People keep asking me for proof that the irritating tics in Mormon writing I\u2019ve mentioned actually exist. In that respect, Taylor Kerby\u2019s post over at BCC is useful in a couple of ways.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnly Superman is Super<\/a>\u201d provides a good example of the imagined audience of Pharisaical dunderheads<\/a>, for one. The post builds on a contrast between a sophisticated reading of the Book of Mormon and an imagined discussion of Nephi in a typical Sunday School class: \u201cYet when we discuss him in Sunday School, this complicated figure, and his agenda, is handled with the sort of nuance we would attach to an earnest Disney prince intent on saving his princess.\u201d The contrast is irritating and unnecessary \u2013 if the ideas are good, they don\u2019t need the invocation of a chapel full of superficial ignoramuses to make them look better.<\/p>\n And of course the post is also an example of Book of Mormon historical revisionism<\/a>. The post includes a long list of items Taylor is skeptical of, beginning with Nephi\u2019s physical self-description and his willingness to forgive his brothers. While it certainly is interesting to speculate about the unknowable historical reality behind the scriptural narrative, Book of Mormon historical revisionism often comes with doctrinal stakes, as it does in this case, too. Taylor proposes that \u201cdivision leads to violence, and violence destroys civilization\u201d is the Book of Mormon\u2019s central warning, overwriting the Book of Mormon\u2019s own warnings with a sentiment that\u2019s at tension with the text: the Book of Mormon knows both wicked and righteous separation, and violence is used both to save and destroy the Nephites.<\/p>\n But I digress. Although I disagree with several of Taylor\u2019s points, the post is absolutely correct to call the Book of Mormon a tragedy, and it raises the question of unreliable narrators. Of course, one problem with treating Nephi as an unreliable narrator is that we then have to ask: unreliable compared to who? Because I need to introduce you to some notably unreliable narrators:<\/p>\n You. And me.<\/p>\n Even under the best conditions, when we\u2019re discussing our own lives in good faith, we warp reality in the interest of narrative and distort the truth in the interest of self-presentation. And we can do this entirely unconsciously because our memories aren\u2019t photographic records. They\u2019re the stories we tell about ourselves in our own minds, and we\u2019re constantly revising them. We need to apply a healthy dose of the skepticism that Taylor has about Nephi to the narratives we create about ourselves.<\/p>\n Let me tell you a true story.<\/p>\n Seven years after I returned from my mission, I decided to write a detailed account of my experience, and so over the space of several months I created an 80,000-word document in which I tried to make sense of what I had seen and done. Among other things, I recorded a teaching opportunity made possibly by a group of Muslim doctors who had come to Europe from Nigeria for some specialized training.<\/p>\n Once, when another Christian friend of theirs was sick, they invited us to go preach to her in the hospital, as we were Christians and preaching to the sick was what one did in Nigeria.\u00a0 While Elder M. talked to their friend, I had a conversation with the German woman in the next bed.\u00a0 She was interested enough to take a book and let me send her address to the sisters in O.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The problem? Seven years after the fact, I had flipped the roles that I and Elder M. had played. What I had actually written in my journal that day was<\/p>\n The patient\u2019s family had met with missionaries before, and the patient herself was pretty interested. And another German lady came by and started asking questions, so Elder M. taught her.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Or as I wrote in my weekly report to the mission president:<\/p>\n While we were there, a German woman came over and asked, \u201cIs that a Bible?\u201d So I taught the Zimbabwean family while Elder M. taught the German woman.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n There\u2019s also photographic evidence. I don\u2019t know why I took a picture. I have nearly no other pictures of people I taught, especially people I knew only briefly. I could tell you that the doctors had asked me to take a picture, or that it was just a random impulse on my part, but there is no reason to suppose that either version is true. But there is a picture, and in it, Elder M. is holding a conversation with a German woman.<\/p>\n Why would my memory switch what I and Elder M. had done? Of all my mission companions, Elder M. was the one with the highest intellectual aspirations (and the only one with the foresight to smuggle a poetry anthology<\/a> into the field), and one element of our companionship was intellectual rivalry and competition, especially at first. By switching our roles, I gave myself the more challenging assignment \u2013 teaching in a foreign language \u2013 and relegated Elder M. to the seemingly easier job of teaching in English. That in turn underscored that I came out ahead in those contests. But did I? Elder M. might see things differently.<\/p>\n Is this a true story? That\u2019s for you to decide. For me, it\u2019s a story for which I have contemporary documentary and photographic evidence, and that\u2019s a much different thing.<\/p>\n So: no, I do not fully trust the narratives you have created based on teenage memories any more than I trust my own. We may accurately remember many things as punctual incidents, but the narratives we\u2019ve built around them are subject to question. I need to see some supporting evidence or additional context. It\u2019s one of the reasons we keep journals: reading what we wrote long ago forces us confront the fact that what we remember as happy years actually had some bleak weeks and months, our anger was not as righteous as we thought \u2013 but also that we were capable of greater wisdom than we give ourselves credit for, and sometimes that jerk we hated looks even worse through adult eyes.<\/p>\n As for Nephi, if we assume \u2013 which I don\u2019t think we can \u2013 that the books of 1-2 Nephi are a handwritten personal account (rather than a work of hagiography for an eponymous ancestor or a text subject to countless generations of copying and redaction), Nephi seems about as reliable a narrator as you or me, describing the significance he saw in past events at the time he got around to recording them. The difference between him and us isn\u2019t our reliability, but that he was a prophet whose writings have been canonized as scripture. I don\u2019t feel any particular obligation to the Lehite family drama or Nephite political struggles, but I value his warnings and teachings. And I\u2019d be a lot more useful to people in my vicinity with a firmer commitment to go and do<\/a> than I can be with a deep understanding of unreliable narrators.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" People keep asking me for proof that the irritating tics in Mormon writing I\u2019ve mentioned actually exist. In that respect, Taylor Kerby\u2019s post over at BCC is useful in a couple of ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,2885,390,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-of-mormon","category-language-and-literature","category-liberal-arts","category-scriptures"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46604","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=46604"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46606,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46604\/revisions\/46606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}