{"id":47446,"date":"2024-06-23T06:50:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-23T12:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=47446"},"modified":"2024-06-23T10:59:10","modified_gmt":"2024-06-23T16:59:10","slug":"michael-austin-on-the-book-of-mormon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2024\/06\/michael-austin-on-the-book-of-mormon\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Austin on the Book of Mormon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A fascinating read that was recently published is Michael Austin\u2019s The Testimony of Two Nations<\/em><\/a>. I\u2019ve already done a review of the book<\/a>, but wanted to highlight a recent interview that Michael Austin did at the Latter-day history blog From the Desk<\/em> that shared some interesting insights from the book. What follows here is a copost to the full interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Michael Austin\u2019s work goes a long way to show how the Book of Mormon interacts with the Bible, subtly shifting our understanding of the Old and New Testaments along the way. One outstanding example that he shared in the interview was about how Lehi\u2019s vision of the Tree of Life interacts with the story of Adam and Eve:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Both the story of Adam and Eve and the vision of the Tree of Life are stories about people finding a tree and eating a fruit, and the later story inverts the narrative of the former. In Genesis, Adam and Eve start off in Paradise and then eat the fruit, and are cast out into the lone and dreary world. Lehi begins in the dark and dreary wilderness, eats the fruit, and ends up in Paradise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Genesis, the serpent tempts Adam and Eve to eat the fruit. In the Book of Mormon, the people in the Great and Spacious Building tempt people not to eat the fruit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Genesis, Adam and Eve feel shame because they disobeyed God and ate the fruit. Shame acts as a conduit to repentance. In the Book of Mormon, people feel shame because the people in the Great and Spacious Building make fun of them for eating the fruit. Shame acts as a conduit to sin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lehi\u2019s vision reverses almost everything important about the Garden of Eden narrative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not coincidentally, this reversal corresponds exactly to the way that the Book of Mormon\u2019s theology reverses the traditional Christian understanding of the Fall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since Augustine, most Christians have seen the Fall as a great tragedy\u2014something that could have been avoided if Adam and Eve had been more obedient and something that has made the human condition worse than it would have been if our first parents had obeyed God and stayed in the Garden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Book of Mormon, however, presents the Fall as a positive thing. Before they fell, Adam and Eve could not have children, and their eating the fruit made humanity and human progression possible. The Book of Mormon does theologically what Lehi\u2019s vision does typologically: it reinterprets the moral logic of the Fall.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This reversal of the traditional western understanding of the Fall in a subtle and clever way that is reflected in the propositional theology shared by Lehi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another insight from Michael Austin\u2019s reading of the Book of Mormon that reflects an interesting broader trend in Book of Mormon scholarship is investigation into the narratives of the Mulekites and how they relate to the Nephites. (This is also something that comes up in Grant Hardy\u2019s Annotated Book of Mormon, for example.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

The Nephites did their best to portray the Zarahemlans as a people who happily assimilated with the Nephites and to present all subsequent conflicts as civil wars with dissident Nephites. But there is reason to believe that the major dissident movements in Alma and Helaman are wrapped up in an indigenous Zarahemlan identity that did not officially exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We see this almost as soon as the Zarahemla narrative begins. When King Benjamin calls his people together, he instructs his son (the second Mosiah), to make a proclamation to \u201cthe people of Zarahemla, and the people of Mosiah\u201d (Mosiah 1:10). There is nothing particularly violent in this request, but it does show us that, two generations after they officially became one people, the Nephites and the Zarahemlans maintained separate identities that were recognized by the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the opening chapter of Alma, the people of Zarahemla have been divided into two religious groups: those who follow the new Church that Alma brought from the Land of Nephi, and those who follow the religion of Nehor. There is some evidence that the Nehorites came from the traditional Zarahemlan segment of the population who resented the sudden prominence of a new and distinctly Nephite Church.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is at least an assumption worth testing. And if we assume that Nehor was a religious leader among the traditional Zarahemlans, then the whole book of Alma starts to look very different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Nehor is accused of killing Gideon, a religious hero from the Land of Nephi, the tensions between the two factions create a political crisis for Alma. And when he solves this crisis by convicting and executing Nehor he sets in motion events that lead to a destructive war with Amlici, who is described as \u201cafter the order of the man that slew Gideon by the sword, who was executed according to the law\u201d (Alma 2:1).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nearly every dissenting Nephite in the Book of Alma is described as either a Nehorite, a Zarahemlan, or both. And in the Book of Helaman, Coriantumr\u2014the general who leads the Lamanites against the Nephites\u2014is described as \u201ca descendant of Zarahemla; and . . . a dissenter from among the Nephites\u201d (Helaman 1:15). This description is telling, as it both asserts and erases Zarahemlan identity from the picture by identifying Coriantumr as a descendent of the last Zarahemlan king while simultaneously labeling him a dissenting Nephite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this is consistent with the kind of enforced assimilation that conquerors often impose on the people they conquer. The Nephite recordkeepers try very hard to convince us that the Zarahemlans voluntarily gave up their language, religion, and culture when the superior Nephites came along and showed them the errors of their ways. But the text itself pushes back hard against that pretense and shows us that the Zarahemlans maintained a distinct identity for at least five generations after the official merger and that this repressed identity often returned in very unpleasant ways.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

There might be more colonialism going on in the interactions between Nephites and Mulekites than is openly acknowledged in the Book of Mormon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve barely scratched the surface of the interview here, but for more on how the Book of Mormon reinterprets the Bible<\/a>, head on over to the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk<\/em> to read the full interview with Michael Austin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A fascinating read that was recently published is Michael Austin\u2019s The Testimony of Two Nations. I\u2019ve already done a review of the book, but wanted to highlight a recent interview that Michael Austin did at the Latter-day history blog From the Desk that shared some interesting insights from the book. What follows here is a copost to the full interview.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10397,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,2890],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-of-mormon","category-from-the-desk"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47446","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\/10397"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47446"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47480,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47446\/revisions\/47480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}