Latter-day Scripture. Robert M. Price
Latter-day Scripture
Studies in the Book of Mormon
by
Robert M. Price
Copyright 2011 Robert M. Price,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0145-4
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Dedicated to
Richard Calder,
Learned seeker, loyal friend
Introduction: The Golden Bible of Joseph Smith
Critical Studies in the Book of Mormon
A Way in the Wilderness
For many decades Latter-day Saints and their critics were stalemated in a rancorous debate over the date and authorship of the Book of Mormon. LDS believers (Mormons) maintained their scripture was an ancient work written by Hebrew-Christian prophets in North America. Non-Mormons insisted the book was a nineteenth-century fraud. Only late in the twentieth century did a third option appear: what if the Book of Mormon was actually a genuine scripture but authored by Joseph Smith? Championed by liberal Mormons and sympathetic non-Mormons alike, this paradigm has made possible a rebirth of Book of Mormon scholarship.
The present collection of essays demonstrates how a flood of new light may be shed on the sacred American text on the hypothesis that Joseph Smith rewrote biblical passages to produce the Book of Mormon in much the same way that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John rewrote the Old Testament as the basis for their gospels. The use of source and redaction criticism, long familiar to biblical scholars, demonstrates new levels of meaning in the Book of Mormon, as well as a hitherto-unguessed literary and theological acumen on the part of its author, Joseph Smith. Such an approach vindicates his role as a genuine prophetic writer, not merely an amateur archeologist stumbling on a buried book in upper New York State. The present book, while bringing to bear an array of critical methods to which Latter-day Saints are unaccustomed, actually turns out to elevate the importance of their founder and their scripture, not least in the eyes of non-Mormons. And by showing the vast extent to which the Book of Mormon depends upon the King James Bible, this book will bring Mormon and non-Mormon Americans closer together by revealing their common scriptural heritage.
Epic and Ethic
I am not a Mormon. I am a Religious Humanist. And, for me, Humanism proceeds from and embodies two key insights, one from the Sophist Protagoras, the other from the philosopher Nietzsche. The first is that “Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not.” The second is that “God is dead.” There is no objective meaning center to the cosmos, and therefore meaning resides in the eye of the beholder. Even if there were a God, his would be but one more opinion, though theoretically we might be in danger, as less powerful beings, if we did not hold it, or pretend to.
It is no use pointing out that human ability to know is so limited that we can never, by ourselves, know that there is nothing to know. No, that is just my point. If there were an objective truth, it would remain unavailable, and is thus like the tree falling in the empty forest. All we as humans can do is to call it like we see it, since there is no other, better, position for us to occupy. The person of faith may urge us to believe that we can occupy the divine perspective by accepting the revelation he offers us in God’s name. But this would only provide supposition, not knowledge. Pretending I have knowledge is not the same thing as having it. My bank account is pretty much empty. I wish I had money in it, but pretending I do does not justify my writing rubber checks.
This godlessness is no bleak vision. We humans are in the position of an artist bursting with creativity and standing before a blank canvas. It is up to us to write the inscription of meaning onto the blank sheet of the world. Of course, we may only do this individually, though we may find we agree with the inventions of others and embrace them as our own. Thus there is a Humanist movement for those who think alike.
But it seems to me that, as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explain in their classic book The Social Construction of Reality, all movements, all collectivities, all societies have done the same. But they have hidden the fact from themselves and their successors. Many or most believe the rules governing them, and their beliefs, are not human products of history, but rather inevitable and immutable products of nature, or of God. They think us guilty of reductionism. We think them guilty of mystification.
Religion is, of course, the great case in point. Humanists like pointing out the human fingerprints that cover all these supposed products of divine creation, the ample marks of human invention of scripture, dogma, ritual. Like the astronomer La Place, when asked by Napoleon if his studies led him to believe in God, we say, “I have no need for that hypothesis.” Religion seems to us, from first to last, a human invention. But here Humanists divide in their sympathies.
Some seem to be disappointed believers who cannot seem to get over their dismay at discovering there is no more a God than a Santa Claus. They become jaundiced Scrooges and have no more to say about religion than “Bah! Humbug!” To them it is all priestcraft, an exploitative hoax, a predatory sham. It is as if they still wish it were all true and want to take vengeance on religion for not being true. But some of us take a more sympathetic view, borne of the academic study of religion. We approach religion with the anthropologist’s eye, as a fascinating human phenomenon, one of the most fruitful loci of human creativity. Religion, even theology, is art, epic, fiction. And much of it is great art. Its grandest claims are grand precisely in their extravagance, just as Camus maintained that art, by nature, must be gratuitous, art for art’s sake. All demands for art to serve some serious cause make it into dreary and grotesque propaganda, not to mention bad science and dishonest historiography.
As a Humanist, I believe that ethics must be autonomous, not heteronomous. That is, we must take an inductive approach to ethics, determining as best we can what will work to maximize security and freedom for everyone. This is the approach all cultures and societies have always taken anyway, which is why values are basically the same all over the world, with universal agreement that murder, theft, deceit, rape, etc., are wrong. There is plenty of disagreement over definitions and details, but that is true even within a single revealed religion. Christian, Jewish, Islamic ethicists have the same debates over ambiguous areas as those of us do who claim no revelation, as Ethan Allen said, except reason. Aquinas avoided the arbitrariness of Divine Command ethics (“It’s right simply because God said so.”) by positing Natural Law, the ethics of what works in the kind of world we find ourselves in. He believed God had created such a world; hence the most effective rules are his will. But the approach is the same even if one believes, as I, a Nietzschean, do, that the Universe is devoid of intrinsic and objective rules of right and wrong. Ethics, personal and social, is a game we create and live by, and we take it very seriously. But we may reason together morally whatever theory we may hold about where the world came from.
The exclusive preserve of religion, I think, is not nature, whence all our ethics, if we are wise, ultimately stem, but rather grace. Grace need have nothing to do with supernatural sacred force. It is basically the same word as gratuitousness, the icing on the cake, what is above and beyond the call of strict duty. Religion provides it, as music and art do, for religion is a member of the same species, a human creation, very often a noble and edifying one. All religions offer us an epic which we may embrace. They offer us symbols rooted, a la Carl Jung, in the unconscious, symbols we must, or at least may, access to facilitate the process of individuation. Ritual is the way we access them, like clicking on the icons on our computer screen to bring this or that program on line from the depths of the computer. The sacred is that artistic second-sight,