- Sterling on Latter-day Saint Apologetics Tier List: “RLD: I think there may be even more political intrigue beneath Mormon’s narration than you’ve suggested, particularly involving the relationship between the Nephites and Mulekites. When Mosiah(1) arrived in Zarahemla, the Mulekites apparently constituted the majority population, yet the Nephites assumed control of both the monarchy and religious institutions. Mosiah 25:13 is especially revealing: the people of Zarahemla were numbered among the Nephites because “the kingdom had been conferred upon none but those who were descendants of Nephi.” This raises questions about how the descendants of Zarahemla, including those who may have traced their ancestry to the royal house of Judah through Mulek, regarded their political subordination. Ammon’s identification as a descendant of Zarahemla in Mosiah 7:3 might therefore be more significant than it initially appears. Was he a member of a surviving Mulekite aristocracy? If so, sending him to recover a lost Nephite colony could have served several political purposes simultaneously: accommodating Mulekite elites by entrusting one of their own with a prestigious mission, distancing a potential rival from Zarahemla, and perhaps avoiding the appearance that Mosiah was personally interested in restoring a competing Nephite monarchy. I also find Ammon’s reaction to his imprisonment intriguing. In Mosiah 7:13, he tells Limhi that had he known who Ammon was, he would never have placed him in bonds. Could this reflect a consciousness of elevated political or genealogical status? There is also a certain irony in a descendant of Zarahemla being dispatched to the ancestral homeland of the Nephites, only to encounter another monarchy whose legitimacy rested partly on popular selection (Mosiah 7:9). This raises a larger question about the subsequent abolition of monarchy under Mosiah(2). If Mulekite elites retained memories of their own royal ancestry, did the establishment of the reign of judges eliminate their remaining hopes of recovering kingship? Might some of the later movements to restore monarchy, particularly the king-men described in Alma 51, have drawn upon unresolved tensions between the descendants of Nephi and Zarahemla? The text never explicitly establishes such a connection, but its references to high birth, hereditary privilege, and competing claims to political authority make the possibility worth considering. Even the later identification of Coriantumr as a descendant of Zarahemla (Helaman 1:15) suggests that Mulekite ancestry remained sufficiently meaningful to warrant preservation in the narrative. None of this establishes that Ammon was a political rival or that the king-men represented a Mulekite faction. But it does raise the possibility that Mormon’s seemingly incidental genealogical details preserve traces of a much longer struggle over political legitimacy within a society whose majority population had been incorporated into a ruling Nephite identity. Your interpretation of Mosiah’s maneuvering may be one glimpse of that larger, largely untold history.” Oct 28, 17:13
- on Church Education Expansion Under Ernest Wilkinson: “In seminary in Rexburg in the late 60s/early 70’s, I was told that the reason we were so wicked was that our parents were being punished for fighting the move of Ricks College from Rexburg to Idaho Falls. Supposedly someone had prophesied that their vehement disagreement with Church authorities would result in their children going astray.” Oct 28, 11:17
- on Church Education Expansion Under Ernest Wilkinson: “Though the Junior College program didn’t work out, there was a silver lining to it. The land that the Church bought in Portland Oregon for a junior college in the Pacific Northwest proved to be the perfect place for the Portland Oregon Temple to be constructed on a few decades later.” Oct 28, 08:30
- on Reading the New Testament on Its Own Terms: A Review of Alex Douglas’s The New Testament for Latter-day Saints: “Well, I haven’t read this and I likely won’t but you won’t convince me by saying “Toward Understanding the New Testament” was a book that “laid essential groundwork.” That is one of the worst books on the NT I have ever had the misfortune to read. Even if you set aside it’s completely skeptical, non-believing stance (it spends way too much time explaining away the miracles), it’s scholarship was 30 years or more out of date when it came out. Despite a handful of references to recent (at the time) scholarship, it was basically a work of pre-1950s New Testament scholarship.” Oct 27, 18:28
- on Latter-day Saint Apologetics Tier List: “Under Book of Mormon complexity, one thing I find compelling is that the drivers of important plot points are sometimes never explained. Fiction writers don’t do that. Zeniff’s effort to recolonize the Land of Nephi was in defiance of the prophetic command given to King Mosiah(1) for the Nephites to leave that land. Nothing goes right for long, even for Alma’s repentant people, until they obey that commandment and return to Zarahemla. This would have been a classic place for some “And thus we see…” commentary from Mormon, but he never says it. Maybe he didn’t want to bring out that the Nephite Church was started among an apostate people. You have to look at the story as a whole and connect it back to previous history to see it. King Mosiah(2) strongly opposes sending anyone to the Land of Nephi to check on the people who went there. Apparently he fears that this will stir up the desire to return (even Captain Moroni is briefly tempted by it). The time when the people demand that he send an expedition is described as the end of a period of peace. When they finally force his hand, he very cleverly puts a descendent of Zarahemla in charge, not a Nephite, even though this is Nephite business. Ammon(1) has no emotional ties to the Land of Nephi and is not at all tempted to stay there. It wouldn’t surprise me if the whole expedition was made up of Mulekites. Mormon dutifully records that Ammon was chosen, but doesn’t say anything about the significance of the choice. Maybe he didn’t recognize it. For a fiction writer, this would have been one of the highlights of Mosiah’s story: how he outmaneuvered his opponents and helped bring all the Nephites home to Zarahemla where they belonged.” Oct 27, 09:50
- on Latter-day Saint Apologetics Tier List: “For the Chiasmus’ and other Hebrew parallel poetry in the Book of Mormon, one of the podcasts I listed to went over where they are found in the Book of Mormon. The common pattern is that they a found where a righteous individual is writing. The letters from the Lamanites don’t have them, the off-the-cuff discussions don’t have them. Going over that just blew my mind.” Oct 27, 09:13
- on The Framework of My Historical Argument about Polygamy: “I understand that with our hundreds of years of utopian experimentation and awareness of things that can go very wrong, we’d read Plato through that lens. I’m just saying that the Josephs (father and son) wouldn’t have looked at such ideas through the legitimate baggage of 20th-century communism. I’m writing on this theme currently, and Zion in Missouri did have a number of restrictions. That bothered some people, like Oliver Cowdery.” Oct 27, 08:20
- on The Framework of My Historical Argument about Polygamy: “You’re both right. Yes, Plato was remarkably feminist, insisting that women should hold all the same offices as men. The second paragraph I quoted refers to this, saying that the officials in charge of childcare will be both men and women. It’s also not too much of an exaggeration to say that women in The Republic are one step away from goods, to be used, deceived, and carefully manipulated by the state. Men are too. Granted, The Republic is not all of Plato’s thinking.” Oct 27, 07:23
- on Latter-day Saint Apologetics Tier List: “I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks the Kinderhook plates are strong evidence for Joseph’s prophethood. If you know metal plates are a fabrication of your imagination, what better way to prove you’re a prophet than “discerning” a plot to entrap you? But if you’ve dealt with metal plates before and expect to find more, wouldn’t you be excited to find them?” Oct 27, 07:09
- on Latter-day Saint Apologetics Tier List: “I’m also ambivalent about chiasmus. I think it’s a good example of the Book of Mormon’s complexity and how aspects of the text can escape notice for 150 years before anyone notices them, but it gets more attention than it deserves. B tier, but overall complexity is an A tier for me. The Book of Mormon has a depth that is hard to explain. I’d put the physicality of the golden plates in the B+/A range. They sound so improbable, but in the contemporary historical documents, their physical reality is hard to wave away. Joseph Smith doesn’t act like someone trying to keep a fiction going, but like someone trying to keep possession of a very real stack of metallic plates. I agree that the Kinderhook Plates belong somewhere near the top. They get treated as a scandal, but they actually point in the opposite direction. As you say, none of this is conclusive, but a lot of it is far weirder than dismissive accounts of early church history depict it.” Oct 27, 05:06
