{"id":4487,"date":"2008-04-09T04:36:23","date_gmt":"2008-04-09T08:36:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=4487"},"modified":"2017-03-15T14:33:54","modified_gmt":"2017-03-15T19:33:54","slug":"whats-wrong-with-ancient-research-in-mormon-studies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2008\/04\/whats-wrong-with-ancient-research-in-mormon-studies\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s Wrong with Ancient Research in Mormon Studies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mormon Studies has become a relic area for outdated ideas about texts and their transmission. That becomes clear in reading a number of contributions to Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy<\/a><\/em> (FARMS, 2005).<\/p>\n

For most of the last 2000 years, the central concern of textual interpretation lay in determining how to properly read the Bible. The variety of manuscript readings represented a significant problem for people who believed in biblical inerrancy. The scholarly solution of previous centuries was to assume that copyists’ mistakes had crept into the text over time, replacing the original textual unity with corrupt variant readings. Scholarly editions were strongly influenced by the idea that careful analysis of the variant readings could recover the original text, and that the purpose of an edition was to restore the author’s original intent. (For a brief overview of the history of textual criticism, see the first sections of this article<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Alas, attempting to recover lost original texts ultimately fails, both in theory and in practice. For epics as well as for Exodus, there is no original, pure, perfect text. Instead, the earliest textual witnesses often show a high degree of variation. Not only do authors tend to tell a tale more than once and vary the form each time, but many, perhaps most texts have no authors in the modern sense at all; they circulate as community property that can change at each retelling. Textual unity comes only later through a process of canon formation. At each stage of its transmission, a text has to meet the needs of its momentary readers, not an absent or long-dead author. While there were certainly careless scribes, most were conscientious readers who often knew two or more versions of the text and made conscious choices about what to include or omit. Even access to an unblemished original would not answer every question about a text, because reading and writing are forever and always interpretive acts. Meaning arises when readers engage with texts, and even an autograph manuscript is not semantically self-contained.<\/p>\n

Different forces come into play with scriptural transmission, of course; textual authenticity and authority become paramount and interpretation takes place in an institutional framework. But the New Testament was not scripture, and not subject to the forces of scriptural transmission, until the various processes of canon formation (with all its compromises between competing interests and institutional needs) had taken place.<\/p>\n

The realization that there was no original papyrus containing Matthew, all of Matthew, and nothing but Matthew does not undermine the whole project of textual criticism. In fact, it is only possible to do textual criticism once one takes into account the actual history of texts, rather than a flawed model of stemmatic descent. It is still possible to argue that one sentence reflects an earlier stage of the text, and another is a later addition, while the question of authenticity is a different matter entirely: whether a particular verse was in the earliest manuscripts of John does not settle the question of its authenticity as a witness to early Christian belief. A spectacular archeological discovery is not going to put an end to controversy.<\/p>\n

But Mormon scholars writing about ancient texts still assume the existence of inerrant originals. In “The Corruption of Scripture in Early Christianity<\/a>,” John Gee argues that textual corruption consists of the “deliberate or unintentional changing of the text, either through the expansion, deletion, or alteration of the passage’s faulty interpretation (either exegesis or translation), and manipulation of the canon (which books are considered scripture).” Not only is this definition impossibly overbroad, but it gets the nature of textual transmission backwards: there was no early Christian scripture, no books of the New Testament, until after processes of expansion, deletion, alteration, interpretation, translation, and, finally, canonization (the ultimate manipulation of the canon!) had brought it into existence.<\/p>\n

Noel Reynolds, in his introductory essay to Early Christians in Disarray, “What Went Wrong for the Early Christians?<\/a>” notes that Nephi, in his vision of a great and abominable church, saw that “the devil’s church took away many parts of the gospel, and later took away many precious things out of the Bible.” To this Reynolds adds an anecdote:<\/p>\n

A few years ago I had a personal experience that confirmed Nephi’s account in a dramatic way. I was a guest of the director of the Vatican Library in Rome, and he brought out their fourth century copy of the complete Greek Bible for me to see – Codex Vaticanus B<\/em>. The first page we looked at had numerous erasures, additions, and changes written right on the page in different inks and different hands I asked, pointing to some of these, ‘What is that?’ The reply: ‘Oh, that’s where they made corrections.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Curiously, this anecdote is offered as a debunking of the myth that the Roman Catholic Church is the diabolical organization of 1 Nephi. Even more curiously, Reynolds notes recent scholarship on the development of the New Testament canon, yet he still sees manuscript corrections as evidence for the devil’s handiwork in corrupting an original text.<\/p>\n

John Welch’s contribution, “Modern Revelation: A Guide to Research about the Apostasy<\/a>,” suffers from a similar view of textual transmission. With reference to the same passages from Nephi’s vision, Welch analyzes the parable of the wheat and the tares as reflected in its telling in Matthew 13:24-30, its interpretation in Matthew 13:37-43, emendations from the JST, and D&C 86:1-8. It is a reasonable exercise in scriptural interpretation. Unfortunately, Welch wants to do textual history: “Consideration of six differences between the wording of these four texts sheds light on how these texts relate to each other and which is more likely the original version of the parable given by Jesus during his Galilean ministry.” Welch suggests later that the “modern revelation might reflect a restoration of the original.” But this is the textual equivalent of Creation Science. There are, first of all, the groundless assumptions that Christ told the parable only once, and that it was recorded only once, and that there were no other versions of the story already known to the evangelist – all of which are very possibly mistaken. Also, as a matter of textual criticism, D&C 86 is not a tenable witness to an Aramaic parable spoken many centuries previously. Devotional insights from the scriptures are welcome, but contrary to the chapter’s title, they are not a guide to research. Nephi’s vision of an uncorrupted Gospel does not compel Mormon textual scholars to accept an antiquated notion of uncorrupted gospels or a hopeless agenda of recovering them.<\/p>\n

Mormon teaching is actually quite well prepared for the complexities of textual transmission. After all, Mormonism may be the only religious movement named for an editor, and our defining work of scripture proclaims itself an abridgment of other records. We understand that scripture is not inerrant, that it can be marred by human error, that it is not complete, and that multiple accounts of God’s actions in the world represent a welcome improvement over biblical singularity. Mormon truth claims rest on belief in continuing revelation, not on the possession or recovery or interpretation of an original text. The scriptures that we have, for all their imperfections, still merit divine approval, canonical status in the church, and our own careful study. Although Mormons sometimes think of the JST as a recreation of the original text, it is much more a prophetic commentary on an existing text, adding to the stock of possible readings rather than reducing the variants to a single possibility – that Joseph Smith’s notes on the Bible consist of English words and not Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic ones makes clear that his concern was how we understand the scriptures, not the recovery of a lost original. Possessing the original manuscript of Matthew, if such a thing existed, would not make the Bible more or less the word of God, nor would translating it correctly be any less necessary, or contentious. It’s a good thing that Mormon scholars are working on ancient documents, because I think Mormonism can bring a unique and valuable perspective to the task. I just don’t see that a Mormon contribution to textual scholarship entails clinging to an outdated notion of textual descent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mormon Studies has become a relic area for outdated ideas about texts and their transmission. That becomes clear in reading a number of contributions to Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy (FARMS, 2005)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4487"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36353,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4487\/revisions\/36353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}