At a conference and later book that Jonathan and I both contributed to, Terryl Givens noted the Mormon notion of restoration was quite different than Protestants. Givens quoted Parley Pratt, “We can never understand precisely what is meant by restoration, unless we understand what is lost or taken away.”
“The problems seen by other restorationists,” noted Givens, “from Calvin and Severtus to the Campbellites was unwarranted accrual, not missing elements.” Givens noted Mormon revelations that speak of “no paring away, no stripping back to essentials, but rather, the hint of a vast expansion…. The Bible … was neither complete nor accurate. Neither was it sufficient.”[1]
Protestants wanted to restore primitive Christianity by removing what they saw as non-biblical elements accrued over the millennia, while Joseph Smith wanted to restore elements that had been removed. 1 Nephi 13:26 “thou seest the formation of that great and abominable church, which is most abominable above all other churches; for behold, they have taken away from the gospel of the Lamb many parts which are plain and most precious; and also many covenants of the Lord have they taken away.”
As I note in the video (minute 23-24), the claim that Christianity was corrupted by Greek philosophy was quite common in available Protestant books in Joseph Smith’s day. Smith owned one of the most popular of such books: Johann Lorentz von Mosheim’s Institutes of Ecclesiastical History.[2] But as Givens and 1 Nephi 13 note, Smith taught the opposite: it wasn’t the addition of false ideas after Jesus that was the problem, the problem was the REMOVAL of true principles.
I argue in my dissertation’s introduction that Mosheim attributed a notion of such removal of truth to the early Christian Platonist Ammonius Saccas. Mosheim spends considerable time attacking early Christian Platonists and describes them as having many Mormon ideas—like truth scattered everywhere, there being secret initiation rites, and links to other Mormon ideas elsewhere—ideas Mosheim hated and claimed corrupted Christianity.[3]
Mosheim thus wanted to explain Ammonius’s thought even though we have almost no writings from Ammonius. Mosheim therefore found the similarities in those whom Ammonius taught and attributed those ideas to Ammonius.
Mosheim said that Ammonius Saccas taught that Jesus’s “sole view, in descending upon earth, was … to remove the errors that had crept into the religions of all nations but not to abolish the ancient theology from whence they were derived.” Mosheim went on to say that Jesus’s “only intention was to purify the ancient religion, and that his followers had manifestly corrupted the doctrine of their divine master.”[4]
To “abolish” would be a suppressing or taking away, thus the later followers’ “corruption” that Mosheim claimed Ammonius claimed, would seem to be a taking away. The abundant Mormon ideas in the “ancient religion” and among the Christian Platonists that Mosheim denounced suggests that the removal of those ideas would be a loss of Mormon ideas that Smith restored.
I’ve stated many times that Smith’s later Nauvoo theology was full of Platonic ideas especially the plan of salvation (see Chapter Six of my dissertation as an example). The “vast expansion” that Smith restored had much in common with the ancient theology/religion that Mosheim noted and denounced.
Later Mormon thinkers adopted the Protestant view that Greek philosophy corrupted Christianity. But Joseph Smith specifically rejected such claims, and declared the opposite: truth was missing.
I’ll give more examples in upcoming posts.
[1] Terryl Givens, “’We Have Only the Old Thing’: Rethinking Mormon Restoration,” in Miranda Wilcox and John D. Young eds. Standing Apart: Mormon Historical Consciousness and the Concept of Apostasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 339-40.
[2] Christopher C. Jones, “The Complete Record of the Nauvoo Library and Literary Institute,” Mormon Historical Studies 10, no. 1 (2009): 192.
[3] Stephen J. Fleming, “’The Fulness of the Gospel’: Christian Platonism and the Origins of Mormonism” (PhD Diss.: University of California, Santa Barbara, 2014). Page 1 for gathering all truth like JS, and 6-16 for a summary of other themes.
[4] Johann Lorentz von Mosheim, Institutes of Ecclesiastical History, trans. Archibald MacLaine (New York, 1821), 1:141, 143. The notion that Jesus’s disciples removed Platonic truth from Christianity probably came from Renaissance Christian Platonist Marsilio Ficino. Hannegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 50-51; James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 1:283-84.
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