Book of Mormon Studies Podcast: Mormon Scholarship with Terryl Givens

Rosalynde Welch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute's Book of Mormon Studies podcast. My name is Rosalynde Welch. I'm the host of the podcast and I'm joined today by my colleague and my friend, Dr. Terryl Givens. Dr. Givens is a senior research fellow here at the Maxwell Institute. He's, I'm sure, well known to many of our listeners. He's an important figure himself in the field of Book of Mormon Studies. He's the author of two, at least two books on the Book of Mormon: By the Hand of Mormon, an extremely important book, and The Book of Mormon: a very short introduction, which is exactly as it is advertised, a very useful and very short introduction. Terryl is... Oh, that's right. And of course, his brief theological introduction to 2 Nephi, which we have already discussed here on the podcast. Currently, Terryl is working on a big book, A History of Christianity Through the Prism of God's Love, which sounds like a wonderful project. Terryl, welcome to the podcast today.

Terryl Givens: Thank you. Good to be here.

Welch: Today we're focusing on scholarly work that has been done on the book of Mormon. And this is going to be continually confusing for our listeners because I'm not talking about the big Book of Mormon. I'm talking about the small book of Mormon, this autobiographical record of Mormon himself that we find right in between 4th Nephi and Ether. So, we're going to be talking about what we judge to be a few interesting and useful scholarly resources that are out there about this book that help us to understand who Mormon is and what he is trying to accomplish here in these seven chapters that he writes, plus two chapters that his son Moroni writes. So, these nine chapters of the small book of Mormon.

And we're going to start out talking about a type of scholarly resource that we haven't addressed yet on this podcast. Here we are all the way in Mormon, so we're making it through the year almost to the end of the book, but we haven't talked yet about a particular class of scholarly books, and that is called a commentary. So, Terryl, share with us what is a scriptural commentary, why is it useful, how do you use it, and how do scholars use them generally?

Givens: Well, there are a wide variety of types of commentary, whether you're talking about biblical scholarship or Book of Mormon scholarship. They're doctrinal, you can have cultural, you can have historical, you can have analytical. And I've never done a count, but there are a fair number of commentaries on the Book of Mormon going all the way back to the 19th century. I personally don't find most of them very useful or helpful, since often effectively what you're getting is just paraphrases and kind of subjective input and reactions to scriptural passages and so forth. I'm a great fan of one commentary that I do use, both in my own teaching and in my own personal study. And it's a six -volume commentary put together by Brant Gardner.

Welch: There it is, yes, Second Witness: an analytical and contextual commentary on the Book of Mormon, yeah.

Givens: Right, yeah. And so, he tells us a little bit about what it's going to be just by that subtitle, Contextual, Analytical and Contextual. What I like about Brent Gardner is that he brings strong qualifications to the job of talking about the Book of Mormon. He's a credentialed anthropologist and he has written extensively on the Book of Mormon. And in this volume, he breaks his commentary up into different categories, depending on the passages that he's looking at. But some discussions he calls cultural, some he calls historical, some he calls textual.

There are several things that I like about Gardner's commentary. One is that he doesn't write it as an apologetic. And I think this is also a strength of Grant Hardy, that he's sometimes surprisingly honest if there are difficulties, problems that emerge in the text.

For example, when he's doing Mormon, just one thing I will mention specific to his commentary on Mormon, he looks at a passage in chapter 5 verse 18, which reads, “But now behold, they are led about by Satan, even as chaff is driven before the wind, or as the vessel is tossed about upon the waves without sail.” And he points out, well, there was no grain that was being grown in Mesoamerica or the area where the Book of Mormon probably unfolded. Chaff would have been unknown. Seagoing vessels currently in Mesoamerica did not have sails. And so, he says these are clear anachronisms. And he doesn't try to justify or defend or explain. He just says there they are, they're problematic and they probably suggest something about the dangers of assuming that Joseph Smith is getting a straightforward dictation word for word from the plates to the text, and that maybe we need to acknowledge, as actually a recent Gospel Topics page produced on the church website announced last, I'm not sure if you are familiar with this one, Rosalynde, but there were four new Gospel Topics essays that were introduced on the church website. And one of them specifically said, we must be cognizant of the fact that the Old Testament was delivered through the cultural prisms of the ancient Middle East, and the Book of Mormon came through a conceptual vocabulary and language of the 19th century. And I think those kinds of statements give us a lot more latitude and freedom to not get overly anxious every time there seems to be some kind of a textual problem in terms of diction or assumptions or background. So, I like that about Brandt Gardner.

Welch: Well, and it's worth noting that Gardner actually does bring a very strong kind of historicist Mesoamerican lens to his reading, at least in part. That's not the only thing he does, right? But he's, yeah, so he puts it in a kind of a Mayan context, and he sees the Jaredites as Olmecs, if I'm not mistaken. So, he brings this kind of anthropological lens, seeing what this could mean if we put it in that kind of Mesoamerican context. So, he brings, obviously, a very strong historicist bent, but at the same time, just as you say, he's a very adept reader of the text, and he'll say, you know what, this doesn’t fit in a Mesoamerican context. So, this has to come from somewhere else, whether it be from Joseph Smith's own conceptual vocabulary or, you know, who knows? We're still figuring out exactly how this translation was produced. But that's his approach. Yeah.

Givens: That's right. That's right. So, he does come with a very strong bias and he's very open about this. He comes out of the kind of the John Sorensen school that sees the Book of Mormon as, you know, the limited geography model, which, you know, virtually all the scholars who have ever been associated with FARMS or with Maxwell also buy into, as do I. And so, for him, it's more an assumption than an argument that it's kind of, he thinks, kind of obvious that the Book of Mormon took place there. And so, he uses his anthropological training to set the background and to explain the keys, the connections, the tie-ins to what we know about Indigenous cultures of that era.

Welch: Yeah. Yeah. And yet it goes beyond that as well. And that's what I appreciate about him is that he's also very attuned to text. He does his best to, and he does a wonderful job following literary features. He's great at keeping track of chronology and geography. He has some very interesting framings for the theology of the Book of Mormon. He tends to put it into a kind of Middle Eastern, Semitic context. So, his commentary isn't exhausted by the kind of Mesoamerican framing, but he does add that in as well. Just for any readers who may have never looked at a commentary on a book of scripture, what you'll find when you open the book is that typically verse by verse or sometimes passage by passage, chunk by chunk, the text of the scripture will be reproduced there, and then underneath it, you'll simply have the author's comment on it. And those comments, as you alluded to earlier, they can range from simply paraphrase of the text itself, in which case it may not be as useful, to all sorts of different kinds of contextual framing. And of course, this is an inherently interpretive project.

So, there's going to be some kind of interpretation through the perspective of the writer, which we have to be aware of, of course. But a commentary is different from a book in that it's not advancing a single sustained argument. Instead, it's just looking at individual passage by passage and trying to explain what it says, clarify any problems, and identify the most important lenses and frames for reading it.

So, Terryl, how would a scholar, for instance, like you, use a commentary in your own work?

Givens: Well, very few scholars are competent across as wide a variety of disciplines as can be useful in reading the Book of Mormon or any book of scripture. So just to give another example or two, he's an anthropologist, but when he confronts, as one has to, the deutero-Isaiah problem, when one is looking at the first chapters of Isaiah that Nephi cites, that, according to the consensus today, were produced by an Isaiah figure subsequent to the Babylonian captivity. That creates problems with the chronology that Latter-day Saints understand the Book of Mormon to fit into. And so, he makes himself conversant on the backgrounds and current status of debates about the Deutero-Isaiah problem or the different names of God. And he gives a very accurate and reliable overview of scholarship on the development of monotheism in the post-Josiah eras.

And so, I can't be competent in theology and history and Mesoamerican culture. And so that's why I find it useful, is because it expands far beyond my own areas of expertise.

Welch: Yeah, yeah. So, when we want to get a handle on what's happening in a particular book of scripture, and especially one that we're not necessarily expert in ourselves, then we can rely on that as kind of an orienting first step that will orient us to the most important issues in the text and the context that we need to know. Do you think that let's say a listener of ours who loves the Book of Mormon, has read some Book of Mormon scholarship, but isn't necessarily producing, isn't writing scholarship of their own--would a commentary be of interest to that type of a reader, do you think?

Givens: I think absolutely. I mean, I can think of a moment that was pivotal in Fiona's and my own spiritual life as well as kind of public work. It was first brought to my attention by Gardner's commentary that 1 Nephi 13 has that pivotal change in one of the words in 1 Nephi 13:32, where the angel is describing to Nephi the state of the world in the latter days and refers to the world as being in an awful state of blindness. And he points out that the 1830 text describes it as a state of awful woundedness.

And it seems to me that just that simple change from woundedness to blindness is highly significant. The fact that woundedness and blindness both draw attention to the lack of personal responsibility for the kind of right theological universe that we inherit. And so that's where Fiona and I first started thinking much more deeply about what happens if we use that word woundedness instead of sin, healing instead of salvation, to think through the deeper significance of how the restoration should kind of reorient our thoughts about, you know, exactly what is sin and salvation and how might we rethink them in fresh terms. So, you don't have to be an academic to have a little light go on because of some little detail to which a good commentary introduces you that you are not aware of.

Welch: Yeah, yeah, that's remarkable. And of course, that insight about blindness versus woundedness, that kind of became the center of your book, The Christ Who Heals. And so it was that insight gained from a commentary that sparked the chain of thought that led to this wonderful book. So, commentaries are, they're also, so they can be very useful for individual readers and scholars. They're also an interesting sign of the development of a field, right?

Givens: That's exactly right.

Welch: And you mentioned that there have been a number of commentaries, even from the very beginning, the number of biblical commentaries out there is vast. I don't know if it even can be numbered, but there are so many biblical commentaries out there signaling the extremely developed state of the field of biblical studies.

Givens: Yeah, and I just want to make an additional pitch for the importance of commentaries and that we should be exposing ourselves to more commentaries even as just lay readers of scripture. You know, the Catholics have had 2000 years to try to make sense of a lot of difficulties in the Bible and the Protestants five centuries. And there's a lot that we can learn from Catholics and Protestants who have wrestled with Paul, for example, right? Paul is not an easy figure to accommodate to a Latter-day Saint theology.

And so, I just think commentaries are one quick and easy and effective way of exposing ourselves to some of the most important trends and findings of biblical scholarship coming from people who take scripture reading seriously.

Welch: I very much agree when it comes to the world of the Bible and when we're back into a New Testament or an Old Testament year, I highly recommend, just as you say, looking at a Bible commentary. We now have a Latter-day Saint biblical commentary that BYU Studies has published--and is in the process of publishing--this New Testament commentary volume by volume, and that's fantastic.

But the value of reading a Catholic Commentary or a Protestant commentary are our brothers and sisters in Christ and other denominations have this history, as you say, of thousands of years of biblical study. And they bring wonderful contexts and perspectives that can complement our, of course, unique Restoration spin or Restoration understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And I always start by looking at a commentary, if I'm going to be trying to write seriously about a Bible verse, because I would feel silly to do it without knowing some of the past.

Givens: Yeah, I'm just since we're on the subject. This is one of a six volume commentary. And as far as I can tell, this is called Clark's Commentary in the Bible. And this is the commentary that Joseph Smith used more than any other resource when he was reading the Bible. And we know this because he would quote from it. He would allude to it. And this is the same edition that he worked with as far as I can tell. So, I have that on my shelf. And I have a more modern copy of that. I figured if Joseph Smith found it helpful and useful that I can too.

Welch: If it's good enough for Joseph Smith, it's good enough for me. That's fascinating. I know you have an extensive library, Terryl, don't you, of the reference books and other books that Joseph Smith had access to.

Givens: Yeah, that's kind of a side hobby of mine. We have a record of the books that Joseph donated to the Nauvoo Library that's been reconstituted by Kenneth Godfrey and others. And so, I've gone on to eBay from time to time and I have managed to acquire about half of the volumes that he listed in the same editions or very close to the editions that he would have had in his personal library. And it's quite remarkable, the breadth of Joseph Smith's interests. He had two manuals of Catholic piety. He had a book of Methodist devotions. He had two books on the arguments about the freedom of the will, Baptist encyclopedia, and other reference works. So, it gives us an idea of how his mental universe was being constructed by looking at the library he had.

Welch: Yeah, yeah. That's fascinating. I like you; I recommend Gardner's commentary. Again, it's called Second Witness: analytical and contextual commentary on the Book of Mormon. As we mentioned, there are a number of other commentaries out there on the Book of Mormon. One sort of well-known one is called the Doctrinal Commentary on the Book of Mormon by Robert Millett and Joseph Fielding McConkie. That can be very interesting to look at. As the title suggests, it's focused on the doctrinal teachings and how those connect to other Restoration teachings.

There's a personal favorite of mine, it's sort of like a commentary, it's a little different, it's called The Book of Mormon Made Harder: Scripture Study Questions by James Faulconer. And he has a whole series of these volumes on each scripture, “the such and such made harder.” And it's just a series of questions. So, he doesn't do any paraphrase or explanatory work, he simply raises fruitful questions, which is an extremely stimulating way to supplement your study as well.

And then I'll just mention another one. This is a one volume commentary by John W. Welch that just came out a couple of months ago. It's called Inspiration and Insights from the Book of Mormon but laid out like a commentary that you can use as a companion with your scripture study.

So, I think it's a good sign for the development of the field of Book of Mormon studies that we have a number of commentaries now. We have a critical text, of course, thanks to the work of Royal Skousen. These are some of the foundations that must be in place before a kind of robust and mature scholarly field can get off the ground. And we're just in those early stages now.

Terryl, you've been a big part of the development of the field of Book of Mormon Studies, but it's reassuring and gratifying to see the work that--and a commentary is an incredible labor of love because it takes a long time. And it's not as flashy as writing a book that advances an exciting argument, right?

Welch: Okay, well let's move on then to talking about another work of scholarship. And this is a book that I've mentioned before. We talked about it earlier in the season. I'm looking to see if it's around me and I don't have it at arm's reach right now. Oh, well it's by Grant Hardy, yes. Grant Hardy is another incredibly important name in the field of Book of Mormon Studies.

And you just showed, Terryl, his most recent publication, which is called The Annotated Book of Mormon, which was published by Oxford University Press' Bible Division. This is a little inside baseball, but for our listeners to know, it's extremely significant that the Book of Mormon was published through Oxford's Bible Division. They hold the highest standards of editorial practices there and to have a publication of the Book of Mormon through that outlet accords a real respect to the book and to the editor himself.

So that book, it's the entire Book of Mormon, and he calls it the Annotated Book of Mormon. It doesn't look exactly like a commentary, it looks more like a study Bible or a study edition of the Book of Mormon, but it is full of notes, and it functions in many ways as a commentary on the Book of Mormon if you were to go through and read every essay and every note that he includes. I highly recommend it. It's fantastic and I think it will become the new standard for an academic study edition of the Book of Mormon. Do you agree with that, Terryl?

Givens: Absolutely, yeah, it's a monumental achievement. It represents a lifetime of passionate devotion to the Book of Mormon. Grant Hardy is certainly one of our greatest living scholars of the Book of Mormon. And as you said, the commentary is kind of right just embedded in a footnote type apparatus. And so there aren't extensive disquisitions on the scriptures, but just little facts, details, changes, edits that have been made. It's just beautifully formatted. And then it has a nice set of essays at the end. So, it's a magnificent piece of work.

Welch: Absolutely, it's beautiful, and magnificent is a good word for it. But that's not the book that I am going to talk about, although I recommend it. But a book that we've talked about before, again, it's called Understanding the Book of Mormon, which was such a crucial--oh, here it is, I'm going to grab it--such a crucial development milestone in Book of Mormon studies, Understanding the Book of Mormon, a Reader's Guide published again by Oxford. Grant Hardy is the author. It was published in 2010. And as we've talked about before, Grant's great insight or innovation was to take a narratological approach to the Book of Mormon. So, in other words, to focus on the primary narrators of the Book of Mormon. And those would be Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni--Nephi, of course, dominating the small plates, and then Mormon and Moroni as the editors of the large plates. And in the process of doing this, he achieves many things. It's an incredibly insightful comment on the text of the Book of Mormon itself, innovative portraits of the motivations of the editors of Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni.

And kind of methodologically, he found that the narratological frame allowed, uniquely, believers and interested good faith non -believers to come together on common ground and be able to have conversations about the Book of Mormon. Because whether you believe, as I do, that Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni were real people, or whether you believe that they’re characters, their work inside the Book of Mormon, as narrative voices can be--you can talk about it from either perspective or have a lot in common. So, he hit on and approach to the Book of Mormon that proved to be very fruitful in terms of opening up the book to non-Latter-day-Saint scholars. Anything else you would add just generally about the significance of Understanding the Book of Mormon?

Givens: Yeah, I would just say this, that he introduces it as, he explicitly introduces it as non-apologetic. And yet it's powerfully apologetic, right? In an oblique way. I may know more people who have had their testimonies strengthened by reading that kind of literary treatment or treatment of the narrative than reading old school apologetics because what Grant reveals, right, is the incredible self-awareness of these persons who are performing the work of editing these records as three distinct individuals with different agendas and different backgrounds and different characterizations. And it makes us aware of a richness and complexity to these narrative threads that most of us hadn't been. So, it does powerful work in that regard as well.

Welch: I agree. I agree. He shows us how to meet these minds here in the text. And with Nephi, it's right there on the surface often. With Mormon and Moroni, sometimes you must do a little more inference by reading into their editorial choices. But he really lays bare that there are three--at least three, there are others as well--principal minds at work in the Book of Mormon. And of course, that can't be reconciled with a sort of single author, Joseph Smith wrote, made up the Book of Mormon itself. So, if you're persuaded by his analysis, as I am, it is a powerful piece of evidence for the multi-authorship of the Book of Mormon.

Well, I wanted to talk just a little bit about his fourth chapter, which is called “Mormon's Dilemma: Competing Agendas,” because I think it yields a nice portrait of who Mormon was as a man. And he points out that if you are reading the Book of Mormon sequentially, we come to know who Mormon is only very gradually and pretty much indirectly. We hear from him for a moment in words of Mormon, and then we see these little moments where he'll pop out and make an interpretive comment here and there, moments which should be noted become larger, more frequent, and more open as he progresses through Mosiah, Alma, and Helaman.

But finally, when we arrive at his own autobiographical book, the small book of Mormon, we come to know who he is. And when we finally get there and we read him in an extended way in his own first -person voice, we come to understand some things about who he's been as an historian earlier on in these large plates.

And so Hardy identifies three competing goals that Mormon is kind of juggling as he makes decisions about how to shape the Book of Mormon. First is that he is an accurate record keeper. It matters to him to be accurate and to be as complete as he can.

Welch: The second is that he's a literary artist. He wants the record to be pleasing in itself. He's not eloquent in the way maybe that Nephi and some others would be, but he has a wonderful sense of balance and a very elegant sense of parallel construction and symmetry. And so, we see him at work as a literary artist.

And finally, he is a moral guide. There is a message that he wants to convey. And that is that when we stay in covenant relationship with the Lord, ourselves, and our community’s flourish. And when we don't, they don't. So, it's very important to him to convey what he sees as this overriding teaching.

And of course, understanding who he was and what he was witnessing in his own life helps us to understand why that message was of utmost importance to him because he is witnessing, of course, the gruesome and heart -rending crumbling of his own society because of their disobedience and their wickedness. So Mormon is juggling these three balls in the air, balancing these different competing agendas as he puts together the large plates through Mosiah, Alma, Helaman, Third and Fourth Nephi. And so finally here, when we get to the Book of Mormon, we can learn a little more about his motives and his aims.

We find out that Mormon understands that his editorial work on the Book of Mormon will directly fulfill the prayer of earlier prophets that he writes about and thus will vindicate their faith. And I think this must be powerfully motivating to Mormon. We've seen all the way through one of his devices that he uses to structure history is by presenting a prophecy and then by showing us its fulfillment. And he'll usually note it. Oftentimes he'll say, hey, look, this is a prophecy. And then when it is fulfilled, he'll say, hey, remember, this prophecy was just fulfilled. So, he'll note those for us. So, this idea of prophecy and fulfillment is one of the primary structuring devices that he uses to make sense of Nephite history.

And it must have been incredibly powerful for him to realize that what he was doing was fulfilling prophecy,

Welch: that the earlier Nephi, Lehi, and Jacob had prophesied that these records would come forth for the Lamanite remnant in the latter days. And Mormon comes to understand that his very work is the verification of those prophecies. Prophecy isn't just something that kind of automatically falls from heaven fulfilled. Now sometimes it does, but it often requires a lot of human effort. And so Mormon, in this labor, is fulfilling and verifying these earlier Book of Mormon prophecies. So, we come to understand why this incredibly difficult project undertaken at incredible danger to himself. It's hard to imagine the conditions under which he was trying to work. He was truly giving his life to this project. Why was he so motivated? Because he understood it was a fulfillment of prophecy.

In addition, Hardy points out that, like Nephi, Mormon sees that he will fail in his efforts to bring his contemporaries to repentance. It seems like maybe for a while early on, he thinks that he may bring them back, but he understands at some point that he will not. And so, at that point, he redirects his preaching into writings that are intended for an audience many centuries later, which of course is us.

I think that shows incredible persistence and love on Mormon's part to continue with this kind of doomed work, you know, in the knowledge that it would only have affect many centuries later. But it also must have brought with it a great weight of despair. And Hardy points out that we can kind of track the development of Mormon's despair in what he sees unfolding around him through his sermons and his letter in the book of Moroni.

So once again, this portrait of Mormon has to be assembled from various sources, but we can see there later in the book of Moroni, his own emotional state. It may have become simply too painful to write about the present. He witnessed it, he witnessed it faithfully. He never abandoned his people, but to cope with it, perhaps he immersed himself in the study of history. So, he turned to the past, and then turned to the present as a kind of literary response to the national tragedy that he sees unfolding around him. Hardy notes, I thought this was interesting, that Mormon in his own book, in the small book of Mormon, he says very little about economic or social factors. These are factors that have really interested him in the Book of Helaman and Alma, of course. In his own book, though, he only focuses on spiritual and military causation. Those are really the only two factors that he pays attention to. Maybe because he has already turned his focus to his latter-day readers and he pleads with us, with the Lamanite remnant, to prepare for the judgment day. He says, it will come upon you just as suddenly as the apocalypse of my people has come upon them. Before you know it, you will find yourself in a reckoning, so be prepared.

However, of course, he is still Mormon, Hardy points out. He is who he is, and so even in just these seven short chapters that he authors in the Book of Mormon, Hardy notes that he quotes 22 specific years. He names 10 different cities lost to the Lamanites in chronological order. So, he's still Mormon. He cares about getting the history right, and these things matter to him.

And then I'll just conclude. I thought Hardy made a lovely observation about who Mormon is and about his character. He notes that over the course of his experience witnessing the demise of the Nephite people, Mormon, he loses faith. In Mormon 3 verse 12, he says, he loses faith “because of the hardness of the hearts of his people.” He loses hope. In Mormon 5 verse 2, he says, he loses hope “for he knew the judgments of the Lord which should come upon them.” He knew he lost hope that the Nephi people would repent and survive. But Hardy points out he never loses his love. And that Pauline trio of virtues-- faith, hope, and love--he never loses his love. And we read in Mormon chapter three, verse 12, “Notwithstanding their wickedness, I had led them many times to battle and had loved them according to the love of God which was in me with all my heart.” What a beautiful testament to who Mormon was, as a disciple of Jesus Christ, as he declares himself called upon to witness about the worst thing that a human being could see. He proved himself as one who could--through his knowledge of the love of God, through his experience of the love of God and through his possession of the love of God for others--he could retain his spiritual firmness and he could do what needed to be done in that twilight of the Nephite nation.

Yeah. What do you think about all that? Do you agree with Hardy's portrait of Mormon as it emerges in this chapter, Terryl?

Givens: I do. I think one of the most poignant confessions that Mormon makes is that he's doing two things at the same time, right? We must remember he's maintaining the large plates. He's chronicling the present, even as he's reviewing the large plates and creating the abridgment. And he tells us specifically that he cannot bring himself to convey in the abridgment the horrors and their depravities. So, he had to chronicle them once as a living witness, and he can't do it a second time. So, to my mind, the most remarkable thing about his character, and you scooped me on the favorite scripture thing, because what's so poignant about that verse 12 of chapter three, right, he's talking about a people who have forsaken God, who are committing war atrocities, who have become as barbarous and callous.

And unlike a Jeremiah or an Isaiah, right, who just utters all the curses of God, he says, “but I loved them.” I mean, his love is intact. And so, there's the fact that he's managed to maintain this kind of core of tenderness that he can't even bear to record the worst excesses of his people and he still loves them.

Welch: Yeah, so do I. I think he must have himself taken so much spiritual strength from what the read of the ministry of Christ among the Nephites. And having seen his people go through horrific destruction, almost to the point of being wiped out earlier, you know, before the coming of Christ, and then seeing how Christ tenderly comes and with an incredible love minister to them. I think that's where he learned--that was his apprenticeship in how to love a ruined people. And we see that come out.

Well, that's a nice, sorry to scoop you on, our listeners will know that I always invite my guests to share a favorite scripture at the end of the episode and I scooped you there. But it fit in there beautifully. And it kind of turns our focus a little now to the next piece that we're going to discuss which zooms in a little bit on who this man, Mormon, was and particularly on what his work was and how he did it. So, you're going to introduce to us an article named Mormon's Sources written by John Sorensen. Tell us a little bit about who John Sorensen is and what he represents in the field of Book of Mormon Studies.

Givens: I think John Sorensen, along with Hugh Nibley, I think those are the two titanic figures of the 20th century Book of Mormon scholarship. John Sorensen, not as well known, in some ways even more influential when you consider that his most important work was a book, and I don't have the dates here, but An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon. So, John Sorensen is an anthropologist, lived a long life. He was born, he lived almost a century. He was born in 1924 and died just three years ago and published over 200 articles and books in his lifetime. His magnum opus that I think he was proudest of; I think the last major work he published was called Mormon's Codex. And he saw that as a compendium of kind of every argument that could be mustered on behalf of the historicity of the Book of Mormon from botany to archeology.

But this book that he published back in the 1980s, An Ancient American Setting, he tells us that the premise behind the book is if we believe there really was a Nephi and gold plates, then their history had to take place somewhere. That's his kind of lead-in sentence. And he says, so I want to establish where that somewhere is. And so, he makes the argument for the Mesoamerican Setting. He isn't the first to do that, but he's the first to do it as thoroughly with the degree of substantiation that he has done. And so, to this day, we refer to the Sorensen model of the Book of Mormon, which locates it in Mesoamerica. And, you know, there are--not everybody's on board with that, but most mainline scholars in the church have been.

But in this one article that you referred to, which is called “Mormon's Sources,” part of what he is doing here is he's kind of developing a couple of facts that come to light in Mormon's own narrative where he talks about there are two important moments in Mormon's relationship to the plates, to the Nephite history. And one is in Mormon 2 verse 17 where in fulfillment of the commission given to him by Amaron, earlier, he goes, and he retrieves the large plates from the hill. So, he retrieves the large plates to fulfill his responsibility to maintain the history. And so, he retrieves these plates and does so. But then there's a later moment which occurs in Mormon chapter four verse 23, where he says, “and now I Mormon, seeing that the Lamanites were about to overthrow the land, therefore I did go to the hill Shim and did take up all the records.” And so, part of what Sorensen is writing about in this essay is, so what did all those records comprise? And he goes through the many different passages in the Book of Mormon to indicate that while that didn't come from the large plates, that had to come from somewhere else. And that didn't come from the brass plates. Where might that have come from? And so he even kind of compiles a table in which he speculates this had to have come from an eyewitness, this had to have come from a Lamanite prisoner, this had to have come from some other chronicle that we don't know about. So, it's just a wonderful work of excavation to reveal to us the richness, the complexity, the diversity of Book of Mormon records.

I'm reminded of a prominent Jewish scholar who said we should never think of the Bible as a history or as a book. We should think of the Bible as an archive. And Sorensen kind of brings that same metaphor to bear on the plates out of which Mormon compiles his records. So it's just a nice example of what a little close reading can do to suddenly expand our picture.

Welch: Yeah, yeah, it's really a wonderful bit of detective work and it shows a kind of--this is the kind of archeology that has really proven fruitful with the Book of Mormon, right? It's the kind of investigation that takes place for the most part within the covers of the book and digging into reading between the lines and really taking seriously the premise that this is an ancient record that was compiled of other records. And when you start with that assumption, you find that it yields incredible insight.

And yeah, he makes the point, as you said, that the large plates of Nephi were Mormon's kind of, they were his primary source. These were probably a kind of royal annals, right? A kind of official writing that was probably updated yearly because we feel that yearly drumbeat going through.

Givens: Yep, like medieval chronicles.

Welch: Yes, like a chronicle, given from a kind of official perspective from the center of Nephite power, you know, kept originally by the king or by the king's scribes. And then after they moved to the priestly family, Alma's family, there was a kind of scribal knowledge that was passed on through his family. But that type of a record, an annalistic type of record, cannot account for the variety of sources that we see. And oftentimes, Mormon will specifically embed like the record of the Zeniffite colony or the sermons that we see. These aren't the type of information that would have been included in a royal annals. So, he must have had some other sources. He doesn't name those, but we can spot them there and we can infer their presence.

And it makes sense of that moment that you pointed to in the words of Mormon where he says, I kind of found myself among the records and I was investigating, and I found these small plates. That really shows us that there, it wasn't just there were the large plates and the small plates, there were a variety of sources that were available to Mormon. And so, his primary problem, well, he had several, one was keeping it all straight. And he does a brilliant job of handling his storylines and his dates and, although there is a glitch here and there, for the most part, the Book of Mormon's record is coherent, and it makes sense. And so Mormon balances and connects those sources very brilliantly.

But the other huge problem he had was that he had to so drastically abridge this wealth of records, he had to abridge it into a single record that would be portable, right? That he could give to his son Moroni, that Moroni could take with him and complete. So that was his primary problem, was how to make decisions of what to leave out and how to compress and condense the information. And, you know, Sorensen spent some time thinking about the writing system, right? This reformed Egyptian writing system that it seems as though Lehi and Nephi learned from the brass plates and then adopted as the writing system that they used for their records.

It wasn't obviously like the Egyptian hieroglyphics that we are, that scholars know today. It might have been a kind of cursive form of hieroglyphics or hieratic or demotic type of script. But the point is that it appears that this system of writing allows a lot of information to be compressed into a small amount of space. So, it's a highly compressive form of writing. So, you can, for instance, just write one character, but that character then would include a lot of information in it. So, it makes it very, very efficient for writing. But the point that Sorensen makes I thought was very interesting is that what's efficient on the writing side is ambiguous on the interpretation side.

Givens: Yeah, I was just going to say the more compression you have, the more ambiguity you're going to find in the actual characters you're using.

Welch: Exactly. So, part of another problem that Mormon and Moroni probably faced was deciphering and understanding what was meant by these characters. And they know there is a lot of information there, but what exactly is it? And there's some ambiguity. When on the title page, you know, Moroni refers to the imperfections and the mistakes of men that are present in the Book of Mormon, perhaps that's one thing that he's referring to is simply the difficulty of deciphering and extracting all the information that could be compressed into the writing system that the Nephite scribes used. Yeah.

Givens: Right? Can I just make one digression here? Because it came to me, I've mentioned this to you before, but in that moment when he goes back to retrieve the records a second time, the placement of that in the narrative to my mind is deeply intriguing and rich with possibilities. So, there's this moment going back to chapter 3 verse 12 again when he decides that he can no longer lead his people. And he says, I just couldn't do it, right? “I did utterly refuse from this time forth to be a commander and leader.” So, he abandons his post. And a chapter later is when he goes to the hill shim, he takes up all the records. In our version, there's a chapter break. But in the 1830 version, there's no chapter break from that to the next verse. And so, in the original, it reads like this. “I did go to the hill shim and take up all the records which Amaron had hit up. And I did go forth among the Nephites and repent of the oath I had made.” So, I think these two things are being connected. There seems to be a direct influence at work in what he discovers when he digs up all these plates and reviews them.

And then the very next thing he tells us is, I had to go back and lead the people again. So, in my own mind, I imagine that he must have encountered at this moment the small plates of Nephi. He read things of which he hadn't previously been aware and something perhaps in Nephi's vision about the inevitability of the extinction of these people, but also about the promises and about the fact that Nephi may have reminded him, that the people had intermixed so thoroughly that even though the Nephites are being destroyed, Moroni's own descendants are surviving because they are a mixture of peoples by this time. So anyhow, I just think it's a poignant vacuum that we have to fill somehow to figure out what's the connection between what he read and why he goes back to lead his people.

Welch: That’s wonderful. That's such a great observation. And it tells us so much, I think, about who Mormon is. Well, as we are coming into the homestretch, I wanted to share just one more work of scholarship on the Book of Mormon. And this is Adam Miller's Brief Theological Introduction to the small book of Mormon, published, of course, by the Maxwell Institute in 2020. And Adam's volume really stands out. You and I, Terryl, both authored volumes in that series. Adam stands out for its approach and its style, and he opens it in dramatic fashion. This is the first sentence of the book. “Mormon is a terrifying book. It is a book about time, about the costs of time, and about what happens when we run out of time.” He says, “As a theologian, I intend to read Mormon's book as a beginner's guide to the end of the world, a case study in apocalyptic discipleship.”

So, Adam really uses as his primary lens this analog between our moment and Mormon's moment, which is that we are in the latter days of our age, right? Mormon is living through the end of the world as he knew it. And likewise, we know that we are here in the latter days as well. So, there's something uniquely relevant about Mormon's form of discipleship, and we've touched on this already, a discipleship that's marked by commitment and by love and by witness to very difficult, beyond difficult, terrible, and horrific things that he witnesses. There's something unique that Mormon's discipleship can offer to us as disciples in the latter days.

And so, he has sort of two primary observations that structure everything that he does through his book, Adam Miller does. One is that he has a very specific lens on the meaning of Christianity as a spiritual practice. And for him, Christianity at root is a spiritual practice of loss, of giving up. And he cites a number of moments from the New Testament to point to this--and from the Restoration--in Matthew 10:30. We must lose our life to save it, Jesus tells us. Our baptism itself, the initiatory ritual into the Christian life is a symbolic death. We're buried in the water then raised from the grave. In Luke 18, Christ tells the rich young man, you must sell all that thou hast and distribute unto the poor. So once again, we're asked to divest and to give up and to witness loss. And finally, in the Restoration itself, of course, our central law, our law of consecration, our central covenant of consecration, we're asked to consecrate, to give all our time, our talents, and our possessions. So, Christianity for Adam is a way of consecrating loss.

Then he combines that with a second observation about just the world and the cosmos, the universe as we know it, which is that our world is structured by time, and time entails entropy and decay. So, one thing that we know about our life as human beings, is that we are guaranteed in the end to lose everything and everyone in big ways and in small ways. My youngest child just turned 15. So, the little three-year-old that Facebook will throw pictures of in my face, that three-year-old is gone forever. So, in these small ways and in these bigger ways, time takes everything from us.

So, the question then is, if time is going to take everything from us regardless, one way or another, what happens if we give it willingly? If as a spiritual discipline, as Christians, we give to time what it will take from us in any case. And if we consecrate that giving intentionally and willingly, it transforms the experience of that loss. And so that's kind of, and turns it into, discipleship itself, the essence of discipleship is a consecrated divestment. So that is the kind of central theme that Adam takes from the Book of Mormon.

And he makes several, you know, several, I think, very sharp readings of Mormon's witness. The first is that Mormon's central role for Adam is not actually as historian, it is as witness. Mormon is called simply to see what it is that happens to his people. The first verse of his book is, “I, Mormon, make a record of the things which I have both seen and heard. And I call it the book of Mormon.” As you said, he couldn't bear to include everything that he saw and heard, but the seeing and the hearing is primary. And what is it that he is asked to see and to hear and to witness? As I've said, it's really the end of his world--those poignant, poignant verses in chapter six. “Oh, ye fair sons and daughters, ye fathers and mothers, ye husbands and wives, ye fair ones, how is it that ye could have fallen? But behold, ye are gone, and my sorrow cannot bring your return.” So Mormon is really called upon to see and to witness and to bear witness to the loss of everything.

And just as I explained, Adam sees that, that Mormon transfigures sheer loss into consecrated sacrifice precisely through his willingness to bear faithful witness. And Adam makes a provocative claim that to hide our face from loss is to hide our face from God because loss is central to God's creative process. And at first, you know, this is hard to understand what Adam means here. Why is it that loss and grief and decay and destruction, how can that be a part of who God is?

Welch: But I think he points, I think very persuasively to our unique Restoration teaching of what creation is, right? Creation is not creation ex nihilo, out of nothing. Creation is always re -creation, it's re -organization. This is of course what we see in the Book of Moses and in Joseph's many sorts of revisiting of what creation is. And if creation is always a re -creation, a reorganization from what existed earlier, then every act of creation is also an act of loss of what came before, right? As matter and as people are transformed into something new, what was before is destroyed, it's lost and it's de-created.

So, to fully countenance the miracle of God's creation, we also have to see that miracle at work in loss and in decay and entropy and in the ravages of time. We have to see that as part and parcel of God's creative process. And Adam points to, in chapters eight and nine, where Moroni takes the reins here. Moroni is really, really focused on God's miracles. He says, if in the latter days you're not seeing miracles, the problem is with you, because God is a God of miracles. He always has been, He always is, He always will be.

And the primary instance that Moroni cites of God's miraculous work is in fact creation and resurrection. Not some sort of supernatural out of the ordinary moment, but the ordinary work of creation as we live in it and as we see the world resurrected morning after morning after morning as God gives us another day and another breath. So, it's really in that process that we see the miraculous character of God's love.

And so just to conclude here then, what Adam helps us see and what I think he sees in Moroni and in Mormon is the sense that what we're called on to love is, or what we're called to do when we're called to love, is not to get attached to a particular instantiation of creation,

Welch: because we know that will be taken from us, whether it is my three -year -old child who has now become a 15 -year -old. If I got so fixated on his purity and his perfection, his innocence as a three -year -old, I wouldn't be able to accept and love who he has become as a 15 -year -old. He's not as cute. He's not as innocent or as pure, but he is still as worthy of love, and he is still as miraculous as that three -year -old. And of course, Christ himself was willing to undertake the same work. And this is the central message of the Christian gospel is that God himself came down among the children of men and made himself subject to these ravages of time that ravaged his body, that took away the people and things that he loved, even to the point of death himself. So, we worship a God who is willing to walk the walk that he asks of us and show us what it means to willingly give what time will take in any case to consecrate our lives and consecrate our losses in the transformative process that he calls discipleship.

Givens: Well, Adam is predictably, right, wonderfully eloquent, and provocative. My concern with the way we read apocalyptic writing is we know that from the very beginning, from Jesus' own mouth, we get a transmutable eschatology. We get an eschatology that oscillates between look forward, this is all going to be destroyed and renewed, and no, no, God is here, the kingdom is here. And so, I think, you know, that we're told to cherish the present and then accept the loss, but I think the scriptures are so replete with injunctions to relish, to cherish, to recreate, to celebrate. And Moroni's plea that we will be wiser than his people had been--I think we're being told this doesn't have to be the prototype for your own annihilation. So, I think it's very beautiful to talk about the cost of discipleship and consecrating loss. I think that's a beautiful, beautiful concept.

But my fear is that in the face of the forces of entropy, God wants us to stay in a whole firm and help recreate the new world and not be quiescent in the face of a kind of inevitable destruction. And I don't think that's what Adam's advocating. But my worry is that historically, we have used our despair about the present to relinquish our responsibility to recreate the present.

Welch: Absolutely, yeah. You see that all the time, right? This sense that, well, yes, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but Jesus is going to come again. So, you know, we can just rest easy, He's going to fix it all. And that kind of relieves us of any responsibility to try to do anything about it. We can just kind of make sure that we're safe and our families are comfortable and then just, okay, well, good luck out there, folks, right? And that's not at all what we're being called to ask, to do, yeah.

I love, and I think we see that in Mormon's life himself, right? There is this moment, as you've alluded to, so beautifully, where he resigns and says, I can't be party to this anymore. And then as you say, something that he's read has transformed him and he realizes, no, I need to go back. And to witness the end of the world, to witness in this sense is an active kind of witnessing. It's not a detached standing back, like, good luck to you. It's, I am with them. I am in there with you. I am an eyewitness because I'm at your side and I see what's happening.

I know that I scooped you earlier on in the podcast by reading one of your favorite scriptures. Would you still just read that to us again, though, Terryl? I think it's worth highlighting. Okay, excellent, good. Well, share with us then, Terryl, something that means something to you personally. Okay.

Givens: Well, I have another one. I'll go to Mormon 9:14. And a few reasons why I love this. Okay. “And then cometh the judgment of the Holy One upon them. And then cometh the time that he that is filthy shall be filthy still, and he that is righteous shall be righteous still.” Those words he's quoting from Jacob.

In 2 Nephi chapter 9, Jacob uses those identical words. But Mormon adds, he adds a line. He adds, “he that is happy shall be happy still. And he that is unhappy shall be unhappy still.” And so, it seems what he has added is he has taken a kind of an abstract principle about righteousness and added the effect of reality that he has lived through but ultimately righteousness is just another word for happiness. And you know, that can at times be a daunting challenge because we don't always feel happy going through life. And does that mean our inheritance is not going to be happiness? But I prefer to see it as a challenge: that God's intent is that we be joyful even in the midst of these traumatic happenings all around us.

Welch: Yeah, I love that. And you know, Mormon does care about happiness. And there are a couple moments earlier in the record where he points out moments of notable happiness, right? Of course, he has this wonderful meditation on the waters of Mormon, which has personal meaning to him given his name. But he notes that the time of Captain Moroni, for instance,

was the happiest time ever among the Nephites. The first generation after Christ's visit was the happiest way, the happiest that people have ever been. So, he's noted these moments of happiness. Happiness isn't in great supply in his current environs, but I think he recognizes its value. And as you said, he sees that ultimately the plan is a plan of happiness. And so, he grasps onto those moments in the record that he finds and commends it to us as the way of being that we should strive for.

Givens: Yeah, so let's hear yours, Rosalynde.

Welch: Okay, all right, well, I will share some verses that were meaningful to me, and I read a couple of them earlier on. This is in Mormon chapter six, and these are very famous lines here where Mormon is lamenting the loss of his people. Mormon six verse 17, “Oh ye fair ones, how could ye have departed from the ways of the Lord? Oh, ye fair ones, how could ye have rejected that Jesus who stood with open arms to receive you? Behold, if you had done this, you would not have fallen. But behold, ye are fallen, and I mourn your loss. O ye fair sons and daughters, ye fathers and mothers, ye husbands and wives, ye fair ones, how is it that ye could have fallen? But behold, ye are gone, and my sorrows cannot bring your return." There we see that moment, that note of relinquishment and divestment that we've been talking about, loss.

But I want to focus on this line here in verse 17, that Jesus who stood with open arms to receive you. And it's such a beautiful kind of closing of the arc of this imagery of Christ's arms that the Book of Mormon has, from the beginning, has given us. I'm reminded of Lehi's final words in 2 Nephi 1, where he's addressing Laman and Lemuel, of course. And he says, I'm about to go the way of all the earth. “But behold, the Lord hath redeemed my soul from hell. I have beheld his glory, and I am encircled about eternally in the arms of his love." And this idea of Christ's loving arms becomes a kind of image that recurs throughout the Book of Mormon, memorably, of course, in Third Nephi, where after the tremendous destruction and upheaval that would have seemed very familiar to Mormon as he read about it and wrote about it. The voice of Christ comes to this devastated people in 3rd Nephi 9 verse 14 and says, “Yea verily I say unto you, if you will come unto me, ye shall have eternal life. Behold, mine arm of mercy is extended towards you, and whosoever will come, him will I receive. And blessed are those who come unto me.”

So, Mormon very beautifully closes this circle here in his own sign off, that Jesus who stood with open arms to receive you. And of course, the implication is that for us who are reading in the latter days, we haven't progressed as far as the Nephites have yet. Christ is still standing to receive us with open arms, and he will receive all who come unto him. He denieth none. Those arms are open, and the call is there, the invitation is there to repent and to come unto Christ.

Givens: Amen.

Welch: Well, Terryl, this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for your time today and all that you've shared for your work on the Book of Mormon as a whole and for your insights today on the small Book of Mormon. Thank you for joining us.

Givens: Thank you, Rosalynde. Great conversation.

Welch: Bye, bye.