So, I knew very little, if anything, about Mormonism. Unfortunately, after reading the Book and doing a bit of research, it appears that I still know little, if anything, about Mormonism.
In essence, what I have gathered is that judging any Mormon or most Mormon denominations today by only and completely the Book of Mormon would be akin to judging Lutheranism by reading only the Old Testament.
However, in sticking with that comparison, one conclusion that is drawn is that just as I, and probably others, are baffled and/or amused and/or disappointed that liberal Lutherans maintain even the OT as holy scripture, I am just as baffled and amused and disappointed that any Mormon could consider any speck of the Book of Mormon to be truth or divinely inspired in any way.
Poor internal logic, clear improvisation, hilarious word choice, and plain not-worthy-of-respect theology.
I was watching a lecture some time ago by a theology professor arguing for the validity and historicity of the Gospels. His argument that the books were written in or near the place where they are set, at (or around) the time that they were set is that they are so accurate. Too accurate to have been made-up by even the most devoted scholars in a another country in the next century. As an example he mentions a text written, in fact, by an individual who lived after and away from the events of Christianity's nativity, a text which attempts to establish a savior-like figure who traveled the land and performed miracle in the recent past (a counterpart to Jesus, essentially) However, the unfamiliarity of the author with the time, geography, and other such leads him to write his character as going to places and talking with people who existed far too long ago, or who have been destroyed or dead for years.
My point is that this latter example is, I think, almost exactly what we see in the Book of Mormon.
Though I'm still not sure exactly how (other the the scared plates being found in NY), Joe Smith's Mormons, or rather, people of Nephi, are a people of pre-Anglo America, having arrived these after traveling in an ark across a large body of water. And so some 90% of the book is set in North or Middle America. Joe then has numerous large cities, roads, various kinds of livestock, gems and metals, significant warfare technology (to the point of plate armor and scimitars), and large and fast-growing populations (apparently having 10 children was normal, though rarely mentioned). His characters talk to or about Christ before Christ was even supposed to have been born (and for this I like to refer to them as "Hipster Christians"), and they cite prophets who, as far as I know, never existed. And if someone could point me to where Moses supposedly prophesied about the coming fo Christ, that's be great.
Even the most basic survey of cultural and/or material archaeology in the Americas begets complete dissonance with the land Smith describes.
Of course there are a number of arguments in the other direction, attempting to show that the existence of God-blessed people in the America's is the only way to explain the internal consistency, turns of phase, and other such facets of the BoM. Interestingly, there is an argument in this direction by well-known author Orson Scott Card, which I plan to address in a more in-depth post later on.
I'll say this much: Card's argument is coming partial from an authorial perspective. As a scholar and writer of fiction, he knows something of what it's like to write a piece of fiction; the work that goes into the setting, establishing a sense of realism in a fictional setting, and how to spot hints, clues, and mannerisms that tend to slip into an author's work which betray the earthly era in which they were written and the nature of the individual writing the book. Part of his argument, then, is that in reading the BoM one comes across few, if any, indicators that book was written in the 1800's by a person such as Smith. And because of this lack of "bias", we should consider the possibility of pre-Christian American authors.
What struck me most about this is that I felt almost exactly the opposite while reading the text. Perhaps unfortunately, I do not say that from a scholarly historical or archaeological point of view. Rather, the feeling arises from a more basic, visceral part of me, which also happens to be something of a writer.
Backing up a bit; I kind of knew, before setting out how to read the book, how it was written. Something about transcription. Possibly I suspected that it was dictated. However, when I started the book, I pictured Smith writing it, so I must not have had an entirely clear idea of how it came to be. However, somewhere over halfway or more of the way through, I began to clearly imagine the text being dictated to a third party as Smith "translated" it. It could not have been more clear to me. It was as though the Book of Mormon inserted a video into my head, crystal clear, of some guy bullshitting while somebody else wrote it down. (Look up how Smith did his translating, and see if you disagree) And I daresay it was more than that. Not only could I envision the scene, the feeling was so strong that I could feel myself in Smith's shoes as the improvisation continued.
I've written fiction stories (not exactly good, mind), most set in some fictional past. I've been doing this since I was a child. Reading the Book of Mormon, seeing Smith improvise in my mind's eye, it was like watching a video of myself as an adolescent, pacing in my room, making up a fictional history. I get this uncanny feeling that, were I raised in similar context as Smith, and went about telling a religious history like the BoM is, it would come out in almost exactly the same style. The repetitive phrasing, the word choices, the manner and timing of information revelation, particular phrases used or chapter arrangement; it all reads perfectly like somebody making something up on the spot. It's not just that the setting seems fictional and the miracles magical, but the text itself reveals improvisation. And not just any kind of improvisation, but spoken improvisation. It begins to read like a transcript. Keep in mind that the supposed ancient authors were writing on plates of brass. Improved speech is very free-form; writing on something permanent and limited is deliberate and conservative. It seems to me that one does not write, sometimes on multiple occasions, "And here I was about to write more of [this-and-that], but the Lord has come to me and deemed that I write no more on this issue" (Not exact quote) or "Behold, I was about to write the names of those who were never to taste of death, but the Lord forbade; therefore I write them not, for they are hid from the world" (3 Nephi 28:25). Those are not written phrases. Those are spoken phrases, backpedaling phrases, spoken by Smith as he was thinking "Crap, I don't know what else to say...umm, I'll just say that it was really awesome and then that's all Lord let me write" or "Crap, I can't think of anymore names. I'll just say the Lord forbade me write them". Agree? Disagree? Maybe some actual texts do have phrases like that. But it seems to me an unlikely, jarring, and somewhat humorous occurrence.
In initial summation, the Book seems to me to have poor internal logic, definite improvision, hilarious word choice, and plain not-worthy-of-respect theology. More on most of those later. And, while I was reading as an atheist, let me be clear that I came to the Book without any intent to disdain. Certainly I knew I would disagree with some of the core ideas, but I was excited to learn about this religion and see what interesting secrets and stories and thoughts would be revealed through the text. I thought I would be reading a serious tome, but all I got was long periods of alternating agonizing dullness and gut-busting humor, culminating in the extreme souring of my desire to ever pick up another religious text.
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