Book of Mormon Studies Podcast: Mosiah Text with Nicholas Frederick

Rosalynde Welch: Hello and welcome to the Maxwell Institute Book of Mormon Studies Podcast. I am Rosalynde Welch and I'm here today with my guest, Dr. Nick Frederick. Nick is an associate professor in the Department of Ancient Scripture here at BYU and his primary area of research is really fascinating and really important. It's intertextuality between the New Testament and the Book of Mormon. That is, the ways that these two books of scripture share language between the two of them. So we're delighted to have you with us today. Nick, welcome to the podcast.

Nicholas Frederick: Thanks Rosalynde, appreciate you having me on.

Welch: Well, we're discussing today the text of the Book of Mosiah. So we are moving right along through the Book of Mormon. And by now, our listeners may sort of understand the rhythm that we're going for here. But this first episode on the Book of Mosiah will be focused on the text itself. Now, we won't be walking verse by verse or chapter by chapter through the entire 20 –how many, 29 chapters? Yeah, of the Book of Mosiah. That would take a long time. But we will be trying to provide an introduction and sensitize our listeners to the important contexts and frameworks and themes that they can have their eye out for as they're reading on their own through the Book of Mosiah and hopefully will enrich your understanding and your enjoyment of the book. So with that in mind, Dr. Frederick, help us know what sort of context we should consider before we even read a word here in the Book of Mosiah.

Frederick: Mosiah is fascinating because it's really a transition chapter in the Book of Mormon. We're coming out of the small plates and then we have this kind of bridge with the words of Mormon and then we just jump right into the Book of Mosiah, which is the first thing we have as far as the large plates go. So it's our first chance to really engage Mormon as an author, as an abridger, to get a chance to see what he cares about what kind of his agenda is as far as constructing a narrative. And just to kind of compare what we've seen in the small plates, what we've been spending on for quite a while here, and then we see this kind of different take on things, a different kind of author that we get to work with, with the figure of Mormon.

Welch: Yeah, yeah, it has a different feel, doesn't it? We've sort of gotten used to, in the small plates, this sort of first-person sense that we're seeing things from a very distinct first-person perspective. I, Nephi, I, Jacob, all the way through the multiple authors in the Book of Omni, and now suddenly we're largely in a third-person perspective, that is Mormon, most of the time stays invisible behind the language. He will embed particular documents into his history, right? So we might hear for a short period of time a first-person perspective, for instance, in King Benjamin's address or in the record of Zeniff. And every once in a while, Mormon himself will step out from behind the curtains and speak in his own voice. But for the most part, we're in a more observational kind of third person feel here in the book of Mosiah, right?

Frederick: Yeah, and the stage feels bigger as well. I mean, when the first person, you're kind of limited to what that writer, what that author wants to reveal to you. And now with Mormon, it just feels like the scope is a little bigger, the stage is bigger, we have more characters on our narrative rather than just kind of one author's musings, right? Or kind of in the case of Omni-Several, just kind of passing it back and forth. Now it's like we have an entire cast, right? That's set out before us of these characters and Mormon's going to kind of go out of his way to show us how he feels about those characters and their kind of role in the narrative.

Welch: Yeah, that's right. So there's been, notably in the small plates that we've just been reading, there's been an absence of history. History just kind of shows up on the margins because the small plates, of course, were intended to be dedicated to the things of the ministry and the prophecies. So we have to infer kind of the history of the Nephite people throughout these years. And the writers will give us a glimpse here and there, but there's a lot that's missing. But from what we can infer, tell me if I've got this right, Nick, is that the last writer of The Small Plates, Amalekai, appears to have had no, he says that he has no seed, he has no sons, and he might've given it to his brother because we saw a transfer from brother to brother in The Small Plates, but his brother has left on the expedition led by Zeniff to go try to reclaim the land of Lehi-Nephi. So Amalekai has no one to pass the plates to. So it is because of that he then takes the records and gives them to the current king who is Benjamin. They have made the migration over to Zarahemla and Benjamin has worked to kind of solidify the place of the Nephite people in Zarahemla among the Mulekites and make it safe, expel the Lamanites. And there's a moment –we can sort of enter in a moment of relative stability. And it's at this moment that Amalekai has given the small plates to Benjamin. They've concluded the small plates. And now we're switching over to the large plates and the royal record, but we're seeing this consolidation of records--that actually will be a theme that we see throughout the Book of Mosiah. Do I have all that right?

Frederick: Yeah, and this is kind of one of those places where maybe four words you've never, or five words you maybe never heard before, but thank goodness for the Book of Omni. Right? I mean, if it wasn't for Omni, because we seem to have a, there seems to be something missing here. And so this is where the 116 pages in that story comes into play. It seems that the 116 pages encompass everything from, you know, Mormon's large plates from the Book of Lehi, up through the reign of King Mosiah, if we look at the printer's manuscript of the Book of Mormon, it seems that what we have as chapter one in our modern Book of Mormon was originally chapter three of the Book of Mosiah. And those are the original chapter breaks, which are much longer than our modern chapter breaks. And so we're missing a large gap of information here. Everywhere else in the Book of Mormon, when Mormon abridges a book, there's an italicized heading that opens that book.

There is not one of those for the Book of Mosiah. And so either Mormon was kind of wanting to open things in medius race, right, and kind of just drop us right in the middle of things, or the 116 pages included the beginning of Benjamin's reign and probably Mosiah's reign, Mosiah the first. And so Omni gives us these critical glimpses of this migration out of the land of Nephi and the, you know, being inspired to take this group with them and then this really curious story of this presumably ragtag group of Nephite refugees who somehow find themselves in a position of power and prominence in the land of Zarahemla amongst the Mulekites.

And so if it wasn't for Omni, I mean, we would just all of a sudden, we'd be going from a group of Nephites living in the land of Nephite, all of a sudden, a whole new cast of characters living in land of Zarahemla, we'd have no idea what was going on. And so Omni really becomes critical to understanding this, this kind of hinge point in the Book of Mormon story.

Welch: Yeah, that's right. So that's a good summary of sort of the political and historical context. Well let's now move on to thinking about the structure of the Book of Mosiah as a whole. And this is, I enjoy thinking about how Mormon made deliberate choices to put together this history. And there's something to be learned, even when he doesn't sort of explicitly tell us, this is how I'm putting it together and this is why, oftentimes there can be things that we learn when we take a step back and try to look at how the content of an entire book is put together. So walk us through here the structure of the Book of Mosiah.

Frederick: Well, if only it was that easy. Part of this, again, is complicated by the fact that we seem to be missing the first chunk of it. Right? And so it's kind of it's hard to piece together. I mean, you get something like Alma, right, breaks very cleanly into pieces because we can see the whole scope of the book. And so we're kind of lost to or kind of left to wonder what those initial chapters in Mosiah may have looked like and how they may have affected any kind of structure that Mormon's going for. But I think we can at least identify four kind of crucial parts of the book. I mean these first six chapters, right, we’re in Zarahemla with King Benjamin giving this speech. Then beginning in chapter seven, our attention diverts up to the land of Nephi. One of the peculiarities, right, of the Book of Mormon is you always go up to the land of Nephi, even though it's in the south, right, and you always go down to Zarahemla. And so suggesting elevation –perhaps one of the reasons why people were so eager to return to the land of Nephi was it may have just been a nicer climate. But we shift gears to this new scene, right? What's going on in the land of Nephi, and that takes us through about chapter 17 or so.

Then I think our third phase is attempts to return to the land of Zarahemla. We see Limhi's party and we see Alma's party, right? And then we also see this group of Amulonites, okay, having their kind of sway as they develop as well.

And then this fourth section seems to be events in the land of Zarahemla as we try to consolidate these different groups. And so I kind of see a structure based on where we're at and where we're going geographically.

Welch: Yeah, yeah, that's really helpful. And it gets complicated. Some of the most complex plotting, I think, in the entire Book of Mormon happens in this account of the Nephite colony in the land of Nephi. There's so many different groups that are all moving around and very complex happenings. So it can be a challenge just to keep track of where we are. On top of that, Mormon's, again, his historical method of including primary records when possible means that we have some flashbacks, right?

So we read King Benjamin's sermon, but then we have to flashback to the beginning of the history of the people who followed Zeniff to the land of Nephi. So the result is that it can seem like King Benjamin gave his address before Abinadi was speaking to the priests of King Noah, but likely it was actually the reverse in terms of chronological order. So it can be tricky temporally to keep track of where we are in time.

Frederick: And this is where Mormon, I think, really shows his expertise as an abridger. He's able to balance all of these timelines, all these different records, and put them together in a way that while it feels, on a first time reading through, it feels a little bit disorienting, right? Once you familiarize yourself with it, it actually makes a lot of sense the way that he does it. But this isn't just somebody who's just, yeah, here's a record and I'm abridging it, here's a record and I'm abridging it. He's put thought, he's put care into this, right, as he organizes this record.

Welch: Yeah, yeah, and a remarkable achievement, as you say, that he never drops a ball and he manages to bring all the threads together. And I think he does it in this complex way, perhaps for kind of spiritual purposes. He pops out at least once in this book to tell us, to give us a little comment on what's about to happen to Alma's people as they're about to be subjugated to the Lamanites. And he says, the Lord does this to chasten his people, he's going to deliver them. So you can see that he has a kind of theological or spiritual vision that's also organizing his historical practice here.

And for me, I see sort of three high points in the book. And you tell me if you agree with this or you see it differently. So the beginning, of course, King Benjamin's sermon and the way that he teaches his people and brings them to make a covenant with God and take upon them the name of Christ and become sons and daughters of Christ.

Then in the middle, we have Alma's foundation of the Church of God or the Church of Christ and the baptism at the waters of Mormon and the great joy and clapping of hands and the sort of spiritual enthusiasm that they feel at that moment of baptism. And of course, it's beautiful to see the way that small community comes together and grows.

And then at the end of the book in chapter 27, we have the conversion of Alma the Younger, in which he himself, on an individual basis, experiences a kind of new birth in the way that Benjamin's people had collectively at the beginning of the book. So we can kind of move through those three spiritual high points where we see people changed by knowing Christ and changed by committing to Him and covenant-ing with Him and changing their lives.

And you know, whether or not something was –likely, we know that something probably was cut off from the beginning of the Book of Mosiah. Nevertheless, what we have now makes a kind of nice beginning, book-ended beginning and ending. Scholars will often talk about an inclusio, which is a structure where the beginning and end of a portion of scriptural text will be marked by a parallel, right? The same theme or the same idea will appear at the beginning and the end. So you can sort of tell where the divisions in the text should occur.

And so here in what we have as Mosiah one, we see Benjamin teaching his son about the records and conferring the kingdom on his son Mosiah. And then at the very end of the book, we see the end of the kingship, right? And we see Mosiah transferring those records and artifacts to Alma. So we have a nice kind of coming full circle where the custody of the plates and the artifacts is squared away and we see the end to the story of Nephite kingship.

Frederick: Yeah, that's nice. And it almost makes me wonder if Benjamin's story is kind of a foreshadowing of a sort. I mean, Benjamin's story makes it seem so easy that he can take this, this Mulekite Nephite group that in words of Mormon, it apparently been a fair amount of tension. And by the time we get to chapter five, I mean, they're all ready to make a covenant. All right.

And then the next several chapters are about other communities that are also trying to be unified but are struggling to find, to ease that tension and find that unification. And it's almost like Mormon saying, I showed you how it was done initially, and now we're gonna look at some of the complications that keep it from happening, and then we'll tie it all together right in the end. And so it's almost like Benjamin's, kind of the faith or the trust in what Benjamin is doing is gonna be a through line as we explore these other communities that are struggling.

Welch: Yeah, exactly. It's sort of case studies, right? He uses these as case studies in what does it mean to be in community in Christ. Again, this has been since Lehi's dream where we see Lehi partaking of the fruit and then turning immediately to find his family. This is always the question. How do we move from individual experience of Christ to come together as a church and as a body of Christ?

Well, let's talk about some of the characters. Moving, as we've been talking about, from the small plates to the large plates, there is suddenly this explosion of characters. We had a very limited small cast of people in the small plates, and suddenly we have a whole bunch of names, a whole bunch of people, many of them probably quite familiar to our listeners. If you've read the Book of Mormon once or twice, a lot of these names, you're gonna know these characters. Who are some of the key figures to keep our eye on through the book of Mosiah?

Frederick: Yeah, it's almost overwhelming, right, in a way that if you've just gone to the small plates and now you get here, it's just character after character and characters with color to them, right? You have a righteous king in the form of Benjamin who's contrasted with a wicked king, right, in the form of Noah. And so Mormon seems to kind of set those two apart as contrasting figures that we're supposed to use as points of comparison.

And so Benjamin, you've got Noah, you've got Zeniff , who describes himself as overzealous, but this is weird because I don't think anybody actually is overzealous. Whatever describes themselves as overzealous. And so, this explorer who's desirous to reclaim the land of Nephi, and we see his story emerge, and he of course turns things over to Noah, and there's a succession crisis there that perhaps is meant to parallel the succession crisis that potentially could happen up in Zarahemla.

So we have these three kings in Zarahemla, Mosiah, Benjamin, and Mosiah, and then three kings in the land of Nephi with Zeniff and Noah, and then Limhi, his son. Then in the midst of that, we're going to meet a fellow by the name of Abinadi who's going to give one of the most remarkable sermons on Jesus Christ in the entire Book of Mormon to King Noah and his court, which is going to spark the conversion of Alma, right, and lead to the formation of this church.

And I think that's, then toward the end of the book, we'll meet Alma's son, Alma the Younger, who in kind of a Paul-like story begins as something of an opponent to the Nephite Christian church, but finds himself going on to becoming, arguably, the major figure, the major Nephite figure for the rest of the Book of Mormon. I mean, he, what he accomplishes as kind of the protagonist in the book of Alma, right, in preaching the gospel, in establishing the Nephites, in just missionary efforts. I mean, his story, right, is pretty remarkable. But we see the beginning of that, his conversion story, comes along right at the end. And so those are kind of our major figures.

Rosalynde: Yeah, yeah, that's so helpful. I was really struck, I kind of, one of the joys of reading the Book of Mormon again and again is that I feel like you get more insight into the people. At first, you're kind of mastering just the events, right? Once you have sort of mastered the events, I feel like then you can start understanding the characters better. And this time through, as I was reading, I was really struck by the character of Limhi. And I think I recognized his wisdom, goodness and appreciated that more than I had before.

In particular, I was really struck by his restraint in his dealings with the Lamanites. There were a couple of occasions where he could have sought revenge. I'm thinking in particular about when the Lamanites approached his people thinking that they are the ones who had kidnapped their daughters, right, their daughters. And rather than going out with arms blazing, with the assistance of Gideon, they counsel together and they decide to seek understanding. And they, in sort of a preview of what we'll see with the Anti-Nephi-Lehi's, he leads his people out unarmed to meet the Lamanite army. And indeed the Lamanite army is moved with compassion. I think that shows tremendous courage and tremendous wisdom and restraint in Limhi. So I was really impressed with him this time through.

Frederick: Yeah, that's nicely said and it makes me wonder if one of Mormon's kind of sub-themes here is parents and children, right? Because we see, I mean, Limhi is the son of the most notorious of the kings here, which is Noah, who was himself the son of a man who seems to be a righteous king, right? Zeneph. And of course, then we have Mosiah and Benjamin and Mosiah and Alma the elder and Alma the younger. We have this parent and child relationships that in some cases turn out well, right? In the case of Mosiah and Benjamin and Mosiah, in other cases it's more complicated, whether that child ends up being King Noah or whether that child ends up being the rebellious Alma the Younger, but at the same time of the effort of a parent to pray and to hope that child may see the light, of course, comes to fruition.

Welch: Great, well, let's move on to one of my favorite parts of these introductions that we provide to the text and that is looking at the different literary or textual forms that we might see in the Book of Mosiah. I'm a former English major. I love to pay attention to different kinds of writing, and different kinds of writing invite us to read them differently. So it's important to pay attention to, you know, what the –how the choices that Mormon is making as he puts this together from a literary perspective. So walk us through any literary forms that you've noted in the Book of Messiah.

Frederick: Yeah, I mean, there's definitely, again, it's another thing where Mormon shows his, just his sure hand as an author, as abridger here. We have a, we just have a large variety of literary forms, as you say. I mean, we have these two lengthy rhetorical masterpieces in the form of King Benjamin's speech, then aAbinadi’s, sermon about Jesus Christ.

We have a couple of embedded documents. Beginning in Mosiah 9, going through Mosiah 10, we have this history of Zeniff preserved, in his own language, his own words, as if Mormon is just inscribing what Zeniff himself had said on the plates. And so it gives us some insight into the man himself. Then at the very end of the book, we'll have Mosiah the second, his proclamation to the people.

And so again, we get a chance to see Mosiah in his own words. So we get those kind of embedded documents there. Then we have some lengthy quotations. We have an encounter between Abinadi and the priests of Noah. The priests of Noah begin with a quotation from Isaiah 52, and Abinadi kind of pushes back with a quotation from the Book of Exodus on the Ten Commandments. Then this beautiful, brilliant exposition on Isaiah 53.

He quotes the entirety of Isaiah 53 in chapter 14 and then breaks it down for us in Mosiah 15. And so we start to see kind of the role of the brass plates, the scriptural text, right, in the minds of the Nephites at this point.

And then we have a couple nice intertextual nods, right, for example, the kind of violent abduction of the young Lamanite girls by the priests of Amulon, or by Amulon and the priests of Noah, rather, of course brings to mind the violent events at the end of the Book of Judges, where we see the same thing by the tribe of Benjamin after they are almost exterminated by the Israelites. And of course, the moral of that story was, this is what society looks like when you don't have a king. And so, it's a nice move on Mormon's part to bring that story into a book, the Book of Mosiah. That seems to be about this is what good kings look like and this is what bad kings look like.

Welch: Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about, again, this big word, intertextuality, which is your field of study. And it's where you'll see either a big piece or even just a small piece of language that comes from another text and it is reproduced, it shows up in the text that you're reading here. So inter-textual, right? You have the same language that moves between different texts.

And sometimes it's just a simple quotation, but from what you just said, do you think it's right if we come across a place where we notice this and we say, oh yeah, I recognize this from the New Testament or this sounds like something in the book of Judges? Is it a safe bet that we can not only recognize the language, but bring the themes to bear as well? Almost like a hyperlink, right? It sort of invites you to import the religious ideas and themes from the other text into this text when the language itself is used. Is that fair or is that going too far?

Frederick: Yeah, I'm going to steal that from you if you don't mind the hyperlink reference. That's pretty good. I think that's exactly right. I think part of the beauty, part of the complexity of the Book of Mormon is the way it works hand in hand with the Bible and that it acts as kind of a second witness of the biblical story, right? This is how God interacts with his people. And I think those kinds of allusions, those moves on the part of the Book of Mormon authors are intentional to say, here's how our story is interacting. Right, with the Israelite story. And sometimes there'll be similarities, and sometimes there'll be differences. But it's kind of incumbent upon us as readers to be willing to interrogate the text and ask those questions and look for those places where the Book of Mormon seems to be saying, pointing us towards the Bible, saying, there's an important hyperlink here, right? There's an important story that will add meaning to your experience if you take the time to consider it.

Like we said with Amulon and the Lamanite daughters and the events in the book of Judges. Or Abinadi, very much the story of Abinadi, he's portrayed as kind of a Moses figure, right? Some of the language that's used, the way he's described, we're supposed to see him as he's delivering the Ten Commandments, right? We're supposed to see him as kind of a Moses figure of sorts. Well, how does that parallel with Moses impact or change, affect how we view the Abinadi story and his encounter with the priest?

I think those things are there in the text. I think we're supposed to be looking for them and asking how the Bible can help us read the Book of Mormon and how the Book of Mormon can help us read the Bible. These two books are our partners, right? And we're supposed to kind of, I think, read them as such.

Welch: Yeah, I think that's right. I'm persuaded by that. On the one hand, it's very helpful. It's an economical way for a writer of scripture, maybe especially one who is laboriously engraving on plates, to, with just an alllusion, to gesture towards a lot more that could be said. And then he allows us, as the reader, to chase down those meanings and the parallels or the differences just by putting these two things side by side. But it's also –yeah go ahead.

Frederick: Yeah, no, I was going to say, I mean, you can see that in just this broad narrative of Alma the Younger and the story of Paul. I mean, if you read the story of Alma the Younger, aware of the story of Paul, then that brings a whole different level of awareness and foreshadowing into what you're reading. You start to see, okay, are we going to expect to see the same thing here? There's an angel who's taking on somebody who's been a little bit of a thorn in the side of the church, and we know how Paul's story ends.

Right now, let's look and see how Alma the Younger's story ends with that kind of framework in mind. So it kind of moves the lens on the character of Alma the Younger and gives us a different perspective.

Welch: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's useful and powerful technique for a prophet or a writer of scripture to use. But I've also been convinced, especially just after reading 2 Nephi not too long ago, that it's also kind of the way that prophet's minds work: they themselves are so immersed in ancient texts, in the words of scripture and in the words of past prophets that it seems like the way that the spirit actually kind of works with their mind is by using past language and infusing it with new meaning in a new context. And that's what we see Nephi doing of course with Isaiah in 2nd Nephi and throughout the New Testament authors doing the very same thing including Christ himself with the Old Testament. If we look in the Old Testament, we see Old Testament prophets drawing on, repurposing and recontextualizing the prophets who came before them. So we end up with this really, really deeply layered kind of language that seems to just explode with meaning. If every single word is a hyperlink, then the ways in which that text can be interpreted is just incredibly rich and it seems to me that allows for the spirit to come in and to guide the reader to find the meanings that are relevant to them. So you've introduced us to the idea of intertextuality. Can I now introduce you to another idea?

Frederick: I'd go for it. I'd love to hear it.

Welch: Sort of sounds similar. Okay, it's called metatextuality. And you probably already know this, Nick, so thanks for playing along with me. But metatextuality is a big word, and if you like big words, you can put that in your pocket and keep it. If not, you can ignore it. It just means a text that is about text.

So it's kind of self-referential, right? And this is something that we actually see a lot of in the Book of Mormon because it is so remarkably open, especially in the small plates, but as I said, Mormon himself pops out from behind the curtain every once in a while here in showing us how scripture is made. So we see these moments throughout the Book of Mosiah where we check in on the plates. We see them being passed from person to person.

We hear people discussing, we hear Benjamin teaching his sons in the language of the Nephites and helping them to understand the significance of the plates. Of course we see the 24 gold Jaredite plates that are found by the people of Limhi, which you know kind of takes us one removed back and allows us to see the Book of Mormon from the outside, right? Another set of plates that are discovered by this people. And then we see Mosiah the second translate them and the spiritual impact that translation has on the people there.

It's also a kind of meta-interpretive book of scripture, Mosiah is, meaning it's interpretation about interpretation. And we see this in this wonderful moment where Abinadi is brought and put on trial before Noah and his priests and the priests open--their opening gambit is to ask him about the interpretation of Isaiah. So this whole debate unfolds about what is the proper interpretation of scripture. So the Book of Mormon is really just delightful and special I think as a book of scripture in its focus on these meta-textual and meta-interpretive moments. It pulls back the curtain and asks us to be a part of the process and allows us to consider the processes that go into creating and interpreting scripture. I think it's really cool.

Frederick: Yeah, that's nicely said. I mean, I can't think of another book that is self-aware of itself.

Welch: Okay, then one last big word and then we'll move on. But again, former English major, so don't blame me. But there is a beautiful instance of what literary scholars call heteroglossia. Again, if you like big words, that's my gift to you for today. If not, you can throw it away. It just means different language, different language. It means different voices.

And I love in chapter 10, we get this moment here in the Book of Mosiah where we get to see the Lamanite point of view for a minute. Sort of famously, the Book of Mormon is written from the Nephite perspective. And we filter through that, right? All the events that happen, we take into account the perspective of the authors, and we know that they're speaking from their own point of view. But every once in a while, we get a moment where we get to hear from the Lamanites. We get to hear the Lamanite perspective.

So in chapter 10, there's this moment where Mormon allows us to see the counter narrative that has structured the Lamanite self-understanding of those foundational events between Lehi, Nephi, Laman, and Lemuel coming out of Jerusalem, traveling through the wilderness, and setting up their new society here in the new world. And they have a very, very different perspective.

Frederick: But this sets the stage then, I mean, we need to know that so that when we get to the end of the chapter, right, or the end of the book of Mosiah rather, when we start to see that the sons of Mosiah, when we see Aaron and Ammon, they want to go on a mission to recover the Lamanites. And then when we see Ammon's interaction with the Lamanites in the book of Alma, and then the story of the Anti-Nephi-Lehis. And then we get to the war chapters and we see that the primary aggressors are the Nephites, not the Lamanites.

Those stories make sense because we've got the perspective of the Lamanites back here, right in the Book of Mosiah. So, I mean, if we don't have this, if we don't have Zeniff record there preserving the Lamanite perspective, it makes it hard to understand those subsequent events at the end of the Book of Mosiah and throughout the Book of Alma.

Welch: Yeah, yeah. Excellent, okay. Well, let's move on to talking about some of the themes. And there are so many. My list here goes on for pages. And I promise our readers, we will not touch on all of them. But it is such a rich book. Mormon really has something to say. So let's talk about what you see as a few of the most important themes in the Book of Mosiah.

Frederick: So one of the things that I was pondering as I was reading this over the last week or so is there seems to be this, for lack of a better phrase, this quest for community that exists in the Book of Mormon and the underlying tension that accompanies it as we get these different groups of people who are looking for a community but struggling to make it come together. And so you have Benjamin giving his sermon in these opening chapters and it feels like by the time you get to chapter 6 that he's accomplished that. And we have this, because in chapter 5 we've made this covenant and we're now sons and daughters of Jesus Christ. We're now no longer worried about these kinds of Nephite and Mulekite labels, but that doesn't seem to be the case. You get to chapter 25 and when Mosiah stands up, the people are divided into two groups. It seems that again, we've got Nephites on one side, it seems to be ethnicity, Nephites on one side and Mulekites on the other. So the implication is perhaps Benjamin's speech didn't have quite the impact on the community that we initially hoped. Then you get this attempt by Zeniff and others to go to the land of Nephi and again reestablish a community there. And it starts off good with Zeniff, but things quickly go downhill with Noah to the point where we have Limhi who is left and under the control of the Lamanites.

We have Alma who again tries to start a community of believers and is the tension of Noah kind having some kind of oversight and forcing them to have to flee initially from the waters of Mormon and start their own settlement. But then the people of Amulon and his people are put in charge. You have the violent abduction of the Lamanite daughters by Amulon and the priests as they attempt to start their own community. And it feels like you just have these different groups who are trying to find a refuge of sorts, but there's tension behind it every move. No one can quite capture what that looks like.

And I wonder if, I mean, we won't find resolution to this till we get to fourth Nephi, but I wonder if in a way Moroni is saying, look, Zion can't be easily built. You can't just give a sermon and all of a sudden everybody is fine. You can't just go back home and all of a sudden everybody's fine, right? This establishing Zion is a task that is incredibly complicated and the book of Mosiah tries again and again and again. It just can't quite seem to capture it. And so that's one thing that stood out to me.

Welch: I love how we get a closer look though at Alma's church. It seems like of the various attempts, Alma's is the one that has the real legs on it, right? The most spiritual power behind it. And Mormon sort of very carefully gives us some glimpses into the way of life of this church of God. And there's a couple of things that stood out to me.

One is that there's this question of authority, right? Baptism becomes the mark of entrance into the joining of the church and it matters who has authority to be baptized. So we see Alma kind of consecrating priests and teachers. We see Limhi's people deciding not to be baptized because they feel that they don't have the proper authority at that time. So this question of clerical authority sort of becomes important.

This question of sharing a common life together, both the sharing of material resources and the sharing of emotional resources, the love and the unity, the hearts knit together, that should be a part of any Christian community.

The opposite side of that, the flip side of that, is that sometimes there do need to be membership boundaries. When Alma brings the church and it's integrated within Zarahemla, and in fact it grows into multiple different assemblies here in Zarahemla, and this group of people called the unbelievers arises, it becomes necessary to draw some boundaries around the church. Not everybody could be--if there's going to be an environment of trust and mutual sharing within the community, that necessitates certain boundaries for bad actors who might come in to try to exploit that.

And we see its relationship with the state, right? One of the differences between Benjamin's establishment of the covenant and Alma's is that Benjamin's appears to have been, he was the king, so this was a kind of state church. Whereas Alma's was different from the state church. It was a more voluntary organization where people joined if they wanted to, not simply by virtue of being subjects of Benjamin or Mosiah. So it seems to be making the point that it works better if it's a voluntary organization and not a kind of state church.

And then finally, the importance of preaching within the church as a crucial way of transmitting faith. We see after, we see Alma, you know, we see multiple instances of really amazing, powerful preaching from Benjamin, from Abinadi. Abinadi's remarkable address will get written down by Alma and then that will become kind of the founding document of this Church of God that Alma organizes.

But then we see maybe the greatest preacher of the Book of Mormon, who is Alma the Younger. And we see him getting his chops here in these last chapters of Mosiah as after his conversion as he goes among the people trying to repair the damage that he's done. And we're told that he's a man of many words, very skilled orator. So we see him developing his preaching chops.

And then in the Book of Alma, of course, we'll see the fruits of that with sermon after sermon after classic powerful sermon coming from Alma. So it seems to me that those are some of, if and when it is going to work, those are some of the characteristics that a church of Christ will have.

Frederick: Yeah, and I really like that. I'm struck by that even when all those pieces are in place, there's still persecution. There's still the next generation that doesn't want to follow along. And even when we change the government, like we do at the end of the Book of Mosiah, where Alma chapter 1, we've got Nehor. Alma chapter 2, we've got Amlici. There's this dissent within the larger Nephite community that always seems to be keeping the Nephite Christian church from fully blooming and blossoming into what it could be. And again, it's a situation that just isn't going to be resolved. I mean, we haven't got secret combinations yet, right, until we get to the Book of Helaman. But I just find myself going back and forth just asking, kind of, what is Mormon trying to get me to understand by seeing the struggles that this church...

with an incredible figure like Alma and a credible successor like Alma the younger, yet it still is going and finds itself budding up against problem after problem after problem.

Welch: Yeah. Yes, yes, the difficulty, the difficulty of creating a long-term, creating and sustaining. Creating isn't the hard part. It looks like it's the sustaining that's the hard part. Yeah. Okay.

Frederick: Yeah. Just sustaining. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah. And just kind of what my role then as a disciple, right, in my church today. I mean, it just, perhaps for any Christian disciple, right, in making sure that the sustainability is there. Don't just rely on the fact that it's been created and it's here because we see that in the Book of Mormon that's not initially going to cut it. It's the sustaining, making it kind of a lasting endeavor.

Welch: Yeah, that's nice and it's a nice connection to maybe I'll jump in here with a theme that's important to me and then I'll turn it back to you. But you know the central kind of point of King Benjamin's address and then Abinadi's as well, in a way, is this question of salvation, right? This is at the heart of the Christian gospel. What is it that Christ offers to us? What do we find in him?

And so Benjamin and Abinadi and Alma offer us a lot of different ways of thinking about what it is that happens to us when we repent and turn to Christ and we find this new birth in Him. It really does feel like we get a kind of new being. We're given a new kind of character. We relate to people in different ways and the quality of our life is different.

But it's something that has to be retained. This is a theme in the Book of Mormon over and over and over again. Not enough just to taste that fruit once. It is so sweet. We see this with Alma's people and then with Alma the younger. We see the sweetness of the light of Christ when we experience it in ourself. But it's not enough just to experience it once. King Benjamin talks about retaining remission of our sins. How do we stay in covenant relationship to Christ over the long term, over our whole life? And that's where it gets hard.

So it seems to me as though it's sort of thematically parallel to the question about Christian community. How do we maintain those communities over time? And it seems like the answer has to be something to do with humility. I think what Benjamin teaches us is that in order to be able to stay in this covenant relationship with Christ, we have to continually remember who we are in relation to him. We have to remember the greatness of God as our Creator and our own weakness, right? He calls it our own nothingness. That humility, it seems like, is sort of the crucial quality to retaining our status as new creatures of Christ.

And in the collective setting, you know, pride is just the recurrent temptation of the Nephites. And again and again, it's these pride and class divisions that disrupt the church. So it seems like humility, again, there is one of the keys to sustaining a Christian community over time.

Frederick: Yeah, I want to bookend your talk of salvation with kind of the Book of Mosiah's nod toward Christology, right? What we learn about the person and the mission and the role of Jesus Christ Himself. And again, we've had some nice places where we've seen this in 1 Nephi 11, for example, in Nephi's vision of the ministry of Jesus, or the doctrine of Christ that 2 Nephi introduces us to.

But as far as kind of a sustained discussion of who Jesus Christ is, what His ministry is going to look like, what atonement actually means, I mean, the idea that He's going to bleed from every pore, okay, comes straight from King Benjamin's speech. And so we have these chapters like Mosiah 3, right, where Benjamin reveals to us the words of an angel, laying out in really nice detail Jesus Christ's ministry.

Then we have Abinadi’s Master Class sermon in--with his quotation from Isaiah 53 in chapter 14, and then in chapter 15, he teases out the meaning of that in that the Messiah is going to come down from heaven, and He's going to condescend and live among the children of men, and He's going to assume two roles. He's going to simultaneously be father and son, right? And just this kind of whole different awareness of Jesus Christ, His mission, His majesty, His purpose, His role, really get laid out between King Benjamin and Abinadi in a way that I don't know if we really get anything better than that until we get to 3rd Nephi itself. Right? And so, I see the contribution of Mosiah being one definitely of illuminating our understanding of the role and the mission and the... just the majesty of Jesus Christ.

Welch: Yeah, I agree with that and it connects to maybe the last point that I would make. The majesty of Christ, you know, Father of heaven and earth, the Lord God Omnipotent, Benjamin's really, as you say, majestic language to describe Jesus Christ, and yet he would condescend to dwell in a tabernacle of clay and to become a human like us. This leads us to questions of what it is to be human. A kind of anthropology that emerges in the Book of Mosiah. And it's a kind of two-part anthropology. There's two ways of looking at what it means to be a human being. I think the most important point is that human beings are all equally creatures of God, created by the Savior. And so we have a fundamental equality.

The way that fundamental equality is expressed though, often, is in the fact that we are equally natural men and women. So this idea that there's a part of human nature, post-fall, separated from God for much of our lives, though we have moments of course to connect with him, and we can connect with the prophets, but in this world there's an element of human nature that is an enemy to God, that is prone to temptation and to evil.

Without the redemption of Christ, without the salvation that he offers and the transformation of our character, we would be consigned to being left in that kind of state of selfish egoism. But when we come to know Christ, when we repent and turn towards him, there's this kind of amazing transformation that can happen to all of us. And once again, it's equally available. This is really important for the prophets, important point that the prophets make over and over again. It's equally available to all people that we can be transformed to become childlike and meek, loving, patient, generous, non-judgmental, as you said, full of service and giving, steadfast faith and obedience throughout the rest of our lives. So we have the potential within us. To truly be born again and to become the children of Christ, the sons and daughters of Christ, and to become like him in our character.

So it's this very sort of two-part vision of what it means to be a human being. And it's kind of dark on the one side to think about ourselves as an enemy to God. It can be difficult to accept that. But when we understand that we are all prone to selfishness and sin,

When we're taught of Christ, God says he is always willing to forgive. Anybody who repents and comes to him, he will receive them into the fold of God and he will transform our hearts and our characters to be like him because we are made in his image.

Frederick: That's a really nice observation. I don't know if I'd made that connection before. I don't know if it's coincidence that Benjamin and Abinadi, in these two sermons laying out Christology, also give us our clearest anthropology. I mean, Abinadi's statement that we're carnal, sensual, and devilish by nature, that the natural man discussion of King Benjamin, just this idea of, I think, transformation is the right word, that in order to become a member of the covenant community, it's not just something that we acquiesce to, it's not just an agreement that we make. It requires us to fundamentally be transformed and we can't do that ourselves. God has to reach down and do that for us once we're ready because there's a part of us that just, as you say, it's dark, but Mormon doesn't pull his punches. It's who we are and it needs to be overcome and it's not going to happen until we accept it and admit it and are ready.

Right, I mean, it's, yeah, I like that.

Welch: Yeah, I love the idea of the dust of the earth, which is a theme that Benjamin comes back to again and again. On the one hand, it conveys that kind of humility that we should have about ourselves, right? Of ourselves, we are nothing.

But dust, of course, was the substrate material from which God created Adam. And so it has the potential to be transformed into something living and beautiful. It can receive the breath of God in it. So I think this image of dust kind of captures that two-part anthropology of humanity.

Frederick: And that's nice, because it's important to remember that we don't want to rush too far to the other side and say we have no worth, right? And become so absorbed in our carnalness and our sensualness and our devilishness that there's no hope, right? Well, if all I am is dust, then why even bother, right? Remember that, well, again, intertextuality, right? It's the substance of creation there. God breathed life into that dust and He'll do the same for us.

Welch: Yeah, beautiful. Well, we're coming up towards the end of our conversation here, Nick. Is there, excuse me, any other theme you'd like to touch on before we move to passages that we love?

Frederick: Um, maybe just a quick shout out to the, to the Jaredites, right? That it's, as you mentioned earlier, it's in Mosiah that we, that we see Limhi's party go out and they completely miss Zarahemla, ended up bringing back this record with them and we're, Mormon's going to delay this. We kind of get excited because, you know, okay, we're going to hear about the Jaredites and it would make sense to include this in the book of Mosiah, but we're not going to get it until Moroni abridges the record all the way into the Book of Mormon, but it seems to have such an impact on the Nephites that as Limhi is reading the record of the Jaredite to the people and the people are hearing, kind of the lesson we've learned all along that kings can be a problem, right? That religious freedom can be oppressed with those who in power aren't in support of it. Not everybody is going to be a Mosiah who just hands things over to Alma.

It seems that this seems to be a catalyst for this political change that happens at the end of this book, where we go from a monarchy to a system of judges, because the Nephites want to avoid the same fate of the Jaredites. That specter kind of hangs over the Nephites and this ominous land northward that keeps coming up again and again and again till we get to the Jaredites. But it's kind of this… the possibilities of the what if, if the Nephites don't shape up, the Jaredites represent what they could become and honestly what they eventually do become, is the Jaredites. But we see the seeds for this sewn here early on in the Book of Mosiah.

Welch: Yeah, I love that. I just love these nested layers here as the, you know, the Nephites are so fascinated by the Jaredites and then so dismayed to see what may become of them. And then of course, as a reader of the Book of Mormon in the modern day, we are told to put ourselves in that same position. Look at the Nephites, what happened to them. Could that happen to you? Is your society heading in that same direction? These are exactly the questions that Mormon and then especially Moroni wants his latter day readers to be focusing on. He says, put yourself, see yourself in the Jaredites, see yourself in the Nephites, know what's coming, wake up.

There are moments when I am just kind of overwhelmed. I just have to sit for a moment in gratitude for Mormon and Moroni and the skill that they demonstrated in the way that they wove together these records specifically for us as the modern reader of the Book of Mormon to draw us into it and to hold up a mirror to ourselves and to always extend that invitation to us, and to avoid the misery and the heartache and the tragedy that we witness in the Book of Mormon.

Frederick: Yeah, absolutely. If it happens to them, is it possible it could happen to us? Right? That's the scary question, the terrible question that the Book of Mormon poses.

Welch: Yeah. All right. Well, let's wrap up here, Nick, by sharing with each other a scripture from the Book of Mosiah that has had some personal meaning to you. Will you go first?

Frederick: Sure, I would love to. I kind of want to build on where you were going a little bit earlier when it came to kind of King Benjamin's speech and the question of redemption. I've always been intrigued by the image in chapter 2 verse 21 of the unprofitable servant, right? And the sense that, you know, as a disciple, the best I can do is to be an unprofitable servant.

And that's kind of depressing because as a disciple, you want to progress and move forward and improve your standing and demonstrate through what I do that I can grow and improve and put off the natural man and become a saint, right, through the spirit. And then Benjamin says, yeah, no matter what you do, right, you remain an unprofitable servant because of your interaction with God and how He bestows upon you blessings for everything that you do.

But at the same time, anyone who's not a disciple is also an unprofitable servant. And so, I find myself with this question from time to time of, so why? Right? Why be a disciple if this is all I'm ever going to be? Right? It's just kind of, you know, what's my role in this? What am I supposed to? How am I supposed to grow and progress? And again, the Book of Mormon doesn't pull its punches. I mean, you're an unprofitable servant. But the thing I love about this is when you read this chapter in conjunction with chapter four, it seems to go again to what we were talking about as far as community goes, right? That I will never go beyond that in my relationship necessarily with the Savior. Right? I'll remain an unprofitable servant. But what I can do is reach out to my neighbor.

What I can do is use the Savior's influence and use the Savior as a model for how I interact with those in my community. I can look at how the Savior interacts with me as a disciple, as an unprofitable servant, as somebody who begs before the judgment seat. And then look and say, okay, how can I help my neighbor? How can I build my community? And I worry less about my position. And I'm saying, okay, this is just what it is. I am what I am, I am where I'm at and I'm comfortable with that. Now how can I look outward? How can I be a better disciple now that I'm no longer worried about increasing my own standing, but now that I'm more worried about making sure that my community, my ward members, my family are in a good place?And I think that's a powerful part of King Benjamin's message, is reminding me as a disciple that discipleship is about sacrificing the self.

Welch: Well, that is so, so powerful. And it, and it has always happens at this part of the, of the conversation. I find that it connects so well to what I had picked out to share. So let me share that with you. This is from the end of the book of Mosiah . This is Mosiah chapter 27. And it's in the story of Alma the younger's visitation by the angel and his, um, his rebirth, his new birth in Christ. So, um, as you mentioned earlier, Nick, there's so many parallels to the experience of Paul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus. But one thing I noticed is that Paul in his experience is temporarily struck blind.

Alma, on the other hand, is temporarily struck dumb, so he couldn't speak, and we're also told rather curiously that he couldn't move his hands. His hands were apparently paralyzed. But he doesn't lose his vision. So he's brought before his father, and surprisingly, his father, Alma, the first, does something kind of surprising. He calls people together. You might think he would want to keep him in a quiet place and just have a, you know, allow him to recover and minister to him privately, but no, he says in verse 22 here, Mosiah 27 22, he caused that the priests should assemble themselves together, and they began to fast and to pray to the Lord their God that he would open the mouth of Alma, that he might speak and also that his limbs might receive their strength, that the eyes of the people might be opened to see and know of the goodness and glory of God.

So I thought that was just so wonderful, kind of intertextually. Here, it's not Alma whose eyes are opened, but it's the eyes of his community that are opened by the redemption that he receives in Christ. And it made me think just along the same lines that you were talking about, the way that we are called into the deepest kind of community with our fellow believers. And maybe this moment here in Mosiah 27 is kind of the climax of, of the common Christian life that we see being developed in fits and starts and imperfectly in the Church of God throughout the Book of Mosiah with its neighbor ethics to love your neighbor as yourself. Here we see people, Alma's community gathered around him and it is their eyes that are opened through his experience. So Alma's own suffering and agony and pain, and then also the miraculous light of Christ that he sees. He shares that with his community and they, just as if it had happened to them, their eyes were opened and they too are brought to know of the power of God. This is a really deep theme throughout the Book of Mormon, even going back to Isaiah, the idea that, you know, God's gathering of Israel will be a light to the Gentiles and that in witnessing God's steadfast love towards his people, then the Gentiles themselves will be drawn to the God of Israel and will be drawn into the covenant. It seems like it's the same mechanism that we're seeing here. As other people witnessing Alma's salvation, their eyes are open to the power of Christ and they too are invited to enter into that covenant relationship with him.

Frederick: Yeah, which kind of takes us back to the inclusio reference that you brought up earlier, right? You have this kind of just this nice bookend with King Benjamin's speech on what the ideal Christian community looks like. Then you see what that looks like on the ground with, you know, with fathers and sons and neighbors and just people who are actually part of that community trying to live that relationship that Benjamin had kind of laid out earlier in the book. So the practical application, right, of the theoretical, it just makes for a nice bookend.

Welch: Yeah. Well, I think that is a wonderful place to end. Nic, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much for joining us today on the Book of Mormon Studies podcast. Bye-bye.

Frederick: Thanks, Rosalynde.