come and no further.’
I believe the Bible as it read when it came from the pen of the original writers. Ignorant translators, careless transcribers, or designing and corrupt priests have committed many errors (CHC 6:56-59, reprinted in TPJS 326-329).
There’s nothing there about the Bible having ceased to be scripture, or about The Book of Mormon having replaced the Bible. If anything Joseph is setting out the need for restoration. But there’s something more important about the quote, something we forget. Joseph was speaking from personal experience with people who set out to alter scripture for their own purposes and gain.
D&C 3, which introduces the story of the stolen 116 manuscript pages begins, “The works, and the designs, and purposes of God cannot be frustrated, neither can they come to naught.”
Section 10 details the reason the “purposes of God cannot be frustrated.” God built a backup plan into the records Joseph was working with long before Joseph worked with them. The story is well known how the Lord inspired Mormon to append a smaller record to his record, a smaller record with the same information found in the lost Book of Lehi, but we probably don’t appreciate the irony involved in that appendix.
It ends with an extended, detailed account of how scripture is written and passed from one generation of record keepers to the other. The books of Enos, Jarom, Omni, and the Words of Mormon all deal with passing down scripture. Even the writers who only make cursory entries still obey the command to record and pass along. We see scripture being created and passed along for several generations. There is nothing in the books about scripture being dictated. Rather, they paint a picture of people recording their testimonies and experiences in response to divine command.
That picture of scriptural production and transmission has a lot to do with the Mormon concept of scripture. Here’s another component. Yesterday I was listening to the other Gospel Doctrine teacher talk about Jesus healing the man born blind, and one class member pointed out that there are a lot of miracles we only know about because they took place on the Sabbath, and someone objected to that fact, and the objection got recorded.
I wrote a note, “That’s a very Mormon view of scripture, that it’s incomplete–sometimes by design.”
Sometimes the design is to severely abridge existing records so people can get some sense of the vast richness of experience that went into creating the scripture. John ends his gospel on a wistful note about how much he couldn’t include, and Mormon–who had more space than John–makes the comment about severe abridgment several times.
But sometimes there are other designs at work in the incompleteness of scripture. Consider this passage from III Nephi 23
9 Verily I say unto you, I commanded my servant Samuel, the Lamanite, that he should testify unto this people, that at the day that the Father should glorify his name in me that there were many saints who should arise from the dead, and should appear unto many, and should minister unto them. And he said unto them: Was it not so?
10 And his disciples answered him and said: Yea, Lord, Samuel did prophesy according to thy words, and they were all fulfilled.
11 And Jesus said unto them: How be it that ye have not written this thing, that many saints did arise and appear unto many and did minister unto them?
12 And it came to pass that Nephi remembered that this thing had not been written.
13 And it came to pass that Jesus commanded that it should be written; therefore it was written according as he commanded.
Eugene England suggested in one of his essays that the omission was deliberate and involved the whole prophecy of Samuel the Lamanite. Because he was a Lamanite. And the Nephites didn’t want to preserve his words.
But the purposes of God in having those words spoken and recorded could not be frustrated. And if we’re going to talk about a Mormon view of scripture, and how we expect scripture behaves, that inability to be frustrated, that ability to fulfill purpose, is a very good place to start.
Your turn (if comments have been turned back on)
Valuable and well-stated points. In the Mormon view, scripture is subject to mortal filters of various kinds (though we don’t consistently apply that to texts other than the Bible). And in the Mormon view, the need for new scripture doesn’t undercut the value of existing scripture.
An idea that occurred to me in gospel doctrine class the idea other day is that one of the reasons for the need for continuing revelation is so that each successive generation can be called to repentance for their own specific actions. Even if (as is usually the case) their sins are not all that different from the sins of generations previous, still there is a need for that renewed and tailored witness. And I suspect the same is true of other, more positive things as well, such as the testimony of Christ. From this perspective, ongoing revelation is actually a witness of the value of the scriptures, not a move to replace them.