Happy Memorial Day. The other Gospel Doctrine teacher mentioned yesterday that we rightly have two days a year to honor the men and women who made our country a world leader, but 52 days a year to make a memorial to the One who created the world (48 if you consider that at stake and general conferences the sacrament is not served–but who’s not counting?)
Suppose you’re a writer and someone comes to you with the following story outline.
A man finds a record and the means to translate it. With the help of a scribe he translates the mansuscript. The scribe’s wife is enthusiastic about the manuscript and offers her help and economic resources, but the finder suspects she wants to gain control of the project and rebuffs her, so she grows increasingly hostile to the project. After the scribe has produced a good quantity of pages he takes them to his wife to demonstrate the finder’s good will. She (or someone) steals the pages and burns them, or arranges a trap. If the finder retranslates the record and the translation is different they’ll use that difference to discredit him. If the translation is the same they’ll alter the stolen manuscript and use the alterations to discredit this man, who, by the way is semi-literate–hence the scribe.
What would you say about this story?
I can imagine Eric Samuelsen, who once posted on AML-List an admonition to Paint Your Characters into a Corner, saying, “You’ve painted him into a fine corner here. How are you going to get him out?”
Margaret Young, who wrote a novel about a man who tries to murder his wife through a priesthood blessing, might ask how the manuscript thieves treat their wives, or slaves, others they have power over. Margaret might point out that creating double binds is a characteristic of abusers, that abuse doesn’t end at the boundaries of a marriage, and the story could broaden out into a critique of the power politics of American culture.
Scott Parkin, with his attention to the technological details of imagined worlds, might ask two questions, When does the story take place? and, How do the thieves intend to publish their findings? He would probably point out that the story has to take place in a time with some kind of effective means of mass communications, like a Chautauqua circuit or camp meetings or newspapers, but not a time that has effective means of photographic reproduction. That is, their plot can’t depend on comparative photographs because they would make obvious the fact that the thieves had altered the manuscript.
Then Scott might say, “Wait a minute, they don’t even have to have the pages, all they have to do is know about them. Suppose the scribe’s wife burns the pages, that wouldn’t stop someone from standing up at a camp meeting with a sheaf of papers in one hand, the published book in the other, and saying, ‘This is what the book says. This is what the original said.’ The same technique would work in a newspaper, a side-by-side comparison of the published work with their alterations.”
Patricia Karamesines, with her concern for language as environment, might point out that when we lay linguistic traps for each other we are polluting the linguistic landscape, but pretending the landscape is undisturbed. That is, we use assumptions we don’t think our audience will question. Indeed, we may not think to question them ourselves, since we’re not often honest when we go about laying traps for each other, so this story is not only about people at enmity with each other it’s about people despoiling their environment.
It’s worth thinking a bit about the unspoken assumptions in the plot, as outlined in Doctrine & Covenants 10.
14 Verily, I say unto you, that I will not suffer that Satan shall accomplish his evil design in this thing.
15 For behold, he has put it into their hearts to get thee to tempt the Lord thy God, in asking to translate it over again.
16 And then, behold, they say and think in their hearts—We will see if God has given him power to translate; if so, he will also give him power again;
17 And if God giveth him power again, or if he translates again, or, in other words, if he bringeth forth the same words, behold, we have the same with us, and we have altered them;
18 Therefore they will not agree, and we will say that he has lied in his words, and that he has no gift, and that he has no power;
19 Therefore we will destroy him, and also the work; and we will do this that we may not be ashamed in the end, and that we may get glory of the world.
First look at the appositives in verse 17 for the phrase “if God giveth him power again.” The first appositive defines power as the ability to translate. The second appositive defines translation as bringing forth the same words repeatedly. Please note that these appositives are not the Lord’s definition of translation. (See v. 14 for whose definition they are.)
We should remember that “power to translate” depends on access to the source you’re translating, and when Joseph talks about the translation coming through “the gift and power of God,” surely physical possession of the record is part of that gift. The gift need not include dictation of the translation to the translator, or the requirement that there is only one correct translation of a passage.
Indeed, in Section 9 the Lord specifically rejects the idea that translation involves having the translation given to you. The story is well known. Most people who have been in the Church long enough to go through the four-year Gospel Doctrine study cycle know how Oliver Cowdery wanted to translate, but it proved too difficult and he went back to scribing. The Lord explained that translation was difficult because Oliver was approaching his task from a false idea of how translation works:
7 Behold, you have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me.
8 But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right.
9 But if it be not right you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have a stupor of thought that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong; therefore, you cannot write that which is sacred save it be given you from me.
10 Now, if you had known this you could have translated; nevertheless, it is not expedient that you should translate now.
We typically broaden this out to instruction about how to receive revelation in general, but when we do we miss an important implication: If the Lord were to give Oliver (or Joseph) the translation it would be His translation, not theirs. Verse 8 suggests one purpose of translation is to teach the translators to look closely at what they are translating, to look closely at scripture, to study it out and understand it.
It’s quite possible that in translating the 116 pages of The Book of Lehi Joseph learned things about the language and scripture that would have changed the phrasing of a retranslation. I’m confident it would have. When I started studying the differences between various editions of the Book of Mormon, it didn’t take me long to understand that Joseph did what any good writer does, he revised his work, but he felt such urgency to get the work published that he waited to do his revisions till it was time to prepare a new edition, that is, till the edition was exhausted.
Some of the revisions are fairly significant. For example, in the first edition 2 Nephi 30:6 reads:
And then shall they rejoice: for they shall know that it is a blessing unto them from the hand of God; and their scales of darkness shall begin to fall from their eyes; and many generations shall not pass away among them, save they shall be a white and a delightsome people (117).
In the third edition Joseph Smith changed it to read “a pure and a delightsome people,” but the change was lost until 1981 because the missionarying Twelve in Britain ran out of copies and typeset a new edition based on the second edition, and later editions were based on the British edition rather than the third edition.
The change is significant because there are only 11 other passages in the Book of Mormon that mention a word we associate with color, like white or black, light or dark, applied to people, or to skin, and if you follow Joseph’s lead and substitute pure or impure in those passages the racial content of the Book of Mormon disappears and you see clearly that Nephite animosity and disdain for Lamanites is based on the idea of apostasy and impurity, not skin color. (See In Tents #4 for a more extensive treatment of this, including the 11 passages)
As Joseph learned and pondered he revised earlier writing to reflect his new understanding.
Wait a minute, Harlow, (I can hear someone saying) are you suggesting that scripture is not literally the voice of God speaking to us through the mouths of prophets? No. If you want to hear the voice of God speaking directly read the Doctrine and Covenants or Leviticus. What I’m suggesting is that in the Book of Mormon, the Book of Moses, and the five chapters from his dictated history of the Church that appear in the Pearl of Great Price Joseph Smith radically redefined scripture–or the Lord gave us a radically different portrait of scripture through Joseph Smith.
The Book of Mormon begins with a commandment to a prophet to write a record of his communications with God, and to retrieve an earlier record. The book traces the history of the record as it is passes from record keeper to record keeper, and we learn at the end that this is not the only record to be passed down through generations of prophets.
In translating and abridging this second record, Moroni replays what Mormon has done and foreshadows what Joseph Smith will do. But even the Jaredite record Ether left for another prophet to find was not the first. We learn from the Book of Moses that Adam was commanded to keep a record of his doings with the Lord, as were Enoch, Noah, Moses, the Brother of Jared, Lehi, Joseph Smith, John the Revelator, and many others.
That is, the picture of scripture that emerges from Joseph Smith’s writings and translations is of a record of direct experience with God, personal experience, not abstract ideas. Even the Doctrine and Covenants, which doesn’t weave the revelations into a narrative thread the way the Torah does, comes in answer to Joseph’s questions to the Lord. It’s a product of experience, and a command to “write the vision.”
I’ll talk more about the implications of scripture as experience later, but consider one example. Somewhere around 1984 Richard Cracroft wrote a dean’s editorial in the BYU College of Humanities newsletter about the joys of literary scholarship, mentioning what it meant to him and Neal Lambert to be able to say they had sought out every account of someone seeing God in upstate New York in the early 1800s and could now draw some conclusions about Joseph Smith’s six different versions of his vision story.
Several years later I read Cracroft and Lambert’s “Historical Form and Literary Understanding” in the Journal of Mormon History, and was discussing it with Michael Lyon (then keeping himself busy as art director for the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley). Their thesis is that in the earliest accounts Joseph was trying to tell his story like a good Methodist would tell it. By 1838 he had found the vocabulary and ideas of Methodism inadequate and he told his story in language that better captured his experience.
Mike replied that we don’t fully understand an experience at first, and it may take years of pondering before we do.
Years of pondering later my brother Dennis gave me a wonderful example when he pointed out the similarity between Joseph Smith’s First Vision and Jacob’s wrestle at Penuel. Both went to pray, both were attacked by a being bent on destroying them, and both were delivered by God. “I think Jacob mistook his deliverer for his attacker,” Dennis said. Or maybe the account in Genesis 32 represents Jacob’s early version, before he fully understood what had happened, and later writers favored it over Jacob’s later accounts because the idea of wrestling with and defeating God is so intriguing and dramatic.
Experience as scripture and scripture as experience. What think ye?
Of course, the idea of scripture as a history of prophetic interactions with God also appears in the Bible, New Testament and Old Testament both. As does another scriptural genre you’ve not mentioned here: that is, religious teaching by a prophet or spiritual leader, which (again) is by implication in the prophet’s own words, not those of God. (Though I’m unsure if that latter genre appears in the Old Testament, or the New Testament only, biblically speaking.).
For that matter, “wrestling with an angel” itself provides a vivid metaphor for the process of writing, and perhaps especially for the process of writing words in which one attempts to reflect the voice and will of God.
I think Proverbs and Ecclesiastes might qualify in the latter genre; surely they are as easy to follow as any of Paul’s letters, if not more so.
Thanks for your comment , Jonathan. It fits nicely with the Mormon sense that all the doctrines of the Restored Gospel can be found in the Bible if you know what to look for. And I suspect not a lot of adherents to the Abrahamic religions would object to the general sentiment that scripture is a record of human encounters with the divine, and divine instructions to us.
But if you asked those same adherents for a general definition of scripture it would be something more like, “The word of God.” A lot of Mormons would say the same thing, since Father Abraham’s children share a common vocabulary and sensibility to some extent.
But for a great many the words carry assumptions we don’t usually think about. The, the one and only, no more additions to the canon. Word, from God’s mouth to the prophet’s ear, independent of the prophet’s sensibility. Of, belonging to, sacrosanct, no additions or subtractions, God, perfect, whole, complete, so the word of God is perfect, whole, complete.
That is, the concept of scripture, for most of the Abrahamic religions, is deeply tied to the past, to events long past that have enough relevance for the present that there is no need to repeat them.
In contrast, the first section of the Doctrine & Covenants contains a statement about scripture being given to prophets after the manner of their weakness, not as whole. perfect. or complete documents, and the second section is a quote from scripture but a little different from how it reads in the Bible.
I’ll talk more about this in my next post.