Over the next few posts, I\u2019m going to sketch out an argument that believing in the historicity of the Book of Mormon is a rational choice. To put it briefly: the Book of Mormon does not need to strain historical plausibility nearly as much as it might seem; treating the Book of Mormon as a document that existed in history offers insights on the text that a focus only on its 19th-century context would overlook; and the historicity of the Book of Mormon offers a compelling explanation for a number of things that are otherwise difficult to explain.<\/p>\n
This series builds on ideas I\u2019ve written about before, scattered over various posts going back a long time. Instead of repeating myself, here are the basic points, which I think are true statements about the Book of Mormon.<\/p>\n
The Nephite coalition<\/strong><\/p>\n What the historical sections of the Book of Mormon describe is not a millennium- and continent-spanning clash of empires, but something much more plausible. As found in Mosiah-3 Nephi 7, the Nephites are a tribal confederation<\/a> (itself a part of a larger cultural continuum) that existed for a little more than a century.<\/p>\n The Nephite confederation was assembled from four principal components. As the book of Mosiah opens, and towards the end of the reign of King Benjamin, the Nephites consist of:<\/p>\n Apart from the Mulekites, about whom we only have an origin story, these Nephite peoples seem to have arisen only recently. Their histories reach back only two generations at most. Mosiah, the first Nephite king and the father of Benjamin, was not crowned until after the Nephite migration to Zarahemla<\/a>, and no previous political leaders are known. The peoples of Limhi and Alma also extend back only two generations, to Zeniff, a rough contemporary of Mosiah. Major features of Nephite religion extend back a single generation to Abinadi. The later Book of Mormon does not refer to any Nephite leaders or quote any prophets from the centuries immediately preceding Mosiah, Zeniff and Abinadi. Mormon cites Abinadi and Samuel the Lamanite<\/a> seemingly as bookends of Nephite religious history.<\/p>\n During the Nephite tribal coalition\u2019s existence, there were occasional additions from other Lamanite exiles, departures of Nephite dissenters back to the Lamanites, uncertain relationships with the neighboring Zoramites, and ongoing conflict with the Lamanites. After around a century \u2013 a very plausible life span for a tribal coalition \u2013 the Nephites collapsed into their constituent parts and new ethnic identities due to political and religious tensions that were never fully resolved. The cultural memory of the Nephites remained, and Mormon eventually inherited some of their records. But not much record-keeping seems to have been done after the collapse. Some people continued to see themselves as the cultural or religious heirs of the Nephites for some time, and then even these traces finally disappeared at the time of Mormon.<\/p>\n I find it quite plausible that something like this happened somewhere in the centuries prior to Joseph Smith. This is not an argument for believing in Book of Mormon historicity, just the observation that the general outline of Nephite history starts from a place of basic plausibility.<\/p>\n I can understand religious hesitation to treat a book of scripture as less than objective history, but I don\u2019t think I\u2019m suggesting anything unprecedented for the historical interpretation of premodern writing. Ancient historians had agendas and drew on both trustworthy chronicles and more speculative types of writing.<\/p>\n This approach has implications for how we read other parts of the Book of Mormon. In the next post, I\u2019ll look at some of the ways that a historicist reading helps us understand some otherwise puzzling aspects of the Book of Mormon. Then in the third post, I\u2019ll make a case that seeing history in the Book of Mormon is not only possible, but may also offer a more plausible explanation for a number of things than the ahistorical alternative.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n The issue here is rational belief, where you think history and archeology are good and useful, and you also think the Book of Mormon is good and revealed scripture, although the two may seem to be in tension. If you accept the reality of the scriptural narrative purely on faith, that\u2019s great \u2013 I see no reason to dissuade you. If you think the Book of Mormon is best understood as fiction, you might find some interesting ideas to think about here.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re saying that I\u2019m just minimizing cognitive dissonance, my answer is: Of course I am. We try to reduce cognitive dissonance in everything we do, in all our decisions and relationships and allegiances. There is no special ribbon at the Last Judgment for heightening the contradictions and forcing yourself to live a life of spiritual agony. And, really, it doesn\u2019t take much to reduce the cognitive dissonance associated with Book of Mormon historicity. You just need to tap back on history a bit, and nudge the text a bit to the side, and push back on your expectations, and without getting any of them bent too far out of shape it\u2019s possible to find a Nephite-shaped hole for everything to fit.<\/p>\n I\u2019m primarily focusing on profane history rather than on supernatural occurrences or sermons and theological discourses. I\u2019m grateful for the teachings of the Book of Mormon, but even in the best case, its theology reflects Joseph Smith\u2019s American Christian rewriting of Mormon\u2019s Christian rewriting of an unknown chain of reception and transmission, which seem like poor conditions for doing intellectual history, and I am in any case not an intellectual historian. Even a closely-controlled translation doesn\u2019t mean that the original text was the source of control, and I expect that there are numerous examples of nineteenth century influence. There\u2019s bound to be someone else better equipped than me to make a case for rational belief in Book of Mormon historicity based on its theology.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n These posts are of course inspired by Stephen Fleming\u2019s thoughts on Book of Mormon historicity. He and I are approaching historicity from slightly different angles, however. The question Stephen is addressing seems to be: Did 1000 years of history take place just as described? While my question is: Could real people living before the time of Joseph Smith have created a record like the Book of Mormon?\u00a0 Our different approaches give us areas of both overlap and disagreement. I\u2019ve expressed my disagreements with a lot of Stephen\u2019s points, but it\u2019s important to understand that our disagreements are completely<\/em> fine<\/em>. We\u2019re academics; disagreeing is what we do for fun. We\u2019re both PhDs (albeit with oddly shaped academic careers), his degree more directly in Religious Studies, while I\u2019m an interloper from language and literature (but an AHA president did like my book). We\u2019ve read some of the same books and looked at some of the same sources and drawn different conclusions. Hopefully both Stephen\u2019s posts and my own help us all think a little more clearly about what we believe and provide viable options for people to accept the Book of Mormon as scripture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the next few posts, I\u2019m going to sketch out an argument that believing in the historicity of the Book of Mormon is a rational choice. To put it briefly: the Book of Mormon does not need to strain historical plausibility nearly as much as it might seem; treating the Book of Mormon as a document that existed in history offers insights on the text that a focus only on its 19th-century context would overlook; and the historicity of the Book of Mormon offers a compelling explanation for a number of things that are otherwise difficult to explain.<\/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":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latter-day-saint-thought"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48060","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=48060"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48126,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48060\/revisions\/48126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n