Journal of Book of Mormon Studies

Paul J. Griffiths, in his book Religious Reading, speaks of the Christian way of “training the conscience” as involving three practices: worship, prayer, and reading scripture. His book is devoted to making that third element a more deliberate, religious act, learning to read “in a particular way.” His endeavor is about more than developing personal spirituality. A primary focus of religious reading, for him, is how reading scripture enables believers to gain hold of their own faith as “a religious account.” What Griffiths means by “a religious account,” though, is what is important. He means that our experience of our faith tradition must provide a “comprehensive” narrative. It must be “unsurpassed” by competing versions, offering us the best available interpretive matrix, and it must address in a “central” way the most pressing issues and questions in our lives.1One might quibble about the exact criteria Griffiths selects, but the underlying thrust is one that Latter-day Saints might heartily—and profitably—embrace: reading religiously means to read holistically. From the beginning, Christianity proposed a radical re-interpretation of the divine person, human nature, and humankind's potential. All of life—its agonies and joys, its cultural forms and social norms, its political institutions and the ebb and flow of history, the silent meaning of the visible galaxies and the ultimate grief of death's shock—everything is re-interpreted in light of Christ's advent in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Reading religiously, for Griffiths, means to read in such a way that the outlines of that total re-interpretation assume a coherent and transmissible form.The Restoration re-enacts, with an overlay of a revised mythos, such a cosmic key. Even within the Latter-day Saint tradition, however, the extent of this reformulation has been debated. Was it essentially a matter of replacing some corrupted parts and restoring missing authority? Was it a wholesale reconstitution of an original, pure kerygma? Or, a third version, was it the first full exposition of gospel fullness without any truly complete antecedent (this time including temple ordinances, a family emphasis, Heavenly Mother, premortal doctrine, and additional scripture)?The most conspicuous additional Restoration scripture, of course, is the Book of Mormon. For the first century and a half of the Church's existence, I have argued elsewhere, the primary function the Book of Mormon served was to signal a Restoration event presided over by God, administered through heaven-sent beings, and channeled through the Prophet Joseph Smith.2 By the 1980s, an efflorescence of historicist and historicizing scholarship had brought increased attention to the scripture, but without seriously altering its primarily instrumentalist function. As a sign of Joseph Smith's divine commission, the focus had always been and was still to understand the Book of Mormon as a pointer rather than a repository. In twentieth-century evangelizing, in fact, that instrumentalist function was made explicit with Moroni's promise, the culminating textual focus of its employment and the fulcrum on which the entire conversion enterprise pivoted.3 But something else was perhaps stirring in those last two decades of the twentieth century. President Ezra Taft Benson's effective call in the 1980s to re-situate the scripture at the heart of Latter-day Saint devotion might be said to have opened doors to a growing recognition of the devotional potency of the Book of Mormon, and this was soon supplemented by some of the first attempts to plumb its theological content in rigorous and fruitful ways.The direction of Book of Mormon studies in the coming decades may therefore be already set. Theology may prove to be the order of the day. If I were to express a hope for a more particular shift in attention, I would take a cue from Griffith's observations, with which I began. Eugene England once lamented the propensity of expositors of Latter-day Saint doctrine to take an atomistic, definitional approach (what he termed “CD-ROM theology”).4 Bruce R. McConkie's work in Mormon Doctrine5 was the most famous instance of an encyclopedic approach to Restoration doctrine, tabulating and organizing the corpus of Latter-day Saint teachings in discrete and demarcated topical treatments. Official institutionalization of scriptural cross-referencing, which began with Orson Pratt, can be illuminating but can also encourage the development of a misleading sense of absolute consistency, coherence, and interconnected organicity among disparate scriptural voices. Latter-day Saint scriptures do not constitute one holistic text but an archive of texts. Even the Book of Mormon, as Grant Hardy demonstrates, consists of distinctly different voices and intentions.6 The Church has not canonized the cross-referencing system—but in common practice, members of the Church see the system of cross-referencing as textually indistinguishable from the Word itself and assume a scriptural understanding that isolates scriptural words from their history, their context, and any overarching narrative. If we are not careful, readers can be tempted to reduce scripture to, or impute to scripture, a perfect consistency, a static coherence, a fixed point within a Summa Theologica of doctrine. Karl Barth noted the desiccation of scripture that has occurred due to parallel tendencies in fundamentalism: “Orthodoxy transformed the Scriptures from a witness to revelation into a doctrinal sourcebook. In so doing, the rigid and rationalistic orthodox doctrine of inspiration denied, in effect, the lordship of God over the biblical witness.”7It may be ironic to invoke testimony from a Protestant theologian to reframe the Book of Mormon's principal self-proclaimed task: “a witness to revelation.” Barth's reminder of God's “lordship” over the biblical witness frames his protest over Catholic views of scripture as a “static deposit of truth” that is institutionally stewarded. For him, scripture was neither infallible nor reducible to a historically mediated human construct; as a witness to revelation, it models and invites God's active presence in our lives. Talk of “our lives” is, of course, an essential hallmark of the Protestant repositioning of the individual at the heart of an unmediated religious experience. Latter-day Saints share such repositioning without abandoning the role of an essential, priestly sacramentalism, like that of Catholics. However, the decades into which scholarly readers of the Book of Mormon are now entering may be propitious for a powerful merger of the views of Griffiths and Barth, one that emphasizes the workings of God as an active agent, personally available but invading history as well as individual life in transformative ways. At the same time, the Book of Mormon is unique in being edited as a narrative rather than as a simple compilation—which suggests that we need to do better at reading it as a narrative, with a paramount meaning that is not extractable from isolated passages.One theme in particular may find growing resonance and fruitfulness if the Book of Mormon is read this way—but only if we can read the text in terms of its presentness rather than its pastness.Can Latter-day Saints do a better job of reading the Book of Mormon with an eye to the totality of the “religious account” that it provides? In some ways, this might mean reading beyond the historical, not limiting ourselves to the “pastness” of the account we are reading. I mean that in the sense in which the Russian theologian Nikolai Berdyaev prompts us: We are enraptured by the beauty of historic ruins. But in that past which attracts us there were no ruins, the ruins belong precisely to the present day. We are delighted by the beauty of an ancient church. But the ancient church belongs to our own time. In the past that church was new, it was only just built, it was not an ancient thing. And so with everything else. In the past, that past which attracts the aesthete did not exist, what existed in the past was the present.8Traditionally, Latter-day Saints have given history an outsized importance. It's a universal proclivity, as Berdyaev recognized. The Restoration's rootedness in the fertile ground of an America obsessed with history (the early Republic witnessed the birth of the museum, a mania for the origins of native peoples, a newly charged millenarianism) conditioned Saints to read the Book of Mormon through the lens of that history and to interpret contemporary history through the lens of the Book of Mormon. As a Restoration church, much of the Saints’ preoccupation has been with fitting their contemporary institution onto the template of the past (as Article of Faith 6 makes explicit). In Parley P. Pratt's vision, as a result, Andrew Jackson became not a genocidal monster but the American Cyrus, gathering the Lamanites to fulfill prophecy.9 The Church was born in a world of fervent millennialism transmuted into the local and the imminent. The most cited sections from the Book of Mormon in the early Church, as Grant Underwood has documented, were those sections that described the building of the New Jerusalem in America.10 Christ's coming was near, and the Saints would be engaged in building their Zion at His coming. All the way into the 1970s and beyond, Church discourse placed the imminence of the Second Coming front and center in Latter-day Saint consciousness—except that the physical building of Zion in Independence, Missouri, was left incomplete, and Christ still hasn't come.I am proposing that if it is read holistically, the Book of Mormon may be narrating a similarly unfinished story. We might do well to see the Book of Mormon—with its not incidental double-chronicle of apocalypse (Nephite destruction, Jaredite destruction)—as warning its readers away from certain kinds of religious hope, certain kinds of religious exceptionalism, and certain varieties of crippling nostalgia—things to which its failed peoples were inclined. The pivotal episode in the nineteenth-century Church could be that moment, on the banks of Fishing River, when Joseph Smith learned what was so painfully and gradually registered in the Nephite consciousness: Zion was not (primarily) a fixed abode in either time or place. Section 105 of the Doctrine and Covenants was received on June 22, 1834, at the moment when the Zion's Camp endeavor had collapsed in death and failure. The aspiration to physically possess and thereby effect “the redemption of Zion” (v. 13) gave way to constituting a new Zion ideal: temple building, endowment with “power from on high,” and the sanctification of a people.President Russell M. Nelson's recurrent reminder for Latter-day Saint readers of the Book of Mormon that the Restoration is in process is a significant tonal—and doctrinal—shift in this regard.11 David Bentley Hart, in words that deserve our close attention in this context, opines that “the configurations of the old Christian order are irrecoverable now, and in many ways that is for the best.” We need, he urges, to be “disencumbered of nostalgia,” and to “imagine an altogether different social and cultural [not to mention religious!] synthesis.”12The material to do so is ready to hand. The Book of Mormon presents its readers with an iteration—very seldom elaborated—of primitive Christianity's “invisible church,” a body of Christ that transcends time, place, or institutional form. “The church of the Lamb,” “those who will have him to be their God,” and other scattered references fall in the orbit of that conception (1 Nephi 14:10; 17:40). And yet Latter-day Saints’ vision of Zion was not just physically focused; it could tend toward a defiant insularity and exclusivity. The fortress temples of Utah were visual emblems of their determination to prosecute their project in the geographical safety and remoteness of Utah. Commentary long interpreted what the Book of Mormon calls the church of the Lamb as the Saints, and what it calls the church of the devil as all the rest. “This is the Zion of the Lord—this is the only place where the Lord has a people,” proclaimed one leader shortly after arrival in the valley.13 In the Journal of Discourses, the church of the Lamb is invariably assumed to be the institutional Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.14 When others, later, interpreted Nephi's vision of the church of the Lamb, they, too, believed “he saw this day. He saw us, here, gathered as we are in the tops of the mountains.”15 Another testified explicitly that “we are the Church of Christ, representing the Church of the Lamb upon the earth.”16 The trend continued into the mid-twentieth century and beyond.17The last decade and more have witnessed a shift in the rhetoric of Church leadership. Zion is no longer simply equated with the institutional Church. Interfaith and intercultural efforts are proceeding with unprecedented vigor. Zion is increasingly referred to in more pluralistic ways—consistent with Book of Mormon motifs that might find new emphasis: “he loveth those who will have him to be their God” (1 Nephi 17:40); “all those who have hearkened . . . are his seed or they are heirs of the kingdom of God” (Mosiah 15:11); the Atonement applies to “all those who have not the law” (2 Nephi 9:26); “he claimeth all those who have faith in him” (Moroni 7:28); the Holy Ghost is a gift to “all those who diligently seek him” (1 Nephi 10:17); “He offereth himself” for “all those who have a broken heart” (2 Nephi 2:7).I anticipate that future scholars working within the believing community will be products of a more inclusive and expansive Church culture, benefitting from an institutional shift toward greater appreciation for the contributions of non-Latter-day Saint peoples to Zion. Such scholars will be drawn to emphasize the universalizing rather than particularizing aspects of the Book of Mormon—and see a kind of dangerous religious triumphalism in the record's protagonists that was more deeply entrenched and ineradicable than those peoples themselves may have recognized. Congruent with this, there has been for some time a growing willingness to see the Book of Mormon as a historically conditioned document, in the sense that it occasionally reflects the interests and even the biases of its authors.18 As the Church renews its calls to combat racism and polarized politics, the Book of Mormon can amply reinforce an ethic that opposes divisions comparable to (even if different in kind from) those that plagued ancient Americans. In a word, although believing readers have long recognized important failings among the Nephites (the Nephites are, after all, “a fallen people,” according to Doctrine and Covenants 20:9!), there are more failings—and kinds of failings—chronicled in that record than has been traditionally perceived. Recognizing these and learning from them seems to be one of the things the book wishes of its readers (see Mormon 9:31). Many of these scholars to come will doubtless be non-Americans, for whom these readings will be more natural and reflective of a truly global—rather than American—Church. Perhaps, like Paul to the Romans, they will also confront more objectively yet appreciatively the question, “What advantage then [or unique role and contribution] hath the [American church]?” (Romans 3:1).Zion strikes me as already becoming a more expansive, inclusive, and hopeful term—expansive and inclusive as we recuperate modern revelation's consistent references to the invisible church mentioned above. Nephi's reference to a borderless “church of the lamb of God” and the Doctrine and Covenant's explicit and comforting reassurances to God's “church” pronounced in 1829 (before the Restoration had seen the emergence of the Church) seem to be combining with an ecumenical spirit and have moved us light-years in the direction of interfaith, multicultural, and global conceptions of a cooperative project that is a very differently conceived Zion than the one that emphasized isolation, consolidation, and exceptionalism. Similarly, the language of apostasy has softened—and become more historically illuminating and defensible in the process.19 A genuine recognition and appreciation of the manifold voices in the wilderness of “holy men [and women]” that we “know not of” (D&C 49:8) have made of our interfaith efforts more than token gestures. Further and finally, one might detect how linguistic emphasis is shifting from a pre-millennialist emphasis on destructions and cataclysms from which only divine intervention can save us to more hope-filled aspirations that proactively cooperate with God in redeeming a suffering world. One striking example of changes that are already afoot came in the October 2022 General Conference: The Church of Jesus Christ is committed to serving those in need, and it is also committed to cooperating with others in that effort. We recently made a large gift to the United Nations World Food Programme. Over the many decades of our humanitarian work, two organizations stand out as key collaborators: projects with the Red Cross and Red Crescent agencies in dozens of countries have provided the children of God crucial relief during natural disasters and conflicts. Likewise, we have a long record of assistance with Catholic Relief Services. These organizations have taught us much about world-class relief. We have also had fruitful collaborations with other organizations, including Muslim Aid, Water for People, and IsraAID, to name just a few.20I was recently reading a collection of Protestant essays on scriptural interpretation. I noticed in an early chapter a reference to the audience of the essay as “the Church.”21 It took a moment to recognize that I, so accustomed to being a “Mormon at the margins,” was being invited into a broader audience of Christian strivers. By Church, the author meant the body of Christ—the general Christian community, leaving God to decide who are the visible and who the invisible members of that community. I found myself powerfully moved by the beauty of that awareness.In the Latter-day Saint community, believers often conflate the two entities, even though their scripture explicitly differentiates the collective from the individual identities. Such differentiation occurs most clearly in Latter-day Saint scripture, perhaps, in the tenth section of the Doctrine and Covenants (to which I alluded just above), when God speaks comfort to a “church” that was not the church founded by Joseph Smith—since the revelation came in 1829. “Now I do not say [these things] to destroy my church, but I say this to build up my church; Therefore, whosoever belongeth to my church need not fear, for such shall inherit the kingdom of heaven” (vv. 54–55).Pondering on the recent prophetic imperative for members of the Church to use only the designated name of the Church, one can see how a new possibility emerged. It may be that the emphasis on the Church's name is intended not just to help the world recognize that Latter-day Saints are Christians, but also to help Latter-day Saints remember that the larger Christian world is made up of Christians too. As their long-held name attests, Christ recognizes Christians not of our faith as part of his church as well.22My question is, Can Latter-day Saints move toward a greater integration—not only quite generally, but in the context of Book of Mormon studies too? As a student of Restoration history, the most significant shifts I see underway in our religious culture are in the ways we are re-defining the project of Restoration and our project's situation in the larger Christian experience. As more than one wit has observed, Latter-day Saint missionaries seem to be, at the present moment, answering questions that no one is asking. Many Saints have historically seen themselves (and employed the Book of Mormon accordingly) as engaged in competition with other Christian faiths. But it is Christianity itself that now finds itself in critical decline. Suddenly, the Saints are facing a shared challenge. They may also, in years ahead, find more in the way of shared resources as well. Not just in what they have to offer the world, but in terms of what those “holy men [and women]” in the world have to offer.

The field of Book of Mormon reception history is ready to be built. Though the label of “reception history” may be most known among literary scholars, the field of biblical reception history grew considerably in the second half of the twentieth century. Even though the academic label may not be familiar to all, building the foundation of Book of Mormon reception history has in turn already begun. It is a fruitful field ready to expand. To begin to understand the possibilities of the field, we must begin with definitions—defining first “reception” and then “the history of reception.” In this article, I will consider why this is important to the field of Book of Mormon studies, summarize what work has already been done, offer some potential correctives, and survey possibilities for the history of Book of Mormon reception.As Jonathan Roberts introduces The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible, he defines “biblical reception”: “The reception of the Bible comprises every single act or word of interpretation of that book (or books) over the course of three millennia. It includes everything from Jesus reading Isaiah, or Augustine reading Romans, to a Sunday school nativity play, or the appearance of 2COR4:6 as a stock number on military gunscopes. No one and nothing is excluded.”1 So it is for Book of Mormon reception: anything that demonstrates the book's influence is reception. Book of Mormon reception began with the first people to receive the book. Those who accepted the book as scripture would be called Mormonites and then Mormons—epithets originating in the book. Depending on our focus, however, we might pinpoint multiple beginnings.We might start with the first readers of the published book in 1830. We could begin with Thomas Marsh who, after hearing of a “Golden Book,” read a single galley sheet fresh off Grandin's Press in Palmyra, New York—the first sixteen pages of the Book of Mormon—and wanted more. He immediately gave it to his wife, Elizabeth, who also read and believed “it to be the work of God.” This desire to share would only grow once the book was published. He continued to ask others to consider the book.2 On a visit to Providence, Rhode Island, he told Mary Ann Angell of it, and she shared it with her family and many others over the years. Thomas's sister Ann Marsh Abbott and her husband, Lewis, were among those who also believed after Thomas shared the book with them. Ann in turn pleaded that their oldest brother Nathan would “read the Book of Mormon without prejudice” so that he could know “the plan of salvation” for himself.3 Before official proselytizing efforts began, word of mouth expanded the reception of the book.In search of a beginning, we could also choose to look earlier, considering Joseph Smith's scribes, such as Emma Smith and Oliver Cowdery, writing down the translation of the book as he dictated it to them. Later tasked with creating a printer's manuscript as they worked to publish the book, Cowdery demonstrates how he internalized the words of the book—he began to develop a relationship with the text. As he wrote to Joseph Smith in late 1829, he detailed their progress on the printer's manuscript—they had made it halfway through the text—and then he waxed introspective and began to consider his relationship with God. As he described his experience, he incorporated a dozen phrases from the first half of the book—as far as they were in the printer's manuscript. The words of this new scripture had become his own, and they enabled the expression of his own numinous experience. For Cowdery and many other Saints—such as Smith's mother, Lucy Mack Smith—they internalized the words of the book very quickly.4In some ways, though, reception began even earlier. It arguably begins before the Book of Mormon's text ends. The book is self-referential. Within the Book of Mormon, later prophets quote earlier prophets, demonstrating another level of reception in the book itself. Whatever beginning point is chosen, reception extends out from there. From that point on, any and every “act or word of interpretation” of the book is Book of Mormon reception.5 From devoted members reading from the book on a daily basis, to quotes or paraphrases from the book in an official proclamation or a General Conference talk, to naming children after Book of Mormon figures, to a cross-stitched bookmark of a phrase from the book, to action figures, to a politician calling someone Captain Moroni—all of this is reception. However, the analytical work of history requires more than just the collation of instances of reception.From the book's beginnings to today, countless people—the curious, believers, and critics—have all received the book, and that reception has been manifested in a multitude of ways. At one extreme, as Terryl Givens has pinpointed, some early critics don't seem to have read the Book of Mormon, yet they still responded to the possibility of the book. At another extreme, of course, believers have from the beginning tried to make material sense of the words of the book, incorporating its meaning into their lives. However, to do reception history is not just to accumulate all the endless modes of reception or continuing interpretative debates. It requires an analytical framework to understand cases of reception and their context.Jonathan Roberts locates the origins of modern biblical reception history in the twentieth-century work of Hans Georg Gadamer, who focused on the subjectivity of the individual and the individual's situatedness within their own context—the recognition that meaning is not static. A person's historical context—their situatedness—will always affect their interpretation. Roberts argues that rather than using the Enlightenment model in which methodology is thought to enable the scholar to transcend their own context and history, Gadamer demands that we acknowledge our context and its affect.6 When considering reception history, we see how different individuals have interpreted and applied different facets and angles of the same text over time.The Book of Mormon's text itself could support such an argument. Nephi, for example, has read and re-read Isaiah—his soul delights in it.7 He saw the application and fulfillment of Isaiah's words within Isaiah's own context, as referring to the invasion of Sennacherib. Although Nephi's own context is strikingly different from that of Isaiah, he sees its application to his own context and interprets it. Moreover, its application to Nephi and his people nullifies neither earlier applications to Isaiah and his people nor later applications to others; all are interpretively reliant on their own location—their own context—and are encouraged by Nephi. Indeed, Joseph Smith's famous 1841 declaration of the Book of Mormon as “the most correct” of any book, capable of bringing one “nearer to God” than any other book, depends on a person in their own context receiving the book and applying its principles.8Ultimately, Roberts argues that scriptural reception history “is a recognition of the dynamic, living relationship between texts and readers.”9 Again, this could be seen as a predictable application of a Book of Mormon injunction: Nephi pleads with his followers and later readers to “liken” scriptures to themselves, as he does, “that it might be for our profit and learning” (1 Nephi 19:23–24). For Nephi, the covenant is applicable to all. The reader receives the text and applies it. The historian comes later to analyze such acts of reception. My own research has begun to demonstrate how early Latter-day Saints and other Restoration groups developed a relationship with the Book of Mormon and used it in practice. That relationship is an organic living thing, never static. This is something that was emphasized from early in the tradition. In 1832, a Joseph Smith revelation “on the priesthood” chided the Saints for forgetting “the new covenant, even the Book of Mormon and the former commandments.” Knowing scripture and the covenant is not enough—they needed to “not only . . . say, but to do according to that which I have written” (D&C 84:57).Both saying and doing are inherent parts of reception. Former Journal of Book of Mormon Studies editor S. Kent Brown identified as a need for the journal to continue to explore the “ancient dimensions of the text and the modern story of the Book of Mormon.”10 While much work has been done to focus on ancient dimensions of the text, proportionally much less time has been spent on the modern history of the Book of Mormon. As such, it is a field ready to be built.The first step to building the field of Book of Mormon studies is to consider what scholarship already fits into this category and what needs to be revisited. In some ways, we know more about the critical reception of the Book of Mormon than about its welcome among believers. Research scholars at FARMS (the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies) collected every article written about the book's appearance in 1830. Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library's digital collection “19th-Century Mormon Article Newspaper Index” makes those articles readily accessible.11 While some studies have focused on personal narratives of conversion to the Book, much less has work been focused on further usage and practice.Though perhaps best-known from Terryl Givens's book By the Hand of Mormon, an argument developed over time in various academic articles and books that the Book of Mormon functioned principally as a signal or sign for early believers.12 The book signaled to the world that the heavens were open, charismatic gifts had not ceased, and Joseph Smith was a modern-day prophet.13 Considering the function of the Book of Mormon as sign is a significant element of Book of Mormon reception history; nevertheless, it is insufficient in its ability to communicate and explain the full range of the relationships between early converts and the Book of Mormon. Moreover, at times, the argument has been erroneously expanded and inflated beyond the historical evidence to claim that early Saints “did not readily incorporate the new scripture into their devotions.”14 The Book of Mormon did function as a sign; however, there remains much more to do to understand its full range of functionality in the lives and belief of the Saints.Another area where we have prior scholarship is in the history of exegesis. In the first issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought in 1969, historian Davis Bitton noted that then there was “no reliable study of Mormon exegesis.”15 A decade and a half later, in 1984, Grant Underwood likewise argued for the need to establish a field of “exegetical history”—a history of the interpretation of scripture—and decades later, that need remains. Although much exegetical work on the Book of Mormon text has been done, only the beginning work to understanding how that exegesis shifts over time has been done. While Philip Barlow's work on early Latter-day Saint usage of the Bible initiated that project for the Bible, Underwood began to work on the interpretive history of the Book of Mormon; however, there is still much to do.16Underwood quipped that we have assumed that “the Book of Mormon can be used as evidence of early Mormon belief. While this is true in many respects, it fails to properly account for that crucial mediating link between the written text and the actual life and teaching of the Church—interpretation.”17 Underwood's work is an important early foundation to exegetical history, yet not without its limitations. Underwood's work focused on published accounts—first utilizing citations of the Book of Mormon published in Church periodicals from 1830–1846, as originally identified by a 1940 master's thesis. However, citations alone do not represent the whole of reception. Underwood cites Parley Pratt's A Voice of Warning as an example of the limited use of the Book of Mormon. And while Pratt directly or explicitly cites the Book of Mormon only three times at the end of the text, by the third paragraph of the book, he is melding the Book of Mormon's language with that of the Bible. Rather than quoting Romans 15:4 straight from the King James Version, he combines the text (“Whatsoever was written aforetime was written for our profit”) with words initially spoken by Lehi at the beginning of the Book of Mormon (adding “and learning”). The Book of Mormon shapes Pratt's argument as well. The chapter on the Book of Mormon, for instance, focuses on how the Bible itself opens the way for more scripture, using the biblical text to establish the need for the Book of Mormon. Insertions, paraphrases, allusions, and echoes of the Book of Mormon's text are all types of intertextuality marking reception, but these are not as easily identifiable as quotation marks and a reference. Very long chapters and the lack of verses in early editions of the Book of Mormon further undercut the broad applicability of only using cited quotes to measure usage.Moreover, while Church periodicals today are generally inwardly focused on Church membership, in the early Church, they were outwardly oriented and played an important role in proselytizing, which likewise hampers the assumption of broad applicability. In a footnote, Underwood mentions that he looked at three published excerpts of men's journals, which seemed to support his argument, and then assumes his conclusions might be extended to the whole of practical usage of the Book of Mormon. He not only missed some opportunities in these journals in the orbit of Church leadership, but the three journals are only a drop in the bucket when we consider the number of lives documented in the writings of early Latter-day Saints.18 Church periodicals played a critical role in presenting the Restoration to new converts and outsiders, but they do not automatically represent how the Book of Mormon was used in practice. Praxis provides a broader interpretative possibility. Thus, exegetical history is better understood as a subfield of a much broader field of Book of Mormon reception.Although the subfield of exegetical history has expanded since 1969, it persists as a need. As shown by Daniel McLellan's important recent article on the interpretation of Nephi's phrase “all we can do” (2 Nephi 25:23), there remains much exegetical history to be done.19 The Scripture Citation Index database (https://scriptures.byu.edu) offers some of the raw materials to easily begin to compare Book of Mormon interpretations over the pulpit in official Latter-day Saint discourse over time. The database “indexed the scriptures cited by speakers in the General Conference between 1942 and the present, and those cited by speakers recorded in the Journal of Discourses between 1839 and 1886.”20 It additionally includes Joseph Smith's sermons through citations in Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith from Richard Galbraith's 1995 Scriptural Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith. Importantly, there are some significant limitations to the database that must be acknowledged. In most instances, neither the Journal of Discourses nor Joseph Smith's Teachings originally included scripture references. For the former, some references were added in the contemporary editing processes, but most were artificially added much later for this database.21 For Joseph Smith's words, Richard Galbraith laid out the scriptural framework he saw undergirding Smith's teachings and saw considerably more emphasis on the Book of Mormon than had other scholars. Some of his work is enlightening and useful, but other ideas do not stand up to scrutiny or considerable advances in digital searching capabilities since 1995.22Moreover, exegetical history is not only formed by leaders in published official venues. “Interpretation” covers considerably more ground than Grant Underwood originally acknowledged. The rise of lived religion defines religion more broadly—it is not just the provenance of leader's official statements and publications. As I discussed in my 2018 JBMS article, although church periodicals are “a fruitful and dense source,” they are one “ill-equipped to proffer wide-ranging insight into personal application and religiosity. The analysis of published articles alone does not yield a sense of the surrounding context—or if they affected personal religiosity and practice.”23 When Lucy Mack Smith led a group of early Saints from New York to Kirtland in early 1831, she saw her group like Lehi's family traveling “by commandment of the Lord.” She, like Nephi, saw great murmuring and grumbling on their travels and some who believed “we would have done better to have remained at home” just as Nephi's brothers did.24 Such application of the Book of Mormon narrative would escape reliance on periodical sources. This might also be extended to those outside the broad scope of Mormon faith traditions who engage the Book of Mormon text devotionally, such as recent examples of Andrew Teal and William Barber II. Both spoke on building a beloved community at Brigham Young University in 2021. Teal, a Church of England chaplain and Oxford theologian, pointed to the book's witness of Christ and used 2 Nephi—“a text that lodged in [his] heart since [he] first read it”—to consider his own motivations in speaking.25 Barber, an influential American Protestant minister and social activist, who described himself as a “fellow faith traveler who takes seriously the word of God,” quoted King Benjamin's poignant plea to his people—“Are we not all beggars?”—as he argued for an urgent communal responsibility to care for the poor.26 Interpretation is a broad, ever-growing category of reception.Other aspects of church organizational structure and practice likewise offer fruitful avenues for expansion. The foundational work to better understand the use of the Book of Mormon in official ecclesiastical and liturgical practices has likewise already begun. Mark Ashurst-McGee, Scott Faulring, Michael Hubbard Mackay, Gerrit Dirkmaat, Gerald Smith, and Ryan Tobler have all contributed an important foundation.27 While the Joseph Smith Papers Project has done much to encourage this work, to focus only on Joseph Smith would limit our understanding of the millions who have received the Book—whose lives have been influenced and changed by the Book. Not just official responses and uses of scripture demonstrate reception. The Book of Mormon was “a central spring for expanding ecclesiology, liturgy, and missiology.”28 This offers us a jumping-off point for the many possibilities of reception history.Many previous treatments of early Book of Mormon reception employ methods that assume much about what sources are of value, privileging especially the published words of male Church leaders. The lens of gender asks us to consider our assumptions about where history comes from. Were male Church leaders the only ones developing a relationship with and using the Book of Mormon? Were Latter-day Saints the only ones? When scholars choose to privilege a certain category of thought or action, they create a limited view of the past. Trying to understand the whole of a religious life and one's relationship to scripture requires more. This view may not actually reflect what was of central concern to ordinary individuals. As I have argued elsewhere, “it is possible that theological claims did not center lived religious life. It is more likely that theological claims inhabit a portion of a much broader scope of religious experience.”29 As Kathleen Flake has argued, Joseph Smith did not speak exclusively in theological propositions; he told stories.30 The lives of the Saints bear the markers of the influence of Smith's narrative theology, and a holistic approach to reception history will demonstrate that. The Book of Mormon offered stories that were readily applicable to the lives and concerns of the Book's readers, just as they applied the Bible to their contemporary lives. None of these prior approaches address the personal role of the Book of Mormon in the daily lives of early Latter-day Saints and other Mormon traditions. And they focused almost exclusively on the words of men.While this is not a problem unique to Book of Mormon studies, it remains a consistent problem. Defining historical trends of American religion like declension, feminization, and secularization—trends that endured for decades—have all been dismantled or at least substantively altered when subsequent scholarship has grown to include women's voices and experiences. In her seminal essay “Women's History Is American Religious History,” Ann Braude argues that “these three fictions result from the assumption that public influence of the Protestant clergy is the most important measure of the role of religion.”31 Ignoring women's experiences distorts our view of the past. If our goal is a better understanding of the past, we need women's voices and experiences, as well as those of ordinary believers in the Book of Mormon more generally (those in the center and those on the margins). Examining early Book of Mormon reception history highlights the populism of individuals developing a relationship with the text. Smith's equitable impulse encouraged individuals to develop their own relationship to the text, and then, if they desired, to share it with others. Male editors publishing Church newspapers were never the only ones to accept, read, and interpret the Book of Mormon. These efforts are not just essential to merely including women and other individuals as a token nod, but because broadening our scope offers a more complete understanding of the past.The lens of gender is only one of several important methodologies essential to recovering a holistic understanding of how the Book of Mormon became scripture for Latter-day Saints and other Restoration traditions. Religious experience and interaction with scripture is not just the provenance of prophets: hundreds and then thousands and then millions developed a relationship with the Book of Mormon because they believed it brought them to the divine. Working to better understand the “dynamic, living relationship between texts and readers” is a central way to better understand the Book of Mormon and its influence. Scripture may remain scripture in a theological sense if no one reads it, but the relationship created with its readers supports and reinforces its categorization as scripture. There are many facets of reception in practice, and creative modes of scholarship might help us to access the lived religion of those in relationship with Smith's new scripture. What follows is a suggestive, not comprehensive, list of the possibilities that might continue to build and expand the reception history of the Book of Mormon.Just as biblical reception began with the text's earliest readers, boundary maintenance over appropriate application and interpretation of scriptural text has likewise occurred since the earliest readers. One might argue that much of the field of Patristics is devoted to analyzing similar phenomena among the earliest Christians as readers of the Bible, and interest in such questions has only multiplied exponentially from there. The earliest Saints in the Restoration tradition likewise experienced tensions between right reception and wrong reception. The first group of Latter-day Saint missionaries set out to proselytize to native peoples and introduce them to the Book of Mormon in the Fall of 1830. The missionaries stopped in Kirtland, Ohio, on their way to “Indian Territory.” In the ensuing weeks, they baptized hundreds of converts but had few copies of the Book of Mormon to leave with the new converts. Those earliest converts were more likely to hear the text rather than have their own book to read. In the months that followed, interesting charismatic forms of reception began to spring up—judged by many to be overly enthusiastic religious fervor. Some acted out the book's narrative as they traveled in canoes to visit the “Lamanites” or fought with the “sword of Laban.” A small group of self-appointed missionaries began to knock themselves unconscious—by hitting their heads on the rafters and holding their breath until they were blue in the face—claiming that such behavior would produce a spiritual experience. Perhaps such behavior becomes less unusual when considering the book's text: several Book of Mormon characters pass out by divine means, and these events create remarkable spiritual experiences for those who pass out (see Mosiah 27; Alma 18–19). In Kirtland, Levi Hancock wasn't sure what to think of such phenomena; he thought he should wait for Joseph Smith's arrival in Kirtland to judge.32 Missionary Parley Pratt was quick to censure such behavior when he returned from preaching among Native Americans. Identifying and interpreting change over time in determining orthodox and heterodox behavior as related to the Book of Mormon is a potential area for growth within reception history.Moreover, those Kirtland missionaries’ example offers yet another way to better understand the Book of Mormon's influence. They acted out the narrative. One might argue that they tried to manipulate spiritual experience rather than allowing one to come organically, but they were doing the same thing that many early Saints did first with the biblical text and then with the Book of Mormon. As mentioned above, as Lucy Mack Smith led a group of New York Saints to Kirtland, she saw parallels in Lehi's family journey to the Promised Land. Parley Pratt was uncomfortable with the Kirtland phenomena, but acting out the book's narrative did not seem to be what was at issue for him. Pratt himself, on one occasion, gathered a group of fifty adults and children into a circle. When the adults began blessing the children, he was hoping they might call down angels, as Jesus had during his visit to the New World in 3 Nephi 18.33 Although the Saints’ Kirtland experience is a particularly fertile source of such examples, others can be found. The Saints, for example, continued to live out the narrative as they moved across the United States to Utah. Naming modern people and places after people and places from the Book of Mormon is another convention of reception with a long history. A practice that begins in the book's own narrative, naming conventions have demonstrated Book of Mormon reception since the 1830s. Many early Saints clearly saw themselves reliving the scriptural narrative (although we know remarkably little about this particular kind of practical reception). An extension of this practice occurs in recent political intersections with the Book of Mormon. When Cliven Bundy and his sons (one significantly named Ammon) led their militia to occupy a wildlife preserve in Oregon in 2016, one of their guards called himself Captain Moroni34—a Book of Mormon military leader fighting “in memory of our god, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children” (Alma 46:12). In 2020, Senator Mike Lee compared US president Donald Trump to Captain Moroni at an Arizona campaign rally.35 Nathan Entrekin of Arizona breached the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in cosplay also inspired by Captain Moroni—flag and all.36 None of these more recent appeals have been without criticism and controversy, naturally, but all reflect continued reception.Translations of the Book of Mormon's text into non-English language bore, with themselves, from the very beginning, the possibility of decentering the text, from its American reception to having implications for readers all over the world. To have a text that could become their own, believers needed to read it in their own tongue. The impulse to expand the book's influence seems somewhat instinctive. Like Book of Mormon prophet Lehi, once one tastes the fruit of God's love, one wants to share it (see 1 Nephi 8). The Revelator's apocalyptic vision includes the “angel fly[ing] in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people” (Revelation 14:6). Dozens of echoes in Restoration scripture initiated both Joseph Smith's desire and the desire of those converted to the Book of Mormon to spread the gospel to “every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people.” However, this impulse came without a specific plan. For Latter-day Saints today, the translation process is centrally controlled and streamlined so much that it becomes difficult to imagine just how individual and sporadic early translations were. No two early editions were created in the same way.Some translations developed after substantive demand from those already converted arose, but others were optimistic attempts to create something to which converts might be attracted—to build it, and they would come. Between 1851 and 1855, the Church published the first six non-English editions of the Book of Mormon. Introductory articles on each of these editions exist—the Danish, French, Italian, German, Welsh, and Hawaiian editions.37 However, there remains much to be understood about these early editions: How do they relate one to another? Most of the articles written on the subject focus solely on the production of the translation and the publication of the books, stopping short of trying to understand the books’ growing audience and their experience of reception. How did the experience of a brush-maker in Wales who purchased a subscription for the Book of Mormon and waited months for delivery differ from that of a Parisian who wandered into the Saints’ mission office on the Rue de Tournon and purchased a ready-to-be-bound copy waiting on the shelf?The history of the Book of Mormon in other branches of the Restoration likewise offers significant research possibilities. There has always been considerable cross-pollination of scriptural usage among different Resto

Sir Philip Sidney maintains that religion and poetry have walked together for millennia, as far back as the Romans and further still to the Psalms.1 The Hebrew Bible in fact contains many poetic passages, whether in historical books like Judges, emphatically poetic books like Job, or prophetic books like Ezekiel and Micah. Deborah, David, and Isaiah found their inspired voices in verse. Indeed, as Sidney reminds us, the word for poet in Latin, vates, lies behind the title Vatican, denoting prophecy and vision.2 Although the existence of poetry in the New Testament is more contested,3 the Revelation of John at the very least can be viewed as apocalyptic poetry. Eastern religious sacred texts also feature poetic elements,4 as does the Qur'an.5In addition to there being poetic passages within sacred texts themselves, poets for millennia have borrowed from holy books in their own poetry. Countless Jewish and Christian authors have explored their faith through biblical allusions, quotations, and retellings. Muslim writers have also alluded to the divine voice from the Qur'an in their own poetry.6 Devotional poetry is, of course, not confined to monotheistic faiths. Publishers have issued thousands of anthologies and studies on Buddhist and Hindu poetry. Additionally, many English-speaking authors have borrowed from Buddhist and Hindu thought in their poetry, including T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Allen Ginsberg, and William Carlos Williams.7If it was natural for ancient oracles to write in verse, and if it is also common for believing poets to adapt scriptural texts for contemporary audiences, then believers naturally expect there to be a Book of Mormon poetics. However, there is a danger here of conflating two very different poetic mediums. As with other volumes of scripture sacred to other traditions, there are Book of Mormon poems inside the text written by prophets and historians who safeguarded the records that became the Book of Mormon, and there are Book of Mormon poems outside the text written by literary artists inspired by the book.8 Unquestionably, the Book of Mormon contains poetry, above and beyond its Isaiah and Micah quotations.9 In fact, it has more obvious poetry than the New Testament, with what has been called Nephi's Psalm and Alma's quotation of Zenos's prayer as some of the finest examples (see 2 Nephi 4:16–35; Alma 33:4–11). Poets from the earliest days of the Restoration have also adapted the Book of Mormon and its peoples, themes, and motifs into verse form—most often for devotional, and sometimes even polemical, reasons. In the early nineteenth century, these were primarily hymns and short lyrical poems. Epic and long narrative poems followed, telling the story of the Book of Mormon.Poetry in and poetry influenced by the Book of Mormon both demonstrate the rich religious materials and heritage found in the Latter-day Saint religious movement. This review of literature highlights the scholarly conversation surrounding the tradition's greatest poetic works, both inside the text—what I am calling Book of Mormon poetry—and those adapted from it—what I call poetry influenced by the Book of Mormon.There is a challenge to the study of Book of Mormon poetry right at the outset. Any study of poetry in translation must begin with the source text, as Robert Nichols has observed with regard to the Book of Mormon.10 This presents a problem for students of the Book of Mormon from the outset. According to the faith of the book's believing adherents, the most original source available to us is in the translation's target language (English), a text translated “by the gift and power of God,” through Joseph Smith. Because this translation process could range from literal to idiomatic to anywhere in between (as scholars have long discussed), analysis of poetic forms in the text is complicated from the outset. A divine translation process does not make things easier, despite what might be expected. While Smith affirmed divine assistance in translation, he also pleaded to God to “deliver us in thy due time from the little, narrow prison, almost as it were total darkness, of paper, pen, and ink, and a crooked, broken, scattered, and imperfect language.”11 God may aid in translation, in other words, but Joseph Smith still viewed English—and likely any human language—as a “prison . . . , crooked, broken, scattered, and imperfect.”Moreover, regardless of what Book of Mormon translation theory one may subscribe to, it must be conceded that Joseph Smith never attempted to delineate genres in the manuscript that he and Oliver Cowdery gave to Egbert Grandin. Occasionally, the text calls out a particular literary form within itself,12 but most often, readers are left to identify and navigate the various literary genres of the text on their own. There are speeches, epistles, sermons, midrash, lamentations, historical narratives, diaries, and other formats that are obvious. There are also poems, some of which are relatively apparent when reading in English, thanks to parallelisms and couplets found throughout the text. But it is very possible that some of what we read as prose—even after much labor in uncovering Hebrew poetic forms in the Book of Mormon—is actually poetry.13 Put another way, just as the Aeneid can be rendered in elegant verse, such as in Fitzgerald's more pensive mood or Fagles's forceful energy, readers of the Book of Mormon have, in effect, a Loeb prose translation of the Book of Mormon, but without the source language on the reverse page. We only have the target language: English.But, for believers, the issue goes deeper than the insufficient nature of language to convey ideas and the missing meaning from an unavailable source text in translation. One must also remember that the records from which Mormon and Moroni take the narrative found in the Book of Mormon come from several thousands of years of writers, across different languages and continents. Nephi wrote “in the language of [his] father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.”14 It is unclear how much of the Nephite spoken language was based on this unique written combination (or even what this combination was—a point scholars have debated). In any case, granting what the text says about these linguistic matters, Nephite and Lamanite Hebrew would have evolved over the thousand years to Mormon's time; in much the same way that we struggle to understand Beowulf or even Chaucer today, in their respective original Old and Middle English, later Nephite authors presumably struggled to read earlier authors. We learn from Mormon that the Mulekites’ language had been so altered over the few hundred years since their ancestors fled from Jerusalem that Mosiah's people couldn't understand them.15 And the Adamic language of Jared creates yet another layer of translation mystique that almost defies any attempt at analogy.16 It's as though we're stumbling through the Iliad, but it was first written not in the poet's native Attic Greek but in some sort of Greco-Akkadian shorthand, then commented on and compiled by a Byzantine scholar-general, whose son also tried to summarize a cuneiform history spanning two-and-a-half millennia (and therefore undergoing its own linguistic metamorphoses) that had been translated at some point into a Late Greco-Akkadian—and, finally, these various translations were at last translated into English prose in the nineteenth century. While believers acknowledge each author's and translator's appeal to divine inspiration, one must also realize that it is no wonder poetry is difficult to find in the Book of Mormon! Despite this labyrinthine journey through time and from hand to hand, it is remarkable that the text itself records such a convoluted transmission.17In addition to the significant barrier caused by translation, readers of the Book of Mormon in English have faced several other challenges when attempting to identify poetry in the words of Nephi, Alma, and Mormon. Culturally, the Western tradition, and certainly late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century primary and secondary education, presents an English language poetics steeped in rhyme and meter. It is common for readers in English to think of poetry only in these terms. From the earliest days of poetic study, the typical poetry pedagogy highlights works from Mother Goose to Edgar Allan Poe's “The Raven.” Regardless of how pedestrian or masterful the poem, Anglo-American readers are accustomed to a lilting rhythm and a playful rhyme as hallmarks of the English poem. When this sort of thing doesn't appear in the Book of Mormon, it is too easy to decide that it is bereft of poetry.For its part, the Hebrew Bible has little rhyme in its poetry, and while it does have metrical elements, it does not have a consistent meter like classical Western poetry. Similarly, poetry in the Bible is far more prophetic in tone than the heroic mode of the Greeks and Romans. Despite stemming from a shared Mesopotamian literary history, the Greek and Roman poetics diverged quickly from Hebrew poetics. Unlike the Greeks who employed poetry—even lyrical and pastoral poetry—as narrative, biblical poetry rarely tells a story. There are no “epics” in the Hebrew text.18 Schökel cautions against taking this so far as to make Hebrew poetry somehow inferior to the classics.19 But it is important to delineate the two. The poetry of Isaiah is decidedly different from his contemporary, Homer, even if both trace some of their literary ancestry to Gilgamesh. Even knowing that biblical poetry has meter is not enough, however, because meter is lost in translation. One must turn elsewhere for a Hebrew poetic convention—namely, parallelism—for a clue to biblical poetry. It is to this, unsurprisingly, that Book of Mormon scholars looking for poetry have also turned.Hebrew parallelisms come in a variety of forms, but the simplest definition is a couplet where the first line expresses a figurative image used to convey a prophetic message, which is then repeated with a slight variation in the second line. We find a prime example from the opening scene of the literary masterpiece, Job: Then Job arose,and rent his mantle, and shaved his head,and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped,And said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither:the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.20The line lengths are not uniform, which is something English readers may expect from poetry with a strict meter, such as poems written by Wordsworth or Shakespeare. Parallelisms, however, are not found in the length of the line but rather in the theme and content of the words themselves. Aside from the powerful imagery of being born with nothing and dying with nothing, the author of Job demonstrates a firm understanding of the repetitive power of parallelisms. These parallelisms are found throughout the Hebrew Bible, and scholars have for decades been arguing that they appear also throughout the Book of Mormon.21One can lean heavily into parallelisms to locate poetry in the Bible, and therefore in the Book of Mormon, but Alter notes that even some psalms have little to no parallelism attributes.22 Thus, as with the Hebrew Bible, a parallelistic passage in the Book of Mormon does not poetry make. Instead, parallelisms in the text serve as signals to the reader of a more figurative and imaginative idiom. Put another way, regardless of whether a parallelism is poetry or not, Kenneth Bailey writes, “it is enough to affirm that Hebrew parallelism is an identifiable artistic device and that where it is used it needs to be observed by the translator, reader, and interpreter.”23 When searching for Book of Mormon poetry, locating a parallelism will serve at the very least to alert the reader that the author may be writing poetry rather than prose.Scholars have been fascinated by the literary qualities of the Book of Mormon for decades, long before some of them struck on the possibility of rooting Book of Mormon poetics in parallelistic constructions.24 In 1947, Sidney Sperry published the first work that referred to the Book of Mormon as literature.25 In spite of his insistence on treating the book as having literary features, Sperry regards most of the Book of Mormon text as being of lower literary quality than the Bible.26 “Occasionally,” he qualifies, “one glimpses passages of considerable literary merit such as the psalm in 2 Nephi 4:28–34; parts of Alma, 3 Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni may also be read for aesthetic enjoyment,”27 but these seem to be the rare exception for Sperry. He does not therefore discount Book of Mormon poetry, however. After discussing Joseph Smith's lack of education, Sperry proposes that the literary qualities of the original might have been more readily apparent in translation if Joseph had been a literary scholar.28Later in his text, Sperry analyzes 2 Nephi 4:16–35 at some length, in what may be the earliest study on Book of Mormon poetry, albeit a short one. He first refers to the passage as a psalm,29 and it serves as Sperry's example of that particular genre or literary form in the text. “Formally,” Sperry writes, “we may call it ‘The Psalm of Nephi.’”30 Sperry shares portions of the psalm and then concludes briefly by verifying that the work is indeed a psalm. “Its rhythm is comparable to the noble cadence of David's poems. It not only praises God, but lays bare to us the very depths of Nephi's soul.”31 Sperry doesn't speak to the parallelisms in the text, however, nor does he define the term for his readers.While contemporary readers of the Book of Mormon may be familiar with the psalm of Nephi (even if they don't know where the term originated), the next important poetic analysis of the Book of Mormon focuses on a text less remarked on for its literary qualities. Ten years after Sperry's examination of the psalm of Nephi, the Church distributed Hugh Nibley's An Approach to the Book of Mormon as a lesson manual for adult men.32 Alongside lessons on ancient Middle Eastern economics, culture, and politics, Nibley includes a curious tangent about Lehi as a poet. In 1 Nephi 2:9–10, Lehi admonishes his older sons, Laman and Lemuel (incidentally, in the first scene in which readers meet these two brothers), to be like the natural features of their exile: a river and valley. In the lesson on this scene, Nibley considers Lehi's poem as a qasidah, an Arabic form in which the speaker remarks on beautiful natural terrain, such as a river or lake, and then invites the addressee of the poem to emulate the landscape's qualities.33[to Laman] “O that thou mightest be like unto this river, continually running into the fountain of all righteousness!”[to Lemuel] “O that thou mightest be like unto this valley, firm and steadfast, and immovable in keeping the commandments of the Lord!”34Lehi employs a powerful double parallelism here: river and fountain, valley and immovable. One is in constant motion, and the other is static. But while Nibley highlights the parallel themes in the passage, he does not use or define the term “parallelism,” similar to Sperry. Connecting such passages with parallelism as a convention would come still later.Twelve years later, in 1969, shortly after returning from a mission in Germany, a young graduate student John W. Welch published his seminal paper “Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon” in BYU Studies Quarterly.35 Welch was the first scholar to identify parallelism as a particular poetic form in the Book of Mormon. He examined biblical verses as examples before turning to the Book of Mormon, where he analyzed over a dozen passages, including an overview of the Book of Mosiah as a chiasm and, of course, the crucial chapter Alma 36. Welch's discoveries would go on to launch an entire field of inquiry in Book of Mormon studies.36 Most of the work on chiasmus in the Book of Mormon has focused on the form as a literary device for particular apologetic purposes, not on the rhetorical power of the poetry itself. But there is no question that it was a boon for the study of Book of Mormon poetry.It was not long before Welch's discoveries bore fruit for the study of more obvious literary passages in the Book of Mormon. Steven Sondrup was the first to apply parallelistic forms to the Psalm of Nephi, understanding it specifically as poetry.37 He opens his 1981 essay by surveying parallelisms in the Bible but also in American poetry to demonstrate how the form functions, before then turning to a close study of Nephi's psalm. He argues that studying poetry in the Book of Mormon as poetry can lead to “the most profound understanding of meaning of the text and the richest appreciation of its significance.”38 Sondrup's work paved the way for other later studies on the psalm.39Angela Crowell, writing outside the Utah-centered Latter-day Saint tradition, was the next to publish on the subject, producing a series of articles on the Book of Mormon, poetry, and its Hebraisms.40 Crowell wrote for members of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (now Community of Christ). In her studies, she illustrates several forms of Hebrew literary devices in the text for readers unfamiliar with such scholarship. In doing so, Crowell drew heavily from Welch's work on parallelisms and chiasmus. At about the same time that Crowell's two studies appeared, Richard D. Rust published a similar article for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in its youth magazine.41 Meant as an introduction to poetry in the Book of Mormon for lay readers, Rust's article avoids literary terms such as “parallelism” in favor of simply describing the form and showing examples in the text. Like Sondrup, Rust advocated for reading the text as poetry, stating that “Book of Mormon prose may be likened to a highway: it moves sequentially from one place to the next. Book of Mormon poetry, on the other hand, is cumulative: one idea builds upon another. It is like a beautiful structure such as the Salt Lake Temple.”42 The Book of Mormon's repetitive style might no longer be regarded as tedious but instead as emphatic, boosting the mood of the text. Rust expanded on this article in his formative chapter “Poetry in the Book of Mormon,” published in Rediscovering the Book of Mormon in 1991,43 and then again in his culminating and pivotal 1997 work, Feasting on the Word.44Feasting on the Word remains the most substantial attempt at reading the Book of Mormon from a literary perspective, examining the text through forms such as poetry, narrative, typology, and other devices that support its themes and messages. Rust's chapter on Book of Mormon poetry is an essential primer on the genre found within the sacred work.45 In addition, Rust mentored Sarah Hatch in her undergraduate study of how poetic parallelisms in the Book of Mormon aid translation.46 Hatch suggests that Book of Mormon authors used parallelistic structures in their writings and poetry specifically to mitigate the loss of meaning through translation.Donald Parry joined this conversation and changed the scholarly landscape in this province with a long series of studies on parallelisms in the Book of Mormon. Beginning with his Parallelisms according to Classification, Parry worked to categorize various types of parallelisms found in the Book of Mormon. In 1992, he published the monumental Book of Mormon Text Reformatted according to Parallelistic Patterns, in which he painstakingly reformats the entire Book of Mormon, highlighting every parallelism he could identify and naming every type of parallelism in the text for readers. Parry's most recent book on the subject, Preserved in Translation: Hebrew and Other Ancient Literary Forms in the Book of Mormon, expands on his earlier books with additional insights.47 Parry's work is invaluable for anyone examining the English text for Hebraic parallelisms. Parry has proven to be less interested in the question of what the parallelistic structures in the Book of Mormon mean for reading it as poetry or prose, but his contribution to the field in reformatting the text based on a literary form will lead to many more studies on Book of Mormon parallelism.48In 2003, as the current field of Book of Mormon studies was taking its rise, Grant Hardy published his groundbreaking The Book of Mormon: A Reader's Edition. In this edition of the text (and in a follow-up study edition a decade and a half later), Hardy formats the Book of Mormon in paragraphs for prose, rather than breaking up the text into columns, but he also draws on Parry's structural work to present parallelisms with line breaks, and formats the text into verse form where “more refined and elevated language” is present.49 However, Hardy has far fewer parallelisms formatted in the Reader's Edition, as compared to Parry's efforts. In fact, Hardy presents Alma 36 primarily as prose, even though it is one of the most memorable parallelistic passages (in this case, a chiasm) in the entire Book of Mormon. His choice to do so, it seems, is primarily due to the length of the passage.50 Hardy was probably also following the conventions of contemporary Biblical translations and critical editions, which tend not to use various indentation lengths for elaborate parallelisms. Hardy would later publish a literary reading of the Book of Mormon, Understanding the Book of Mormon, in which he would reinforce the chiastic structure of Alma 36 and the parallelisms making up Nephi's Psalm. He would also discuss Nephi's intimate, and unusual, window into the ancient prophet's personal weaknesses and anxieties.51 Hardy joins Rust in promoting a new Book of Mormon critical method, focusing on the narrative design of the text and what a literary reading can bring to Book of Mormon scholarship.More recently, other scholars have explored parallelisms outside of the well-known poems in 2 Nephi and Alma. Carl J. Cranney makes the case that parallelisms are used by speakers in the Book of Mormon to enhance their oral delivery as a mnemonic device.52 Cranney posits that some passages that seem to read as prose speeches, such as Alma 5, may in fact be poetry.53 Jeff Lindsay has published a study on Janus parallelism, a Hebrew literary device where the Hebrew word in a parallelism relates to both prior and subsequent lines in the passage, creating a double meaning.54 Lindsay borrows from Scott B. Noegel's Janus Parallelism in the Book of Job to demonstrate locations in the Book of Mormon where writers may be employing Janus parallelisms. Of course, to definitively show Janus parallelism in any translation, the source text must be available—so, as Lindsay acknowledges, this hinders his examination. Paul Y. Hoskisson has added several more possible Janus parallelisms in another study.55 In a short piece, Madison Landrith branches out to the Book of Ether and discusses the peculiar use parallelism to call the reader's attention to one passage and its importance.56 The conversation, it seems, will continue.Now, most of the studies discussed in this section have at their heart the motive to provide evidence of the Book of Mormon's ancient origins. From Nibley's qasidah to Welch's chiasmus, and throughout the discussion about parallelistic poetry, these authors have cataloged ancient Near Eastern literary forms as so many things that Joseph Smith could not have known about. Some writers have even connected the Book of Mormon to the epic in an effort to support its ancient origins.57 In addition to the forms already reviewed, Kevin Barney has highlighted the poetic device enallage, a sudden change in tense, pronoun, case, or gender, in the Book of Mormon.58 Drawing on Thomas Brookbank's extensive series “Hebrew Idioms and Analogies in the Book of Mormon,” in the Improvement Era,59 Barney suggests that enallage demonstrates the connections between Hebrew and the Book of Mormon.60 David Bokovoy has further explicated enallage in the Book of Mormon, defending its use in the text as intentional rather than “a blunder in syntax,”61 seemingly responding to critics of Book of Mormon grammar.The drive to defend the Book of Mormon's antiquity has other implications for the study of Book of Mormon poetry. For example, the largest concentration of poetry in the Book of Mormon is in the extensive Isaiah quotations. However, scholarship on Isaiah passages in the Book of Mormon rarely, if ever, examines the poetry itself, focusing rather on what Sidney Sperry termed “the Isaiah Problem.”62 Frederik S. Kleiner has noticed this trend in Book of Mormon literary scholarship, but has built on it in a kind of non-partisan fashion. In his recent volume, Experiment Upon the Word, Kleiner celebrates the Book of Mormon as a great American achievement. He brackets the authenticity question, favoring instead a close reading of the text itself to discover what it tries to accomplish poetically. For Kleiner, the Book of Mormon is a post-secular text, encouraging the reader to experiment upon the word, that is, to be a co-creator with the text in influencing how the reader lives and thinks. He repeatedly criticizes modern literary scholarship on the Book of Mormon because it regularly seeks to identify literary devices in the text as proof of the text's ancient origin—something Kleiner feels is a distraction from the value of the text itself. It may well be that the future of Book of Mormon poetry studies will depart from apologetics and concentrate instead on the text as a text, as Kleiner recommends.63Having surveyed the study of Book of Mormon poetry—poetry within the Book of Mormon—it is time now to examine the production of poetry based on the Book of Mormon in some way. All religious traditions have their poets. As Kimberly Johnson remarks, “poetry and religion stand as two sympathetic and often overlapping responses to the same existential curiosities.”64 Poetry and theology ask similar questions about human existence and our fleeting time on earth, so it is no wonder that devout poets turn to their sacred works for literary, as well as spiritual, inspiration. As with poetry in the Book of Mormon, poetry influenced by the Book of Mormon is closely connected to poetry influenced by the Bible. For centuries, the most influential works in English were Shakespeare's tragedies and the King James Version of the Holy Bible.65 A cursory examination of poetry up through the nineteenth century reveals an active, devotional, and at times playful engagement with the Authorized Version. Authors took for granted that their readers would be as baptized in the language of the Psalms and Revelation as they were in water. Biblical allusions added depth to the poetic voice of the composer and, when executed well, induced a Horatian insight and pleasure in the reader. As modernism and secularism grew in the twentieth century, this shared diet of the Bible as a universal poetic cuisine faltered. Poets could no longer assume that readers could connect with a Hebraic or Pauline allusion. Seamus Heaney, Irish Nobel poet laureate, put it this way: “We have lost the overall, ordering Christian myth of ‘down there, up there, us in between.’ It's been lost as a living myth.”66 Careening as we are headlong into the second quarter of the twenty-first century, this loss of myth through biblical imagery is becoming ever more pronounced. Today, the average English speaker is more likely to understand a Marvel reference than a Mosaic one.Before discussing poetic adaptations of the Book of Mormon, it is necessary first to define them. Scholars have debated what constitutes “Latter-day Saint” poetry and generally have opted for a wide-open interpretation of that term, including poems that have clear Latter-day Saint themes as well as those that—although their authors are Latter-day Saints in one sense or another—have no overt religious or cultural connection to the faith. In his editor's note to Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems, Eugene England defined Latter-day Saint poetry in terms of “its religious or regional content.”67 England's co-editor Dennis Clark admitted, however, that “not all [of the anthologized poems] are related to the Mormon experience.”68 Indeed, membership cannot be the qualifier here either, because some poets included in the anthology were “back-sliding” members or friends of other faiths.69 Each anthology of poetry since then has included devotional poetry, to be sure, but many poems anthologized, although written by celebrated Latter-day Saint poets, have no obvious connection with the faith.Because Latter-day Saints are Christians, the line between a Latter-day Saint poem and a Book of Mormon poem can sometimes be blurry. Twenty years ago, in an unpublished paper delivered at Sunstone Symposium, Robert Hughes, Latter-day Saint poet and critic, identifies roughly eight thousand poems written by Latter-day Saints, of which only a mere hundred or so include Book of Mormon themes.70 He goes on to say that there are far more Latter-day Saint poems with biblical influences than with Book of Mormon influences. There are probably multiple reasons for this, with marketability71 being one of the most obvious and pedestrian, although another could be how biblical themes and Book of Mormon themes are defined. A biblical theme in a poem can simply be about Christian faith broadly, but to identify something as a Book of Mormon theme requires more specific, and exclusive, evidence. For example, a poem about Christ's redemptive power could be seen as “biblical” even if nothing from Matthew or Luke is quoted. But for it to be especially a Book of Mormon poem, it must say something about the atonement that is only found in that sacred text. For the purposes of this essay, Book of Mormon poems are poems that are overtly influenced by or alluding to Book of Mormon events, peo

The famous scientist and philosopher Isaac Newton once observed to fellow polymath Robert Hooke: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”1 Any discussion of the future of Book of Mormon studies, especially in the field of historical and comparative approaches, is going to involve looking out from the vantage point of what has gone before and building on the work of previous scholars, many of whom were instrumental in first looking at the Book of Mormon through a scholarly lens. By historical and comparative approaches, I mean the branch of Book of Mormon scholarship that explores the volume based on evidence and materials that are found outside the Book of Mormon. Often this material comes from the ancient Near East or ancient Israel.2 Other times, the comparative material is drawn from connections with pre-Columbian America.3 These are very much blanket approaches, utilizing linguistics,4 anthropology,5 law,6 and other disciplines, to provide data for an increased understanding of the Book of Mormon.These approaches to Book of Mormon studies have often been employed by scholars supporting the truth claims of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including using the parallels adduced from the various fields to both explain elements of the Book of Mormon to those who accept it as an ancient document as well as to respond to critics of the book.7 It is guaranteed that this will continue to be a concern for those who approach and understand the Book of Mormon according to historical and comparative lenses, simply because the impetus for supporting the Book of Mormon's specific claims has not disappeared from discussion on and around the Book of Mormon. Most Latter-day Saint readers of the Book of Mormon still care deeply about questions of historicity, and, because of that, they still care deeply about questions of history. The useful proliferation of other approaches to understanding the Book of Mormon does not remove for these readers the value of exploring what we can understand about how the Book of Mormon derives from and is embedded in its various ancient contexts. Although it is possible that historical and comparative approaches are some of the approaches most closely connected to traditional claims about the Book of Mormon, they have value for those who do not accept those claims because, at their best, they involve a close reading of the Book of Mormon.It is possible to engage in these kinds of approaches to the Book of Mormon without necessarily accepting the specific truth claims of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but to do so requires simply looking at the narrative that the book itself presents, apart from its origins.8 Part of this is because the Book of Mormon presents itself as a relentlessly historical book. In the first few pages, Nephi1 tells us that his narrative begins “in the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah” (1 Nephi 1:4). This gives a specific date and time, and therefore a historical context, for the beginning of the Book of Mormon. According to its own internal narrative, the Book of Mormon begins in the ancient kingdom of Judah in the year 597 BCE. The implication, then, is that understanding what is happening politically, culturally, and religiously in the ancient Near East in and around 597 BCE can provide tools for understanding and explicating the Book of Mormon. The occupation with historical time in the Book of Mormon never really goes away—Mormon's abridgment in particular is marked by his use of dating formulas.9As we look to the future of historical and comparative approaches, scholars will essentially build on the excellent work that has been done and is currently being done on the Book of Mormon.10 There is, as in all fields and approaches, room for improvement. Specifically, future comparative scholarship about the Book of Mormon, while building on the acknowledgment of the essentially historical claims that the Book of Mormon itself makes, should acknowledge the limits of that data. The famous Harvard Semiticist Thomas O. Lambdin used to observe about his own field of Semitic linguistics that “we are working with no data, but we may conclude . . . .”11 In many ways, Book of Mormon scholarship—however it is approached—involves some element of recognizing how limited the data set is, since we are dealing with one relatively thin volume as a corpus. One of the goals of comparative and historical approaches to the Book of Mormon is to broaden the set of data without compromising the evidentiary standards that characterize scholarship.From my perspective, the future of Book of Mormon scholarship engaging with historical or comparativist questions must do more than simply broaden the data set, however. It is useful in Book of Mormon studies to be able to say that “this element of ancient culture seems to have resonance with these various aspects found in the Book of Mormon.” In the future (and, of course, I am extrapolating from current Book of Mormon studies), I anticipate a real and increased concern with exploring the implications of having adduced such parallels. The future of historical and comparative Book of Mormon studies will come from trying to answer the question “So what?” It is not sufficient to simply state the existence of a given parallel—the future of these approaches to Book of Mormon studies is in looking at implications of those parallels for understanding the Book of Mormon. For the balance of my discussion, I will explore three specific examples that can push forward the idea of “So what?” These examples attempt to look at parallel data and try to explore and explain some potential implications.One place where questions of “So what?” become useful is in working through the Book of Mormon's idea of the saving work of Jesus Christ, which the Title Page of the Book of Mormon suggests is one of its primary purposes. Russell M. Nelson, then serving as President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, stated: “The Book of Mormon provides the fullest and most authoritative understanding of the Atonement of Jesus Christ to be found anywhere.”12 This observation is useful for the faith-building work that is the primary use of the Book of Mormon within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. From a scholarly perspective, it actually encourages a specific question—What is “the Atonement of Jesus Christ?”—and, perhaps more importantly, How is it understood in the Book of Mormon?It is worth noting that one of the most common words used in the discourse of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is “atonement.”13 The Church's Guide to the Scriptures defines this word as “to reconcile man to God.” The Guide to the Scriptures further states: “As used in the scriptures, to atone is to suffer the penalty for an act of sin, thereby removing the effects of sin from the repentant sinner and allowing him to be reconciled to God.”14 This is an intriguing statement because the scriptures that make up the Latter-day Saint canon do not actually use the word “atonement” very often, especially when discussing the act of reconciliation performed by Jesus. The words “atone” or “atonement” only appear one time in the King James Version (KJV) of the New Testament.15 These terms appear five times in the Doctrine and Covenants and twice in the Pearl of Great Price.16 They appear thirty-nine times in the Book of Mormon and eighty-one times in the Old Testament. By way of contrast, the words “redeem” or “redemption” appear 122 times in the Old Testament, twenty-two times in the New Testament, 117 times in the Book of Mormon, sixty-five times in the Doctrine and Covenants, and four times in the Pearl of Great Price. Comparing usage of these two terms shows that “atonement” is not actually the preferred scriptural term for discussing Jesus Christ and his saving work.An examination of the actual use of the word “atone” in the Latter-day Saint canon shows that this term, which finds its primary expression in the Old Testament, is primarily a word referring to the ancient Israelite temple service and priestly concerns. Indeed, of the eighty-one times “atone” or “atonement” appear in the King James Version of the Old Testament, forty-nine of those appear in Leviticus, with another twenty-eight appearing in Exodus and Numbers. Ninety percent of the uses of this word appear in priestly sources in priestly contexts. In fact, these words appear more times in Leviticus alone than in the New Testament, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price combined. As used in the Latter-day Saint scriptures, then, “atone” and “atonement” are primarily Levitical and priestly concerns. This has specific implications for the study of how the Book of Mormon serves as the basis for Latter-day Saint understandings of one of the central tenets of its religious faith.It should be noted that the Book of Mormon does use “atone” and “atonement” in its presentation of Jesus Christ and its claims about His saving work. But it is not, as already noted, the primary word used, instead representing a specific subset of how the various parts of the Book of Mormon discourse about Jesus. In the Book of Mormon, “atonement” retains its temple and priestly meaning, but that meaning is transferred to Jesus Christ. This then has led to its adoption as the generic term used by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for the saving work of Jesus Christ.As already noted, “atone,” or its variants, appears thirty-nine times in the Book of Mormon. These instances are not, however, distributed equally over the entire volume. Eight are attributed to Jacob, making up 20.5 percent of the total count. Another eight instances appear within Benjamin's sermon, in addition to two more quotations of such passages later, bringing his count to ten for 25.6 percent of the total. Amulek has seven examples of usage (17.9 percent), and Alma2 accounts for five examples (12.8 percent). Thus, four Book of Mormon figures alone account for about three-fourths of the use of the word “atonement” in the Book of Mormon. The remaining quarter comes from various other figures in the Book of Mormon, but many of these are allusions or quotations of the above figures. (These are not counted in the general reckoning because they are less specific.)An examination of the use of “atonement” by these individuals in the Book of Mormon shows that a temple or priestly context underscores their usage of the word “atone” and its variants. In other words, this pattern is not random. Within the religious world presented by the Book of Mormon, notions of atonement appear to retain their primarily temple and sacrificial contexts. As this paper is primarily focused on thinking through a putative future of Book of Mormon studies, one example of this should suffice to illustrate.The first time the Book of Mormon uses the word “atonement” is in Lehi's final teaching to his son Jacob. Here, Lehi suggests that intercession is necessary “to answer the ends of the atonement” (2 Nephi 2:10). It is no mistake that this first use of the word is addressed to Jacob. Jacob is ordained a priest by his brother.17 Even Lehi's initial address to Jacob suggests his role as a priest, for Lehi tells Jacob: “All your days shall be spent in the service of thy God.” “Service” connects to the Hebrew word avodah, work or service, used often in the Pentateuch to refer to the work of the sanctuary.18 Read with this lens, a promise to spend all one's days in the “service” of God suggests a priestly role. Indeed, Jacob's role as priest means that he is closely associated with the temple and the law of Moses, perhaps more so than any figure in the Book of Mormon.19 Thus, not only does the first recorded teachings to Jacob talk about “atonement,” but his recorded sermons also draw heavily on this sacrificial context.Jacob's own first recorded sermon in the Book of Mormon appears in 2 Nephi 6–10. It includes two chapters from Isaiah, but even these prophetic chapters have a strong Mosaic element. Although it is the first time the Book of Mormon records Jacob's teachings, 2 Nephi 6:3 makes it clear that this is not the first time that Jacob has addressed the people. Jacob here uses the past tense, noting that he has taught the people the words of his father as well as words “concerning all things which were written, from the creation of the world” (v. 3).20 Jacob begins his interpretation in 2 Nephi 9 by telling the Nephites that he read from Isaiah so they might “know concerning the covenants of the Lord that he has covenanted with all the house of Israel” (v. 1). This reference to the Lord covenanting with all the house of Israel makes clear that the covenant indicated is the Sinai covenant (rather than the Abrahamic or an earlier covenant), since it was at Sinai that the Lord first covenanted with the house of Israel as such. The invocation of Sinai indicates that Jacob presents his teachings in connection with the law of Moses. He then moves this Sinai context into a discourse on resurrection and atonement. On the surface, this seems an odd switch, but in making it, Jacob continues the covenantal theme while giving it a distinctively Nephite and Book of Mormon spin.Thus, in 2 Nephi 9:7, Jacob introduces the notion that the resurrection and the return to the presence of God are made possible by an “infinite atonement.” The priestly ideas and notions that underscore Jacob's usage explain why he insists that it must be an “infinite atonement.” The other, finite atonements Jacob obliquely invokes are those effected by the sacrificial system of the law of Moses. Jacob's assumption (it is probably too strong to call it an argument) seems to be that while the daily sacrificial system was sufficient to deal with daily difficulties, it could not completely overcome humanity's fallen nature.21 There needed, therefore, to be an “infinite atonement” to cover everything the law was insufficient to cover on its own. It is in this light that Jacob can claim that “the atonement satisfieth the demands of his justice upon all those who have not the law given to them” (v. 26). He recontextualizes the Mosaic atonement within a universal saving that covers even those who do not have the law.22 (Jacob's brother, Nephi, seems to be building on Jacob's notion of an “infinite atonement” when he uses the same language in 2 Nephi 25:16.)The legal context of Jacob's use of “atonement” is also visible in the interactions with Sherem in Jacob 7. Sherem's contention is that Jacob (and, by extension, Nephi) has “led away much of this people that they pervert the right way of God and keep not the law of Moses which is the right way and convert the law of Moses into the worship of a being which ye say shall come many hundred years hence” (v. 7). Sherem argues that his disagreement with Jacob concerns the right way to live and understand the law of Moses. Jacob's response focuses on his own revelatory experiences and his earlier articulation of an infinite atonement. He tells Sherem: “It has been made manifest unto me, for I have heard and seen; and also it has been made manifest unto me by the power of the Holy Ghost, wherefore I know if there should be no atonement made all mankind must be lost” (v. 12). Jacob's response to Sherem's accusations about the law of Moses is couched in language taken from the law of Moses. For Jacob, Jesus Christ's saving work is essentially part and parcel with the law; he approaches the law from a different angle than Sherem. Jacob has kept the Mosaic idea of atonement but given it a new context.The patterns on display in connection with Jacob appear elsewhere. Although the Book of Mormon uses “atonement” to describe its position on Jesus Christ and its theology of His saving of humanity, it is not the general or even the most common word used. On the contrary, its use is confined to specific social contexts. These contexts are all places where the law of Moses, with its attendant priesthood and sacrificial system, is already in view. This is not surprising because atonement is, at its core, a priestly concept. This is visible in the sacrificial setting of Benjamin's speech, in Abinadi's disagreement with priests in the temple, in Alma's quotation of Psalm 95, and in the Zoramites’ rejection of temple and church. The Book of Mormon takes the priestly context of the concept of “atonement” and, within the bounds of the ancient sacrificial system, deploys and recontextualizes it to refer to Jesus Christ and the sacrifice and the salvation that derives from his blood. That recontextualization remains, however, only a limited one because it remains within the bounds of temple and priestly concerns.The foregoing discussion of the “atonement” in the Book of Mormon shows, I hope, the richness of a comparative and historical approach to the study of the Book of Mormon, as well as the value in looking beyond the first elements. The idea that the Book of Mormon teaches about the “atonement” is a standard statement for members of the Church of Jesus Christ. Examination of the actual text of the Book of Mormon, especially alongside the Hebrew Bible, deepens our understanding of the Book of Mormon perspective, showing the complexities of its usage within the text. Future research into this and other topics will continue to reckon with how the Book of Mormon informs Latter-day Saint discourse, but also how Latter-day Saint discourse informs how we read the Book of Mormon.Another place where we can see how the future of these approaches to the Book of Mormon might play out is in discussions of kingship in the Book of Mormon. Again, there is already valuable work being done on this topic. Taylor Halverson recently discussed the Deuteronomistic rules on kingship as the basis for understanding Book of Mormon kingship ideology.23 Halverson's point is well-taken, but there is an essentially apologetic element to his conclusion that states: “If Joseph Smith was the putative author of the Book of Mormon, it is incredibly remarkable that he had prescience enough to construct kingship narratives that so unfailingly adhered to or perfectly disagreed with what God expected of a king as expressed in Deuteronomy 17:14–20.”24 This is a useful observation for Halverson's goal, and as I stated at the outset, I think that there is value in using the Book of Mormon as a tool for faith formation for Latter-day Saints. I also think that the future of historical and comparative approaches is to continue to address the question of “So what?”In the case of the Deuteronomistic presentation of kingship, Halverson's thesis raises questions about the reception of the law of Moses in general, and Deuteronomy in particular, among the people of Nephi1. After Nephi1 and his brothers return from Jerusalem with the brass plates, Lehi finds that “they did contain the five books of Moses, which gave an account of the creation of the world, and also of Adam and Eve, who were our first parents” (1 Nephi 5:11). This is the only Book of Mormon reference to the existence of five books of Moses. It should be noted that Nephi does not clarify or specify what these five books are. He does not mention any of them by name, or really tell us what their content is. Nephi1 does say that these five books of Moses contain a creation account and a version of the story of Adam and Eve, but these stories correspond only to the first three or four chapters of Genesis (out of the 187 chapters appearing between Genesis and Deuteronomy in the Bible). There is so much about the appearance of “the five books of Moses” in the Book of Mormon we simply don't know. Future studies on the contents of the brass plates must contend with how little we know about the process of the composition of the Pentateuch as now constituted.25We do know that the Book of Mormon contains some material similar to what we now have in Deuteronomy, including material that is proximate to the material Halverson suggests is the basis for the Book of Mormon understanding of kingship.26 We know this because the Book of Mormon authors quote a tradition similar to what is now Deuteronomy 18:18–19. There, YHWH promises Moses: “I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him.”27 Lehi1 seems to allude to and expand on this tradition, with Nephi1 indicating that his father stated: “Yea, even six hundred years from the time that my father left Jerusalem, a prophet would the Lord God raise up among the Jews—even a Messiah, or, in other words, a Savior of the world” (1 Nephi 10:4). This shows that, for Lehi1 the prophet like Moses will be a Messiah, which in his ancient Judahite context meant a king. It is possible that Lehi1 is deriving the kingly context from the proximity of this statement and the law of the king now found in Deuteronomy 17, but again, it is important to note that we simply cannot say. In a similar vein, Nephi 1 paraphrases Deuteronomy 18:18–19 in 1 Nephi 22:20, changing the pronouns around so that it is Moses speaking of a prophet, rather than the Lord to Moses. Both Lehi 1 and Nephi 1 clearly allude to what is now Deuteronomy 18, but neither of them actually quotes it, making it unclear what form it had in the text available to them. This situation represents, in many ways, a microcosm for the future of Book of Mormon studies that draw comparisons with the biblical text (and other ancient resources), as it represents the value in looking at comparisons but also illustrates the limits of the information we have.This feeds directly into Halverson's argument. On the one hand, Halverson clearly shows ways that something like the kingship ideology from Deuteronomy appears in notions of Book of Mormon kingship. Halverson does not, however, differentiate between the small plates and Mormon's abridgment of the large plates. Is Mormon using Deuteronomy 17 identically to Nephi? Halverson further argues that for the purposes of his paper, if there is a verse that does not specifically say that an individual is not keeping one of the criteria from Deuteronomy 17, it means that the individual is.28 The use of Deuteronomy 17 also ignores evidence in the Book of Mormon, such as the fact that its kings exercise sacral powers that are denied to kings in Deuteronomy. In the Book of Mormon, kings are sacred persons who have oversight of the temple and priesthood.29 Thus, even a simple question like that concerning the use of a specific biblical passage to inform one aspect of Nephite polity or ideology proves to have more profound depths and implications. For me, an important part of the future of historical and comparative approaches to the Book of Mormon will involve probing those depths and implications.The final area I would like to explore in thinking about the future of Book of Mormon studies is the well-watered field of chiasmus. Since John W. Welch's observation of this phenomenon in the Book of Mormon, it has been a fruitful area for scholars interested in comparative approaches to the Book of Mormon.30 Welch's original purpose in putting the matter forward was to show that because “the Book of Mormon contains numerous chiasms, it becomes logical to consider the book a product of the ancient world.”31 Similarly, a few years later, Paul Y. Hoskisson observed that “the complicated chiasm of Alma 36 can leave little doubt that a vorlage of ancient Near Eastern descent lies behind the English translation.”32 It should be noted that in Welch's 1989 discussion of Alma 36, which Noel Reynolds has recently called Welch's “final in-depth treatment” of the passage,33 Welch concludes by inviting further research into the “spiritual and intellectual” implications of Welch's analysis of Alma 36 as a chiasm.34 This call has been picked up by many, and a full history of the study of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon is beyond the purview of the present study.35 It should be noted that chiasmus studies, including in the Book of Mormon, are still flourishing, and indeed there was a major conference at Brigham Young University in 2020 that drew Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint scholars from all over the world.36The point of reviewing this history is simply to observe that even with all the legitimate scholarly discussion that has gone into the discussion of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon, and especially in Alma 36, there have been certain questions that do not appear to have been explored. For example, allowing that Alma 36 is an intentionally chiastic composition composed in the ancient world, what does that say about Book of Mormon composition, or about the relationship between orality and literacy among the Book of Mormon peoples? The level of literacy in the ancient world was quite low. One thing that is highlighted by recent research37 is the degree of fluidity between the written and oral word in the ancient world. For example, even texts that quickly became “scripture” for their communities, such as the New Testament Gospels, seem to have a core of oral traditions that circulated through the early Jesus-movement.38 Letters, although written for ease of transmission, were read out loud and were thus often experienced as oral texts.39 In the ancient world, written texts were experienced in an oral environment, and oral experiences could be later written down and codified. In Hebrew (the language spoken by the Lehites at the beginning of the Book of Mormon), this fluidity is coded at the semantic level. The Hebrew word “to read” (qr‘) also means “to call out.”It should not be a surprise, therefore, to find similar fluidity between the written and the oral in the Book of Mormon. Many of the writings that Book of Mormon readers experience are presented as oral speeches or presentations. In some instances, as in 2 Nephi 7–8 and Mosiah 12:34–13:25, there is a written text that is quoted as part of an oral presentation, which is then written down and read by modern readers—Abinadi's quotation of the Ten Commandments from Exodus in particular, as it seems that he is reciting the initial elements of the Decalogue from memory in Mosiah 12:34–37, but then in 13:11, he says that he will “read unto [the priests] the remainder of the commandments of God.”40 Even in the middle of Abinadi's interaction with the scriptures, he exhibits fluidity between written and oral. Brant Gardner suggests: “As we approach the text, we may gain new insights into the art with which it was constructed by examining it as the literate result of a primarily oral culture.”41 There is still much work to be done on this front, which is where the scholarship on chiasmus in general, and Alma 36 in particular, come in.An important contention in scholarship on chiasmus is that chiasms are not random collections but carefully constructed rhetorical devices, designed to center on specific points.42 Chiasms are deliberate constructions. Because of this, the position that Alma 36 represents “one of the longest chiasms you will find anywhere”43 presents another intriguing place for the discussion of the Book of Mormon and the complex relationship between orality and literacy. Generally speaking, we have no evidence that the various speeches and preaching recorded in the Book of Mormon were composed before delivery.44 The fact that Alma 36 seems to be a large and complex chiasm makes this one place where the Book of Mormon seems to present such evidence.Alma 36 is part of a series of passages where Alma2 addresses his sons in what appears to be a kind of testamentum. In Alma 36, Alma2 addresses his son Helaman2, recounting his transformative experience with the sons of Mosiah. At no point does the Book of Mormon suggest that Alma2 pre-composed these remarks—in fact, Alma1’s remarks to his son Corianton have markers of extemporaneity, as Alma1 “perceives” in Alma 40:1 some of the difficulties that face his son. Alma 36, however, is not an extemporaneous piece. It is a careful, literary production. This observation raises questions about the relationship between the oral and written in this passage. Did Alma1 write his remarks before addressing Helaman2 and then read them to him? Did he give an oral version of his conversion but write down a polished literary version? The answers to these questions can help provide grist for ongoing scholarly discussion about how the relationship between speech, record, and composition plays out in the Book of Mormon.In this essay I have presented three concrete examples that I believe illustrate what is needed in the future from comparative and historical approaches to the Book of Mormon. There is value in pointing out parallels, but the future of these approaches in Book of Mormon studies must not stop there. It must use gathered data to aid in more sophisticated readings of the Book of Mormon, increasing understanding of both what the book is presenting and how it is presenting it. For me, this is one of the most important elements for the future of Book of Mormon studies—the recognition that finding parallels with the biblical text or other ancient cultures is not, in and of itself, sufficient as a point of scholarly interest. It is an excellent starting point, but the future of Book of Mormon studies will move on from that point. Future scholarship naturally builds on what has gone before, but standing on the shoulders of giants will allow future Book of Mormon scholars to see even further than before.

Most people who have ever spent much time in a Latter-day Saint congregation have at some point listened to a sacrament meeting talk or Sunday School lesson about the signs of the times. I vividly remember a high councilman rhapsodizing about “rivers of blood” flowing in the streets of Jerusalem at the time of Jesus's Second Coming—and privately wondering on more than one occasion how exactly the various prophesied plagues, pestilences, natural disasters, and wars would discriminate so carefully as to target only the wicked.“The Latter-day Saints of the nineteenth century belonged to an apocalyptic tradition,” argues historian and folklorist Christopher Blythe in his highly informative book Terrible Revolution. Most twentieth- and twenty-first-century Saints, rather less so. Blythe charts the rise and fall of Mormon apocalyptic discourse over the two-hundred-year history of the Restoration. He defines “apocalyptic” as “the belief that society was headed toward cataclysmic events that would uproot the current social order in favor of a divine order that would be established in its place” (p. 2). For the most part, these apocalyptic expectations corresponded to beliefs about the events leading up to and including the “great and dreadful day” of Christ's return (Malachi 4:5; 3 Nephi 25:5).I use the word “Mormon” intentionally here as a capacious designation that encompasses but is broader than the institutional Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.1 Indeed, one of Blythe's signal contributions is to demonstrate convincingly that “apocalypticism was a communal project not confined to any one segment of the Mormon body” (p. 3). Joseph Smith and other members of the institutional hierarchy played a crucial role in establishing a “master narrative” of Mormon apocalypticism, but the creation of a “vernacular narrative tradition” also relied on the contributions of lay men and women, mainstream and fundamentalist, orthodox and heterodox (p. 7). Like trying to capture lightning in a bottle, apocalyptic prophecies, dreams, and visions could never be fully contained in officially approved channels.It is somewhat curious that apocalypticism—also known as millennialism or millenarianism—has received relatively scant scholarly treatment in the extensive Mormon studies literature. Apocalypticism is central to the religious tradition and has shaped the worldviews of virtually all Latter-day Saints, particularly in the nineteenth century. Indeed, other than the centrality of Jesus Christ, a belief in the coming eschaton is the only Restoration doctrine that merits inclusion in the Church's name, which Latter-day Saints believe was revealed directly from God.To date, the standard work on the subject has been Grant Underwood's 1993 book The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism. Terrible Revolution should be read as a complement to and extension of Underwood's classic work rather than a replacement of it. Underwood's analysis of millenarian discourse in early Latter-day Saint periodicals and his comparison with other contemporaneous millennialist groups (particularly the Millerites) remain unsurpassed. Blythe's book extends the chronological time line (Underwood deals only with the Joseph Smith period) and expands the cast of characters and source material (Underwood focuses primarily on print sources written by male leaders). In so doing, Blythe gives us a rich and textured portrait of an apocalyptic culture expressed just as often through popular stories and excited rumors as through canonized scriptures and published discourses.Blythe might have chosen to commence his story with Joseph Smith's First Vision. In his first known written account of his theophany, Smith said the Lord declared that “mine anger is kindling against the inhabitants of the earth to visit them according to their ungodliness and to bring to pass that which [hath] been spoken by the mouth of the prophets and Ap[o]stles behold and lo I come quickly as it [is] written of me in the cloud [clothed] in the glory of my Father.”2 Blythe begins instead with Joseph Smith's 1823 vision of the angel Moroni, who quoted several apocalyptic biblical texts over the course of the night. Either way, the author's point is well taken: apocalypticism was baked into the new religion from its inception.Readers of the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies will be particularly interested in Terrible Revolution's treatment of apocalypticism in the Book of Mormon. Blythe's thesis here is clear: “The Book of Mormon is an apocalyptic text, continually drawing on themes of destruction and renewal” (p. 16). He spends several pages developing this argument, focusing first on Nephi's apocalypse in 1 Nephi 12–14. Blythe aptly acknowledges the parallels to John the Revelator's text, but notes how the Book of Mormon offers a peculiarly American apocalypse. In one of the book's stronger contextual moves, Blythe situates Nephi's apocalypse within a longer tradition in which Columbus, Puritans, Jonathan Edwards, and the revolutionary generation strove to fit America into both providential history and eschatology.As other scholars have done, Blythe notes how the Book of Mormon's text offers both continuities and discontinuities with early American discourse more broadly. On the one hand, “the Book of Mormon canonizes and therefore preserves the speculation on the apocalyptic significance of America,” and it considers the role of the continent's Indigenous peoples in salvation history (p. 22). On the other hand, the new scripture offered some distinctive features of a new American apocalypticism, including the presence of the New Jerusalem on the American continent and most prominently what Jared Hickman has called the book's “Amerindian apocalypse.”3Blythe is keenly aware that the role of the Lamanites in salvation history is arguably the Book of Mormon's most distinctive contribution to the Judeo-Christian apocalyptic tradition. He traces the work that the new scripture's Amerindian apocalypse performed among and upon the nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint community, particularly in their colonization of the intermountain West. The pioneers read the American landscape and its Indigenous inhabitants through the lens of the Book of Mormon. They inscribed the book's narratives and characters onto their mountain “Deseret.” And they “understood living Natives through the undercurrents of apocalypticism” (p. 115).The widescale conversion of Native Americans did not happen like the pioneers had hoped. They celebrated the few baptisms that did occur, but those were too few and far between to make anyone believe that the Book of Mormon's prophecies were truly being fulfilled. In this respect, Blythe hints at an argument that deserves fuller examination. Although it is more complicated than some previous scholars have made it appear, it has nevertheless become a truism that the Bible far outshone the Book of Mormon in Latter-day Saint discourse for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Blythe suggests that this may be in part because the “redemption of the Lamanites” never materialized. He cites Orson Pratt, who, in 1875, criticized his fellow Saints for their Book of Mormon illiteracy, supposing that they, rather than the Lamanites, would be the principal agents of preparing the world for the Second Coming. “It is not so,” Pratt insisted. “We have got to be helpers” in the work, but the Book of Mormon makes clear that the Lamanites must take the lead (p. 170). Blythe comments: While some may have been ignorant of what the Book of Mormon said about the Indians building the New Jerusalem, this forgetting may have had more to do with the subsequent history of Mormon-Native relations in the West. The Mormons never amassed the number of Native conversions they had anticipated early on. Instead, they found interactions with indigenous peoples in the Great Basin were complicated and unpredictable. From the perspective of the late nineteenth century, Mormons likely found it hard to believe that those they saw as their unreceptive and sometimes hostile neighbors would become their messiahs. (pp. 170–71)To be clear, Terrible Revolution is not meant to be a reception history of the Book of Mormon. But Blythe might have tugged on this string a little more in the service of tracing the development of Mormon apocalypticism in the twentieth century. In particular, he might have more fully examined the role of the Amerindian apocalypse in Spencer W. Kimball's “Lamanite theology.” And then he might have considered George P. Lee's claim that the post-Kimball First Presidency essentially did what Orson Pratt had criticized in 1875—de-centering the Lamanites in redemption history and centering instead the role of the Church.4 In any case, future scholars may want to pick up on Blythe's provocative hypothesis, considering the connection between the failure to “redeem the Lamanites” and the relative de-emphasis on the Book of Mormon among the Latter-day Saints for so many decades.One of the primary themes of Terrible Revolution is the centrality of America. It is fair to debate whether the Restoration tradition is, in its essence, an “American religion,” or whether the United States’ hitherto disproportionate importance in the tradition is simply a matter of geographic and historical happenstance that will change as it becomes increasingly and authentically global. (By way of comparison, nobody thinks of Christianity as an Eastern Mediterranean religion despite its origins there, whereas Arabic language, culture, and worldviews retain their primacy in Islam.) Blythe does an outstanding job of carefully analyzing numerous statements and texts—produced by Church leaders and lay members alike—that have centered America so powerfully in the Mormon apocalyptic imagination.For contemporary American Latter-day Saints who have so generally embraced the Stars and Stripes, the anti-Americanism of mid-nineteenth-century Mormonism will always come as a shock. Blythe is hardly the first historian to document the Saints’ vitriol toward the government and citizenry of the United States in the wake of the Missouri persecutions, Joseph Smith's murder, and the forced expulsion from Nauvoo. But he expands the repertoire of the Latter-day Saints’ deep-seated alienation and shows how “the trauma of Nauvoo's final years held ramifications that lasted throughout the century” (p. 96). Apocalypticism became one of the primary grammars through which the Saints expressed their anger. Curses and calls for divine vengeance saturated mid-nineteenth-century Mormon discourse. The Latter-day Saints identified, and to some degree reveled in, the accounts they read of “war, disease, drought, famine, fires, and natural disasters” that consumed America in the 1850s and 1860s (p. 130). The nation's travails—most notably the Civil War—were nothing more than the judgments of a righteous God on a wicked and untoward generation that had literally spilled the blood of saints and prophets.But the nation survived. The world kept turning—even after 1890, which Blythe delightfully examines as the year of millennial expectations for so many (disappointed) Latter-day Saints. Indeed, the last days truly became the more amorphous latter days. Apocalyptic prophecy was increasingly out of vogue in a religion that wanted to acculturate to modernity. Others have narrated Mormonism's institutional and cultural transformations in the period from 1890 to 1930; Blythe shows how this was accomplished in and through shifts in apocalypticism. These changes were overseen by “a new generation of leaders [who] modified the more radical elements of nineteenth-century apocalypticism,” in large part “through the condemnation of prophecy that originated among the laity” (p. 181). The dreams and visions that had once been part of the grist of communal faith gradually disappeared from public rehearsal, and in a few instances, were specifically refuted by the First Presidency. “This was not the end of lay prophecy,” Blythe importantly notes, “but Mormons were increasingly inclined to be suspicious of the vernacular supernatural” (p. 194).The book's last chapter is simultaneously frustrating and fascinating. After spending nearly two hundred pages on the nineteenth century, Blythe dedicates all of eight pages to apocalypticism in official Latter-day Saint discourse in the twentieth century; for this reader, it was the most unsatisfactory section of the book. The bulk of the chapter traces some of the recent currents of fundamentalist and vernacular Mormon apocalypticism. Blythe is one of the pre-eminent observers and scholars of these diverse branches of the Mormon family tree, and I could imagine an entire book-length sequel to Terrible Revolution that further develops some of the themes and characters present in this final chapter.In refocusing our gaze on the apocalyptic themes central to the Restoration tradition, Terrible Revolution is a significant addition to the Mormon studies corpus. The book's focus on the construction and development of a lay vernacular apocalyptic discourse is particularly welcome. Those who don “Keep Mormonism Weird” T-shirts will find much to love in these pages, although the objects of their affection will appear mostly in the rearview mirror. For the most part, the Latter-day Saint apocalypse has become a rather tame affair, even while history and sacred texts manifest that other apocalyptic trajectories have been and remain available within the tradition.

With his sins forgiven and his guilt swept away, Enos asks a crucial question in Enos 1:7: “Lord, how is it done?”Enos has observed the effect—he knows he has been forgiven—but he doesn't yet know the cause. How was he forgiven? And why?In this way, Enos is like all of us. At birth, he passed through the veil that divides “now” from “before” and, thus, he passed through the veil that separates this world's branching effects from their root causes. Having passed through the veil, Enos suffers from the fact that, as Baruch Spinoza puts it in the appendix to Part 1 of his Ethics, “all men are born ignorant of the causes of things.”1The problem that results is threefold.Ignorant of causes, Enos is ignorant of God, his first cause.Ignorant of causes, Enos is ignorant of his father, one of his nearest causes.And crucially, ignorant of causes, Enos suffers from the fact that he is ignorant of how to consciously be a cause, of how to act and not just be acted upon.Framed by these three problems, my thesis with respect to reading Enos 1 is the following: that the pivot point in Enos's story of redemption comes after he has been forgiven, when he first poses this decisive question: “Lord, how is it done?”The turning point comes when Enos asks: “Lord, what is the cause?”For Enos, his story about God—and his discovery of causes—begins with his father.To start, it is helpful to note that, unlike other books in the small plates, the Book of Enos floats free of its causal genealogy. Though Enos begins with his father (Enos 1:1), he never says who his father is. He never names Jacob. And unlike Jacob who precedes him or Jarom who follows him, Enos also never names his spiritual successor (cf. Jacob 7:27; Jarom 1:15). These genealogical dots aren't hard to infer, but Enos doesn't connect them. He doesn't link himself into the larger family tree.Add to this lack of linkage the weird chronology spanning the lives of Jacob and Enos—there appears to be something like 124 years between them—and it is likely that Enos was a small child when Jacob died.2 If Enos hardly knew his father, this makes a common problem all the more acute: the problem that it is hard for children, even in the best of circumstances, to understand their fathers.Of course, this ignorance doesn't mean that fathers don't leave a deep causal mark. Being ignorant of a cause doesn't stop it from functioning as a cause. It doesn't stop that cause from working on us and through us, from shaping us and persisting in us.In a very real sense, every effect is “indwelt” by the causes that preceded it, just as every son is indwelt by the causal stamp of his father.And this, as we're told, is exactly where Enos finds himself: though his father is long dead, Enos can't get his father's voice out of his head. That voice is still inside him. It is still working on him, still pushing, still creating new effects. As an active cause, that voice still has a kind of life and agency all its own. “I went to hunt beasts in the forests,” Enos says, and instead, “the words which I had often heard my father speak concerning eternal life, and the joy of the saints, sunk deep into my heart” (Enos 1:3).This characteristic of his father's sunk-words—that his father's voice has a life of its own in Enos's head—is, for Enos, a hint, a clue. This autonomous voice in his head is a symptom of the fact that Enos's head isn't simply his own. It is a symptom of the fact that Enos—regardless of his ignorance—is caused.Enos describes what comes next as a wrestle. “I will tell you about the wrestle which I had before God, before I received a remission of my sins” (Enos 1:2).The irony of this wrestle is that it happens only once Enos is alone. It happens in the presence of God, “before” God—but it is not exactly with God, at least not at first, at least not directly. As with the biblical Jacob's famous wrestle with an “angel”—a description that already presumes too much given the opacity of the text—the nature of Enos's opponent is ambiguous: like Jacob in Genesis 32, it was only once Enos was “left alone” in the wild that “there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day” (Genesis 32:24).But how does one wrestle alone? With whom is Enos wrestling?Enos is wrestling with himself—after a fashion. Or he is wrestling with some part of himself, with some part of himself that isn't simply the same as himself. He is wrestling, I would suggest, with some force or cause that indwells him.Again, as pivotal as this is for Enos, it is not unusual. If you want to discover what causes indwell you—and, thus, wrestle with yourself—few catalysts are as potent as solitude and silence. So, for Enos, it is no surprise that his father's voice becomes impossible to ignore only once he is alone in the forest. It is no surprise that he must first be alone to discover he is not actually alone, that his mind and body are effectively indwelt by the voices and lives that caused him.This, I would argue, is the precondition for his forthcoming struggle: Enos can wrestle with himself before God because he has discovered he is not just himself. He has discovered that every effect is irreparably intertwined with its cause.The structure of this wrestle is obliquely mirrored in the grammar of the book's opening verses.In verse 1, Enos's first move is to name himself—twice. His first move is to duplicate himself, simultaneously positioning himself as both a first-person cause and a third-person effect: “Behold, it came to pass that I, Enos, knowing my father . . . ” (Enos 1:1).On the one hand, Enos is the “I,” the subject of the sentence. And on the other hand, he is also “Enos,” the object of someone else's attention and address. He is both at once, doubled and divided. “It came to pass that I, Enos . . . ”What induces this grammatical doubling of Enos into both cause and effect? In this sentence, the proximate reason is the introduction of Enos's father. “I, Enos, knowing my father that he was a just man—for he taught me in his language, and also in the nurture and admonition of the Lord . . . ” (Enos 1:1). Structurally, Enos's father sits at this fork that makes it possible for Enos to wrestle with himself.Moreover, Enos's description of his father also mirrors this same doubling: “I, Enos, knowing my father that he was a just man . . . ” (Enos 1:1). On one hand, Enos knows his father—my father, he says—as a person, in the first person. On the other hand, he interrupts this personal connection with the insertion of an awkward, third-person qualification: “that he was a just man.”And, perhaps most telling, the end result of this forked grammar is that the sentence introduced by I/Enos breaks off without ever introducing an active verb. The sentence that begins in verse 1 is grammatically incomplete. It is an incomplete sentence. And verse 2, instead of addressing the problem, opts to just start from scratch. “I, Enos, knowing my father that he was a just man. . . . And I will tell you of the wrestle which I had before God” (Enos 1:1, 2).Hamstrung in this way between his status as a subject and his status as an object, Enos doesn't yet know how to be active. He doesn't know how it is done. He doesn't know how to be a cause.Suffering his ignorance, indwelt by his father's voice, divided, and hamstrung, Enos begins to wrestle with himself. His soul begins to hunger. “And my soul hungered,” he tells us, “and I kneeled down before my Maker, and I cried unto him in mighty prayer and supplication for mine own soul” (Enos 1:4).Enos's soul is hungry. For what would a soul hunger? What would satisfy a soul? There may be a clue in the roughly poetic structure of verse 4, rendered as follows: (A) And my soul hungered(B) And I kneeled down before my Maker(B) And I cried unto him(A) In mighty prayer and supplication for mine own soul(C) And all the day long did I cry unto him(C) And when the night came I did still raise my voiceEnos's soul hungers, and so he kneels down, and he cries unto his Maker for . . . his own soul? Enos's soul is, apparently, hungry for itself. Enos's soul, in some way, lacks enough of itself. Enos's soul is apparently hungry for more soul.Is “mighty prayer” simply the sound of a soul rumbling with hunger for more of itself? Is Enos's soul hungry for a “whole” soul (cf. Enos 1:8), rather than a partial or inadequate or incomplete soul? What would this mean? What would it mean for a soul to be whole rather than incomplete?My thesis is that Enos's soul—knowing itself only as an effect—is hungry for knowledge of its causes. Enos puts it this way himself: his soul, he says, cried out for its first cause, for its “Maker” (Enos 1:4).This kind of soul, a soul that is cut off from its causes—a soul that is ignorant of its God and Maker, that knows itself only as an effect, a soul that isn't whole—is a soul caught in the grip of sin. Hamstrung by ignorance, sinners experience themselves (1) as cut off from their Maker, (2) as inadequate or incomplete, (3) as random and haphazard, (4) as a passive effect, and (5) as powerless to act.In terms of emotions or affects, the soul's incomplete sense of itself—as rootless, inadequate, aimless, passive, and powerless—expresses itself acutely in the felt form of guilt. Guilt is what it feels like to be ignorant of one's causes. Guilt is what it feels like to be inadequate and incomplete. Guilt it what it feels like to not be whole. Guilt is what it feels like to need more soul.In itself, this guilt—like all pain, like all passive suffering—is pointless. But, as a clue, this guilt may be helpful. As a clue, guilt may be a powerful symptom orienting Enos to his missing causes. Prompted by the persistence of his father's words, Enos takes his guilt as a sign and, as a sign, his guilt is transfigured into hunger: “And my soul hungered; and I kneeled down before my Maker, I cried unto him in mighty prayer and supplication for mine own soul” (Enos 1:4).In response to his hungry heart-cry, Enos reports that “a voice came unto me, saying: Enos, thy sins are forgiven thee, and thou shalt be blessed” (Enos 1:5).This is, of course, a vital moment—though, for my part, I think the more important moment comes next. What results for Enos from this conjunction of forgiveness and blessing?What results is that he acquires a new idea and, specifically, he acquires a new idea about something necessary and essential. What results is that he learns something about how God—as cause—acts. “And I, Enos, knew that God could not lie; wherefore my guilt was swept away” (Enos 1:6).This moment might be read in a number of ways. However, for my purposes, I don't want to read this as an idea about God that Enos already had in hand before he cried out. Rather, I want to read this as a new idea that Enos acquired as a result of what the voice told him. I want to read this as a privileged example of exactly the kind of adequate idea Enos's soul originally hungered for when he asked for more soul.Why might this specific idea about God be an example of what Enos was praying for? What makes an adequate idea different from an inadequate idea?Inadequate ideas are partial or incomplete because they are ignorant of causes. Adequate ideas, on the other hand, are whole or complete because they link effects back to their causes.In addition, as I've already noted, inadequate ideas, because they're ignorant of causes, also feel a certain way. In the register of emotions or affects, inadequate ideas feel rootless, aimless, passive, and powerless. They feel contingent and haphazard and accidental. They feel like the shell of an idea, empty and meaningless. And this, of course, is exactly the constellation of emotions that converge in an experience of guilt.How, though, do adequate ideas feel? In the register of emotions or affects, adequate ideas feel rooted, directed, active, and powerful. With the cause of an effect clearly in view, with the two halves of the puzzle reunited, adequate ideas, as adequate, feel necessary. In short, an adequate idea will present itself as a necessity.What, then, does the presence of God—as cause, as Maker—feel like?God's presence feel likes necessity. God's presence feels like the following conviction: that things are necessarily what they are and that now we must do what must be done. God's presence feels both like the full and unavoidable truth and a moral imperative to act in light of that truth.And this is exactly the kind of idea given to Enos's mind, hungry as it is for necessity. What does Enos learn? “And I, Enos, knew that God could not lie” (Enos 1:6). Enos doesn't learn that God “didn't” or “wouldn't” lie. Enos learns that God couldn't lie. Enos learns something about God, and this idea about God presents itself as a necessity.Then, anchored in this divine necessity, Enos finds his guilt swept away. Aligned with his Maker, he no longer feels inadequate. Grounded in God as his cause, he no longer feels incomplete, rootless, aimless, passive, or powerless. The connection between cause and effect has been made, and the lights have come on.We are positioned now at the fulcrum of Enos's conversion.Having connected with God as cause, having felt that cause as a necessity, and having had his feeling of guilt thus swept away, Enos asks: “Lord, how is it done?”Again, I think this question is open to multiple readings. In light of my thesis, though, I would suggest that Enos is not asking God for an explanation of what just happened. Rather, I think he is asking for instructions about how to do it again, himself.Lord, how is it done? Meaning, “How does one do this?”Enos has experienced God as necessary cause—this is critical—but now he still needs to address that third fundamental problem: How does he stop living as an effect and start acting as a cause? How does he become an active agent in his own right?The answer, as God explains it, is to have faith in Christ. “And I said: Lord, how is it done? And he said unto me: Because of thy faith in Christ” (Enos 1:8).What, though, is faith?Here, on my reading, Spinoza makes another helpful distinction when he outlines two different ways of achieving adequate knowledge of causes. As he argues in Part 2 of his Ethics, adequate knowledge of causes can be achieved: (1) via reason, or (2) via intuition.3Achieving an adequate knowledge of causes via reason is hard work. It is adequation by works rather than faith. You must painstakingly work step-by-step through the causal chain, identifying all the links, until the necessity of those connections comes clearly into view. Once their causal necessity comes into view, then you have knowledge. You're no longer ignorant of those causes.The trouble with reason, however, is that while all causal chains ultimately link back to God, these causal chains are also infinite, and so you can never reach God this way. You can get a sense for local necessities, but you'll never secure a grasp of a global cause or necessity.But adequate knowledge of causes via intuition has a different shape. Rather than painstakingly working your way back through the local causal chain by way of observations and inferences, you instead have an immediate intuition of God as a global cause or necessity. In one revelatory leap, you essentially skip the intermediate chain to intuit—especially in the form of an affective grasp of necessity—God as global cause. This intuitive grasp of necessity is, I think, something like adequation by faith rather than works.In this latter case, you still get all the redemptive effects of adequate knowledge—for example, the dissolution of guilt and your empowerment as an agent—but without actually knowing the details of all the intermediate steps that compose the causal network.Here, faith isn't a lack of knowledge or a blind hope. Rather, faith is a real, operational knowledge of God as cause—it is just that faith, unlike reason, doesn't claim to have adequate knowledge of all the other local causes besides God. To paraphrase Nephi, we might say: Faith is a real intuition of causal necessity; nevertheless, faith doesn't know the meaning of everything that is necessary (cf. 1 Nephi 11:17).Faith, in this sense, is a principle of power. It empowers us to act and not just be acted upon. While we can't understand or control all the causes that affect us—we will always be indwelt and affected by all manner of voices and causes we can't control—we can grasp their necessity when we see them from God's perspective.And this truth—perhaps counterintuitively—is redemptive.First, it is liberating and empowering to stop wishing that things were otherwise, and instead affirm them as necessarily being what they are. I am what I am. Things are what they are. It is liberating to see and affirm that this world truly is what it is. Truth, in itself, is liberating.And, too, it is consequently liberating and empowering to then also feel in my bones, in light of these necessities, what must now be done. It is liberating and empowering to be convicted about what I must now do as I submit to divine imperatives.But as mortals, the only way to do this—the only way to stop living as effects and start acting as causes—is to align ourselves, by way of faith, with the Cause. The only way to be active rather than passive is to act in God's name, as his agent, on behalf of what's necessary, placing our faith in Christ rather than in our own ideas and desires.In Enos's account, this is exactly what follows: Enos, having faith in Christ, begins to act as an agent of his Maker, as an active cause now aligned with his ultimate Cause. And, tellingly, he does so by seeking the welfare of others. He does so by actively seeking the welfare of the voices and lives and causes that surround him and indwell him.The difficulty of this work is that Enos, as God's agent, will have to commit himself to struggling in faith with necessities he cannot control.What does this work—the work of faith—look like?Enos starts by struggling as an agent of God on behalf of those voices and causes closest to him. “Now, it came to pass,” Enos says, “that when I had heard these words I began to feel a desire for the welfare of my brethren, the Nephites, wherefore, I did pour out my whole soul unto God for them” (Enos 1:9). God, in response, makes Enos a promise: “I will visit thy brethren according to their diligence in keeping my commandments” (Enos 1:10).This, though, is not enough, and Enos again widens the scope of his concern. “And after I, Enos, had heard these words, my faith began to be unshaken in the Lord; and I prayed unto him with many long strugglings for my brethren, the Lamanites” (Enos 1:11). And God again responds: “The Lord said unto me: I will grant unto thee according to thy desires, because of thy faith” (Enos 1:12).However, it is not until verse 13 that Enos gives us a look at the specific form of “his many long strugglings” for his brethren. Anchored in faith, Enos must now go to work as an agent. But what does this work—on the ground, as an agent among a mass of other agents—look like? What form does this work take?It takes, I think, the form of reason.To his faith, Enos must add works. To his adequate knowledge by way of intuition, he must add adequate knowledge by way of reason.Under the umbrella of faith in God, Enos's struggle with necessity takes the form of painstakingly working step-by-step back through the causal chain, identifying all the links, until the necessity of those connections comes clearly into view and those relationships are understood.Here, this local work of producing adequate knowledge by way of reason takes the very specific form of a complex hypothetical statement that tries to map out the causal relationships at stake in his love for the Lamanites. It takes the form of those tangled, complex, local necessities that Enos unravels in verse 13: And now behold, this was the desire which I desired of him—that if it should so be, that my people, the Nephites, should fall into transgression, and by any means be destroyed, and the Lamanites should not be destroyed, that the Lord God would preserve a record of my people, the Nephites; even if it so be by the power of his holy arm, that it might be brought forth at some future day unto the Lamanites, that, perhaps, they might be brought unto salvation— (Enos 1:13)Or, if we abstract from the content of Enos's desire to focus just on its form, then Enos's reported struggle with necessity on behalf of the Lamanites would look something like this: If this and this, and also this happen, then God promises to do this, even if it also requires this, so that this might happen, and, perhaps, also this.Here, Enos has the look of a man who has been struggling with a vast network of necessities beyond his control, a man struggling to reconcile himself with what he cannot change and still, “perhaps,” leverage some of those implacable necessities to save some part of what he had hoped to save.The key, for Enos, is to engage with these local hypotheticals only under the sign of global (and categorical) necessities. His works must be a function of his faith in Christ. His work must unfold as an attempt to reconcile himself, in love, with all the voices and lives and causes he cannot control, working on behalf of their welfare without attempting to dictate the results of that work.But Enos must be careful here. Because if his works stop being a function of his faith in Christ, then he will end up back where he started. Whenever we attempt to dictate results, then we end up ignoring necessities, and, once again, we end up rootless, aimless, passive, and powerless. We end up guilty all over again. We end up positioned as effects, cut loose from their causes.Enos's conversion, originally catalyzed by the indwelling voice of his father, is almost complete.Operating now as an agent of the Lord, Enos is struggling—with all manner of complicated local necessities—on behalf of the Lamanites. But, despite the difficulty of this work, Enos won't let go. “I cried unto [God] continually, for he had said unto me: Whatsoever thing ye shall ask in faith, believing that ye shall receive in the name of Christ, ye shall receive it” (Enos 1:15). If Enos asks in faith, as an agent of Christ, for what is necessary, he is guaranteed to receive it.The remarkable thing about this promise is its scope: it applies, God says, to “whatsoever thing” Enos asks in faith. Even more striking, however, is what Enos then decides to pray for.Enos doesn't pray for “whatsoever” thing. Rather, with laser-like precision, Enos zeroes in on just one thing: “And I had faith, and I did cry unto God that he would preserve the records” (Enos 1:16). In response, God covenants with Enos to do just that: to “bring [the records] forth unto the Lamanites in his own due time” (Enos 1:16).Enos is relieved. Having received this covenant, he finds the peace he has been looking for. He tells us: “And I, Enos, knew it would be according to the covenant which he had made; wherefore my soul did rest” (Enos 1:17).This, it seems, is the happy ending we have been waiting for: wherefore Enos's soul did rest. But, from God's perspective, the story is not over yet. Enos—though he doesn't seem to realize it—has not quite reached his destination. He hasn't quite come full circle.To close the loop, God will have to proactively intervene.For the first time, in verse 18, the voice of the Lord does not come into Enos's mind in response to a wrestle or struggle or pleading. For the first time in the narrative, God speaks without first being addressed. Rather, in verse 18, the voice causes itself to come into Enos's head.God needs Enos to know one more thing.God needs Enos to know one last thing about what Enos had, in faith, desired of God: “And the Lord said unto me: Thy fathers have also required of me this thing; and it shall be done unto them according to their faith; for their faith was like unto thine” (Enos 1:18). Here, God reveals to Enos that his desire is the same as his father's desire. “Thy fathers also required of me this thing,” God says. “Their faith was like unto thine.”Enos's story begins when he can't stop hearing his father's words in his head (cf. Enos 1:1). And Enos's story ends when God reveals to Enos that Enos's own words—for a long time now, all through his many long strugglings, sunk deep in his heart, without his ever realizing it—are his father's words (cf. Enos 1:18).This was the desire that Enos now desired: his father's desire (cf. Enos 1:13).Enos, rather than suffering those words, had become their agent. What Enos had at first only heard, he had finally learned to say.Enos, as caused, had—in Christ—become a cause.

When it comes to predicting futures for readings of the Book of Mormon, it's hard to beat the book itself. As readers of the text know well, 2 Nephi 29 contains perhaps the greatest prophecy ever made about reception of a forthcoming book: “Because my words shall hiss forth, many of the Gentiles shall say: A Bible, a Bible, we have got a Bible! And there cannot be any more Bible!”1 This prediction turned out to be accurate. When the book first appeared in print in 1830, “many of the Gentiles” did react with ire, and, indeed, nonbelievers have spent practically every day since the book's publication asserting that “there cannot be any more Bible.” Nevertheless, the book's second prediction about itself also has proven prescient. “For after the book of which I have spoken shall come forth and be written unto the Gentiles and sealed up again unto the Lord,” the prophecy continues, “there shall be many which shall believe the words which are written” (2 Nephi 30:3). From its outset, the Book of Mormon knows itself to be a contested object—one that will inspire reactions ranging from anger to reverence. It predicts the foundational argument that will change not only the American but also the global religious landscape for centuries to come. What the book did not predict, though, was that nearly two hundred years after Joseph Smith, Jr., dictated it to his friends, an academic journal dedicated to assessing the book's significance would attempt to predict even more of its futures.In this essay, I want to zoom in on one aspect of the Book of Mormon's prophesying, which is that it describes its future form as a book. Even when this prophecy uses sonic terms—describing words spoken by the Lord as “hiss[ing] forth”—the Book of Mormon imagines itself as a codex and its recipients (believers and nonbelievers alike) as readers of texts inscribed within it. The Gentiles of this prophecy do not say “a religion, a religion, we have got a religion!” Nor do they assert that they already “have got” a faith or a history. It is the Bible-ness of the Book of Mormon to which these impending Gentiles object. Thus, as Sonia Hazard puts it, “encounters with material objects lie at the heart of Mormonism's origin story.”2 The book's physical presence, both within its narrative time line and in the nineteenth century of its emergence, is never far from the surface of its import. Joseph Smith, Jr., claimed to encounter an angel who led him to metal plates buried in the earth. He translated those plates using a stone and a hat. His friends and family members took his dictations with pen, ink, and paper in loose sheets as well as bound books—copying and recopying his many revelations. Within the Book of Mormon's stories, too, materiality is always a concern. Nephi and Mormon describe the process of forging the metal plates upon which their accounts are inscribed. Nephi's brother Jacob complains about “the difficulty of engraving our words upon plates” (Jacob 4:1). Moroni makes a similar complaint directly to the Lord: “Thou hast made us that we could write but little because of the awkwardness of our hands” (Ether 12:24). I may be in good company, then, when I predict that an important line of inquiry in Book of Mormon studies will be serious engagement with its status as a material object. One future for Book of Mormon studies, in other words, lies in the fields of Book and Print History.Before delving into specific potentialities, I'd like to highlight two influences on my thinking about this topic—one practical, the other theoretical. First, the practical: a major development in the study of early Latter-day Saint documents is the work of the Joseph Smith Papers Project. Housed at the Church History Library in Salt Lake City, this project has its roots in mid-twentieth-century efforts to collect and organize documents related to the early Church and its first prophet.3 The last fifteen years, though, have borne many fruits of these long-standing labors. The project has produced a massive collection of printed volumes that include facsimiles of documents, unabridged transcripts, and detailed historical and source information. Much of this material also is publicly available online. The digital catalog is searchable, and it includes links among documents that contain similar materials, so researchers can examine different versions of the “same” text with relative ease. At the risk of sounding like I work in the project's marketing department, I must say that it has been a game-changer for scholars interested in early Latter-day Saint records, especially for those of us who live far from Salt Lake City. Many of these documents—which include both print and manuscript artifacts and range from revelations to histories to journals to meeting minutes to Book of Mormon editions—would be otherwise inaccessible to most researchers. The mere fact of the increased availability of this archive will produce studies that were unimaginable even a decade ago. It certainly has created opportunities to situate the Book of Mormon within new contexts. It also has generated some possibilities not only for thinking about the material conditions under which early Church documents were produced but also about the how those conditions shaped the texts and those who produced and received them.The theoretical consideration that underpins my approach is not entirely distinct from this practical development. Digitization has reshaped the field of Book History in some exciting (if not altogether unproblematic) ways, and Book of Mormon studies may both contribute to and benefit from these emerging modes of inquiry. In Thinking Outside the Book, Augusta Rohrbach argues that a few key concepts . . . have remained all too stable [in the fields of literary studies and Book History], among them Literacy, Authorship, Publication, Edition, and Editor. Although each of these building blocks of print culture continues to circulate powerfully in academia and among the public at large, with the advent of new media they no longer serve the purpose they once did. In today's participatory culture, these terms have lost their meaning because the processes they name have become so fluid. The dynamic changes wrought by the digital world call out for a new vocabulary, one as flexible as the history out of which it was born.4For my purposes, the most important piece of Rohrbach's argument is that last part—her sense that digital technologies don't simply destabilize what once was stable: they highlight the ever-present fluidity of texts and their histories. Rather than argue that everything we do must change in the face of digitization, Rohrbach shows that the concepts literary historians have long taken for granted (authorship, editing, publication) have always been contested. The movement of texts from paper to screen affords us a chance to contend newly with the fact that even something as ostensibly simple as “authorship” is a volatile category.The Book of Mormon strikes me as an ideal text for book historians to examine, precisely because it forces the kinds of reassessment that Rohrbach's work demands. It has occupied myriad material states and has blown apart easy constructions of everything from authorship to translation to material presence since Smith began his work with it the 1820s. Likewise, scholars focused on the Book of Mormon may gain much from engaging more deeply with its various physical manifestations through space and time. The prospect of this kind of work raises many questions. When we talk about “the Book of Mormon,” for example, to which “book” do we refer? Is it the collection of metal plates constructed by Mormon? The two sets of plates produced by Nephi? Both sets, plus the stories contained in the brass plates and the plates of Ether? Is it a mostly unreadable manuscript, damaged by water after being hidden in the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House? A printer's manuscript? What about the approximately 116 pages lost by Martin Harris—are those part of the Book of Mormon? Is the Book of Mormon an ancient text or a modern one? Is it a codex printed in 1830? Is it every edition printed since? And who is its author? Mormon? Nephi? Smith? Nephi + Mormon + Smith? Ether + Nephi + (Jacob + Enos + Jarom + Omni) + Mormon + Moroni + Smith? Even if I could land on the correct equation to answer this question, I would still need to contend with some editorial issues, as even a cursory look at the Joseph Smith Papers reveals several nineteenth-century hands at work on these texts. Do Oliver Cowdery's textual corrections make him an author of sorts? What about John Whitmer's transcriptions? Orson Pratt's innovations? Where does the Deseret Alphabet fit into all of this? Does the presence of Smith's handwriting on certain manuscript pages, typically making revisions, complicate the ostensible division between author and amanuensis? How can Book History contend with a text that has more than one history? How can Book of Mormon studies meet the challenge of theorizing these knotty problems of materiality?This essay will answer none of these questions. My aim is far more modest: to explore possible futures for the field rather than to offer definitive theories regarding the Book of Mormon. What I hope these questions highlight, though, in addition to the wealth of opportunities available to scholars who wish to explore these areas, is the thorniness of thinking about history in general when it comes to this text. This is well-trodden ground, but any honest engagement with the book's material histories must at least acknowledge the fact that scholars bring competing assumptions about the book's origins to their work. A tradition of apologist engagements with the Book of Mormon as a set of metal plates already exists.5 Likewise, the book's detractors have expended plenty of ink in their efforts to prove the book a fraud by explaining why its account of itself as an object is implausible.6 Frankly, as a nonbeliever who nonetheless believes this book to be one of the most important objects ever produced, I don't think the future of Book of Mormon studies lies in using Book History to draw conclusions about the book's veracity as a historical record or as a scripture.7 I do, however, think careful consideration of this text's various materialities will not only produce fresh insights into the book but also may enable a rethinking of the very notion of material history.Any viable future is always tied to a usable past, and the future I will attempt to chart is no exception. Scholars working in the fields of Mormon studies and Book History have already laid significant groundwork to enable further exploration of the Book of Mormon and related texts as material objects. But much work remains to be done. In what follows, I will outline what I see as fruitful lines of inquiry emerging at the intersection of Book of Mormon studies and Book History. These lines include (1) material study of the Book of Mormon itself; (2) study of the manuscript and print cultures that sprang up around the book and the early Church; (3) challenges and possibilities that the Book of Mormon presents to the fields of Book and Print History; (4) assessment of how the book's recursive temporality extends to (or perhaps out from) its materiality.Scholars wishing to engage in a Book History approach to the Book of Mormon probably will find their most solid footing in the study of the book as a modern artifact. By this, I mean study of the book's various physical forms beginning in the 1820s. Endeavors along these lines will benefit from the herculean efforts of scholars such as Royal Skousen and Robin Scott Jensen, who have meticulously reconstructed the legible (and illegible) fragments of the original manuscript and made the text's many variants available to readers in an accessible fashion.8 In addition to this crucial work, there already is a vibrant conversation about the book's material histories into which more scholars could enter. Paul Gutjahr's book The Book of Mormon: A Biography, and his subsequent studies of Orson Pratt's “scientific” edition of the text, for example, can offer useful entry points for thinking about how this book appeared to readers as an object, particularly in the nineteenth century.9 In a similar vein, the recent collection Producing Ancient Scripture contains several essays that contend with the material aspects of Smith's translation projects.10 There remains a wealth of material to work with in this still largely untapped area. Inquiries could include the study of witness accounts of the plates in the nineteenth century, as well as of the original manuscript, the printer's manuscript, the first printed edition, subsequent printed editions, translations into modern languages, illustrated or children's editions, pageant performances, and digital editions. Study of marginalia in different copies of historical editions could reveal new insights into reception of the Book of Mormon in different places and eras. The study of how the book circulates in various communities, how it has been used in worship practices, and the space it has occupied in Latter-day Saint households across time could produce new understandings of how this book historically has operated not only as The Word but also as a book.One area of study ripe for future exploration is that of the Book of Mormon as an object of global circulation. My area of expertise is early US literature, so my work has focused entirely on situating the Book of Mormon within that context. But as a field, Book of Mormon studies must continue to assess the book's complex international lives. There are already good scholarly models for thinking about the circulation of this book beyond the United States. The collection, Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-Century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier, for example, offers essays that model a global approach to Mormon studies that could usefully inform a work focused on material culture.11 Maffly-Kipp's more recent work on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ghana and Nigeria highlights the importance of a Mormon studies approach that attends to local and historical specifics even as it widens its aperture to include more global spaces.12 When the Book of Mormon first appeared as a printed book in the United States, its binding style and format mimicked the Bibles already sitting on people's shelves. That book contained neither chapter and verse numberings nor interpretive marginalia (Orson Pratt added those in 1879). From a design perspective, that first edition is a far cry from the slender, soft-covered, dark blue volume that many people now recognize as the Book of Mormon. As the book continues to be translated into more languages and makes its way into more nations, how do readers experience its materiality? What is it like to read the Book of Mormon from right to left? Or to work as a community with a single copy of the book? Or to encounter the book primarily as a digital text or as a work read aloud by someone else? How do the book's claims about plates and stones and balls of curious workmanship resonate in different cultural spaces? And, perhaps most crucially, how has the history of colonialism shaped the book's circulation, reception, and interpretation in places still grappling with the legacies of the American empire?While the Book of Mormon itself has generated a relatively high degree of interest from scholars, far less attention has been paid to the wealth of other documents produced by Smith and his associates in the early years of Church formation. There are many reasons for this: the Book of Mormon is a narrative as well as a scripture, which lends it interdisciplinary interest; Smith's account of his discovery of the plates is as compelling as it is contested; the book has been available to scholars in several easily accessible forms for many years; and the other documents (with a few exceptions) have been hard to access or simply inaccessible. While digital versions and high-quality facsimiles may not be perfect substitutes for the “real thing,” they do enable scholars living anywhere to explore these texts, and they mitigate the risk of document deterioration. Our current moment is an exciting time to be working at the nexus of Book History and Book of Mormon studies because not only are more texts available for analysis, but also there is a great deal of data available about the histories and physical properties of those texts. What is more, there is a wealth of recent scholarship on nineteenth-century document cultures that can help scholars make sense of this vast archive.I'll offer a brief case study to illustrate my point. One example of an exciting artifact recently made available by the Joseph Smith Papers Project is a readymade manuscript book referred to as Revelation 1 by the project, and elsewhere as The Book of Commandments and Revelations (BCR). This book, which was acquired (probably from a stationer's store) by a Church member sometime around 1831, contains transcriptions of revelations primarily received by Smith and previously written on loose sheets of paper. Those loose sheets no longer exist. Most of the transcriptions were done by John Whitmer, though Oliver Cowdery's hand also appears on several pages. This book offers the earliest known versions of some revelations, and it was used as a printer's manuscript for typesetting many of them. Its importance to Church history cannot be overstated. Despite its significance, though, the book was unknown to scholars until 2005, because Joseph Fielding Smith secured it in his personal safe sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. It then was stored in the First Presidency Papers until Church President Gordon B. Hinkley opened that collection to review by the Joseph Smith Papers. Now fully digitized, rendered in facsimile, and transcribed, this fragile object can be assessed by scholars across disciplines. My own interest in Revelation 1 stems from how it both marks a significant moment in the history of book production in the United States and serves as a reminder that many of the Church's earliest members had experience with printing and bookmaking. This little notebook, in other words, carries big implications for thinking about the early Church's relationship to sacred and profane books.There are many lines of inquiry a scholar might pursue in thinking about Revelation 1 and its status as a prefabricated object purchased for Church recordkeeping. Blake Bronson-Bartlett's recent work shows that technological developments in papermaking and bookbinding meant that readymade blank books became widely available for purchase during the time Smith was forming the Church of Christ. Machines that could produce paper in rolls instead of sheets sped up the papermaking process and made it easier to manufacture paper in a variety of sizes. The development of cloth-covered case construction binding, which became popular in the United States around 1820, also streamlined and reduced the cost of bookmaking. In case construction binding, book covers are made separately from the text block, which can then be glued into place. Faster, cheaper, and more uniform methods of book production meant that people accustomed to making their own journals and ledgers suddenly could walk into a stationer's store and buy a blank book. As Bronson-Bartlett puts it, “between 1830 and 1860 readymade manuscript books began displacing the loose-leaf assemblages that were more common around and long before 1800.”13 John Whitmer's transcriptions of Smith's loose-leaf revelations emerged within this coincidental development in bookmaking history, and they participated in a shifting culture of reading and writing. Although we may take blank books for granted today, in the 1820s, people who used blank books typically made them themselves out of stacks of loose paper. The blank book of the 1830s did not, in other words, necessarily appear to those who encountered it as a single, unified text. Readers and writers still thought of blank books as collections of sheets and gatherings and often treated even prefabricated ones as such.Revelation 1 bears evidence of such treatment. At some point, it was disassembled, probably to aid in the printing of its contents. It then was reassembled, and it seems that a few of its original gatherings were lost during this process. Those gatherings may have been blank, or they may have contained writing now lost to history. The book no longer bears its original cover, but it was recovered with brown paperboard not long after its disassembly.14 Whatever else all of this may mean, it indicates that whoever took the book apart related to it as a collection of discrete gatherings as well as a unified text. The fact that Revelation 1 was resewn, recovered, and preserved as a single object for two centuries also indicates an attachment not only to the words of the various revelations it contains but also to their collection within a handwritten codex. The existence of printed copies of its contents did not eradicate the importance of the manuscript book that held Whitmer's original transcriptions. Consideration of the material processes a book such as Revelation 1 underwent in its journey from stationer's shelf to Whitmer's house to print shop to Joseph F. Smith's safe to the Joseph Smith Papers Project's digital repository may reveal new insights into the relationship between sacred writing and record keeping in the early Church and beyond.Documents contained in the Joseph Smith Papers not only are compelling objects of study individually, but they may also help scholars build new frameworks for considering the Book of Mormon. Revelation 1 has raised questions for me about the role of blank books in the production of Latter-day Saint scriptures, as well as how the work of transcription operates within these sacred texts. Until I encountered this manuscript book with its machine-lined pages and neat transcriptions, it never had occurred to me that the Book of Mormon describes itself as a blank book. Not only does Nephi construct all his plates in advance, but so, too, does Mormon.15 Thus, the many inscribers who show up in the book's narrative—Nephi, Jacob, Enos, Jarom, Omni, Chemish, Abinadom, Ameleki, Mormon, Moroni—encounter a stack of prefabricated subscripts. What demands do such stacks impose upon their inscribers? What limitations? And what kinds of religious subjects are brought into being by a blank codex? Was Whitmer hailed by the blank book that became Revelation 1 in the same way Moroni was hailed by his father's unfinished plates? Does the disassembly and reassembly of Revelation 1 mirror the reordering and abridgement of plates that form Mormon's book? Did Whitmer perceive his transcribing of Smith's revelations as a process akin to Mormon's editorial work? What are the implications for theorizing the Book of Mormon as a copy of copies? Do Revelation 1 and the Book of Mormon call to each other like recursive echoes? These are just some of the questions this little book, which sat unexamined in an archive for over a century, raises for me. Other scholars exploring Revelation 1 and other documents doubtless will discover more questions—and possibly even some answers.In the last two decades, the field of Book History has begun to acknowledge the significance of race and racism not only to the production of texts around the globe but also to its own disciplinary formation and methods. Likewise, a serious and searching engagement with racial issues in the Book of Mormon and the Church is a relatively recent development within the fields of Book of Mormon studies and Latter-day Saint History.16 I would argue that future study of the material histories of early Church documents must involve assessment of both racism and racial diversity among Latter-day Saints. Any scholarship along these lines must take seriously Joanna Brooks's call to “press deeper to investigate American Christianity as a mass culture that . . . has in fact contributed essentially to the establishment and maintenance of white supremacy broadly defined.”17 It also must acknowledge the centrality of race to the history of writing and print cultures, particularly in the early United States. None of this work will be easy. It will require, among other things, the recovery of documents related to Latter-day Saints of color, the mastery of long-standing scholarly conversations specifically regarding early African American and Native American literary and print cultures, and engagement with extant theories regarding the intersections of race, Christianity, and nationalism in the United States.18 It also will require a fearless acceptance of the fact that white supremacy remains a powerful force in the United States—including within academic and religious institutions—one that has shaped the very tools of inquiry available to those of us working in these fields.This is an area of study that defies a simple thumbnail sketch. And I, a white scholar working at a predominantly white institution in Vermont, write these paragraphs with a question in mind that was raised years ago by Ann duCille: “What does it mean for the field in general and for junior African Americanists in particular,” she writes, “that senior scholars, who are not trained in African American studies and whose career-building work often has excluded (or at least not included) black women, are now teaching courses in and publishing texts about African American literature and generating supposedly ‘new scholarship’?”19 One could ask many versions of this question with respect to literary and religious studies. P. Gabrielle Foreman, for example, reminds us that all this work is conducted within institutions (universities, societies, journals, presses) that often exclude the very subjects who then become objects of inquiry. “What is the calculus of gain and loss,” she asks, “when panel after panel at conferences discuss underrepresented subjects when fewer and fewer of such scholars are present not only at the table but in the room?”20 Much of what I am concerned with in this essay is what individual scholars might do with the Book of Mormon and the theoretical apparatus of Book History. But in this area, the future lies first and foremost with what institutions must do to bring people into the room and up to the table. The answer to these questions is not tokenism. It isn't the addition, here and there, of discussions of texts by black and Native Latter-day Saints or the inclusion of the occasional scholar of color in discussions of these topics. Rather, it is the systematic broadening of Book of Mormon studies not only to include more diverse voices but also to include rigorous engagement with fields such as African American studies and Native American studies. This may be the most challenging future to bring about, because many scholars of color outside the faith tradition will be understandably uninterested in engaging with the Book of Mormon. It is, nonetheless, some of the most crucial work the field might undertake.A Book History approach to the Book of Mormon at some point will have to grapple with the fact that the Book of Mormon—unlike most books—offers a detailed history of its own life as an object. Richard Bushman has recently argued that “The Book of Mormon begs to be read as Book History and, more particularly, as scriptural book history.”21 Bushman specifically contends that consideration of the book's self-presentation as a collection of metal plates fabricated by human hands makes it possible to view Smith's translation project “as more a collaboration between God and man than an entirely miraculous intervention.”22 The Book of Mormon's continuous assertions of its own materiality render it a scripture uniquely invested in human labor. Just as its narrators often struggle to inscribe Nephi's metal plates, Smith and his scribes struggled to translate those inscriptions onto a manageable subscript and into a language that nineteenth-century readers could understand. The transferring of speech to metal back to speech and onto paper is human work, even if its origins are divine. Here again, it is important to acknowledge that readers will draw a variety of conclusions about the Book of Mormon's status as a historical object, and at times, those conclusions will owe in part to their beliefs regarding the book. My experiences working with the Book of Mormon in the last decade suggest that it is possible for believers and nonbelievers to work together on the text, to respect each other's methods, and to honestly acknowledge the points at which their analyses must diverge. Bushman and I may not share a religious cosmology, but I agree wholeheartedly with his contention that the Book of Mormon “shows readers a world where humans and God collaborated continuously in the production of holy writing.”23 In the end, that is what matters.Scholars interested in taking seriously the notion that the Book of Mormon presents itself as Book History will find many possibilities before them. Rather than attempting to flatten out the book's recursive time lines and strange narrative contours, scholars might take seriously Rohrbach's call to acknowledge the instability of ostensibly stable concepts within literary and material history. One such concept is provenance. Within the field of Book History, “provenance” refers to an object's chain of custody. Provenance is visible in bookplates, inscriptions, marginalia, and even custom bindings. It can also be determined through documents external to a book, such as purchase records or library inventories. Typically, provenance operates within the realm of the extra-textual, evident in what is added to a book rather than what is part o

Once in a while, one comes across a treasure. Richard L. Saunders's The 1920 Edition of the Book of Mormon is so full of careful scholarship and keenly calibrated insights that I found myself not only learning new things on almost every page, but feeling like I had in my hands a model for what thoughtful, thorough, engaging bibliographic scholarship looks like. While writing book reviews is often an act of service to the Academy, this review turned out to be one where I found myself feeling more like I was the one being served. I learned from this book, but more importantly, I was inspired by its scholarly approach and integrity.Books taking as their subject a single book have become something of a vogue, and thus almost a cottage industry in the last decade. These books on books fall roughly into two categories: cultural or bibliographic histories. Notable cultural historical approaches include such works as Peter Finn and Petra Couvée's The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book (2014), Kevin Birmingham's The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses (2014), and David L. Weaver-Zercher's Martyrs Mirror: A Social History (2016). The list of such cultural book histories, however, goes on and on, including works looking at Uncle Tom's Cabin, Little Women, and Peyton Place, as well as an entire series published by Princeton University Press focused on the lives of famous and influential religious books.What Saunders offers us in his careful study of the 1920 Book of Mormon is a book study that clearly falls into the category of bibliographic book history. Those looking for a more cultural history of the Book of Mormon in line with the titles listed above will be disappointed. While, at times, Saunders touches upon cultural currents that affected the 1920 Book of Mormon's production and editorial practices, his work is centered most squarely in the more specialized world of bibliographic history and analysis. What is important to understand in the realm of sacred books is that the editors and purveyors of such works are most often deadly serious about matters of textual accuracy. If a message derives from a supernatural source and has been transferred into a medium for more natural consumption, it is vitally important that the message be conveyed as accurately as possible. Thus, the accuracy of the textual elements of a sacred text becomes a paramount concern, a concern vividly attested to in the work of Royal Skousen when he looks at the original manuscripts of the Book of Mormon, or the cohort of highly trained scholars who are at work on the many volumes of the Joseph Smith Papers.Saunders divides his work into three parts. In the first of these, he takes as his focus the history of the edition's early twentieth-century editing and production practices. He follows these production practices up until 1948 when new typesetting, page formats, binding practices, and a new copyright notice came to characterize the book. His second part moves from a broader view of the text's emergence to one focused on the tiniest of bibliographic details of successive issues of the book. This section is a treasure trove for the more hard-core bibliophile but may be of far less interest to those who are less concerned with signatures, paper types, printer marks, tail bands, binding materials, repositories, and descriptive bibliographies in the tradition of Fredson Bowers. His last section takes up a careful examination of impressions of the 1920 edition after its type was reset after 1948, when a new edition of the book was produced and published without public notice and was thereby often confused with its 1920 ancestor.While Saunders's chief concern is the 1920 edition of the Book of Mormon, his first section is invaluable for its concise and careful publishing history of the Book of Mormon before the 1920 edition. Of particular note here is how Saunders parses the differences between the printing and binding practices connected to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Utah from firms producing Church materials located in Kansas City, Chicago, and New York. Especially important here was the Chicago firm of Etten and Company, which produced several print runs of the Book of Mormon for the Church because the Church itself lacked the substantive book infrastructure to produce the books as inexpensively and as well as this Chicago publisher. Saunders convincingly shows that while the Church today might control every aspect of the production of its eponymous sacred text, this certainly was not true in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Economies of scale and profitability in the Church's publishing enterprises came to be a concern of Heber J. Grant, a former bookkeeper and insurance company executive, upon his ascension to the Church's presidency in 1919. To overhaul and better coordinate the Church's disparate publishing endeavors, Grant turned to James E. Talmage, a much-understudied figure when it comes to Latter-day Saint book history. Trained as a geologist and ordained as an apostle in 1911, Talmage had significant experience in both writing and publishing. He had made his name in Mormon letters with The Articles of Faith (1899), The Great Apostasy (1909), The House of the Lord (1912), Jesus the Christ (1915), and his work on the First Presidency, The Father and the Son (1917).Under the auspices of President Grant, Talmage came to stand at the center of Latter-day Saint scripture production in the early twentieth century. Although largely remembered now for his work on the 1920 version of the Book of Mormon, he also helped with an important revision of the Doctrine and Covenants in 1921. Furthermore, he helped create the Church's retail book activities, which led to the consolidation of the key Church printing enterprises. Grant was interested in improving the study (and thus the works used to study) the sacred works of the Church, and so he wanted Talmage to better organize the production and sale of the sacred works and the numerous study aids connected to them.At the center of Grant's desire for a publishing reorganization in the Church lay a new, carefully curated edition of the Book of Mormon. Concerned that current editions of the book had far too many errors and were often inconsistently produced by a number of non-Church publishing enterprises, Grant wished for the book to be revised and corrected to create a new standard text. He commissioned a group of six apostles to review and edit the book in order to create a new, standard edition of the Book of Mormon. George F. Richards, as the senior apostle of the group, stood as the revision committee's chair, but it was Talmage with his deep knowledge of editing and publishing who proved to be the most pivotal member of the group. Beginning in March 1920, the committee began its work of examining “all standard editions” of the Book of Mormon (p. 33). It systematically worked through collating and proofreading these texts in order to create a new, standard text. They painstakingly reviewed every aspect of the sacred volume, including grammar, capitalization, spelling, and punctuation. Old footnotes and other scholarly glosses were discarded as the committee created new footnotes and study aids. This committee also changed the basic format of the volume. New pagination came to characterize the text, as did a new two-column page layout and new chapter headings, making the 1920 version different from previous editions. The 1920 edition also included an entirely new feature, a dating chronology of the book's events placed in the bottom corner of each page. Such formatting changes made the book more closely resemble the common Bible editions of the day. In this way, the Latter-day Saint sacred text came to mirror, and thus invoke, the culture's more widely accepted Christian sacred text.Perhaps the greatest value in Saunders's work is the way in which it traces the editorial evolution of the 1920 edition from its creation to its many eventual expressions in the following three decades. Saunders carefully and systematically works through a wide range of different printings of the 1920 edition in the second part of his volume, after first laying the groundwork in his opening section for how printing was done in this period. Those who know little about printing history are given an incredibly lucid and cogent primer on early twentieth-century printing practices before Saunders turns his focus to specific editions, impressions, and variants of the 1920 Book of Mormon.Saunders calls his book's second section “An Edition's Catalogue.” In it, he compiles descriptive bibliographies of dozens of issues and editions of the book as it appears between 1920 and 1948. There is much to be learned here for those both familiar and unfamiliar with such intricacies tied to editions, impressions, issues, versions, formats, variants, and states. Descriptive bibliographies and repository notes are to be found here for all known 1920 printings of the book. What makes this section so valuable for the serious bibliographic scholar, the collector, and even the more casual reader is the vast number of careful photographic illustrations that accompany these bibliographies. Page after page puts on full display the many different bindings and impressions of the 1920 edition, from missionary editions to triple combinations. I have read many descriptive bibliographies, but I have read few presented with such a rich repository of accompanying illustrations. Saunders's work here makes countless other studies on a single book's history through descriptive bibliographies suffer in comparison.The importance of the publishing industry and its history comes across in Saunders's discussion of copyright law and the Book of Mormon. By the late 1940s, the twenty-eight-year standard copyright on the 1920 edition was about to expire, and when this happened, what had come to be the Church's standard Book of Mormon would enter the public domain. The Church, as it continued to evolve into a more centralized entity in matters of church administration, publication, and education, had no interest in losing control of the copyright of its namesake text. To protect its copyright on the Book of Mormon, the Church needed to register a new edition under a new copyright. It is this new edition that serves as a focal point for the third part of Saunders's volume on the 1920 edition.Saunders's third section thus looks at the Church's strategy to protect its copyright on the 1920 Book of Mormon by creating a new edition of the book. The 1920 edition was produced through 1947, but the Church went to great lengths to create a new edition of the text in 1948 to continue its control of the text's copyright. What is important to note here is that the text remained unchanged in the 1948 edition. The Church felt that the careful, standardizing work of the 1920 edition needed no internal textual revision. But a new copyright demanded a new version. The Church decided to take “new version” quite literally, and, instead of changing the book's central text, it simply reset the book's type for printing a new imposition of the book. It also added a new copyright statement on the title page verso of every edition printed in the United States after 1948. This new copyright statement lengthened the copyright of the book by claiming that a book that had simply been reset in type was indeed a new book. The ploy worked. Saunders does go on to note that bindings changed in the post-1948 editions, making the book indeed look new, and there were also subtle differences in type and page design in the post-1948 edition.Seen in one light, Saunders's volume is a case study in a printed text's evolution. The glory of this volume is the care with which he traces and analyzes even the smallest and seemingly insignificant changes to be found in different printings of the 1920 Book of Mormon. In many ways, this volume comes across as a labor of love, and the entire work reminds one that it is this type of love that stands at the heart of the term “bibliophile.” Saunders has given much to understanding the emergence of a standard work in Latter-day Saint publishing and, in so doing, has created a new standard work of his own.

What does it mean to anatomize a book? How does one “cut up” (ana-tomé) or “dissect” the written word? But more to the point, what is at stake in the cutting? When all is said and done, what does anatomy accomplish? If the discipline of textual anatomy looks anything like bodily anatomy, do we expect and accept a certain violence to the body lingual, perhaps justified by its being the dead letter? And what if the text still breathes? What then? When anatomists cut up something that is still alive so as to uncover its vital structures, it is called vivisection. What might it mean to vivisect a book, or still more, scripture? In this brief review, I propose to read Joseph Spencer's The Anatomy of Book of Mormon Theology in response to this question. Further, I will outline what vivisection has to do with the notion of prophecy that Spencer identifies in the Book of Mormon. I suggest that the interpretive role of vivisection and the declarative role of prophecy are united in a sacramental hermeneutics—that is, following the Latter-day Saint use of “sacrament” for Eucharist, a sanctifying instance of ritualized logophagic—that is, word-devouring—consumption exemplified in Nephi's injunction to “feast upon the words of Christ” (2 Nephi 31:20).The Anatomy of Book of Mormon Theology is comprised of thirty-eight essays over two volumes, representing more than a decade of exploratory and experimental work by Latter-day Saint philosopher and theologian Joseph Spencer. By his own account, the volumes are “a kind of archive” (Vol. 1, p. vii) of the development of his thought on the relationship between theology and the Book of Mormon, but Spencer nevertheless makes clear from the outset that the collection has a coherent argument, “that the Book of Mormon will be best served, going forward, by theological reading” (Vol. 1, p. ix). In his wide-ranging forays into traditional theological territory in Volume 1—in essays about, among other things, atonement, pneumatology, messianism, faith, hope, and charity—it can be easy to lose sight of the intentional structure of the volume, which is as much about Spencer's personal journey as it is about the Book of Mormon. Beginning with the first section called “Halting First Steps” and continuing with “Running toward Theology,” Spencer frames the overall structure of Anatomy as a kind of hybrid bildungsroman (or coming-of-age novel) and apologia pro sua vita (defense of his career).In a narrative introduction to the first chapter, “Faith, Hope, and Charity: Alma and Joseph Smith,” we learn that Spencer's journey began as an undergraduate when he wrote an essay for a course on the philosophy of religion taught by James Faulconer at Brigham Young University. This “halting first step” led to others that would become crucial to Spencer's intellectual and methodological formation, especially his role in helping establish the Latter-day Saint Theology Seminar and his increasingly frequent collaboration with Adam Miller, James Faulconer, Jenny Webb, Robert Couch, and others. Every chapter of Anatomy features a similar narrative introduction in which Spencer historicizes each essay and often its theological orientation with respect to other interpreters in the Latter-day Saint tradition.By the beginning of Volume 2, Spencer is no longer “running toward theology” but has confidently assumed the mantle of theologian. Particularly in the sections “Microscopic Theology” and “Macroscopic Theology,” Spencer outlines—in what seems an increasingly urgent tone—two methods of “doing theology” with the Book of Mormon. The first method, microscopic theology, was developed collaboratively by the Latter-day Saint Theology Seminar and involves sustained attention to very limited excerpts of scriptural text, such as a verse, or even a phrase or word (Vol. 2, p. viii). Macroscopic theology, Spencer's own method, investigates larger structures, such as the ways that the Book of Mormon interacts with the Bible theologically. Crucial to both modes of interpretation is the term theology. But just what is theology in Anatomy?In the opening essay of Volume 2, “Toward a Methodology for the Theological Interpretation of the Book of Mormon,” Spencer argues that rather than “tracing theologies within the Book of Mormon” or “producing theologies through the Book of Mormon,” he aims to “[construct] a theology of the Book of Mormon” (Vol. 2, p. 5; emphasis added). Spencer clarifies that what this entails is nothing less than “[determining] the overall theological shape of the Mormon scriptural canon”—working toward the theological unity of all scripture—by closely attending to “the relationship between the Book of Mormon and the Bible” (Vol. 2, p. 6). How to approach such a daunting task? Spencer argues that the notion of intertextuality, particularly as methodologically adapted from biblical studies by Latter-day Saint scholar Nicholas Frederick, is a way to establish a relatively stable typology of sorts of intertextual interaction, to discern patterns in the several sorts’ usage and distribution, and to produce by such a means a general schema of the Book of Mormon's use of the Bible. And it is with a schema of this sort that serious theological work might be done. (Vol. 2, p. 11)But this is all preliminary to theology itself. Theology, on my reading of Spencer, is not so much about the availability of the scriptural word for imaginative speculation (although imagination is no doubt a primary medium of theology!) or what 2 Peter calls “private interpretation” (2 Peter 1:20). Rather, what Spencer and his colleagues in the Latter-day Saint Theology Seminar call “scriptural theology” is instead the labor of making oneself available to the word of prophecy. In this sense, it is an intersubjective hermeneutics in which the anatomist must vivisect the living word so as to see its deep structures. But there is more. Vivisection is a primarily descriptive and destructive operation. And yet to vivisect the Book of Mormon is not to act by coercion, because the Book of Mormon is always already given. The Book of Mormon gives itself to us, as if it pre-anatomizes itself. And not only this—it gives us the power to interpret both itself and the Bible. “The unity of Mormon scripture,” writes Spencer, “is therefore hermeneutic in nature. Within the Book of Mormon's biblical hermeneutic both a basic worldview and a set of biblical stories take shape—a worldview that presupposes a series of Christian symbols and practices, along with a set of stories about Israel's and then Christianity's global history” (Vol. 2, p. 14).But if vivisection, like dissection, involves the use of sharp implements and probing tools to map the body of the word, what are these tools? For Spencer, they have names like Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. An easy critique of Spencer's overall approach to theology would be that his interlocuters are almost entirely inaccessible to his primary audience—French thinkers who are notoriously difficult to comprehend. How do normal people like you and me know that Spencer isn't just sneaking “the philosophies of men” through the back door? While in the Latter-day Saint context, this question is entirely merited and understandable, let me suggest that Spencer's core comparative method addresses this problem from the outset. Spencer himself is worth quoting at length on this: In the best comparative work, the task is first to develop an entire network of similarities and differences between apparently divergent phenomena. Similarities are brought to the fore principally in order to make all the starker points of dissimilarity. And dissimilarities are brought into focus chiefly so that the stakes of any genuine points of similarity can be measured. What ideally emerges in the course of rigorous comparative work is a set of forms, each form distinct in each of its several instantiations but indicative of what remains largely invariant across those same instantiations. To the extent that such forms—repeated configurations of networks of similarity and difference—become discernible through careful comparative work, it becomes possible to ask about their philosophical importance: What tasks does the existence of such and such a form give to philosophical reflection?1To put this in the context of vivisection, the labor of scriptural theology, insofar as it utilizes philosophy, is not to recast scripture as either an adjunct of philosophy or an object-language that only philosophy can translate. Nor indeed, so far as I can tell, is philosophy being synthesized with scripture here. Rather, for Spencer, the comparison between philosophy and scripture can aid interpreters in clarifying “the set[s] of forms” and “networks of similarity and difference.” Rather than calling for philosophical reflection, “the existence of . . . [these forms]” calls for theological reflection, or discipleship. “To the extent that such forms . . . become discernible through careful comparative work,” then, scriptural theology is a method of illuminating not (or not only) philosophical problematics, but the demands that the living word makes on the interpreter. In other words, far from either importing philosophy into scripture or arrogating to oneself the binding interpretive authority reserved in the Latter-day Saint tradition for apostles, scriptural theology in Anatomy is an invitation to come and see.In the space that remains, I conclude by taking up the invitation of Anatomy, attempting to perform a microscopic theological reading of my own. I consider a moment in the Book of Mormon that Spencer returns to again and again—the moment in which Nephi seems to invite readers to see the vision of all. In my reading of Spencer reading Nephi “reading” Lehi, I outline a “sacramental hermeneutics”—the form of interpretation that seems to me to be at the heart of both the Book of Mormon and Spencer's Anatomy. Sacramental hermeneutics, I suggest, is a transformative encounter with the body of the scriptural word analogous to the encounter with the body of Christ in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. Sacramental hermeneutics is transformative precisely to the extent that its post-vivisectional ingestion of the living word allows prophecy to re-interpret the interpreter—commissioning the interpreter to declare. This evental hermeneutics seems to get to the heart of Spencer's deep theological investment in the notion of prophecy and the “holy remnant” (Vol. 2, p. 159).Readers familiar with Spencer's work will notice that I have not yet mentioned Isaiah, which is Spencer's primary site of expertise in the Book of Mormon's network of interactions with the Bible. Let me here, then, invoke Isaiah: Nephi's record . . . uses Isaiah's encounter in the temple, alongside the similar encounter of Nephi's own father, as the basic outline for an experience that it then, quite audaciously, recommends that all of its readers seek to replicate. Not only does the Book of Mormon place Isaiah 6 at the turning point of the structurally privileged center of Nephi's writings, it also draws on Isaiah 6 to outline the aim of the true Christian disciple. (Vol. 2, p. 152)If Spencer is correct in interpreting the Isaianic throne theophany as paradigmatic, let's take a brief look at what that might look like in the Book of Mormon. Following Isaiah's temple vision, the Lord commands him to “take . . . a great roll and write in it with a man's pen concerning Maher-shalal-hash-baz” (Isaiah 8:1), following which Isaiah's wife bears a son for whom the Lord provides that surprising and already-written name (see v. 3). The act of writing prophecy, for Isaiah, precedes the act of engendering its reality.Similar to Isaiah, Lehi is “carried away in a vision” and sees “God sitting upon his throne, surrounded with numberless concourses of angels” (1 Nephi 1:8). At just this moment, a lustrous figure followed by twelve others descends from heaven. The first of the twelve comes and stands before Lehi and gives him a book and bids “him that he should read” (v. 11). While prior to the loss of the 116 pages, the Book of Mormon apparently included the prophecies that Lehi wrote (or caused to be written), we only have a record of him reading this heavenly book.This account has an instructive parallel in Ezekiel 1–3, in which the prophet Ezekiel sees a vision of God on the heavenly throne surrounded by heavenly beings and is given a scroll with writing on it. A voice speaks to the prophet saying: “Son of man, eat that thou findest; eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel” (Ezekiel 3:1). Ezekiel continues, “And he said unto me, Son of man, cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with this roll that I give thee. Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.” But like Lehi's book, Ezekiel's scroll contained “lamentations, and mourning, and woe” (Ezekiel 2:10). While it appears that Ezekiel likely read the words on the scroll, the narrative emphasizes that he ate it.A similar account occurs in Revelation 10, in which the Seer sees a vision of an angel with a book in his hand: “And the voice which I had heard from heaven spake unto me again, and said, Go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth. And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey” (Revelation 10:9). As with Ezekiel, this instance of eating the bittersweet heavenly book is tied to prophecy. “And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and people” (v. 11). The consumption of the heavenly book, it seems, effects the necessary “physiological” changes involved in or required by the declaration of prophecy.Why, then, is Lehi given to read the text when Ezekiel and John were bidden to eat? In all three cases, reading or eating causes the prophet to prophesy. Is eating only a metaphor for internalizing the divine message and letting it act on the sympathies and emotions (“fill [the] bowels”)? According to Spencer, Nephi's concluding exhortations in 2 Nephi 31 structurally connect Lehi's and Isaiah's throne theophanies and “[enjoin] . . . readers to join the heavenly chorus as his father had done back in Jerusalem” (Vol. 2, p. 151). And then Nephi, as we know, neither read nor ate, but “sat pondering in [his] heart” when he “was caught away in the Spirit of the Lord into an exceedingly high mountain” (1 Nephi 11:1). There, he confessed to the Spirit his desire to see what his father had seen (in 1 Nephi 8). What separates Nephi from Lehi, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and John is what followed his seeing: He asked to “know the interpretation thereof” (1 Nephi 11:11). Nevertheless, in his final exhortations, Nephi urges readers to “press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ” (2 Nephi 31:20), and further clarifies that having received the Holy Ghost, they can now speak with the tongue of angels. And what is the tongue of angels? It is nothing other than “the words of Christ,” according to the text. “Wherefore, I said unto you,” writes Nephi, “feast upon the words of Christ; for behold, the words of Christ will tell you all things what ye should do” (2 Nephi 32:3). This nexus of desire, vision, consumption, interpretation, prophecy, and speech is what I have termed sacramental hermeneutics, and it is at the heart of both Joseph Spencer's Anatomy and the Book of Mormon itself.Let me conclude by quoting Anatomy: What fires descend onto what rocks before us today, in whose dancing flames we might, with enough care and enough study, begin to recognize the latent potency of our own situation? What book descends from heaven today that, once we have been bidden to read it, fills us with prophetic insight enough to see the fulness rather than the emptiness of the world? What preaching ought we today to pursue—if, that is, we still have the courage to hope to scandalize our contemporaries by insisting that the messianic remains relevant? And then, what wilderness should we be prepared to flee to? (Vol. 2, p. 70)

In ways I've tried to articulate elsewhere, the publication of Terryl Givens's By the Hand of Mormon in 2002 was a genuine event for Book of Mormon studies.1 When that book appeared, scholarly work on the Book of Mormon had been pursued in one form or another for more than a hundred years, had been undertaken by trained professionals for about half a century, and had been built around dedicated institutions for at least two decades. But there is a very real sense in which the publication of Givens's book was a founding event. It didn't overturn what had occurred in the twentieth century but gave such earlier work a real sense of itself while opening space for much new work. To whatever extent there is an identifiable field of Book of Mormon scholarship today, then it is because Givens surveyed the land and told us where previous planting was done, and where others might profitably plant next.2The twenty years since Givens's book appeared have seen many years of rich harvest. In my view, at least, the past two decades have produced the most substantial yield that Book of Mormon scholarship has ever witnessed. From editions (devotional and academic alike) to commentaries (doctrinal, historical, and even ethical), from journals (representing various approaches) to books (ranging widely and including several new series), and from organizations (hosting seminars and conferences) to online repositories (making Book of Mormon scholarship more available than ever before)—the granaries are full to overflowing. We are adding sub-discipline to sub-discipline, and specializations are growing up, such that it has proven necessary, recently, to produce a guide to the field, written for students and upcoming scholars.3So, what comes next? If I have rightly captured the spirit of the times here, maybe nothing needs to be said about the future of Book of Mormon studies. Might it not be best to just give high fives all around and get back to work? There is more to plant and more to harvest, to be sure, and we will have to expand the field occasionally to accommodate new crops when it is appropriate. But doesn't that mean that we can expect the right things to come in their due time without a lot of fuss and bother right now about what that will look like? Why distract ourselves with predictions and prognostications?The quantitative growth of the field of Book of Mormon studies is undeniable, and there is no obvious reason to think that it's about to slow down. There is good reason to celebrate, then. But quantitative growth isn't all that is to be anticipated, I think. If there is something lacking in Book of Mormon studies today, it isn't just more Book of Mormon studies (a better yield) or more kinds of Book of Mormon research (an expanded field). What is lacking in the field of Book of Mormon studies today is a center of gravity. The field is essentially two-dimensional rather than three-dimensional, a formation without topography. The key symptom here is the fact that, although there is so much scholarly research on the Book of Mormon going on, very little of it feels like required reading for anyone coming to the field for the first time. That is, almost everything written on the Book of Mormon is required reading only for those who happen to write on the same specific subject;4 there is little that can be called required reading for all Book of Mormon scholars, regardless of their particular interests.“Fine,” one might say, “but is that so troubling? And anyway, aren't there certain publications that every would-be Book of Mormon scholar has to know or at least be aware of?” Fair enough. Every Book of Mormon scholar has to know Givens's already mentioned book, Royal Skousen's The Earliest Text, and Grant Hardy's Understanding the Book of Mormon.5 But it also has to be said that, despite the influence such projects have had on the discipline, surprisingly few students of the Book of Mormon feel they have to build directly on, respond substantively to, or argue convincingly against the claims made in the work of such authors (except where one's subject of interest is directly addressed in them). They represent the best work in the field, rather than field-centering work. Their major works notwithstanding, what populates the field of Book of Mormon studies is a potpourri.“But again,” the objector retorts, “is that so troubling?” Well, “troubling” might be too strong. But I'm convinced that the field stands to gain much when it finally shifts from the second to the third dimension, when it comes to have a clear center of gravity. If Givens's By the Hand of Mormon marked the founding event for the field of Book of Mormon studies as presently constituted, then it will be benefitted greatly by a follow-up transformative event. Such an event would not just allow but would arguably compel all the mostly private and small-group interests that currently make up the field to come into productive contact with each other. The result, I'm convinced, would be deeply desirable. But what would such an event look like? I suspect that, like the current field's founding event, it would involve the appearance of a new study of the Book of Mormon. But this study-to-come would have, I suspect, a nature rather different from the one produced by Givens. It would be, I believe, a whole-book reading of the Book of Mormon.Obviously, I have some explaining to do. I'll proceed as follows. First, I will attempt to explain how the field would benefit from a transformative event of the sort I'm describing. How might a further event in Book of Mormon studies be a good thing in itself, whether or not I'm right that a whole-book reading would be involved. Second, I will try to clarify what a whole-book reading is and why such a thing might need to be the focus of a transformative event in Book of Mormon studies.Quite apart from what kind of study might trigger a transformative event in Book of Mormon studies—quite apart, that is, from whether a whole-book reading is what is needed—it is worth asking what the unfolding of a transformative event (in itself) would look like. If a transformative event is indeed a desirable thing for Book of Mormon studies, it will obviously only be because there is something about the aftermath of such an event that is in some defensible way better than the pre-evental situation. So exactly how would a transformative event alter the terrain of the field? How do things appear right now, before the event, and how might they appear differently in the post-evental future?I have already said a few things about how the field of Book of Mormon studies appears at present. What characterizes the field is that there is a great deal of work going on, but all of it is arguably only of local interest. What I mean is that any given book or essay is of definite value only to those interested in the same issue addressed in that book or essay. There are studies of specific sermons or stories, of unique authorial voices or figures, of particular themes or ideas or doctrines, and of individual problems or challenges posed by or to the text. But it is seldom obvious how—if at all—the conclusions drawn in a study of some specific Book of Mormon story might bear on questions raised in another study that is given instead to some particular theme or idea in the Book of Mormon, or how the investigation of some unique authorial voice in the larger text means anything for addressing some individual problem posed by the text. Certainly, any one study will have implications for certain other studies, but no existent book or essay about the Book of Mormon has obvious implications for all or even most other studies of the book. The interests exhibited in each contribution to the field are thus local.6I think one could thus say that the situation in Book of Mormon studies is rather like that of Italy in the fifteenth century, long before its unification as a nation. This must seem like a bafflingly obscure comparison to make, but I make it because it might justify what I'm about to do, which is, namely, to draw on the fifteenth-century Italian thinker Niccolò Machiavelli. I like the summary of the Italian situation in the fifteenth century provided by Louis Althusser (in one of his several treatments of Machiavelli's thought): All the circumstances favorable to [Italy's] imitating France or Spain exist [at the time], but without connections between them: a divided and fervent people, the fragmentation of Italy into small obsolete states that have been condemned by history, a generalized but disorderly revolt of an entire world against foreign occupation and pillage, and a profound, latent aspiration of the people to unity, an aspiration to which all the great works of the period bear witness, including that of Dante, who understood nothing of all this, but was waiting for the arrival of the “great hound.” In sum, an atomized country, every atom of which was descending in free fall without encountering its neighbor.7Obviously, not everything here has its perfect parallel in the field of Book of Mormon studies. But it does seem right to me to say that the field of Book of Mormon studies is an atomized one, every atom of which is descending in free fall without encountering its neighbor. And what I'm trying to articulate in this essay is, quite precisely, a latent aspiration for disciplinary unity—not in the form of broad scholarly consensus so much as agreement that there is some clear center of gravity for the field, some compelling positions regarding the Book of Mormon's significance that have to be grappled with by all.What Italy needed in the fifteenth century, according to the most important political philosopher of that time and place, was the emergence of “some nameless man who has enough luck and virtù to establish himself somewhere . . . and, starting out from this atomic point, gradually aggregate the Italians around him in the grand project of founding a national state.”8 Such is Althusser's summary description of Machiavelli's infamous “prince,” the figure who might rise “above” conventional morality to oversee the construction of a unified Italy.9 The prince's imagined emergence—Machiavelli didn't actually see it happen—is what Althusser calls an event, the swerve of some particular atom such that its collision with other atoms starts a chain reaction. Before the prince, an atomized “Italy”; after the prince, Italy as an aggregate.Now, let me be perfectly clear that I'm not in any way suggesting that the field of Book of Mormon studies needs some amoral scholar who knows how both “to be wicked” and “to appear to be good,” some dominant figure who could force the field in some specific direction.10 Academia is and ought to be democratic, and demagoguery has no more a place in Book of Mormon studies than it has in any other scholarly field. What, then, would the parallel to the Machiavellian prince be in Book of Mormon studies? Not a person, as I have suggested already, but a study. What's needed in the field is an event, some kind of trigger to produce encounters between the atoms of Book of Mormon scholarship—encounters consequential enough to affect every atom falling through the void of the field. But the event would, as I'm envisioning it, involve a princely reading, rather than a prince.This, at any rate, is what I have in mind when I say that the field needs a center of gravity, some point from which everyone venturing onto that field takes their orientation or measures their distance. Now, why would such a development be desirable? Is the current atomization of the field so obviously undesirable? Here, I'll discuss a couple of problems that, I think, currently exist due to the atomization of the field and that might be solved by the kind of event I'm discussing.A first problem in the field results straightforwardly from a lack of collaboration. Due to the field's atomization, it is too easy for people working on the Book of Mormon to proceed like pioneers entering uninhabited territory—that is, writing without awareness of the work of others.11 Consequently, there is often more re-invention of the wheel than “progress” going on.12 Scholarship in the field tends to amass like disjointed comments attached to an online news item, rather than moving dialectically forward like a conversation that builds toward a satisfying conclusion. Because there is little or nothing that every Book of Mormon scholar ought to consult before beginning to work on the text, it is too easy to neglect the available literature entirely. This would change dramatically, I suspect, with the emergence of a clear center of gravity. Aspiring contributors would have to pass through certain decidedly important works, and they would inevitably encounter the existence of other useful research in the text and footnotes of those works.13A second problem also results from a lack of collaboration. Even when intriguing readings of a specific Book of Mormon passage or theme appear, it is difficult to know what sticking power it really has. Will a book or essay's conclusions have held up once a sustained and centered conversation emerges among Book of Mormon scholars? Or will it have been more clever than substantial, built on data that point in a certain direction only when viewed without context? At present, there is no common measuring stick—or even an aspiringly common measuring stick—for assessing what new contributions actually contribute to the understanding of the Book of Mormon. When there is little motivation for mutual scholarly engagement, how does one decide what is innovative and what is merely idiosyncratic? A symptom of this state of affairs is that it is easy to find authors in the field who footnote mostly their own previous publications, fail to engage with contrary interpretations even when they are aware of them, or write as if their methods were unassailably grounded without need for defense. A center of gravity for the field would do much to alleviate these conditions.A third problem concerns the relationship between Book of Mormon studies and the larger academy. It is difficult already for committed believers in the Book of Mormon to take in the whole field of Book of Mormon scholarship, but it approaches impossibility for anyone outside the faith community (with less reason to invest the time and effort) to find their way around the conversation. This is partially because much of what naturally interests believers doesn't much interest those outside the tradition.14 In many ways, this is exactly as it should be. The Book of Mormon is a sacred book with a place in the religious lives of numerous believing communities. But Book of Mormon studies is something that belongs to scholars both inside and outside the believing community.15 Much benefit for scholars from the larger academy would derive from there being a clear center of gravity in the field. Research of specific interest to believers would continue to have its clear place in a newly mappable field, while research of general interest—to believers and those outside the believing community—would be a clear point of entry for all and a point of orientation for the newly interested.16Naturally, there are other issues facing Book of Mormon studies as well, and a transformative event for the field might well speak to those issues too. These three issues are sufficient for my purposes, however. They are certainly enough to illustrate how the situation in Book of Mormon studies would be genuinely improved. It would create real collaboration and conversation among scholars, promote the establishment of certain criteria for determining useful work in the field, and make entry into the discipline easier for believers and nonbelievers alike.None of this is to say, naturally, that a transformative event in Book of Mormon studies wouldn't introduce new challenges. For example, centers of gravity often give rise in academic disciplines to intellectual orthodoxies. That is, they often aid and abet intellectual dogmatism.17 The fact is, then, that a genuinely forceful reading of the Book of Mormon, compelling enough to create a center of gravity in the field, would inevitably cause new tensions, triggering new debates that too easily become personal when egos prevail over honest assessments of the data. Of course, this is a key occupational hazard for academia; it isn't a good reason to ward off a transformative event in the field's development.18 Above all, the tendency toward ego in scholarly work should motivate a general call for real honesty in academic endeavor, as well as a serious warning against using emerging consensus as a tool for social power. For novel work in Book of Mormon studies to be genuinely productive rather than simply divisive, those involved in setting their models forth and debating them must be gruelingly honest about how compelling their models are or are not.Another danger deserves attention. Any field-organizing study of the sort that might constitute a transformative event faces the temptation to totalize what it investigates—that is, to treat something that is too complex to be captured by one model as if it were exhaustibly understood. There are, however, many reasons to worry about totalizing interpretations, as much for ethical as for intellectual reasons.19 After all, why should anyone think there is an interpretive approach to the Book of Mormon that is somehow going to take account of everything, or even just of everything that is most important? Might the centerlessness of the field as currently constituted be a good thing—a sign of its humility, or at least of its honesty? I would insist instead, however, that real understanding of a complex phenomenon develops only through increasingly comprehensive models of it. What's needed isn't nervousness about the possibility of totalizing in the work of interpretation, but rather, real honesty about what any model of the Book of Mormon's meaning actually leaves out.There are, then, dangers as well as promises associated with a transformative event. In my view, the promises outweigh the dangers, especially because the most serious dangers can be mitigated or even eliminated by earnest desire to understand the Book of Mormon. An irenic atmosphere in Book of Mormon studies, built on a real commitment to concede the force of others’ interpretations, can go a long way. And the positive results issuing from a transformative event, I believe, would be so desirable as to make every effort at intellectual humility more than worth it.As I stated at the end of my introduction to this essay, I want to do more here than just argue that a transformative event is needed in Book of Mormon studies. I want to also identify what I think the ideal shape of an event-triggering study of the Book of Mormon would be. Of course, I can't predict the future, and I would be quite happy to be wrong about things here. But I highly suspect that what is needed to transform the field of Book of Mormon studies in the way I have been discussing is a whole-book reading. This term needs some definition, to be sure. I will try to give it definition in a few stages, providing first a broad explanation and then following that up with a few evaluative criteria meant to put a very fine point on the proposal.I borrow the term “whole-book reading” loosely from the field of biblical theology,20 but I want to emphasize from the beginning that I don't mean to use it in exactly the same way or for any of the same reasons that biblical theologians do. In fact, although any whole-book reading of the Book of Mormon will inevitably have theological implications (at least as I'll define and defend the notion), it is in no way necessary that a whole-book reading be offered with any of its theological implications made explicit (in the actual written exposition of such a reading, of course, but also even in the mind of the writer of such an exposition). As the name suggests, a whole-book reading consists above all of two things. First, it is a reading. Second, the reading it offers must account in some way for the whole Book of Mormon. These basic terms need some preliminary exposition.First, a reading isn't merely an explanation, although providing a reading might often involve providing an explanation. A reading is rather, as the word indicates, something that develops out of close and sustained interaction with the actual words of the text. It offers some account of the sense (and not just the reference) of those words.21 It has something to say about how various parts of the text relate to each other or work together and thus generate some larger meaning that isn't obvious at a glance. It musters arguments in defense of its interpretations, drawing evidence from the text itself (and maybe also from extra- or non-textual things). Someone offering a reading must be able to articulate the hermeneutic principles that undergird and to some extent justify the interpretive decisions made. If all of these things aren't in play, whatever is being said about the Book of Mormon might be interesting, but it isn't a reading.Second, for a reading to be a whole-book reading, it has to have something to say—even if that something remains inchoate or implicit in some cases—about all the various parts of the text of the Book of Mormon. These parts are of various kinds. For example, what is attributed in the Book of Mormon to Moroni is a part of the book, distinct from the part that is attributed to Nephi. But also, what is said throughout the Book of Mormon about the nature of God constitutes a part of the book, distinct from what is said throughout the volume about the notion of faith. A certain stretch of the narrative is a part of the book, distinct from other stretches of the narrative, and so on. All these are different types of parts of the book, and they all play their roles in constituting the whole of the book. A whole-book reading, then, is a reading that has something to say about all (substantial) parts of the book. However interesting a partial reading of the Book of Mormon might be, it isn't a whole-book reading until it is brought into conversation with readings of all the other parts.Now, I hope the preceding two paragraphs are enough to make the basic idea of a whole-book reading clear. Note that the requirement that a whole-book reading be a reading excludes certain kinds of studies. There are explanations of the Book of Mormon that (claim to) account for it as a whole that nonetheless aren't readings of it. Such, for example, are accounts of the volume's origins. To make a case that the Book of Mormon had its origins among ancient prophets, or to make a case that the Book of Mormon had its origins in the nineteenth century, isn't to offer a reading of the text, even if there is a sense in which it is meant to explain the book as a whole. Such whole-book explanations—as opposed to whole-book readings—have been around for almost two hundred years, and scholarly versions of them have been around in abundance for almost a hundred years.22 These aren't what is needed to see Book of Mormon studies through a transformative event. Note also that the requirement that a whole-book reading account for the whole book excludes certain other studies. Thanks especially to the rise of literary and theological approaches to the Book of Mormon (already in the 1970s but with greater intensity in the past couple of decades), there exist any number of readings of the Book of Mormon that don't account for the book as a whole. Until these grow into fully whole-book readings, they won't usher in what I hope is the coming next stage of Book of Mormon studies.23Are these, though, the only criteria relevant to recognizing a whole-book reading of the Book of Mormon? I don't think so, since all I have really offered here so far is a definition of the term. It is worth adding some evaluative criteria to the definitional criteria. Not just any whole-book reading will be enough to provoke the kind of transformative event I'm hoping we will soon see in the field of Book of Mormon studies. Indeed, readers might well conclude that there already are several whole-book readings of the Book of Mormon in circulation, if they have only the definition I have just offered as a guide. What else, then, is needed from a whole-book reading if it is to make the right kinds of things happen?I will propose four criteria by which to decide both whether a reading is of the whole-book sort and just how good any whole-book reading is. I will give them the following titles: (1) the criterion of comprehensiveness,(2) the criterion of materiality,(3) the criterion of strength, and(4) the criterion of reach.I realize, of course, that these titles don't say much in and of themselves. I will unpack them one by one, using examples available from the present shape of the field to illustrate what I have in mind.Given what I've already said by way just of defining what a whole-book reading is, this first criterion is a relatively obvious one. To be a whole-book reading, I've already said, a reading must have something to say—even if that something remains inchoate or implicit—about all the various parts of the text of the Book of Mormon. This means that if a proposal does not have clear implications for major and even relatively minor features of the Book of Mormon, it cannot really be said to be a whole-book reading. What does this or that proposal suggest about the inclusion of long quotations of Isaiah, or about the so-called “war chapters” at the end of the Book of Alma? What does this or that proposal suggest about the sense of self-awareness that occupies the authorial voices making up the volume, or about the King James diction haunting the book's style? What does this or that proposal mean for the various examinations of key Christian concepts (divine attributes, atonement, eschatology, and so on) scattered through the volume, or for the book's portrayal of economic, racial, or sexual others? If there isn't much of an answer to any of these questions, it is not clear in what sense the proposal in question amounts to a whole-book reading.24 Thus, the satisfaction of this criterion is a yes-or-no kind of affair: a proposal either does or does not satisfy it, and so it either is or is not a (candidate for a) whole-book reading.I will use as an example of a reading that fails to meet this criterion my own first book on the Book of Mormon, An Other Testament: On Typology.25 In that project, I proposed a large-scale interpretation of the whole history set forth in the Book of Mormon, from Nephi's complex project (in First and Second Nephi), through the Abinadi story that inaugurates Mormon's project (as extant beginning in the Book of Mosiah), to the climactic arrival of Jesus Christ among the children of Sariah and Lehi (in Third Nephi). Considering a few key threads that tie those far-flung parts of the book together—especially the themes of the Godhead, the nature of baptism, and the use of Isaiah's prophecies—I set out something aspiring to be a whole-book reading. But the fact of the matter is that the resulting proposal implied far too little (and in many cases, nothing at all) about much of the Book of Mormon. It had nothing at all to say about Moroni's concluding contributions, and little to say about Alma and Helaman. It also addressed itself only to a handful of themes, without obvious implications at all about those it did not address. By the criterion of comprehensiveness, An Other Testament fails to be a whole-book reading.Given that a proposed reading satisfies the first criterion, one must go on to ask about the satisfaction of a second. It, like the first, is a yes-or-no affair; if it is satisfied, then the proposal in question may well be a whole-book reading (given, of course, that other criteria are satisfied as well), but if this criterion is not satisfied, then the proposal will not qualify as a whole-book reading. I call this second criterion the criterion of materiality, drawing on the simple contrast between form and matter. The idea here is that setting forth a governing method for reading the Book of Mormon does not in and of itself yield a whole-book reading. This is true even if the method in question is robustly illustrated with readings of portions from throughout the text and of thematic ideas strung through it. A method of reading—say, a specific literary strategy, a certain theological angle, or a specific historiographical approach—will certainly bear on the interpretation of every theme and every passage of the Book of Mormon. But this does not mean that it amounts to a materially coherent reading of the whole book. It offers a form of reading, one that can be materialized in so many instances, but—unless it is shown to be otherwise—it does not necessarily offer a material reading of the whole thing.26I will use as an example of a reading that fails to satisfy this second criterion Grant Hardy's Understanding the Book of Mormon. Hardy's book introduces and meticulously defends a narratological approach to reading the Book of Mormon—this in order to nudge the volume toward universal readability in a bid to include it, however humbly, in the canon of world scripture.27 Hardy's study is filled with a host of brilliant readings, stories, and sermons, and much else besides, coming into a kind of interpretive clarity when approached in the way he recommends. It is unquestionably among the most important books—if it isn't in fact simply the most important book—yet written on the Book of Mormon. And yet, at the same time, Hardy never proposes an account of the meaning of the Book of Mormon as a whole. His formal labors in establishing an interpretive method do not yield a material account of the meaning of the book as a whole. To be fair, such doesn't seem to be his aim. There is a clear sense in which Hardy's method is genuinely comprehensive, with implications for more or less every word in the Book of Mormon. At the same time, his arguments about method don't crystallize into an actual reading of—a thesis regarding the meaning of—the Book of Mormon as a whole.The third criterion I propose here is of a different sort from the first two. Rather than being a yes-or-no sort of affair, it asks a question that has to be answered in terms of a spectrum of possibilities. It concerns—and in a relatively straightforward way, I think—the strength of a proposed reading, given that it satisfies the first two criteria already examined. How genuinely compelling are the many local readings that go into the overarching reading in question? Is there real hermeneutical insight at each stage of the reading's unfolding? Do the parts add up coherently to a whole, according to a comprehensible logic? Are the various parts of the larger argument built on the same methods, or are variations in method at least clearly motivated—that is, motivated by something other than a bare hope to make the reading work? Where a proposed reading parts ways strongly with traditional interpretations or interpretations on offer in the available literature, are the arguments for the alternative convincing? Does it ever feel as if the reading becomes uneven in its presentation because some part or portion of the Book of Mormon just can't hold up under the weight it is being asked to bear? Such are the questions that need answering in assessing the strength of a whole-book reading. If there are serious ways in which a reading can't compel many readers to follow it very far, then it may fail to be a whole-book reading. Certainly, it fails to be a good one—a whole-book reading that could genuinely serve to create a center (or a new center) of gravity for the field of Book of Mormon studies.28I will use as an example of a project that fails to satisfy this criterion Clyde Forsberg's Equal Rites: The Book of Mormon, Masonry, Gender, and American Culture.29 Forsberg proposes a reading of the whole Book of Mormon with an eye to one overarching question: how it might speak to the intersection between the vicissitudes of Freemasonry during the Antebellum Period of American history and the changing cultures surrounding gender—women in particular—during the same time period. It gathers readings of many passages in the Book of Mormon, and it brings them together into one overarching argument. But, despite its availability to the field of Book of Mormon studies for nearly twenty years already, it has received relatively little attention. This doesn't seem to be because it has simply gone unnoticed. Its readers have consistently regarded its readings as uncompelling and hermeneutically forced.30 Regardless of its potential comprehensiveness and materiality, it has apparently failed in terms of its strength.The fourth and final criterion for what constitutes a (good) whole-book reading is also the kind of thing that has to be judged on a spectrum. It concerns the potential reach of a proposed reading. Granted that a particular proposal regarding the Book of Mormon is comprehensive in scope, that it offers an account of the book's meaning and not just of a method for interpreting specific passages, and that the reading it offers is genuinely compelling, there remains the question of exactly for whom it might matter. I will venture that a genuinely field-shaping reading of the Book of Mormon must have two things at once: on the one hand, real existential force for those who hold the book to be scripture; and on the other hand, serious intellectual payout for those who approach the book for merely academic reasons. Does a proposed whole-book reading matter for on-the-ground believers? Is its thesis substantial enough for them to wonder, once they have heard it, whether there is something they ought to change about their lives because, with new understanding, they feel called to do things they have somehow left undone? But also, does a proposed whole-book reading matter for scholars who don't take the book at all as a guide for life? Is its thesis of enough academic interest that it might render more interesting, for them, the intellectual stakes of the Book of Mormon's existence? If the results of an aspiring whole-book reading aren't of real interest to both of these constituencies in a serious way, it seems to me unlikely to create enough of a center of gravity to reshape the field.This fourth criterion is likely to feel less intuitive than the preceding three. It is also rather difficult to provide illustrations in connection with this criterion.31 The things that interest believers change over time, just as do the things that interest academics. What draws the attention of scholars to the Book of Mormon right at this present moment—when questions of the post-secular are floating about, for example—might not draw the attention of scholars twenty or thirty years from now. And what draws the attention of believers in the Book of Mormon right at this present moment—its grand and compelling outline of Israel's covenants in history—might not draw the attention of believers twenty or thirty years from now. Perhaps, however, it is enough just to say that any whole-book reading that might prove important enough to reshape the field will have to create a center of gravity that is felt as much by those who read the book out of religious devotion as by those who read the book out of scholarly interest. Any reading that doesn't interest both groups (and, of course, the overlapping group of believing scholars!) cannot trigger a genuine event in the field's history.These, then, are the four criteria that I think might help decide whether a reading of the Book of Mormon rises to the level of a whole-book reading at all (the first two criteria, both yes-or-no sorts of issues), and of whether a reading has the kind of gravity necessary to trigger a genuine transformation of the field of Book of Mormon studies (the last two criteria, both matters of judging where a project might fall on a spectrum of possibilities). If an aspiring whole-book reading of the Book of Mormon arises soon that proves able to satisfy the first two criteria and to sufficiently satisfy the last two criteria, then I suspect we will have witnessed the beginning of a new era in Book of Mormon studies. Such an era would be more polemical in nature than the past couple of decades have been, but, I suspect, polemical in a productive rather than a destructive fashion. All the kinds of studies that have been produced during the past two decades—and even before that, all throughout the second half of the twentieth century—can and should, of course, continue. But I sincerely hope they will find their places on a terrain that has been seismically altered by the emergence of something new: a compelling reading of the whole of the Book of Mormon.

How did the Book of Mormon happen?This is a question no reader of the book with even a modicum of appreciation for its monumentality can help but ask. Its sheer length (over five hundred dense manuscript pages), plus the velocity of its composition (the bulk of it was transcribed in about three months), plus its unconventional compositional method (dictated by Joseph Smith to a small cadre of rotating scribes), plus its staggering narrative complexity (centuries of history of an ancient people relayed by multiple narrators in both first and third person through a vast array of embedded texts) distinguish the Book of Mormon from virtually every other major narrative work of the nineteenth century.Answers, of course, abound.Orthodox accounts have cleaved to Smith's own claim that the book is an authentic collection of ancient texts he translated with the aid of divine instruments, perhaps with some measure of stylistic freedom. Skeptical explanations, meanwhile, have often relied on dubious conspiracy theories contending that Smith purloined a fiction written by someone else (the aspiring early American novelist Solomon Spalding being the favored candidate), which he subsequently bowdlerized and appropriated as his new scripture.Then there are what we might call the naturalistic accounts, which broadly accept the orthodox sequence of events of composition but credit Smith with full creative authority. In these, the Book of Mormon stands as the product of Smith's mind and his alone. Some, like the Restoration minister Alexander Campbell, had no doubts about the work's origins but little sympathy or appreciation for it. One of the book's first reviewers, Campbell wrote: “There never was a book more evidently written by one set of fingers, nor more certainly conceived in one cranium since the first book appeared in human language, than this book.”1Campbell took a dim view of the Book of Mormon's quality, as have many others over the past 193 years. Recently, careful readers have found far more to appreciate in the book. Beginning with Grant Hardy's Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide in 2010, there has been a renaissance in Book of Mormon studies. Thanks to the work of scholars like Jared Hickman, Elizabeth Fenton, and many others, books, articles, conferences, and courses on the Book of Mormon have begun proliferating at universities and in fields—like English—where the book has, historically, been dutifully ignored. It is now harder than ever to deny that the Book of Mormon stands as a work of narratological significance regardless of whether a reader accepts it as scripture.Much of this work has succeeded, however, by erecting a boundary between the book itself and the context of its creation. This has been enabling insofar as it has allowed scholars to study the Book of Mormon without having to re-litigate debates over its origins. Yet, as R. John Williams writes, one of the defining characteristics of the Book of Mormon is its “intransigent refusal to let us stay ‘inside’ the text.”2 One can only cordon off the how and the who of the book for so long.Enter William L. Davis's recent book, Visions in a Seer Stone: Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon. Davis holds a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies and approaches the endemic problem of the Book of Mormon's creation through this novel disciplinary lens. Indeed, the first stake he puts in the ground is that the book's compositional process ought not to be thought of, first and foremost, as a scene of writing but of performance. The Book of Mormon, he writes, is “a script, or a transcript, of Smith's performative process—the artifact of a grander multifaceted oratorical effort” (p. 3). No telling of the Book of Mormon origin story is complete without mention of the seer stone, the hat, the barrier between orator and scribe, and the rhythms of the dictation. What Davis does, however, is make the performance itself integral to the style and shape of the book. In his hands, this foundational scene of creation comes thrillingly alive as a vital factor in the making of the Book of Mormon.As Davis takes care to explain, this approach to understanding the Book of Mormon is not intended to foreclose orthodox accounts of the book's creation. Rather, it offers “a framework for both believers and nonbelievers to account for the production of the Book of Mormon, while also accommodating and carefully reflecting on the textual and historical evidence” (p. 160). Davis clearly hopes for a broad spectrum of readers to profit from the case that Visions in a Seer Stone makes.Through seven meticulously argued chapters (along with a brief introduction and epilogue), Davis outlines a case for how Smith could have feasibly dictated the entirety of the Book of Mormon. The heart of the claim is this: Smith's exposure to techniques of extemporaneous and semi-extemporaneous oratory common in the Connecticut River Valley and Burned-Over District in the early decades of the nineteenth-century equipped him with the performative and rhetorical tools that—when paired with his imagination and his receptivity to revelatory experiences—enabled a process of extended narrative dictation capable of producing the Book of Mormon. The first four chapters of Davis’ book methodically build this contextual scaffolding, setting the stage for the discussion of the Book of Mormon and its production in the latter half of the book.Chapter 1, “Seer Stones and Western Esotericism,” considers Smith's use of seer stones to activate his prophetic voice, and why that practice would have been legible to his family and neighbors. Davis details the esoteric traditions, rituals, and beliefs that circulated alongside mainstream Protestantism in nineteenth-century western New York. For families like the Smiths, the “complex entanglement of religious and mystical ideologies became . . . [a] way of life, constructing a cultural and perceptual lens through which they would view and interpret the world” (p. 12). The narrative here is a familiar one, but Davis rehearses it ably and efficiently.The next two chapters veer away from esotericism toward specific elements of composition and oratory characteristic of Protestant sermonizing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Both center on “laying down heads,” or the practice of announcing key topics at the outset of a discourse that form a skeletal outline. Laying down heads is the cornerstone of Davis's argument, informing practically every other claim. In these chapters, he demonstrates just how ubiquitous laying down heads was during the period, in everything from composition guides to personal narratives to sermons. The sheer volume of sources that Davis cites is impressive, as well as the careful work he does to connect these sources to Smith's family and upbringing. To illustrate Smith's direct familiarity with this practice, Davis introduces two texts that Smith dictated—his unfinished 1832 history of the Church and notes taken on his 1843 sermon on the Prodigal Son—both of which incorporate explicit announcements of key topics.In chapter 4, Davis adds another dimension to his discussion of laying down heads by differentiating between explicit and concealed heads. Framing the argument is Smith's 1844 King Follett Sermon, one of the final public addresses Smith delivered before he was assassinated. Although the sermon is remembered today for its theological radicalism, Davis's interest is in its form. Long and digressive, the sermon stands apart from other texts Davis cites because Smith does not “lay down heads” at the beginning of the performance. Yet, Davis contends, Smith almost certainly had a structure in mind that he could depart from and return to as his imagination desired. The topics included in this structure were concealed heads.In these early chapters, Davis demonstrates the pervasiveness of “laying down heads” as a pillar of semi-extemporaneous preaching in Smith's youth. Although he has assembled an impressive array of sources, Davis takes care throughout to keep the argument centered on Smith by frequently returning to the formal and informal avenues through which Smith could have absorbed and honed these techniques, from composition books that detailed the practice to extensive exposure to revival preachers to his participation in debate societies to the Methodist exhortation classes he likely attended to his well-documented fondness for telling stories in all settings.All that said, Davis perhaps overstates his case when he contends that skeletal outlines constitute Smith's “central and most fundamental approach to composition” (p. 87). Given the limited number of examples from Smith's own oeuvre and the intense focus on this single technique, there is not enough extant textual evidence to generalize to this degree or to account for the other ways that Smith may have translated other works for which he was responsible, as well as how these methods may have changed across his prophetic career. Admirable and exhaustive as these early chapters are, this reader would have appreciated more discussion of Smith as a writer and an orator.In chapters 5 and 6, Davis pivots to the Book of Mormon itself. He approaches the book through two of its favored genres: sermons and historical narrative. As Davis notes at the beginning of chapter 5, sermons make up a staggering 40 percent of the entire book. Interweaving discussions of Methodist sermon culture with readings of a slew of Book of Mormon passages, Davis underscores the fact that sermons in the Book of Mormon consistently adhere to conventional nineteenth-century sermonic forms and rehearse standard lists of doctrinal points, theological controversies, and even conventional phrases from revivalist—and specifically, Methodist—preaching.The most tantalizing moments of this chapter come, however, when we begin to see how the scene of the dictation parallels or reflects the work being dictated. One of these moments occurs in the book of Jacob when Jacob relays Nephi's instruction that “if there were preaching which was sacred, or revelation which was great, or prophesying, that I should engraven the heads of them upon these plates, and touch upon them as much as it were possible.”3 Davis makes it possible to see the call to “engraven the heads” (p. 91) as potentially referencing a commonplace technique of semi-extemporaneous speaking in nineteenth-century sermonic culture.Chapter 6 turns toward the Book of Mormon's historical narratives. Specifically, Davis tracks how chapter headings in the book come to function as skeletal outlines. Although italicized and offset in the text, Davis treats these as being potentially part of the stream of language that poured out of Smith during dictation sessions. Here, a paratextual apparatus independent of the narrative comes to be understood as a vital piece of an evolving, performative script. One key example is the head, “an account of the death of Lehi,” at the beginning of 2 Nephi 1, which Smith then expands into “a 4,655-word narrative” (p. 138). The mnemonic cue alone, Davis speculates, could have triggered for Smith the basic elements of the event, and Smith's own imagination would have been able to supply as much content as he felt he needed to elaborate upon it.Over the course of the chapter, Davis provides numerous other examples of brief summaries that precede the narration of events, suggesting that Smith used these as anchors to inform his semi-extemporaneous storytelling. This evidence also leads Davis to contend that the foreknowledge necessary to generate such heads and ensure narrative coherence “militate[s] against the theory that Smith produced the work in spontaneous, unpremeditated outbursts of creativity” (p. 157). Smith, in other words, would have had to engage in an extensive process of preparation.Davis's final body chapter delivers on the promise of the preceding chapters to advance a theory of translation. Davis makes the claim that the Book of Mormon is replete with mnemonic cues and markers of techniques like the “laying down of heads” that could have served as prompts for Joseph Smith to unfurl a story that had been developing in his mind for the better part of a decade. Because this process was performative and included an audience, Davis moreover suggests that the narrative was not solely a recitation of ideas already worked out but a dialectical process that was both responsive to the reactions of his scribes and to Smith's own desire to seek divine confirmation of the veracity of his account. For Smith, the production was, in Davis's words, a “divine collaboration,” a process that is “interactive and divinely engaged” (p. 192). For believers and nonbelievers alike, this makes available a more nuanced and dynamic vision of authorship. The techniques for semi-extemporaneous speech that Smith had acquired in the preceding years could have facilitated this extended collaboration that Smith and those around him recognized as a divine event.The thesis of Visions in a Seer Stone is deceptively simple but no less revelatory for its simplicity. Davis provides a framework that deepens available naturalistic accounts of the process by which the Book of Mormon was created, enabling those who read the book as a nineteenth-century text composed through natural means to connect its content to the conditions of its creation. For readers who may want to consider the Book of Mormon within canons of American literature—as many believers and nonbelievers alike have sought to do for decades—Davis also makes it possible to locate the book alongside other long narrative works from the nineteenth century like Moby Dick or Uncle Tom's Cabin that were composed in concentrated bursts of literary creativity. Just as a whaling ship could be Melville's Yale and Harvard, so, too, could the religious and cultural milieu of the Connecticut River Valley and Burned-Over District have been Joseph Smith's. Moreover, Davis complicates received portraits of Joseph Smith by affording him some measure of agency within the Book of Mormon's creation. As Davis puts it in the epilogue, the story he tells “undermines the hagiographical accounts of Smith as an ignorant farm boy” (p. 194). Davis not only grants Smith his intelligence, creativity, and curiosity, but gives us a version of the story of the Book of Mormon's origins that charts the many possible sources through which Smith could have learned the skills to harness and channel a supernova of creative flourishing.In her epochal 1949 biography of Joseph Smith No Man Knows My History, Fawn M. Brodie celebrated the Book of Mormon as an American literary achievement. But, she cautioned, “any theory of the Book of Mormon that spotlights the prophet and blacks out the stage on which he performed is certain to be a distortion.”4Visions in a Seer Stone raises the house lights and illuminates the stage in a way that will hopefully inspire further work into the conditions under which the Book of Mormon came into existence.

Generally speaking, predictors and prognosticators provide good grist for the comedic mill. The future is notoriously difficult to anticipate, for all the best and all the worst reasons. And human beings too easily fall into the twin traps of (1) being sure that things will go more or less as they desire, or (2) being sure that things will go more or less exactly as they fear. History, however, often cuts an unpredictable figure as it dances its way through time. We pull down our barns and build bigger ones, muttering comfortably to ourselves about the wisdom of our long-term plans, but, staring into the darkness of our sleepless nights, we are all too aware of the anxieties that accompany us in our efforts. And when we anticipate badly, we mourn the tragedy of our mis-preparations, while wiser souls look on and chuckle at the comedy of our pretensions. We are all at the mercy of things to come we know not what.Scholars make predictions and plans as much as others do. Especially given the slowness of our most stable media—the months- or years-long wait involved in careful writing, peer review, production, and finally print—we scholars struggle to know what will matter to others in our field by the time our ideas today are finally in circulation. Will anyone care enough by the time this is out to review it? What discoveries will have emerged in the meanwhile to make this all irrelevant? What fashions and fads are coming that will distract potential readers from what I have poured my heart and my soul into? Perhaps such concerns feel less pressing for at least some scholars working on the Book of Mormon. They can count on perennial interest from the book's believing adherents. And yet, changing demands from larger cultural contexts, changing emphases from leaders of the various churches that embrace the Book of Mormon, and always-fluid forms of media consumption all shape even the most stable potential audience for work on the Book of Mormon.Fools rush in, however. The roundtable discussion that follows ventures out onto the shifting sands of the future of Book of Mormon studies. The 2021 issue of the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies included a roundtable discussion of the past history of the field of Book of Mormon studies, tracking important developments from its first stirrings in the 1870s up until the end of the twentieth century. The 2022 issue of the Journal in turn included a roundtable discussion of the present shape of the field, oriented by numerous new developments in the first decades of the twenty-first century. For this, the 2023 issue of the Journal, I have invited a fresh group of voices to join me in reflecting on the (relatively) near future of the field. What, given our various interests and investments, do we wish to see happen in Book of Mormon scholarship over the next half-century or so? So much has changed in recent years, and this has opened our collective eyes to any number of new possibilities for the discipline. Are there, then, identifiable ways we might best move forward—always aware, of course, of the possibility that we will make fools of ourselves in failing to decipher the future?Scholarly study of the Book of Mormon is, it has to be said, at a particularly interesting point in its development at present. More serious academic attention is being given to the volume (and especially to the book's actual content) than ever before. A variety of new styles of Book of Mormon research are on the rise, grounded in practical ways by the emergence of new research initiatives and institutions. A slowly increasing—but quite real—diversity of voices can be heard in the field. New questions have come into prominence, thanks especially to the intensification of political and ethical questions in recent years. Major changes in the larger field of so-called “Mormon studies” have shaped the styles of discourse in Book of Mormon studies in irreversible ways, changing the stakes of scholarship and altering the nature of its reception. A host of crucial questions press on those working in the field, as a result of all these developments. Where will all of this lead? Is the future bright or bleak, full of promise or bereft of inspiration?Each contributor to this roundtable discussion comes with their own disciplinary background: nineteenth-century American literature, Latter-day Saint history, Christian moral formation, Rabbinic Judaism, Latter-day Saint theology, and scriptural hermeneutics. Each has been carving out their own place in the field of Book of Mormon studies for some time, developing either implicitly or explicitly a vision for the future of the discipline. In bringing them all together, my aim has been to see if we might together sketch a fragmented picture of what might be coming—and of what might be done to meet what is coming in the best way possible.Because his deeply influential book By the Hand of Mormon (Oxford University Press, 2002) essentially gave rise to the current field of Book of Mormon studies, Terryl Givens has the first word in this roundtable. He calls, carefully, for a reconceptualization of what it means for the Book of Mormon to sit in the lap of “the Church.” What might the book be heard to say if it were read as a book available to all of Christianity, introducing a Restoration project into its midst without drawing the same sharp boundaries that it has often been used to draw? The future of Book of Mormon studies, especially given its increased saturation with theological concerns, may well prove to be oriented by a Book of Mormon that is understood to have a universal, rather than a particular, voice.Givens's proposal is followed by an essay by Avram Shannon, a student of historical Judaism and an important advocate for the study of the Book of Mormon in an ancient historical context. Looking back over the voluminous work of past scholars on placing the Book of Mormon in antiquity, Shannon asks how this kind of work might begin to look different in the future. He expresses less interest in making sure that overlooked topics begin to receive adequate attention than in stressing the question “So what?” in future work. It is one thing to put the Book of Mormon in conversation with ancient contexts, but it is another thing to ask what existentially significant consequences would follow from the interpretive consequences of good historical readings.Janiece Johnson, already a crucial voice in calling for more nuanced work on the history of how the Book of Mormon has been read, provides the next contribution to the roundtable discussion. In doing so, she systematizes the plea she has already been making both implicitly and explicitly elsewhere. Although study of the Book of Mormon's historical reception has been on the rise over the past several decades, Johnson points out problems in both the usual methods deployed and the standard scope assumed in such work. Rightly worried about how much scholars’ collective understanding of the Book of Mormon's interpretive history centers on institutional discourse and scholarly publications, she asks what might happen if Book of Mormon reception research were to shift its attention—and adjust its methods—to bring out the ways that everyday believers (and unbelievers) in the Book of Mormon have interacted with the book. Reception historical work has, it seems, only just begun.Woven into the history of reception but ultimately distinct from it is the infinitely fascinating material history of producing the Book of Mormon as a readable text. Elizabeth Fenton takes up the hitherto almost unasked question of what it might mean to bring Book of Mormon studies into conversation with the burgeoning field of book history. From manuscript sources and their preservation, through a host of historically important editions printed under widely varying circumstances, to intricate questions about the ways copies of the Book of Mormon are bound or circulate—the book history of the volume is immense but grossly understudied. The subject takes in, Fenton notes, a wide range of questions, including such thorny issues as the material conditions of literacy and the roles of differently racialized bodies in material production. But material questions are asked at every stage of production. What if, Fenton asks, we were to reflect seriously on the book-historical issues at play in various witnesses’ descriptions of the gold plates? Does it matter that they spoke of the source text as, for instance, something like a three-ring binder?One conversation in Book of Mormon studies stretches back into the twentieth century but is growing in intensity today. It concerns ethical matters, and this is the subject Daniel Becerra addresses in his contribution to the roundtable. With great care, Becerra analyzes the cross-pressured contexts in which the Book of Mormon is read with an eye to its moral implications. Given the increased scrutiny that politically charged topics are receiving in the Book of Mormon, but aware of the complexity of the social settings in which Book of Mormon scholarship occurs, Becerra urges wisdom in posing ethical questions about the volume. Especially important is his contention that the Book of Mormon's own conception of human flourishing should receive attention, so that future conversations about ethics and the Book of Mormon can become constructive and investigative rather than (as they often are today) combative and defensive.My own contribution concludes the roundtable discussion. Setting aside specific subjects and even specific approaches to the study of the Book of Mormon, I ask about how the largely dispersed field of research today might eventually—and hopefully soon—find a real center of gravity. While the field is proliferating rapidly, both in terms of sheer quantity and in terms of diversity of interests and approach, it has to be said that there is little real conversation going on within the discipline. What could happen to help build important points of scholarly consensus? My contention is that the next key event in the development of Book of Mormon studies will be the emergence of what I call whole-book readings—accounts of the volume's meaning that, without becoming merely tendentious or flattening the book into something one-dimensional, have real implications for almost every story and sermon in the Book of Mormon. Although there are reasons to be nervous about grand theories, their utility for propelling scholarship forward is undeniable.The prospects of Book of Mormon scholarship are good as we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century. So much of real value has been done, and so many signals of growing interest are visible. Whatever the future holds for the field, whether in the short or the long term, there is reason to think that good and interesting things are coming. With this roundtable discussion, the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies concludes a series. Over the course of three years, key scholars working in the field have gathered to reflect on where we have been, where we stand now, and where we might be heading. If the signs of the times are not deceiving us, the past at present is opening onto a promising future. May the field of Book of Mormon studies flourish!

In 1938, a new fish species was discovered in a South African hauler's trawl: the coelacanth. Five feet long and blue, it was soon (albeit wrongly) called a “living fossil”: a close relative of the first vertebrate that squirmed its way onto land millions of years ago. Samuel Morris Brown's Joseph Smith's Translation begins with the story of this living fossil as a segue to another: the religion of the Latter-day Saints, what Brown calls a “cultural coelacanth.”This religion, he argues, is an anachronism: it preserves elements of the pre-modern world even while it incorporates aspects of its modern milieu: Church members believe in angels and seer stones but dress their nineteen-year-old missionaries like modern, conservative businessmen. For a while in its history, polygamy and materialist philosophy shared a bed. Latter-day Saints therefore blend old and new, infuse modernity with antiquity. Brown's book examines early Church history and, in particular, the revelatory career of Joseph Smith, to show how and why this came to be true.This book is one of several Brown has written about subjects relevant to research on the Latter-day Saint tradition. Brown himself is a physician—he has more to do with the hospital than the university's ivory tower—but you wouldn't be able to tell by reading his work. Joseph Smith's Translation is a rigorous, articulate, well-thought-out exploration of its subject. It makes its claims carefully, organizes them logically, and defends them with evidence that he uses carefully and creatively.The book itself is divided into two parts. The first section (“Contexts”) analyzes the world of the early Saints and the ways it ran up against the emerging world of modernity around it. He has chapters on language, time, and identity here, each devoted to exploring the peculiar Latter-day Saint vision (or revision) of that context. The second section (“Texts”) dives into Joseph Smith's revelations themselves. Beginning with the Book of Mormon, progressing through Joseph Smith's translation of the Bible and the Book of Abraham, and finishing with the temple liturgy, Brown demonstrates the way these texts and practices weave together old and new, bringing about a translation of their own in the audience's lives. In this way, Brown's book, subtitled “The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism,” is aptly named. Its first half deals with worlds, and the second half, with words.Translation is a hugely important concept for Brown. He notices the double use of the word in Latter-day Saint tradition: texts are translated, yes, but bodies are too. The Book of Mormon was translated, but so were a few of the figures in it. For Brown, these two senses are connected. To translate is to connect past and present, to bridge the gap between human and divine. Translation in this sense is more metaphysical than linguistic, blurring the boundary between words and things. In Brown's words, translation as Joseph Smith did it is “a metaphysical mode of rereading and recreating the Bible,” and it was “concerned with transforming readers and bringing them into relationship with the ancients” (p. 7).Language is especially relevant to these ideas. Smith bristled at its constraints. He considered it fallen, imperfect, a prison, a far cry from the primeval speech of Adam and Eve (what Brown calls the “Edenic” instead of “Adamic” language, to include Eve as well as Adam). Language created confusion, contention, conflict. Instead of binding together cultures and times, it separated them. As a remedy for this confusion, Smith sought to recover Eden's language; he wanted to speak a pure speech untainted by the events of the Tower of Babel.Brown refers to “metaphysical correspondence” in his explanation of Joseph Smith's world and worldview. A worldview espousing correspondence sees causal connections in the affinities between the human and nonhuman, the heavenly and earthly, the divine and mundane. It was common sense for major parts of Western history, and versions of the correspondential worldview surrounded Joseph Smith in the form of ritual magic, freemasonry, and Swedenborgianism. Brown argues that Smith's revelatory project is deeply embedded in that worldview: for him, texts and humans depend on each other. Translation, as Brown sees it, is a mode of correspondence.Brown also uses the word targum to explain Smith's view of texts, human beings, and the relationship between them. A targum is an ancient oral text that transmitted the meaning of an ancient Hebrew text to a community that no longer understood the language. Though controversial, they eventually entered the written record and became almost scriptural in some communities. Since they therefore occupied the threshold between written and oral scripture, Brown follows the Swedish theologian Krister Stendahl in suggesting that Joseph Smith's translations are targums (p. 9). This is especially true because “Smith's targums were not primarily written texts [but] were, originally, speech acts” (p. 123). The Book of Mormon and other scriptures were dictated to assistants and amanuenses. The texts were spoken, not written, into being.For Brown, Joseph Smith's revelatory project sought to “[heal] the rent at the center of existence, the isolation that became central to the experience of late modernity” (p. 9). This alienation had everything to do with space and time. Moreover, it had to do with language and identity. He found himself in a world where language broke into pieces, where antiquity was distant, and where the individual's identity reigned supreme. The radical continuity of the Old World's Great Chain of Being was replaced by the radical discontinuity of competing newspapers and clamoring sects.A major source for Brown's thinking is the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. Taylor argues that the commonplace use of the word “secular” is misleading, that the institutions and attitudes of the modern world are difficult to analyze, and that simple sloganeering is inappropriate to describe them (p. 16). Crude dichotomies do not suffice here. Brown sees the world of the early Saints as a confirmation of this point: since they brought institutions like polygamy and conceptions like the Great Chain of Being from the pre-modern world into the modern one, early Saints blur distinctions between the two.Nevertheless, Taylor's conceptions of modernity—including the idea of the modern “buffered self”—inform Brown's analysis at every point. According to Taylor, the modern self is well-defined and under control. We are less open and more closed. There is less continuity between inside and outside, where there used to be more (pp. 83–84). Go back more than a few centuries, and the human was permeated by the nonhuman, the self by the non-self. Joseph Smith and the early Saints stood at the threshold between these two worlds and navigated the tensions there.One of the most interesting parts of Brown's book, and the most relevant one for present purposes, is his analysis of the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon is not merely a translation of the plates, he suggests, but also, and more importantly, a “translation” of the Bible. Nineteenth-century Protestant America was far removed from the landscapes, events, and cultures that produced the Bible. Georgia and Delaware radically differ from Galilee and Damascus. Epochs and oceans stood between the reader and the writer, and so the Bible, when it was read, was generally misread. For Brown, the Book of Mormon does for the Bible what the Bible couldn't do in a nineteenth-century world: it moves its content into a new context. One translates the other.Brown sees the Laban story in 1 Nephi as a central metaphor here. Nephi has to kill Laban to obtain scripture for his descendants. He sacrifices the curator of the text to preserve that text. Likewise, because it transgresses the bounds of Protestant Christianity for Christianity's sake, the Book of Mormon “kills” the Bible in order to save it. In this way, the Book of Mormon created continuity between the present and a remote past, continuity that could only be created by doing violence to the view that the Bible must remain sacrosanct but therefore inaccessible. That continuity was central to Joseph Smith's “corpus”: “[His] three main scriptural projects represent interdependent aspects of the same fundamental project: to transform the Bible by wresting it free of its temporal and cultural bonds” (p. 124).Brown's account of Joseph Smith's “Egyptian Bible” is just as striking as the texts it describes. He understands the “grammar documents,” interpretations of hieroglyphics Smith performed that aimed to develop a grammatical system, as a kind of glossolalia. These grammar documents would place a hieroglyphic character next to a phonetic transliteration and then an elaborate translation. Smith would interpret the hieroglyphics—inscrutable as speech in tongues—in the same way glossolalia was made intelligible.These phonetic transcriptions often resembled Hebrew and Greek words, but this is not a “novice mistake” (p. 214) in translation. It instead reflects Smith's confidence in the primeval unity of all languages, that they all retained at least a fragment of the Edenic tongue. The grammar documents are an attempt to recover this primeval language, and the idea of hieroglyphs were central to that project. To the nineteenth-century mind, hieroglyphs associated objects and names and seemingly eliminated the gap between language and what it tries to describe. It therefore held the promise, for Smith, of inching language closer to its origin, of restoring Edenic speech and writing.Over a span of more than a few pages, Brown investigates images of female power in these grammar documents and the Book of Abraham. In these texts, Egypt is discovered by a woman, Egyptus, who is the daughter of Ham's wife “Zeptah.” The character “Zip” (present in both names) combines with other transliterated glyphs to signify concepts relating to woman and womanhood. Smith's transliterations suggest the connection of these concepts to royal power and authority, ideas associated with priesthood for the early Saints. These and other threads in Smith's Egyptian Project suggest, for Brown, that “men exist with power parallel to that of women” (p. 221). Women and men, through marriage and parenthood, enact “a physical and metaphysical force” (p. 221) that blurs the distinction between priesthood and genealogy. This vision extends the traditional account of Abraham's covenant and renders it “a priesthood that could interconnect all of humanity” (p. 221).Brown also comments on the “astral” elements of the Egyptian Project. In it, the hierarchies of humans, gods, and stars overlap (p. 225). These stars are intelligences, and they belong to the hierarchies that organize space, time, and bodies. These hierarchies rule by way of both light and time: there is a correspondence between the light of a body's radiation and the length of its revolution. For the Egyptian project, these “orbits” are measured by cubits, which were understood among early Saints to derive from measurements of the human body. Brown sees this use of the cubit as evidence that the early Saints associated the human with the cosmic: “just as orbits measured human lives, so did human bodies measure orbits” (p. 226).The most remarkable aspect of Brown's book comes in his culminating analysis of the Nauvoo temple liturgy. The rituals that were enacted in Nauvoo in the early 1840s reiterated major themes of Joseph Smith's revelatory project. Not only did it place believers within the Adam and Eve story, one that “Smith had been rereading his whole career” (p. 244), but it did so by combining those stories with currents from Western esotericism and elements from Freemason rituals. For Brown, Smith's use of Freemasonry paralleled his work as Bible translator: with both, “he had destroyed it in order to make it a vessel for primordial truth” (p. 244). In another well-written line, Brown says that Smith came to these texts and rituals “with the confidence of a prophet wielding a sharp knife and a well-inked pen” (p. 243). Early Saints saw the Nauvoo endowment as a reversion to, not a perversion of, the primeval wisdom in Freemason practice.And what was the purpose of these rituals? Translation, Brown asserts, in both senses: “The temple ceremonies were the place where Smith sought to translate his human followers. The linguistic and human sense of translation merged in the Nauvoo liturgy as followers translated ancient words, which in turn translated the speakers themselves” (p. 246). This translation was an ontological transfiguration that enabled these initiates to withstand the presence of God, to become gods themselves. In this way, the birth of gods happens over and over. It never stops and never started. Translated by these rituals into a “time before time when God organized the world,” theogony “recurs perpetually within the temple endowment” (p. 249).Brown writes about the words and worlds of Smith and the early Saints. But what about Brown's words, Brown's worlds? Brown, like Smith, stands between one world and another: the book's biographical blurb describes him as “intensive care unit physician, medical researcher, and cultural historian.” This should not surprise. In a world where the educated generalist is becoming an endangered species, interdisciplinary insight risks going the way of the passenger pigeon. However, Brown—used to flitting from one world to another—is well-equipped to see ordinary material from extraordinary angles. The book, while not as explicitly connected with medicine as his 2012 book In Heaven As It Is On Earth, could only have been the work of a citizen of more than one world, a polymath.Brown's words are just as idiosyncratic as his worlds. While remaining professional, he uses images that convey a meaning all their own. When discussing the idea of metaphysics (which he poetically pairs with “physics”), he often uses the phrase “crackling with power” or some variant, and he occasionally uses evocative phrases like “interdigitate” or “tight coilings” to describe the way Joseph Smith mends the rift between worlds. Finally, as an image, prisons arise often in his writing. He speaks (referring to a famous Joseph Smith quote) of the prison of language, but he also applies penitentiary images to time, space, and identity.Brown also has a knack for recognizing patterns. He will connect, almost offhandedly, elements of scripture and history in ways readers generally will not anticipate. For instance, on one page, he takes just a few sentences to suggest that the flight of Lehi's family from Jerusalem in 1 Nephi structurally resembles the “flight” of Enoch's people from the world in the Book of Moses (p. 182). Another aside points out that the stones of Moriancumer (the name Brown insists on using for the brother of Jared), as both a physical trace of God's finger and an instrument in translation, have everything to do with writing (pp. 38–39). These connections open the mind and stir curiosity. One cannot help seeing a parallel, a kind of typology, between Smith and Brown. Both discern invisible meanings in antique texts. Both connect past and present.Joseph Smith's Translation is also Samuel Brown's translation, and it's an excellent one.

This volume is the first sustained scholarly investigation of Joseph Smith's translation projects considered together rather than discretely. It deploys several methods, such as historicizing translation in early American religion, theorizing Smith's unique relationship to translation and translation practices, bringing feminist perspectives to the question, and examining the relationship between the Bible and Smith's translation output, to name a few.The editors, Michael Hubbard MacKay, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid, group the collection into four parts: two on the Book of Mormon; one on the Bible; and one for the Book of Abraham, the “pure language” project, and the (forged) Kinderhook plates. This review focuses on the first two sections as most pertinent to Book of Mormon studies, although a few examples from Parts III and IV relating to essays in the first two groups illustrate the cohesiveness of the collection as a whole.MacKay, Ashurst-McGee, and Hauglid draw on themes that emerged from a 2014 conference at Brigham Young University on translation (from which many of the volume's essays also developed). They note the difference between Smith's revelations, usually dictated to another person and employing his own prophetic voice, and his translations, which tended to center around an artifact of some kind (plates, papyri, the Bible, etc.) and recovered the voices of ancient prophets. As such, these translations “contested traditional Christian conceptions of authority more than his revelations” because “the hermeneutical authority of priests and preachers could be supplanted by a prophet recovering the sacred past directly” (p. 9). In this upending of traditional authority, the ability to translate contributed to hierarchies in the early history of founding Latter-day Saint traditions. As the editors point out, Smith was called “a Translater [sic], a Revelator, a Seer, and Prophet,” and although he named other persons to the last three positions, he “never appointed anyone else to the office of translator. This title and role he reserved to himself” (p. 7).In his contribution to the volume, Christopher James Blythe places the latter-day-identified gift of translation in scriptural contexts of the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Book of Mormon, as well as among other spiritual gifts in the Restoration movement. He also observes the hierarchies that emerge in considering the “gift” of translation. Blythe demonstrates how Smith and his early followers diverged from typical Protestant rejection of continued spiritual gifts and expanded the notion of Pauline spiritual gifts. The Book of Mormon, however, adds to its list of spiritual gifts in Moroni 10 “the interpretation of languages,” and through careful reading, Blythe shows that Limhi's people conflate the words “interpret” and “translate” as they seek someone who can read the engravings they have found (p. 41). In this discussion of the ability to translate, the Book of Mormon names one who can translate a “seer.” Not only does the Book of Mormon add translation to the milieu of Pauline spiritual gifts through intertextual supplement, but it also connects the biblical Urim and Thummim of the priests to the seer's “interpreters” (pp. 42–43). Blythe reconstructs the hierarchy of these gifts from the Book of Mosiah (which concludes that no one can have a gift greater than that of a seer), but also from the history of translation among other figures in early Church history. Oliver Cowdery and W. W. Phelps both aspired to the gift of translation but experienced it only in small doses. Although Brigham Young adopted the titles of Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, as Smith's successor, he dropped the appellation of Translator (p. 53).In the volume's introduction and in Blythe's chapter, translation is a defining feature of the Restoration movement, one that revives ancient text and distinguishes its practitioner as holding the highest of gifts. Jared Hickman's chapter, however, pushes these distinctions much further, beyond their historical context into a speculative attempt to surpass metaphysical boundaries. Hickman provides a brilliant analysis of the etymology of “translate” to recover its earlier meaning, “to transport.” Translation does not merely re-render texts into accessible languages; it moves bodies through time and space, like the translation of Moses, Elijah, or, potentially, Alma in the Book of Mormon. Hickman's proposal reverberates in David W. Grua and William V. Smith's chapter later, in Part III, which addresses the distinction between John the beloved disciple tarrying or being translated away. For Hickman, translation or “bringing forth” not only renders text and does not merely point to the potential of physical transport, but it also signals “the metaphysical translation that it itself ultimately envisions: the winding-up of history in an American New Jerusalem built by Native peoples” (p. 75; emphasis in the original). This fulfillment will require a re-mediation accomplished by ceding the Book of Mormon to indigenous peoples to use as they see fit—effectively allowing them to retranslate. In that spirit, one might recast the title of Hickman's chapter as “Toward a Theory of the Book of Mormon's Theory of (Its Own) Translation.” For instructors, I can vouch that between its excellent close readings and conceptual audacity, this essay teaches well to college students.The remaining two chapters of Part I emphasize the interdependence of material practices and social dynamics in Book of Mormon translation. Michael MacKay details the care and anxiety that Smith, Martin Harris, and others felt to pursue not just spiritual practices of translation but conventional scholarly work as well. The process of copying characters from the plates to bring to academic authorities to verify the translation shows how the translation team was invested in legitimating their efforts. Smith would recall this experience of reproducing characters and attempting to identify or study the source language in his work on the Book of Abraham as well, as Brian M. Hauglid and Matthew J. Grey show in their respective chapters in Part IV. Smith and Harris seem to have understood the scholarly and “supernatural aspect[s]” of the translation to be “processes that could produce the same results,” foregrounding the networking involved in the translation (p. 101). In their discussion of the Kinderhook hoax in Part IV, Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst-McGee make the case that Smith used traditional translation methods rather than revelation to make sense of the plates. Essays in Parts III and IV thus take up these questions of social and academic conventions, demonstrating that Smith's methods were not consistent across translation projects.Amy Easton-Flake and Rachel Cope also highlight the networks of translation in a chapter that, by itself, is worth the price of the volume. Methodologically, they revisit and reconfigure entries to the historical archive to make clearer women's contributions to the translation of the Book of Mormon. In their treatment, Lucy Mack Smith's history changes from a biography of Joseph Smith to a communal history of the entire family. A new look at the loss of manuscript pages rewrites the story of Lucy Harris that we have inherited, revealing her as a generous supporter of the translation and possibly much less to blame than Martin Harris for the loss of the manuscript. Easton-Flake and Cope note that Mary Musselman Whitmer was the first witness of the ancient plates after Smith received them and the only one to have seen them without Smith's supervision. Her experience also brings into relief the extended domestic labor necessary to pull off the translation, down to the detail of discussing the yarn Whitmer may have twined to sew together the manuscript pages. The chapter further emphasizes that it is a mistake to reduce Emma Hale Smith's involvement in translation and the Church's founding to her role as Joseph Smith's wife. Easton-Flake and Cope offer new readings of revelations and historical accounts that posit Hale Smith as the primary scribe for a large portion of the translation, rather than a temporary fill-in until someone else could be found. They suggest that the dynamics and practices between Joseph Smith as translator and the scribes were developed first with Hale Smith and point out that her assignments as scribe and compiler of hymns were understood as distinctly male at the time, transgressing expected gender boundaries. This chapter effectively re-interprets the sources, providing a performative reminder that translation is always a subjective interpretation and is subject to and probably in need of hermeneutic revision.Part II also focuses on the Book of Mormon, and its first two essays, by Samuel Morris Brown and Ann Taves, respectively, revise the traditional models of Joseph Smith's translation mechanism. Brown's suggestive title, “Seeing the Voice of God,” pushes against the “visual-verbal model” for translation that understands Smith to have read the words directly through the aid of the seer stone (p. 140). Brown compares this traditional model to the modern use of a teleprompter, and Taves observes that that model “makes Smith a reader of the text rather than a translator” (p. 175). Taves, however, compares Smith's experience to that of Columbia professor Helen Schucman who, from 1965–1972, recorded in shorthand what she said was the voice of Jesus narrating several didactic and poetic works later published as A Course in Miracles. Brown and Taves in fact both propose a more expansive notion of how the translation process worked, one in which Smith “knew” the words more than seeing or hearing them, as Taves puts it. Smith could have maintained a “considerable degree of control over the experience, and even the ability (as needed) to shift into a visual modality in which he was able to see words spelled out” (p. 186). The defining feature behind Taves's claim is that Smith (and Schucman) produced a complex text but had a “sense that the words they [were] dictating [were] not their own” (p. 171). With their interest in the phenomenology of generating the words of the text, both Brown and Taves look for clues in the details of Smith's subjective experience of receiving revelations. Additionally, Brown reads evidence from the Book of Mormon's self-understanding of its translation. The text's interest in this question is ambitious in its conceptual range—from Moriancumer's stones as proto-interpreters akin to the Urim and Thummim to the Book of Mormon's presentation of “truths that . . . [evade] the grasp of human language”—and it underscores the limitations of its own medium as text, in addition to making the case for a medium of translation that may not have been grounded in text and language (p. 161). Brown thinks through multiple panoramic visions described in the Book of Mormon to suggest that “Smith was similarly watching the Book of Mormon before putting it into words” (p. 157). (In Part III, Thomas A. Wayment and Haley Wilson-Lemmon share a similar account of such a vision in Smith's project translating the Bible.) To account for the multi-vocal character of the Book of Mormon, Brown speculates whether Smith inhabited the view of the various narrators represented in the text, always returning to the claim that “Smith was speaking but not reading” (p. 167).Brown and Taves trouble the visual-verbal model in compelling ways, and their analyses raise new difficulties. While the visual-verbal process of translation problematically prioritizes reading over translation, Taves's model manages a text-centered approach, moving from the speaker knowing the words to put down to (in Schucman's case) recording them in shorthand or (in Smith's case) to dictating them for transcription. This model essentially dispenses with the question of translation but offers an intriguing if still inexplicable version of how the text may have been created. Brown, too, shakes loose from the prescriptive nature of the visual-verbal model in exciting ways, but in swinging the pendulum away from a focus on text, he does not account for the hundreds (or more) examples of textual structure and intertextual relationships across the Book of Mormon. The fact is that these two essays allot greater agency to Smith in the process of dictation, leaving open the question of how much agency to ascribe to the text of the Book of Mormon itself, a question of increasing methodological importance in the field of Book of Mormon studies. (David Golding makes a similar inquiry from a different angle in his Part IV chapter on pure language, pointing to the Book of Mormon's repeated concerns with language, its transmission, and its potential for corruption.)Richard Lyman Bushman also raises these questions in his chapter in Part II. Where several of the earlier chapters (as well as the general cultural conversation surrounding the Book of Mormon) wrestle with the supernatural aspects of Smith's translations, Bushman approaches the Book of Mormon as a volume that “begs to be read as book history” (p. 188). He catalogs how invested the text itself is in the quotidian and mundane details of its creation. The Book of Mormon's obsession with plates (Bushman notes that plates are mentioned over a hundred times, twice in the heading of 1 Nephi alone, as well as in the first chapter) registers as a uniquely Lehite feature, with very little comment on plates in nineteenth-century culture. Translation, however, appears to have more pride of place, at least at first. The “high gift” of seership needed to translate the Jaredite plates, as other chapters discuss, seems to carry over to a sense of Smith's unique gifts as well. And yet, Bushman observes that Moroni may have translated the Jaredite plates with no special discussion of the gift required. Likewise, for Smith, “gradually the gift became routine,” such that he “seemed to feel that translation was something others could do” (p. 203). In this respect, Bushman traces a trajectory of translation that parallels recent developments in critical bibliography or book history. The field began with deep interest in the materiality of texts, with the material features themselves as the object of study. This is not unlike fascination with the mechanics, practices, and material features of Smith's translation of the Book of Mormon. Over time, however, book history has expanded from a topic of study to a method. What might the parallel to such a method be for the study of the Latter-day Saint tradition? Rosalynde Welch's Ether: A Brief Theological Introduction (2021) is one of many recent works that highlights the Book of Mormon's call for translation as a practice of engagement and care with texts. Perhaps the theological turn in Book of Mormon studies is one form of translation as methodology.In his contribution to Part II, Grant Hardy explores the reception experience—the appeal, psychology, and implications—of translation itself. In the case of the Book of Mormon in particular, he considers what a translation has to offer when compared to modern commandments or revelations, such as those found in the Doctrine and Covenants, and he asks what changes when the original record from which the book was translated (the gold plates) is missing. To give just one example of his answers to the latter question: On the one hand, claims of translation buttressed by the existence of a material text tantalize with expectations of historical, archeological, or other kinds of evidence that may corroborate the Book of Mormon. On the other hand, however, a standalone translation—without access to its underlying urtext—leaves itself open to literary analysis on the text's own terms. The Book of Mormon's derivation from an ancient text from which it is cut off puts just enough distance between its origin and the reader that it straddles historical and fictive literature, leaving room for interpretation that modern and doctrinal directives do not.Producing Ancient Scripture stands as a landmark work of scholarship in Book of Mormon studies and for the study of the Latter-day Saint tradition more broadly, the best representation of current work on Joseph Smith's translation that we have. As these teasers illustrate, the multi-vocal nature of this volume shows how varied and productive the topic of translation is, opening more avenues for study rather than seeking to produce immutable conclusions. The editors and contributors are to be commended for their research and for the dialogue they achieve across chapters, sections, and the book as a whole. Through their work, translation emerges as a signature Latter-day Saint trait, whether it be in the context of spiritual gifts, social networks, intellectual practices, or visionary or voiced experiences. Translation marks Joseph Smith's and the Book of Mormon's self-understanding, inviting ever more interpretation and production of ancient scripture.

reaction. There was something about pacifists that got under the patriots’ skin that went beyond their worries about Friends passing on information to British lines. This could have been explored further. Godbeer also highlights other ways Revolutionary Americans, particularly Quakers, understood peace that went beyond issues related to warfare and killing, what peace studies scholars call “positive peace” or I would call “right ordering”—that is, notions of ordering that proponents believed would create the best of all possible worlds, even if it took violent means to achieve it or even if it led to unintended violent outcomes. After the war, Henry got into the maple syrup business, which nearly ruined him, but it was driven by his vision of filling the backcountry with Quakers and other “respectable citizens” who would “build orderly farming communities and treat local Indian nations with respect” (215). Godbeer correctly ties this venture to antislavery—the maple syrup was intended to replace slave-produced Caribbean sugar. But this was also a profoundly complicated articulation of peace as well, one that contained within it the seeds of something more violent—the Federalist and Jeffersonian campaigns for Indian “civilization” and, later, Indian removal. Not coincidentally, even these violent programs were couched in the language of peace. Overall, this is a worthy book for readers interested in learning more about the everyday trauma of life in Revolutionary America. It has an obvious appeal for those interested in Quaker studies, but it deserves a wider reading. As a work of biography, it is exemplary and a repudiation of an older notion that historians should avoid this genre in favor of more traditional narrative forms. Godbeer succeeds in bringing to life the humanity of his protagonists. We see them as they were: imperfect, suffering, living as we do within a set of contradictions, and shaped by the context of their time.

Perhaps the last thing that can be decided about a history is when it begins. I might choose any number of origin points for the emergence of what I'll here call the recent literary turn in Book of Mormon scholarship. Acknowledging that any act of intellectual periodization is artificial, I'll begin this account with the arrival nearly ten years ago of a pair of scholarly articles, Elizabeth Fenton's 2013 “Open Canons: Sacred History and American History in The Book of Mormon” and Jared Hickman's 2014 “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse.”1 The two pieces, published in quick succession in major journals of American literature, and alike in critical sophistication, seemed to signal that the Book of Mormon had at last breached the walls of English departments in the American academy. The twin appearances of Fenton's and Hickman's articles were heralded by a brace of review essays within the next two years, including Joseph Spencer's “The Self-Critical Book of Mormon: Notes on an Emergent Literary Approach” (2015) and Laura Thiemann Scales's “A New ‘Mormon Moment’?: The Book of Mormon in Literary Studies” (2016).2 These essays remarked on both the innovation and the constraining parameters of Fenton's and Hickman's subtle, non-polemical readings of the Book of Mormon and predicted a flowering of such academic treatments among scholars of American literature.3Indeed, the predicted swell of literary interest in the Latter-day Saint scripture was already being realized in the development, by Fenton and Hickman, of the volume Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon, published by Oxford University Press in 2019.4 The much-anticipated collection featured seventeen essays on the Book of Mormon by scholars hailing from a variety of Americanist fields and religious or non-religious identities. The ample representation of non-Latter-day-Saint contributors from English departments was significant given that previous secular treatments of the Book of Mormon had largely originated in the fields of religious studies or history. That the Book of Mormon was now attracting readers from secular literary disciplines could be seen as a kind of sea change in the book's status within the academy. Equally significant in this regard was Fenton's spearheading of a 2017 graduate seminar at the University of Vermont focused exclusively on the Book of Mormon, perhaps the first of its kind at a secular university. Several of the papers produced in this seminar were published the following year as a collection in JBMS, volume 27. Graduate seminars often serve as harbingers of the discipline's future directions and interests.Americanist Approaches has had a follow-on effect on the field as alumni of the volume have gone on to deepen their engagement. Notably, Peter Coviello's 2019 Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism and Fenton's 2020 Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel include extended chapters on the Book of Mormon.5 If the research trajectories of Fenton and Coviello are exemplary, we are likely to see Americanist Approaches bear additional fruits as other contributors integrate the Book of Mormon into their investigations of the American literary landscape.These, then, are the major landmarks in the still-emergent literary turn in Book of Mormon studies. To be sure, many other fine literary or rhetorical treatments deserving review have appeared during the past decade, but I've set them aside in this essay in order to retrace the political and theoretical arc of the strand I've just laid out.6 It is a truth near-universally acknowledged, post-Foucault, that even groundbreaking interventions have their institutional and disciplinary histories, their enabling and constraining parameters. The advent of academic literary study of the Book of Mormon in its present form was made possible by the institutional and intellectual rise of so-called Mormon studies in the early 2000s. In a story ably laid out in these pages by Patrick Mason, the interdisciplinary (though heavily history-oriented) project of Mormon studies grew out of the ashes of the New Mormon History, propelled by the towering Richard Bushman and Jan Shipps, burnished by Terryl Givens, and brought into a second generation by scholars like David Holland and Laurie Maffly-Kipp.7 These scholars and others working in this mode have produced crucial treatments of the Book of Mormon, supplying historical context, reception history, and, it should not be minimized, insightful readings of the text itself.In the last category, Grant Hardy's 2010 Understanding the Book of Mormon, examined in this issue of JBMS by Kimberly Matheson, must be recognized as a singularly important precursor and foundation for literary Book of Mormon criticism.8 Hardy's book demonstrated the possibilities of a narratological approach to the book and, perhaps more importantly, worked as a kind of exegetical handbook to the Book of Mormon's notoriously difficult narrative, allowing non-Latter-day Saint literary scholars reading the book for the first time to get up to speed on the basics of its construction and the arc of its historical narrative. Hardy's book peppers the footnotes of Americanist Approaches. Royal Skousen's critical text project of the Book of Mormon, assessed in this issue of JBMS by Nicholas Frederick, was another crucial exegetical precursor, providing literary scholars with a respected scholarly edition of the text to read and, no less usefully, a respectable source to cite in footnotes.9The collective engagement of Mormon studies with the Book of Mormon established two important methodological paradigms. First, religious studies treatments developed the standard scholarly practice of provisionally bracketing religious truth claims in academic discussion of scripture and theology. Though not without certain analytical drawbacks (discussed further below), this kind of methodological bracketing allowed scholars to bypass the sectarian polemics over the Book of Mormon's authorship and historicity that dominated earlier non-LDS treatments. Second, religious studies scholars established basic formats for scholarly examination of the Book of Mormon, notably the modes of “symptomatic reading” and the related “hermeneutic of suspicion,” by which texts are read against the grain of authorial intent or overall narrative purpose in search of anomalous textual features. Reading these features in light of larger cultural contexts can expose suppressed dimensions of meaning or illuminate how a text signifies in a given place and time. These modes of reading had been well-established in English departments for decades, but religious studies scholars first applied them to the Book of Mormon. Because of the disciplinary silos that divide the academy, however, most Americanist literary scholars did not encounter these historical studies of the Book of Mormon as they appeared in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. The foundational works by Bushman, Shipps, and Hatch are mostly absent from the footnotes of Americanist Approaches, despite the clear resonance of religious studies methods in literary treatments.Knowledge is produced not only by epistemologies but also by institutions and their resources, and it's worth noting the role in this story of the summer seminars in Mormon studies founded by Richard Bushman in 1997, led in various combinations by himself, Claudia Bushman, and Terryl Givens, and hosted at Brigham Young University from 2006 to 2015. Graduate students, among them Jared Hickman, were brought to Utah to learn the methodological ropes, wallow in the archives, and build social relationships among young scholars interested in the same questions. Hickman's career thus provides the social and intellectual bridge for the Book of Mormon to cross from religious studies programs into English departments, trailing methodological norms and critical modes ripe for re-examination.By 2012, then, a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature like Elizabeth Fenton could pick up the Book of Mormon, understand it as a potential object of cultural criticism apart from polemical debates about authorship, dip into an ongoing scholarly conversation about its historical context and reception history, and find numerous resources to untangle its challenging content. That is, a scholar like Elizabeth Fenton could obtain the basic resources to critically investigate the Book of Mormon if some impelling factor introduced the book into her critical consciousness and neutralized its clinging air of disrepute. Fenton relates a comic account of her first encounter with the Book of Mormon from two young missionaries on Halloween, involving a case of mistaken trick-or-treat identity and an awkward moment at the doorstep.10 Fenton's graciousness soon dispelled the social discomfiture of the moment, but the fact remained that a certain professional awkwardness clung to the book as it sat on her shelf through her graduate schooling, despite her personal and professional interest in the text as a cultural phenomenon. As she puts it, “it is, simply and frankly, a challenge to write about someone else's sacred text. . . . There is a vast body of scholarship on the text, but it mainly assumes an audience that has grown up with the book and believes it to be a holy scripture. I wanted to enter this conversation as a scholar of early US literature and as someone who loved the book immediately upon reading it but did not believe it to be a sacred text.”11 Early career scholars must navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of negative controversy and banality, managing to say something simultaneously new and acceptable about a literary text. The task is made more delicate by the incommensurable sensitivities of the various readerly communities—in this case, orthodox Latter-day Saints and scholars of American literature—who might take interest in one's scholarship. One strategy for threading this needle is to apply a leading-edge literary lens to a little-read text, in the hope of producing something new, acceptable, and attractive to gain just the right amount and right kind of public attention. These professional incentives direct the currents of scholarship and supply the content of professional conferences and publications.Thus the availability in 2012 of a scholarly literature, a critical edition, and basic reference material on the Book of Mormon was a necessary but not sufficient condition for a book to command scholarly attention. A vital sexiness factor is required for a scholar to devote years of her career to its examination. As it happened, simultaneously with but distinct from the rise of Mormon studies, a new critical project had made its way into English departments: post-secular critique. It illuminated the Book of Mormon in an attractive new light.During the first decade of the new millennium, a cohort of diverse scholars in anthropology, philosophy, and history began to re-examine secularism: its origin and rise in Western societies and Western imperialism, its role not principally as enemy but as judge of religion, and—most crucially—its ongoing, often invisible function in organizing the epistemic foundations of public life.12 The central concern of post-secular critique, at least at first, was to rebut the celebrated “secularization thesis”: the sociological claim, ascendant through much of the twentieth century, that modernity brings the steady advance of an enlightened rational worldview, progressively liberating societies from the shackles of religion in public and personal life. As Elizabeth Fenton observes, the Book of Mormon itself comments specifically on a version of the secularization narrative, albeit from a critical rather than triumphal perspective, as it both predicts and seeks to stem the retreat of faith among modern Anglo-Europeans.13 By the turn of the millennium, however, the validity of the secularization story had come under scrutiny as the predicted demise of religion failed to materialize, with the proliferation of the “spiritual but not religious” phenomenon and the rise of religiously inflected political and cultural battles.Post-secular critique worked to overturn the reductive progress narrative that had structured the dominant story of an inevitable secular telos for enlightened states. In effect, post-secular critique “desacralizes” the desacralization thesis itself, challenging the claim that religion should or would retreat before the advance of enlightened modernity. It did so in part by showing secularism to be a contingent historical formation in its own right, serving the political and epistemological interests of Western imperialism, not a natural or intrinsic arrow embedded in historical time itself. The appearance of the Book of Mormon in the nineteenth century, well into the modern era, scrambles any simple story of religion's retreat and embodies the scrappy persistence of religious forms. The Book of Mormon thus stands in a divided position under the sign of the secular. On the one hand, the Book of Mormon laments the godlessness of an American society that, as it happened, immediately mobilized to expel the book and its readers from polite society.14 On the other hand, and however unwillingly, the book joins forces with secularism through, for example, its radical opening of the canon and its observation that amid the sectarian fervor of the Second Great Awakening, religious belief was being relativized, fragilized, and ultimately optionalized.15The aim of post-secular critique is not merely to reverse or revise the sociological predictions of secularization theory: it is to critically re-examine the structuring logic of secularism as a tool of imperialism. It investigates how secularism, in its capacity as a conceptual contraption for evaluating ideas, bodies, and practices, has functioned not so much to progressively banish religion as to divide acceptable “good religion” from unacceptable “bad religion.” So classified, acceptable religious movements are ushered into the charmed circle of secular belonging, while the bad are stigmatized and excluded with the rod of state power. As Nancy Bentley puts it, secularism “operates as a diffuse cultural umpire, calling balls and strikes as various phenomena come into view.”16 In the American version of this process, the “winner” was religion that learned to align itself with the rational over the revealed, the liberal over the hierarchical, the spiritual over the ritual, and the progressive over the eschatological. The secular imaginary awaited a blessed future defined not necessarily by the total absence of religion, but by the benign presence of well-behaved religion—for example, liberal Protestantism. This critical account of secularism as primarily a channel for the direction and exercise of power casts, for the post-secular observer, a new light on religion: badly behaved religionists, “Mormonites” among the most nefarious, now appear as underdog vectors of resistance to a secular ideology aggressively seeking cultural and political hegemony. The story of the Latter-day Saints traces the force field of secularism in the negative, precisely because the Saints were anathema to a rising secular worldview. A text like the Book of Mormon could now be seen as a populist voice of dissent—the kind of thing an English professor might want to write about.When post-secular critique arrived in English departments near the end of the 2010s, it prompted among Americanists another re-assessment of the field. The discipline had famously debated the legitimacy of the literary canon as an instrument of social exclusion in the 1980s and 1990s; by the turn of the millennium, formally diverse texts from all strata of American culture populated the syllabus and the seminar. Critical judgment of literary merit had largely been bracketed in favor of describing a text's reflection of and intervention within fields of power, in a methodological shift that paralleled the bracketing of truth claims in religious studies. But post-secular critique now forced Americanists to confront the degree to which an outmoded, pre-critical secularization narrative still structured the study of American literature. Scholars became suspicious of literary histories that implicitly celebrated the retreat of religion from American literature. Such accounts tended to begin with dour Puritan fathers, continue through the blossoming of Melville and Whitman, and end with the formal and ethical free play of the secular postmodern, wherein the arts replaced religion as the site of spiritual authority.Instead, scholars of literature began to seek cultural seams between “dogmatic religiosity on the one hand and dogmatic secularism on the other,” texts where flickerings of religion and spirituality persisted, albeit in fractured, provisional forms.17 As critic Tracy Fessenden describes it, post-secular literary criticism surveys “the spiritual jumble sale from which the project of reenchantment takes its materials, repurposing what serves from depleted forms of religion in a creative spirit of bricolage.”18 The Book of Mormon is an appealing object for this mode of cultural criticism, which is both disinclined to censure the text for its unpolished literary surface and ready to celebrate its cultural marginalization, its anti-elite energies, and its radical eschatology. In this, post-secular literary treatments of the Book of Mormon differ markedly from polite liberalizing historical treatments of Latter-day Saints that attempt to sanitize and tame early Church history, de-emphasizing its controversial teachings (above all, the teaching of humankind's material theosis) and practices (above all, plural marriage). On the contrary, these “embarrassing” aspects of Latter-day Saint tradition are precisely what draw the interest (and the sympathy) of the post-secular reader. One might say that post-secular critique finally created the conditions wherein Moroni's anguished hope for the Gentiles’ reception of the Book of Mormon could be realized: improbable as it seems, the “weak things” of the Book of Mormon had at long last “become strong unto” the learned.19 Strong enough, at least, to read as a genuinely compelling object of inquiry.But if the Book of Mormon had acquired a gleam of sexiness, an obstacle still remained to its full introduction into American literature syllabi and journals. Although overt discussion of the Book of Mormon's historicity was bracketed in academic discourse, the fact remained that inclusion of the book in an American literature seminar amounted to a tacit claim of modern origin and authorship. As Hickman and Fenton described the resulting dilemma, “the Americanist scholar disinclined to resume the allotted role of philosophe discrediting a text sacralized by a religious community probably just won't read [the Book of Mormon]; and the Americanist scholar keen to resume that role is likely to produce an ungenerous and shallowly topical reading presupposing the moral and aesthetic thinness of the text.”20 Scholars had little interest in stepping back into the secular liberal role they were explicitly critiquing, that of the lofty—though ever so civil!—debunker of revealed religion. They had even less interest in kicking the polemical hornet's nest that had characterized so much Book of Mormon debate to that point.Here again, post-secular thought offered a new way of looking at the controversy surrounding the Book of Mormon's position in historical time: Reduced to its crudest form, the central question asks whether the Book of Mormon is a modern or an ancient text. Concepts of temporality lie at the heart of both the secularization thesis and its critics’ objections. Fessenden observes that “what is hardest to throw off of the secularization narrative's pressures, it appears, is the patterning of secular time. The secularization thesis keys the progressive emancipation of individuals and groups to movement forward in time.”21 The secular imaginary adopts an essentially modern model of time, envisioning a liberated future, free of superstition, to be achieved by incremental progress down a yellow brick road of days, years, and decades stretching into the distance toward the enlightened future. One must occupy a single point on this time line, traveling steadily forward with no skips or halts; the future is made by the human action that fills each increment along the way. This notion of linear time drastically limits the way the Book of Mormon's historicity can be modeled: like a marker on a board game, it must be placed in a single square, definitionally excluding all others. This conceptual limitation produces the binary shape of so much Book of Mormon polemic: a secular model of time essentially forces any reader to become either a defender or a debunker. (Thence proceeds also the irony that some arguments for the book's ancient origin, though intended to counter secular debunkers, are themselves built on the secularizing presumptions built into linear models of time. In fairness, the Book of Mormon itself contains traces of the time line model, for instance, in Mormon's careful year-by-year editorial notation of the reign of the judges in Zarahemla through the books of Alma and Helaman, a chronology that resets from year one at the sign of the birth of Christ recounted in 3 Nephi. However, Mormon's historiographical deployment of linear time exists in the Book of Mormon alongside various theological, literary, and meta-historical theories of time, which are particularly prominent in the small plates of Nephi and in the writings and editorial projects of Moroni.22)Post-secular critique attempts, among other efforts to contest the secular, to unseat—or at least to destabilize—the linear model of time. One effect is a whole new gameboard of possibilities for fathoming the Book of Mormon's historicity. And the Book of Mormon itself eagerly contributes to this project. Scholars of the post-secular have produced some of the most compelling readings of the book's looped and folding temporality. The Book of Mormon's distinctive approach to time, as Hickman and Fenton argue in their important “Introduction,” offers the nineteenth-century moment into which it emerges as “an eschatological prism through which the past can be seen to be seeking its fulfillment in the present and the present finding its fulfillment in the past.”23 The narrators of the book themselves privilege as its most important context the secularizing American society into which it would arrive, a society that, they claimed, would be propelled into the eschaton—the (perhaps literal!) explosion of any and all time lines—precisely by indigenous voices from the past that “speak unto [modern readers] as if ye were present.”24 Because the Book of Mormon explicitly posits a nineteenth-century reader and evokes a nineteenth-century cultural context, scholars can simply follow the book's own lead and invoke American contexts without endorsing any position on its authorship—or so goes the argument made by Fenton and Hickman and implicitly taken up by most recent literary scholarship on the Book of Mormon. It's important to note that this position is quite distinct from the “bracketing” of truth claims that is standard in religious studies treatments, even if the effect similarly excuses the critic from taking a position on authorship. Where bracketing requires the reader to temporarily set aside some of the text's claims for itself, this approach doubles down on the book's most radical claims for its own historicity. The Book of Mormon's “wormhole temporality”—another memorable Hickmanian phrase—produces a kind of methodological loophole through which the book can at last evade the toxic polemic surrounding its origins and find place in the seminar and the syllabus.25One point is worth underscoring here, which I believe is underemphasized in Fenton and Hickman's otherwise very fine apologia for their Americanist approach. If the Book of Mormon itself admits an Americanist contextual reading, it does so only on very specific terms. In particular, it denies the legitimacy of any contextual nineteenth-century Americanist reading that adopts a strictly secular model of time—a basket that can include both standard debunking salvos in the historicity wars and other, putatively neutral or even sympathetic readings of the book that may be uninterested in the controversy around its origins. That is, the book denies its status as a standard artifact of modernity understood as a stage in American cultural progress toward secularism.26 Rather, the Book of Mormon admits a modern context only inasmuch as the reader understands the book to function as a prismatic lens that refracts the modern into its messianic strands of past, present, and future. This temporal operation occurs at many levels of the text, most centrally the theological, with its unembarrassed assertion of a proleptic American Christianity fully developed and practiced centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ “as though he had already come among them.”27This means that the literary critic must eschew conventional literary historicizing methods, which are implicitly secular, when treating the Book of Mormon, if he wants to claim that he is performing a surface reading of the book “with the grain,” rather than a symptomatic reading that works (even if implicitly) against the book's own grain. To be sure, I do not believe that symptomatic Americanist readings of the Book of Mormon employing conventional (i.e., secular) historicizing methods and temporalities are in breach of any academic standard of rigor or civility—though such readings are likely, of course, to be discounted by believers in the book's ancient character. However, a conventional contextual reading of the Book or Mormon does place its author, however unwillingly or unwittingly, back in the familiar position of the modern rationalist laying bare the pretensions of scripture in an act of high (and higher) criticism. Because of the theoretical commitments of post-secular critique, this is a particularly uncomfortable place for scholars of the post-secular to sit in relation to the Book of Mormon—but it is very difficult to avoid.As a result, literary scholars have tended to explore the book's idiosyncratic temporality along two tracks, laid by the twin foundations of Fenton's 2013 article and Hickman's 2014 article.28 The first is the Book of Mormon's metatextual preoccupation: its fascination with the physical and subjective processes of its own production and the circumstances and effects of its translation and publication, its frequent invocation of and direct address to readers, and its examination of its own status as a sacred text interacting with other texts, together with the factors that create or determine meaning within them. Fenton's groundbreaking “Open Canons,” for instance, argues that the Book of Mormon pulls back the canonical curtain to reveal the incomplete, imperfect sausage-making of scriptural history—a candor absent in the Bible—and thus destabilizes modern notions of time premised on linearity and incremental completion. “Through its frequent and fraught depictions of record keeping,” Fenton argues, “the book highlights the impossibility of compiling an accurate account of the past even as it offers an alternative history of the Americas. . . . Smith's text . . . reframes American Christianity as a cyclical rather than linear phenomenon.”29 In this vein, subsequent literary studies of the Book of Mormon frequently take up the book's metatextual recursiveness—“plates within plates and writing about writing,” as Fenton puts it—and find that it produces a kind of openness in the text, provisionalizing both its own authority and traditional Protestant ideas about the sufficiency of scripture, and cracking open the locked-down secular time line that underwrites both.30The foundational influence of Jared Hickman's article “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse” is evident in the prominence of empire and race as analytical lenses in the literary treatments that followed in its wake. Hickman builds on a revisionist account of the advent of secular modernity, one that privileges neither the rise of science (as does Auguste Comte) nor the roiling early modern transformation of religion itself (as does Charles Taylor), but rather the encounter between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The encounter with entire civilizations and peoples previously unknown in Europe, unaccounted for in the Bible and unassimilated by providential histories, produced an epistemic shock that fragilized and relativized the anchors of the pre-modern European worldview. The result was the transformation and reconsolidation of religious belief; subjectivity; knowledge production; geo-, eco-, and bio-politics; and, of course, temporality—a suite of epistemic foundations that we know as modernity. Under the new sign of the imperial secular, European colonists racialized Indigenous bodies as expendable and stigmatized Indigenous belief and kinship as superstition. Secularism assumed its role as “cultural umpire,” to again invoke Nancy Bentley's phrase, determining which bodies, beliefs, and families would be admitted to the modern order.31Against this revisionist post-secular backdrop, Hickman positions the Book of Mormon with impressive subtlety. His central intervention is to link its vexed and self-deconstructing racialization of the Lamanites to the book's eschatological temporality, crystallized in the Indigenous-built New Jerusalem that would usher in Christ's return to the Americas. The Book of Mormon renders the catastrophic violence of biblical apocalypse in racial, imperial terms that rebound against

That the Book of Mormon was written “for our day” has become something of a trope amongst Latter-day Saints. The saying is a riff on Moroni's first contribution to the record. There, after ending the account of his own people (Mormon 8:9, 13), Moroni turns his attention to a future time when the record “shall be brought forth out of the earth” (Mormon 8:16). He goes on to list the condition prevailing at its appearance—“It shall come in a day when . . . ” (Mormon 8:26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32)—before revealing that his own knowledge of that “day” is revealed: “The Lord hath shown unto me” (Mormon 8:34). Clarifying that this “Lord” was “Jesus Christ,” Moroni expands: He “hath shown you unto me, and I know your doing,” therefore, “I speak unto you as if ye were present” (Mormon 8:35). From this showing and speaking comes extrapolation of the writing as “for our day.”Of course, for the saying to have any rhetorical force, “our day” must be contrasted with “some other day(s)” for which the book was not written. First appearing in 1830, Moroni's repetition of “it shall come in a day when” suggests Joseph Smith's as the ultimate “day” referred to. If this is the case, how long can that “day” be stretched? “Our day,” in 2022, is radically different. Can the claim that the book was written “for our day” cover both days? Any responsible attempt to answer this question must return to the text.The Book of Mormon presents itself not only as a thousand-year history of ancient inhabitants of the American continent, but as (in the main) two distinct texts. The first, comprising First Nephi through Words of Mormon, is presented as a series of first-person accounts, while the second, from Mosiah to the volume's end is (in the main) an account from one person. Each text covers around five hundred years, and each justifies its own composition. The agenda for the first text is set by Nephi, its initiating and most prominent author, in these ways: it is written to “persuade men to come unto . . . God” (1 Nephi 6:4), and it is written in response to a “commandment of the Lord” to record “the ministry of my people” (1 Nephi 9:3). Later, Jarom adds two more: that a “genealogy may be kept” (Jarom 1:1), and for “the benefit of my brethren the Lamanites” (Jarom 1:2). In other words, in the Book of Mormon's first text, there is no indication that the authors are in any sense writing for a “day” that could be called “ours.”As to the second text, its inception is ambiguous. Mormon, its writer, was living through the end of his people's recorded history, and it was this, more than anything else, that prompted his record: “It hath become expedient that I . . . should make a record of these things which have been done” (3 Nephi 5:14). This record was to run “from the time that Lehi left Jerusalem, even until the present time” (3 Nephi 5:15) and to be sourced from “the accounts which have been given by those who were before me” (3 Nephi 5:16). Its expediency he explained by an appeal “to the will of God, that the prayers of those who have gone hence . . . should be fulfilled” (3 Nephi 5:14). While it is clear that Mormon was writing in response to long-said prayers from his predecessors, it is unclear if it was, like Nephi's contribution, at the Lord's direct command, or at his own initiative as the end of his world coalesced with his reading of the received record. Either way, the prayerful tradition he articulated is most clearly expressed in the book's first text. There, to cite one example, Enos “did cry unto God that he would preserve the records; and he covenanted with me that he would bring them forth unto the Lamanites” (Enos 1:16). Mormon's creation of the book's second text—the implication is—was inspired by his reading of its first. As with the first, there is no indication that Mormon's writing of the second was undertaken with “our day” in view.A return to the text, it appears, suggests that the passage from Moroni may have been misapplied. As the title page makes clear—“Written to the Lamanites . . . and also to Jew and Gentile”—the book self-presents as written for people, more than for days. This makes all the difference. A book written for a particular “day” is immediately limiting. Outside of that “day,” its utility is compromised. A book written for people, on the other hand, can be useful wherever there are people. In the face of changing conceptions of relevance, it remains relevant. Michael Austin's Buried Treasures: Reading the Book of Mormon Again for the First Time convincingly demonstrates that the Book of Mormon is this kind of book.Originally written as a series of blog posts for By Common Consent, Buried Treasures details Austin's first cover-to-cover reading of the Book of Mormon in thirty years. The blog dynamic drives the book's tone. In Austin's own words, the book's forty-four essays, which work linearly through the Book of Mormon text, are “serious” if not “scholarly” (p. 4). Both these words, however, need qualification. If with “serious,” one imagines solemn, stern, and sedate, then this collection is not that. Instead, the essays are short and punchy, shot through with a playful earthiness that the staid would not allow. This earthiness both discloses the book's seriousness—Buried Treasures is a serious book because Austin takes the Book of Mormon seriously—and disqualifies it from the “scholarly” moniker. In such disqualifications, “scholarly” functions as a synonym for “academic.” Shorn of the conventions and trappings of a traditional academic publication, Buried Treasures is tremendously accessible.Yet, in other ways, informed by Austin's own years of training and teaching in English Literature, Buried Treasures is deeply scholarly. This is evident from the get-go as Austin, in the first paragraph of the first chapter (on 1 Nephi 1–5), compares the Book of Mormon's “metafictional self-referentiality” (p. 7.) to that found in Laurence Sterne's eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy and Miguel de Cervantes's seventeenth-century Don Quixote. Similarly, in his second-to-last chapter (on Ether), Austin reconfigures the narrative of Homer's Odyssey in order to illustrate the sense of narrative disjuncture one should feel in encountering the book of Ether. In both cases, the references are in passing and assumed. If you know, you know. This is a continual feature. Austin's reflections are peppered with nods toward the likes of Mikhail Bakhtin (p. 100), Ron Chernow (p. 170), Mere Christianity (p. 108), and the Iliad (p. 200). While in most cases, the reference is unexplained, “getting it” is in no way essential to grasping the point. At the same time, the references are not gratuitous.Consider chapter 22 (on Mosiah 29). There, Austin's basic point—“that every form of government outside of the Kingdom of God has, not only problems, but fatal flaws” (p. 135)—is buttressed by two others: (1) that “the Book of Mormon inverts the Bible's transition from judges to monarchy” (p. 135); and (2) that this, by virtue of suspicion of then-president Andrew Jackson, “would have been significant to readers in 1830” because it “highlight[ed] a contemporary argument” by “revis[ing] and reinterpret[ing] the very biblical passage at the heart of the controversy” (p. 134). The passage was 1 Samuel 8:11–18 and the controversy concerned the divine right of kings—a political philosophy espoused by James VI of Scotland and I of England in both his Basilikon Doron (1599) and The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598). It was also woven into the fabric of his authorized translation of the Bible. In listing a number of figures on each side of the continuing debate, it is not necessary to know the context of their relevance—that, for example, John Locke's 1689 Two Treatises of Government is mainly a rebuttal to Robert Filmer's defense of divine right, Patriarcha (1680)—to grasp that Austin does. Grasping this is one way that the scholarly nature of the project is revealed. If one is in the know, it deepens the discourse; if one is not, Austin's frequent fleeting allusions function as an invitation to further knowledge.For the interested, the nature of the Buried Treasures project gives one more to work with than is typical. While Austin reports that he has “made very few changes” from his original blog posts “beyond some light copyediting and removing a handful of very dated references to political and cultural events of that year” (pp. 3–4), there are a couple that are significant. One is in Austin's description of the thrust of the project itself. In the initial post introducing the project, Austin reported he was reading a facsimile of the 1830 text because he intended to do “a rhetorical study” and wanted “to get a sense of what readers in the early 1830s saw in the Book of Mormon . . . to try to understand how it functioned rhetorically as a book at a very specific point in time.”1 As the removal of dated references to 2016 suggests, that was easier said than done. While, as I read it, Austin's first four essays meet the initial brief, only a further two of the remaining chapters do (chaps. 22 and 23), for a total of six. Thus, while the other thirty-eight chapters also attempt “to understand how [the Book of Mormon] function[s] rhetorically as a book at a very specific point in time,” that time is 2016 and, to a fair degree, 2016 America. This, it must be emphasized, is an observation, not a criticism—one that underscores Austin's own observation of what Mormon was up to in the Book of Mormon's second text: Mormon was trying to understand something about the world he lived in. No matter how hard we try to do otherwise, we must ultimately write only from our own perspective. That's how perspectives work. Furthermore, all historians must use history to understand something about their own present, and Mormon was no different. (p. 240)Neither, for that matter, is Austin.In this light, it is no surprise that the selection of an 1830 facsimile edition is reframed in the introduction to Buried Treasures. No longer is its primary purpose transportation to 1830 America, but to what that represents: “experienc[ing] the text with the fewest possible filters” (p. 3). It is for this reason also, I suspect, that Austin's original “list of companions” for “the journey”2 drop out. Of five originally mentioned, only one—Grant Hardy's 2010 Understanding the Book of Mormon—is engaged by Austin in any of the essays. While acknowledging previous work in the introduction to Buried Treasures, Austin admits: “I didn't read any of it.” The reason his companions were left unread: “I didn't want to spend the year responding to other people's experiences with the text” (p. 3). Austin was after his own experience. The result was “a deeply personal experiment upon the word” (p. 4). In the act of reading the text, getting a sense for what early readers saw was overpowered by having the experience early readers had.The experience that both Austin and the Book of Mormon's early readers had was of the book speaking to their present situation. In this way, Alexander Campbell's early criticism—that “every error and almost every truth discussed in New York for the last ten years” had been reproduced in the Book of Mormon, deciding “all the great controversies”3—while hyperbolic, can be re-read in new ways. Indeed, with similar hyperbole, in Austin's hands, the Book of Mormon can be said to address “every error and almost every truth discussed in the Bloggernacle for the last ten years,” deciding “all the great controversies.” Neither statement is true, but the underlying premise has merit. The book is relevant. Campbell's original rendering is clearly derisory and dismissive, yet it unwittingly conveys a perceptive truth: those who accept the Book of Mormon as scripture experience it as speaking to the “great controversies” of their own soul. Unfettered from the need to address a particular “day,” the book speaks to people across both time and space. It can, in Austin's words, “bear multiple readings from multiple perspectives without exhausting its treasures” (p. 5). Austin himself demonstrates this as he introduces readers to typology, type-scenes, etiology, Deutero-Isaiah, narrative perspective, historiolatry, and political readings of scripture. In these ways and more (for example, his discussions of race, religious freedom, polygamy, sexuality, and the prophetic), Austin's engagement can function as an accessible entry-point to a deepening of one's own encounters.Austin's only comment on the book's historicity is a further example. There, without taking sides he encourages a more honest reading: If we want to believe that [the Book of Mormon] is anything like what it claims to be, we have to acknowledge that its narrators have the same limits that all human beings have and that its narrative complexity does not (because it cannot) give us unfiltered historical or theological truth. . . . If we want to believe that the Book of Mormon is a real historical record, we have to acknowledge that it has the same kinds of biases and blind spots that historical records always have. This is what it means to be historical. (p. 102)One of the biases of the Book of Mormon, he suggests, is that it “leaves very little room for sincere disbelief” (p. 143). While Austin does argue the point convincingly, uncritically rallying the popular reading of “Moroni's famous promise” (p. 144)—that the “truth” of the Book of Mormon is found in sincere prayer, with the associated implication that anyone who does not find it true has not prayed sincerely—threatens to undermine it. It also seems at odds with his experience of the book as “a profound and complex text full of sophisticated narrative devices” (p. 4). Without getting into what it might mean for the text to be “true,” it is worth noting that a close reading of Moroni 10:1–7 suggests that knowledge of its truth is founded upon engagement with the text and certainly not from prayer alone, however sincere. This, in skeletal form, can be seen in the process of reading informing reflection that results in reception. That is, as envisioned by Moroni, before a prayer is said, the text should have been engaged deeply enough for one's soul to be stirred. In this way, asking God “if these things are not true” (Moroni 10:4) finds equivalence in Alma asking the Zoramites “Is not this real?” (Alma 32:35). In both cases, the answer is found in prior experience.Having engaged in “a deeply personal experiment” (p. 4), Austin discovered that the Book of Mormon is “a profoundly human record of people struggling with their relationship to God and to each other” (p. 5). At its core, it is this that makes the Book of Mormon continually relevant, and it's in continually bringing this out that Austin's book finds its own relevance. In sharing treasures from his engagement with the Book of Mormon, Austin's Buried Treasures equips and encourages readers to uncover their own.

We do not know precisely when Emma Smith first read the newly printed Book of Mormon, nor can we recover her thoughts upon reading the opening lines of the work she helped produce. The archival traces of such events do not survive. We can, however, infer a few things. When she read about Nephi, his goodly parents, and his rebellious brothers, she was reading a second opening to the narrative. For Smith, scribe to the earliest portions of the text, the Book of Mormon was a book with two beginnings—one printed with the book and one remembered from her earliest scribal work on that text before that portion was lost or stolen.In attempting to imagine Smith's unique reading, it is a useful reminder to know that the Book of Mormon was (and is) read differently by a variety of individuals with differing backgrounds or experiences. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, members of Community of Christ, and other people of faith who claim the Book of Mormon as a part of their faith heritage read the book any number of ways. Similarly, an increasing number of scholars turn their varied methodological attentions to the text. Thus, Smith's reading may have been unique, but that she read the text based on her background is a universal experience. The Book of Mormon, like every text that draws a great many devoted readers, lives a kind of fragmented life. This fragmenting of the way the text is read ironically mirrors the manuscript from which the book was produced. The unfortunate storage of the original manuscript in the Nauvoo House cornerstone for about forty years in the nineteenth century resulted in only about 30 percent of the text surviving, and much of that in small pieces. A close reading of the Book of Mormon invariably involves confronting—and learning from—its fragmented nature.Like Emma Smith's own reading of the Book of Mormon, the topic addressed in this paper has two beginnings—two ways of explaining the same event. First, in 1984, Mark Hofmann—not yet known as a forger of documents—contacted a relative asking for a loan of $45,000. He told his relative of an opportunity to purchase from the Special Collections of the University of Chicago two leaves of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon, which, if resold, would net a significant profit. About the same time, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints purchased two leaves of the Book of Mormon from the University of Chicago Special Collections. The suspicious timing of the acquisition of these leaves mirrored the suspicious nature of the text. For those who have analyzed the leaves, the two leaves exhibit several textual anomalies, including peculiarities in handwriting, misspellings (including the glaringly obvious misspelling of “Morman”), scribal mistakes, and the nature of the paper itself. These oddities and Hofmann's connection to these leaves produced legitimate questions surrounding the authenticity of the documents. George Throckmorton, who had analyzed dozens of other Hofmann forgeries, turned his forensic eye to these two leaves and could not himself verify their authenticity. Subsequent Book of Mormon scholars have largely ignored the two leaves ever since, with one directly calling them a Hofmann forgery.A second beginning, or a second way of telling the same story: In the 1920s, the William Rainey Harper Memorial Library at the University of Chicago acquired two leaves of the Book of Mormon manuscript from an unknown source. Throughout the twentieth century, they were held within the university's collections, undergoing routine internal archival processes. In the early 1980s, a member of the Church, who was also employed by the university's Joseph Regenstein library, saw the leaves and—with the library administration's permission—contacted the Church about the possibility of acquiring them. The sale was finalized in 1984, with the director of the special collections commenting to Church leadership that he remembered them in the collection as early as the 1950s. As news of the pending sale reached the dealer's market, Mark Hofmann used the opportunity to extract $45,000 from an unsuspecting family member who would not closely inquire after the specifics of the sale. George Throckmorton, after an inconclusive forensic test, proposed that the two leaves undergo additional testing. The forensic tests showed that the ink was inscribed on the paper between 1825 and 1835. The leaves mirror the physical characteristics of other leaves of the original manuscript, though questions about the text remain.In this paper, I argue for a simple thesis: The two leaves acquired by the Church in the 1980s are genuine leaves from the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon, although they have heretofore been dismissed or ignored by scholars who were aware of their existence. To make that argument, I will draw from several fields of inquiry and offer multiple pieces of evidence. I will address provenance, physical characteristics, and textual evidence to show that the leaves align with other authentic leaves of the Book of Mormon. Then, by way of conclusion, I will explore a single historical implication derived from the leaves’ authenticity. That conclusion, necessarily tentative, illustrates one way the original manuscript might better inform historical inquiry into the process of the Book of Mormon's translation. As the argument in this paper winds its way to a conclusion, however, I also subtly set forth a crucial meta-thesis: that authenticating documents necessitates an in-depth and multi-tiered approach. Any fixation or reliance on any single methodology contributes to a potential fragmented approach to the analysis of historic manuscripts.Ultimately, however, a completely holistic approach to the text of the Book of Mormon and the manuscripts on which it is based is an impossibility. No matter how multi-tiered an approach might be, the “read” of that text will be fragmented. Scholarly humility is therefore necessary when approaching the Chicago leaves (or any manuscript, for that matter). The more a manuscript is studied, the more additional data points will surface—any of which might prove to upend years of work, disrupting long-held assumptions or conclusions. This fragmented reality is seldom discussed within scholarship, but confronting this reality might yield better-informed conjectures about the nature of this text.The work of authenticating documents includes identifying conclusive proof of forgery. One incontrovertible fact of forgery displaces all other pieces of evidence to the contrary. So often, however—and certainly in this case—the evidence is far from definitive.1 A hyperfocus on any single piece of tentative or inconclusive evidence of forgery—what some might consider anomalies of the text—ignores a more comprehensive approach. The Chicago leaves offer a reminder for those engaged in the larger field of Book of Mormon studies, well beyond work on establishing the text: no single methodology is paramount, particularly for such a complex text. While the original manuscript comes to us in pieces, the Book of Mormon is much more than the sum of those individual parts. Fragmenting and fragmentary interpretations of the text of the Book of Mormon are not substitutes for the text itself. The Chicago leaves—or better, conclusions about those pages—are based on individual (and therefore limited) perspectives brought to them.Just as Emma Smith's reading of the Book of Mormon was affected by the two beginnings she had experienced for the volume, so, too, will different people approach the Chicago leaves with their own unique experiences. But the Chicago leaves are either forgeries or they are not. It is my hope that this paper will not only lay out the evidence of the authenticity of the Chicago leaves, but will also show the challenges of a multi-tiered approach, reminding scholars of the Book of Mormon that the search for truth is never as simple as it seems.In the twentieth century, the University of Chicago special collections processed and held two pages bearing text from the Book of Mormon. These near proximate leaves are nonsequential—the first bears text of modern-day Alma 3:5–4:2, and the second bears text from Alma 4:20–5:23.2 In November 1984, the University of Chicago sold these two leaves to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. University of Chicago Library staff member Susan Rugh, a Latter-day Saint, had become aware of the items and, with the permission of library administration, contacted Church authorities. Archivists at Chicago had undertaken their own analysis of the leaves in the early 1980s and felt that the handwriting matched other verified samples from Oliver Cowdery, the principal scribe for both the original and the printer's manuscripts of the Book of Mormon. The archivists therefore assumed that this portion of Alma was part of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon. With that conclusion in hand, library administrators considered that the leaves belonged with the bulk of the extant text, held by the Church.In 1989, a published history of the Mark Hofmann affair associated the Chicago leaves with the recently convicted forger. Shortly after the Church took possession of the leaves, according to this published account, Hofmann asked a cousin to supply him with money to purchase “two pages of the original Book of Mormon manuscript, housed at the University of Chicago Library.”3 While some might assume Hofmann forged the Chicago leaves, given his robust career as a forger during this time, it is known that Hofmann was desperate for money and he could have simply used the actual transaction between the University of Chicago and the LDS Church to acquire money for an entirely separate transaction. And while Hofmann's connection to the leaves should give scholars pause, the internal memos and documentation of the Church's purchase safely remove the forger from the acquisition. To assume an actual relationship between Hofmann and the leaves in any way ignores documentation at both repositories. Such a connection between Hofmann and these Chicago leaves demands an impossible scenario.Not at all implausible is the scenario where these two leaves would have been separated from the larger original manuscript to end up in Chicago. Joseph Smith deposited the manuscript of the Book of Mormon into the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House in 1841.4 The day he did so was the last documented time when the original manuscript was fully extant. A little over forty years later, when the manuscript was removed from that same cornerstone, the eyewitnesses were almost universal in describing the loss affecting the entire manuscript—entire leaves were missing, brittle, or flaking, and some of the writing was illegible. But the depletion of the manuscript would continue. Lewis Bidamon, the second husband of Emma Hale Smith, removed the remnants of the manuscript from the cornerstone and began to distribute them to various visitors to Nauvoo. The majority of the manuscript was lost due to the decades-long storage and subsequent dispersal. Between one-quarter and one-fifth of the manuscript is extant, with at least seven distinct chains of custody for surviving collections of leaves and at least five instances where it is known that a surviving leaf was at one time extant but no longer survives.5For many, the value of the manuscript lay not in its content but in its connection to the past. On the one hand, to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (today, Community of Christ), or other denominations that trace their history to Joseph Smith, the original manuscript was an artifact that connected them to one of the most significant founding events of the restoration. For these believers, the manuscript was part of “treasures deposited,”6 tracing a journey with larger sacred echoes: the gold plates and the original manuscript were both deposited in and retrieved from a stone box. But on the other hand, even those who held no belief in the Book of Mormon as scripture, such as the late nineteenth-century caretaker of the manuscript (Bidamon), recognized the manuscript's place in Americana and the history of the movement Smith began. By the late nineteenth century, with an ever-increasing number of local, state, and national historical societies, the idea that two leaves of the manuscript found their way from Bidamon to the library of the University of Chicago was entirely plausible.7Readers, collectors, or other owners of the fragments brought to them a variety of backgrounds and interests. To own a leaf of the Book of Mormon's original manuscript brought with it a connection to the past. Whether that connection was faith-filled or solely of historical interest, the fragmentation of responses to the material artifact reflected the already fragmented way that different groups viewed the origin of the Book of Mormon. Scholars today are no different, of course. The varied backgrounds, trainings, and experiences of experts analyzing the original manuscript not only allow them to bring different things to the table, but they also lead them to walk away with different meanings. Linguists, historians, archivists, and paleographers will find new insights that will reveal different aspects of the manuscript to the whole. This fragmented approach is thus not only insightful, but in fact critical as scholars move forward in studying the Book of Mormon.One reason some experts raise questions about the authenticity of a manuscript is a lack of documentable provenance or custodial history. This, however, is only partially the case with the Chicago leaves. They were definitively part of the holdings of the University of Chicago's library and then the Church History Department for most of the twentieth century. The provenance was literally added to the manuscript. Following serious theft in their special collections around 1965, the university began marking the manuscripts in their collection with an invisible security mark: “ICU” (standing for “Illinois, Chicago University”).8 This mark was meant to be clearly visible under UV light, and indeed, the verso of each of the Chicago leaves bears this security tag (see figures 1–3).Further, internal records of the Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints detail the acquisition of the leaves from the University of Chicago in August 1984.9 At the time of the transaction and shortly thereafter, staff members of the Church History Department also documented the University of Chicago Library's institutional memory. Robert Rosenthal, head of the university's special collections at the time of the purchase, oversaw the manuscript collections beginning in 1951 and ultimately brokered the sale of the leaves to the Church. In the wake of the Hofmann forgeries and murders, Church Historical Department archivist Glenn Rowe contacted Rosenthal to inquire about the provenance of the Chicago leaves. According to Rowe's notes, Rosenthal stated “that he could assure [the Church Historical Department] that the document had been in [the University of Chicago's] collection since the 1920s.”10Besides Rosenthal's personal memory, other documentation of the University of Chicago's ownership exists. According to Daniel Meyer, who, until his recent retirement, served as director of special collections and university archivist, Rosenthal “had an active personal interest in Mormon history.”11 Rosenthal told internal staff as well as the Church at the time of transfer that “the two leaves of the Book of Mormon had been a part of the manuscript collections at the time he first assumed the position of Curator of Manuscripts, Archives, and Lincolniana.”12 Rosenthal was very familiar with the leaves and had in fact taken an early interest in them. He had even tried, unsuccessfully, to determine their history prior to their acquisition by the University of Chicago. Retired archivist Sem C. Sutter believed, along with Rosenthal, that the leaves were originally part of a collection belonging to Charles F. Gunther, a Chicago document and historical artifact collector, before coming to the university. Gunther's vast holdings of historical memorabilia are known to have included documents from Latter-day Saint history, and were acquired by various repositories after Gunther's death in 1920.13 The institutional memory, not to be easily dismissed when authenticating documents, is thus important, despite being only one piece of the twentieth-century puzzle about the University of Chicago's holdings of these leaves.The institutional memory that places the leaves in the collection by the 1950s pre-dates Hofmann and eliminates the realistic possibility that they are Hofmann forgeries. Internal records of the University of Chicago Library strongly place the leaves within their collection by the 1920s. The University of Chicago call number assigned to these leaves provides a clue about the time line of original acquisition by the university. The call number, which is still present on the protective case housing the two leaves, is “BX 8623 f.A1 (No. 207 ub).” The University of Chicago Library began assigning Library of Congress call numbers after about 1912, meaning that these leaves were either acquired after 1912 or were given that call number after that time.14 While the Library of Congress call number could have been assigned at any point after acquisition, the parenthetical “No. 207” sheds some light on the most plausible period of acquisition. “No. 207” is a manuscript catalog number, which was assigned by archivists who processed various manuscript collections. The manuscript numbers were originally assigned sequentially as items were acquired or processed by the university, and four of the numbers from 200 through 211 are assigned to items acquired from 1925 to 1930, strongly suggesting that it is during this time in which the numbers in that sequence were originally assigned.15 Further confirmation comes from the fact that the preserved card catalog referring to the Book of Mormon leaves, which is still held by the University of Chicago Library, matches the type and format of other cards produced by the library from roughly 1923 to 1929.16These clues and an understanding of the leadership and staff of the University of Chicago Library led Daniel Meyer to believe that the leaves were acquired no later than 1928. Ernest D. Burton was the university's library director until he died in 1925. His position was vacant for three years before being filled by M. Llewellyn Raney, a forceful personality who prioritized manuscript acquisition. According to Meyer, if Raney had acquired the two leaves after his ascension to this position, he almost certainly would have publicized the acquisition.17 Since no such internal record or external press coverage exists, Meyer infers that the acquisition most likely pre-dates the start of Raney's tenure in 1928.Meyer further believes that the University of Chicago acquired the leaves from a donation. When the University of Chicago sold the leaves to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the special collections staff at the Regenstein Library conducted a search within their internal records for any correspondence relating to their own acquisition of the leaves; they found none. Meyer points out that if the leaves had been purchased in the 1920s, correspondence would have been generated and preserved.18 That there is no such correspondence indicates that the leaves were likely donated to the library.The ownership of the leaves from the time they left the custody of Bidamon, who removed the remnants of the original manuscript from the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House in 1882, to the time they were acquired by the University of Chicago is unknown. It is here that provenance becomes somewhat murky. But while it is true that there is not a complete chain of custody tracing the Chicago leaves from Bidamon to the University of Chicago, this is far from unusual for historic manuscripts.19 The robust provenance placing the Chicago leaves at the University of Chicago by the twentieth century strongly attests to its authenticity—or at least to it not being forged after the 1920s.20Provenance, therefore, offers a crucial piece of the evidence for the Chicago leaves’ authenticity. It firmly establishes that the Chicago leaves are not Hofmann forgeries or in any way connected with his transactions. But provenance is only one tool on which scholars might draw. And even the concept of provenance complicates our views of historic manuscripts. While a manuscript's provenance establishes custody, ownership, and authenticity, archivists have recently raised questions about foundational theories of provenance. Archivists look to the “social and technical processes of the records’ inscription, transmission, contextualization, and interpretation, which account for its existence, characteristics, and continuing history.”21 It is increasingly clear that “provenance is an ever-changing, infinitely evolving process of recontextualization, encompassing not only the initial creators of the records, but the subjects of the records themselves; the archivists who acquired, described, and digitized them (among other interventions); and the users who constantly reinterpret them.”22 Provenance therefore clarifies details of the manuscript but also changes how that manuscript is viewed by each generation. Investigating and sharing provenance is both informative and transformative. The interpretation of the manuscript becomes fragmented as provenance is considered and reconsidered. This very article, for instance, will affect the “ever-changing, infinitely evolving process of recontextualization” of the Chicago leaves. Therefore, provenance is not only a tool for analysis, but it shapes the way that analysis is carried forth. Scholarship directed toward these leaves contributes to the fragmenting of their interpretation. Thus, on the one hand, establishing provenance is vital, but relying too heavily on it fragments a holistic analysis of the text. Other things from the scholarly tool kit will assist us in better understanding the text.To further assess the authenticity of the Chicago leaves, I will quickly examine several of the physical characteristics, including paper type, paper size, relationship of paper and ink, and handwriting. Although far from exhaustive, such analysis develops a sense for the leaves as artifacts. Additional scholarship will undoubtedly uncover further aspects of the physical leaves, but what follows illustrates how such an approach places the leaves within the larger whole.In 1989, forensic document examiner George Throckmorton examined the paper and ink of the Chicago leaves alongside (1) a leaf of the original manuscript with a provenance traceable through Ruth Smith, and (2) a few “control” leaves of the manuscript with different chains of custody. Throckmorton measured the thickness and analyzed other elements of the paper from the Chicago leaves. His report was not definitive, stating that the paper analysis “provided more questions than answers, and therefore proved to be inconclusive in determining their authenticity.”23 To be clear, an “inconclusive” result is in no way proof of a forgery. Rather, the comparison between paper types proved less useful than hoped. The Chicago leaves and the other leaves underwent very different conservation procedures over many decades, which materially affected some aspects of the paper.24 It is thus unwise to draw definitive conclusions from a comparison of the paper composition of the two Chicago leaves with that of the other leaves of the Book of Mormon manuscript.Throckmorton's report and the history of the conservation force us to recognize that ambiguity and inconclusive analyses are a reality with these two leaves—or for any artifact, for that matter. Proving that historical manuscripts are authentic is far more challenging than the uninitiated might expect. A typewritten letter obviously was not created in the eighteenth century, and no nineteenth-century manuscript is written with a ballpoint pen. But in detecting forgeries, those “mistakes” of the forger are easily recognized. The multi-tiered approach to document analysis is key when methodically studying unknown documents. It also forces one to remember that not everything about a manuscript can be discovered by a single individual. Scholars and experts in their field contribute to the overall knowledge accumulated over time. No one has the final word, and a single discovery can overturn years of consensus. Fragmented approaches are neither systematic nor conclusive, but they do contribute to the overall understanding of the manuscripts.The two Chicago leaves measure at their largest 12¾ × 7⅛ inches. The full height of the Chicago leaves matches exactly that of intact leaves from other portions of the original manuscript held by the Church History Library. It is impossible to determine what the width of the Chicago leaves was in their original state, since the right edge of each recto has been either trimmed—likely due to a conservation process—or damaged. Since the known leaves of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon have varying sizes, a match of one dimension of the various leaves’ sizes could be a coincidence, but that these Chicago leaves match exactly the height of leaves from just a few chapters later in the translation is noteworthy.Wear or damage on the two Chicago leaves matches the pattern of wear or damage on many of the subsequent leaves, also from the book of Alma, among the extant pages of the original manuscript. On the recto of each Chicago leaf, the upper right portion of the page is missing. There is also some damage to the lower center of the manuscript, including a worn-out hole. The similarities of wear or damage on the pages of surrounding text in the original manuscript show a continuity of damage throughout much of the book of Alma (see fig. 4). This continuity matches the supposition that the entire manuscript suffered damage as a whole, while stored as a set, and that each individual leaf suffered unique damage when separated from the larger stack of pages. While the damage to the Chicago leaves is not surprising, that they mirror similar damage to the other leaves long since separated from the collection would indicate that they were originally part of the same stack of pages placed in the cornerstone.In his 1989 report on the Chicago leaves, Throckmorton concluded that the comparison of the paper and ink of the various leaves raised no legitimate questions about the Chicago leaves’ authenticity.25 However, he recommended further testing to determine the date of the ink and paper. This testing, called Scanning Auger Microscopy (SAM), was commissioned by the leadership of the Church History Department and conducted by Roderick J. McNeil of the Data Research Group in late 1989. McNeil's SAM testing—also used with good success on documents that were known to be Hofmann forgeries—measured the ion migration of iron gall ink into the paper on which it was inscribed. Such migration could be measured based on the time that had elapsed since it was first written.26 In his report, McNeil concluded that the inscription on the Chicago leaves dated to 1830, with an error rate of plus or minus five years.27 Such scientific evidence, not visible or easily determined by non-forensic document examiners, offers significant information. One might even be tempted to use such scientific evidence as definitive proof of the leaves’ authenticity. But the authenticity of historical manuscripts is neither proven nor disproven by any single piece of fragmentary evidence, but the accumulation of as much evidence as is necessary to bring about a preponderance of evidence.In his 1989 report, Throckmorton noted some handwriting anomalies in the Chicago leaves and therefore concluded that the handwriting was “not consistent with the known handwriting of Oliver Cowdery.”28 Throckmorton was, however, also unable to identify the handwriting on the Ruth Smith fragment, which Royal Skousen, Dean Jessee, and others have identified as belonging to Oliver Cowdery. Three individuals on the Joseph Smith Papers staff have analyzed the handwriting on the Chicago leaves: Dean Jessee, Sharalyn D. Howcroft, and myself. Jessee looked at the document in the 1980s and concluded that the handwriting was that of Oliver Cowdery. He noted that the size of the characters differed from the typical size of Cowdery's characters, yet he still believed that the characters had indeed been inscribed by Cowdery. Jessee posited that the uncharacteristic size may indicate a fresh start of Cowdery's scribal work.29 Sharalyn Howcroft, the project archivist of the Joseph Smith Papers Project (with two decades of experience on the project), is the project's leading expert on handwriting today. Howcroft agrees that the handwriting is Oliver Cowdery's, even though some possible irregularities exist. According to Howcroft, these irregularities are best explained by a production scenario in which the writer was taking dictation.30 My own independent analysis agrees with that of Jessee and Howcroft.The many elements of the physical characteristics of the Chicago leaves offer strong evidence that the leaves are authentic pieces of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon. The paper dimensions and damage are consistent with the adjacent pages of the original manuscript, the ink inscription on the paper dates to the period of the production of the original manuscript, and the handwriting appears to be that of Oliver Cowdery (the primary scribe of the original manuscript). This evidence, along with the strong prov

Before the literary scholars, theologians, philosophers, and scripture scholars who currently dominate the field of Book of Mormon studies got their hands on the Book of Mormon, the volume was largely the preserve of historians and religious studies scholars. The same impulses that gave birth to the interdisciplinary field that goes by the name of “Mormon studies” also allowed for serious study of the Book of Mormon to take place within the secular academy.1 Or perhaps it is the reverse—that once scholars began to get comfortable with the notion of taking the Book of Mormon seriously, the conditions were then ripe for the advent of the field of Mormon studies. I'm less interested here in determining whether the chicken or egg came first than in charting the contours of academic inquiry that have allowed for both Mormon studies and Book of Mormon studies to thrive in the twenty-first century. Many have pointed to the 2002 publication of Terryl Givens's landmark book By the Hand of Mormon as inaugurating this blessed new age of Book of Mormon studies. But without diminishing Givens's accomplishment or influence, here I consider a number of trends that emerged some two decades before By the Hand of Mormon was published, and then I note how those trends have played out in the current century.Beginning in the 1980s, historians and religious studies scholars developed methods of studying the Book of Mormon that did not rely on making claims for its literary readability or theological profundity, let alone ancient origins. The book's presence and influence in the modern world were simply realities to be reckoned with. This led to a profusion of scholarship not only exploring the internal complexities of the Book of Mormon but also considering the book's role in the development of the Restoration tradition, its place within American religion, and as a case study in scripturalization. By the dawn of the new millennium, it had become not only possible but advantageous in many respects for scholars to engage the Book of Mormon from a neutral, non-confessional perspective. This approach was consonant with, and indeed constitutive of, the emergent field of Mormon studies, as I defined it in the mid-2010s: In Mormon studies, Mormonism and Mormons appear as the subject or object of scholarly study, but the questions, concerns, and issues at the heart of the study are principally generated outside the community of religious believers themselves. . . . Mormon studies is more engaged with the academy than the church, more oriented to Athens than Jerusalem, so to speak. It is chiefly influenced by and in conversation with the categories, theories, paradigms, and discourse of the secular academy.2We can see these dynamics on display in multiple sites, for instance in new scholarship on race in Latter-day Saint history as well as in theoretically innovative reassessments of the documentary evidence regarding the gold plates’ materiality. In these emergent literatures, we recognize the increased maturity of the academic conversation around the Book of Mormon, as well as the intertwined nature of Mormon studies and Book of Mormon studies. While scholars from an ever-expanding range of disciplines have now begun in earnest to engage the Book of Mormon, this essay charts the decades-long contributions and continuing influence of historians and religious studies scholars in the field of Book of Mormon studies.Admittedly, it is strange to refer to Richard Bushman as “underappreciated.” Along with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Bushman was and is one of the two most prominent late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Latter-day Saint historians. Bushman's 2005 biography of Mormonism's founder, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, is required reading for even amateur students of the Restoration. Universally respected by fellow historians, adept with the media, trusted by Church leaders, and revered by a generation of scholars he has mentored, Bushman will long be remembered as a towering figure in this period of Latter-day Saint intellectual and cultural life.Yet for all the praise Bushman has rightly earned as a historian and as Joseph Smith's biographer, my sense is that he gets far less credit than he deserves as a pioneering scholar of the Book of Mormon in the mode of what would come to be known as Mormon studies. By his own account, Bushman has been engaged in a decades-long campaign to “reveal the intricacy” of the Book of Mormon.3 No doubt this stems from Bushman's personal testimony that the book is scripture, a view he has not shied away from sharing publicly. But in addition to his important work on the Book of Mormon's internal complexities, Bushman has also made significant arguments about the book's impact on the historical development and theological character of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Indeed, Bushman's work over the space of several decades anticipated much of the methodologically plural and complex analysis that now characterizes the field.Bushman devoted an entire chapter to the Book of Mormon in his 1984 monograph Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism. The chapter contains a long overview of the Book of Mormon's narrative content, followed by an even longer summary and analysis of the book's many critics through the years. Bushman concludes that while detractors make some important points, their dismissals ultimately fail because they do not “do justice to the work's actual complexity.” Rather than tracing selected passages to some aspect of Joseph Smith's personality or environment, Bushman argues that scholars should seek to “understand the book on its own terms,” candidly acknowledging not only the evident resonances with early American and Smith family culture but the myriad distinctive departures as well. Turning to the Book of Mormon's impact on Joseph Smith and the early movement to which the book lent its name, Bushman asserted that “the book had far less apparent influence than one would expect.” The Book of Mormon never served as the kind of handbook for Church doctrine and practice that many contemporaneous Protestants understood the Bible (especially New Testament) to be. Most if not all the distinctive principles from the Book of Mormon that did take hold in the new Church were also articulated in separate revelations to Joseph Smith, from which they principally drew their authority. In short, one of the curiosities of the early history of the Church of Jesus Christ, according to Bushman, is that “despite the effort that went into the translation, Joseph Smith did not make the [Book of Mormon] the foundation of the church.”4Though Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism was not always cited for being one of the first to make the argument, Bushman's hypothesis—that the Book of Mormon's content had surprisingly little influence on the early development of the Restoration tradition—became the consensus view in ensuing decades. Historian Grant Underwood's classic article “Book of Mormon Usage in Early LDS Theology,” which also appeared in 1984, famously posited that in the Joseph Smith-era Church, the Bible far outshone the Book of Mormon in the Saints’ public references and teachings. Underwood's finding, that in early Latter-day Saint periodicals, “the Bible was cited nearly twenty times more frequently than the Book of Mormon,” has become something of a truism.5 Indeed, this was the view that Terryl Givens theorized and popularized some two decades later in By the Hand of Mormon, when he argued that “the history of the Book of Mormon's place in Mormonism and American religion generally has always been more connected to its status as signifier than signified, or its role as a sacred sign rather than its function as persuasive theology.”6Years earlier, however, Bushman had already nuanced the position he staked out in Beginnings. In his 1986 presidential address to the Mormon History Association, Bushman straightforwardly claimed that his prior argument, that “the Book of Mormon had peculiarly little influence on Mormonism,” was “mistaken.” To the contrary, Bushman proposed, the Book of Mormon had a demonstrably significant influence on Joseph Smith and his fellow Latter-day Saints in at least two ways. First, the book's articulation of “Lamanite theology” dramatically shaped the new religion's theology and eschatology, and the resultant first mission to the Lamanites had enormous (if in many ways unintended) consequences. Second, the Book of Mormon both confirmed and shaped Joseph Smith's self-perception and confidence not only as a prophet but also as a translator of ancient texts.7 Smith's subsequent translations—particularly of the Bible and what became known as the Book of Abraham—ultimately became some of the richest sources of distinctive Latter-day Saint theology.Bushman's view developed further over the next two decades. In his later, fuller biography of Joseph Smith, Bushman argued that the distinctly biblical character of the Book of Mormon had a dual impact on the Restoration's development. If there was a contest in the mind of Smith and other early Latter-day Saints between a Christian and magic worldview, the Book of Mormon clearly settled the question in favor of the former. The Book of Mormon's unyielding Christocentric biblicism provided doctrinal stability even as Smith's (and later Brigham Young's) theology became increasingly audacious. The Book of Mormon “anchored Mormonism in orthodox Christianity.” No matter how innovative “Nauvoo theology” and its successors would become, Bushman maintained, “the Saints never left basic Christianity behind; the Book of Mormon, their third testament, held them to the fundamentals.”8 In short, while the appearance of the Book of Mormon served as a sacred sign of God's renewed work in the last days, the content of the Book of Mormon guaranteed that the resultant new religion would in fact be Christian.Curiously, given his stature in the field, other scholars have often disregarded Bushman's arguments about the Book of Mormon—though more by way of ignoring than countering them. For instance, Bushman's takedown of environmental theories about Book of Mormon origins as insufficiently explanatory did nothing to prevent the accomplished historian Robert Remini from more or less rehashing Alexander Campbell's and Fawn Brodie's old claims in his 2002 biography of Joseph Smith in the Penguin Lives series.9 Furthermore, Underwood's and especially Givens's claims regarding the relative unimportance of the Book of Mormon's content on the Restoration's early theological development continue to hold the field, though historians such as Janiece Johnson have recently begun to complicate the consensus view.10On the other hand, in recent years, some of Bushman's views and methods have emerged as central concepts in Book of Mormon studies, even if many of the scholars who arrived at similar analytical destinations traveled on parallel disciplinary and theoretical tracks. Bushman, for instance, was one of the first to recognize that “the book seems almost postmodern in its self-conscious attention to the production of the text.”11 Just as Hollywood loves movies about movies, postmodern literary scholars love books about books, and the Book of Mormon's obsession with its own authorship and construction provides fertile ground for analysis. Furthermore, historical and literary analysis have each adopted the related practices of reading against the grain of a text and recovering subaltern voices from sublimation and marginalization. Bushman anticipated both of these moves in his classic essay “The Lamanite View of Book of Mormon History,” published in 1990 but written and filed away several years prior. What would it be like, Bushman asks, to “rewrite the Book of Mormon from the Lamanite perspective?” Given that the Lamanites’ history and identity is refracted, however incompletely, through an entirely Nephite lens, what scattered fragments can be recovered and reassembled in order to imagine alternative possibilities contained within the text?12 To be sure, Bushman only hinted at and gestured toward some of these interpretive possibilities that a new generation of scholars have taken up more expansively.13In sum, while this journal has done well to recover and re-examine “the past of Book of Mormon studies,” I would suggest that any stock-taking of the field is incomplete without an appreciation of the many contributions of Richard Bushman.14 Individual scholars working on the Book of Mormon would do well to revisit Bushman's many chapters and essays. In doing so, however, they may find to their chagrin—as I repeatedly have in my own field—that Bushman beat them, often by several decades, to whatever “fresh take” they thought they had.At the same time that Bushman's chapters and essays on the Book of Mormon began appearing regularly, the work of Jan Shipps and Nathan Hatch—neither scholar having any personal connection to the Restoration tradition—brought the Book of Mormon out of academic obscurity and charted new paths that would shape much of contemporary (Book of) Mormon studies. In their respective works, Shipps and Hatch helped turn the scholarly conversation toward an appreciation of the content and function of the Book of Mormon, both in terms of Latter-day Saint history and within the larger context of American religion. Hatch operated within the familiar discipline of history, whereas Shipps innovatively applied religious studies theories and methods. Their work preceded but harmonized with the development within religious studies of the notion of “scripturalization,” which understands scripture to be more of a sociological, historical, and phenomenological category than a strictly theological one.15 At least within the fields of history and religious studies, then, since the 1980s the Book of Mormon has come to be accepted as American scripture—not necessarily because scholars believe the book comes from God, but because believers have successfully constituted a religious and cultural movement predicated in large part on that claim. In a mutually constitutive process, a community scripturalizes a text that in turn sacralizes the community.The importance of Jan Shipps's 1985 book Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition can hardly be overstated. Shipps's various arguments and interventions were wide-ranging, and largely hold up nearly four decades later. Here, I will focus only on what she said about the Book of Mormon. While Shipps recognized the important ways that the Book of Mormon signified Joseph Smith's prophethood, to use Givens's language, for her, the Book of Mormon was no empty vessel. Like Bushman, she contended that the Book of Mormon functioned alongside Smith's other prophecies and the experiences of the first generation of Latter-day Saints to cement among them “a Hebrew-Christian understanding of the story of the world.” Shipps recognized that what mattered most from a historical or religious studies approach was not whether the book was actually true, or whether Joseph Smith really discovered and translated ancient golden plates under the guidance of an angel, but rather the way that those beliefs functioned in the construction of a new religious movement. In this light, Shipps argued that “as far as history is concerned, the question of whether Smith was prophet or fraud is not particularly important.”16 This was the thrust necessary to help the Book of Mormon achieve escape velocity—at least in scholarly circles—from the downward gravity of polemical debates over the volume's authorship and provenance. As Paul Gutjahr noted in his “biography” of the Book of Mormon, published in Princeton University Press's Lives of Great Religious Books series, the Book of Mormon “cannot be fully appreciated outside its close relationship to its supposed prophet and translator.” But “whether the book is a humbug or not is a moot question,” precisely because millions of people past and present have oriented their lives around the proposition that the book is the word of God.17A few years after Shipps's landmark volume appeared, early American historian Nathan Hatch wrote that “for all the recent attention given to the study of Mormonism, surprisingly little has been devoted to the Book of Mormon itself.” In his classic 1989 study of the rise of a populist sensibility within early American religion and culture, The Democratization of American Christianity, Hatch placed Joseph Smith and the Latter-day Saints alongside Methodists, Baptists, African American churches, and Christians (the restorationist-primitivist movement that many early Latter-day Saint converts, such as Sidney Rigdon and Parley Pratt, hailed from). Like Bushman and Shipps before him, Hatch argued that the content of the book simultaneously reflected and shaped the contours of the Restoration movement. Specifically, he read the Book of Mormon as “a document of profound social protest, an impassioned manifesto by a hostile outsider against the smug complacency of those in power and the reality of social distinctions based on wealth, class, and education.” No mere signifier here—the book had a distinctive theology, and it was a theology of liberation. “The Book of Mormon has its own preferential option for the poor,” Hatch concluded, “not as persons to be pitied, but as those whom God has chosen to empower.” Equipped with this vision, Smith and the Saints built a church in which prophetic and priestly authority worked in the service of social and economic equality, all within a “biblical frame of reference.”18Not everyone has been persuaded by Hatch's populist reading of the Book of Mormon.19 Nor did The Democratization of American Christianity succeed in making the Book of Mormon required reading; in his subsequent six-hundred-page tome on the history of early American theology, E. Brooks Holifield mentioned the Book of Mormon only in passing, focusing on Joseph Smith's revelations as the real source of Latter-day Saint theology.20 But the significance of Hatch's book can hardly be disputed. It was one of the first times that a highly regarded non-Latter-day Saint historian treated the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on equal terms alongside other major movements as a significant shaper of American Christianity. Hatch's understanding of and arguments about the Latter-day Saint movement were predicated on his deep engagement with the content and inner logic of the Book of Mormon as a scriptural text worthy of careful analysis. More than three decades later, The Democratization of American Christianity remains a widely read classic. For many graduate students in American history, this book will be their one substantial introduction to the Restoration tradition—and at the heart of that introduction is a theology-rich Book of Mormon.If Jan Shipps and Nathan Hatch implied that the Book of Mormon's status was American scripture, religious studies scholar Laurie Maffly-Kipp—also not a Latter-day Saint—solidified the claim. In 2008, she penned the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of the Book of Mormon, which pitched the book to a national and international readership as “one of the most influential—as well as controversial—religious documents in American history . . . regarded as sacred scripture by followers around the world.” In her insightful twenty-page introduction to the text, Maffly-Kipp follows Bushman and Shipps in focusing on the content of the Book of Mormon and what it has enacted in the world since its 1830 publication. Whether one reads the book “as an historical text that reveals a great deal about the desires and questions of Americans in the early national era,” or as “a sacred text whose meanings have shifted over the years to fit the needs of various religious communities,” she argues that the Book of Mormon cannot be blithely dismissed as either a hoax or an empty sign.21Two years later, Maffly-Kipp edited an “anthology of sacred writings,” again for Penguin Classics, called American Scriptures. The collection gathers lengthy excerpts from fifteen “scriptural” texts produced in the United States from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The Book of Mormon is placed alongside relatively well-known works such as Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures as well as more obscure offerings such as the Shakers’ A Holy, Sacred and Divine Roll and Book and John Ballou Newbrough's Oahspe: A New Bible in the Words of Jehovih and His Angel Embassadors. In her introduction to the anthology, Maffly-Kipp squarely takes on the questions of “scripturalization” that had by then emerged as a major conversation within the field of religious studies. “What is a scripture,” she asks, “and who gets to write one? . . . How does something become a scripture? How do various people and communities use scriptures? How do scriptures bind communities together? What makes some claims of scriptural status more persuasive than others?” Maffly-Kipp notes that one thread that connects all fifteen excerpted works is that they all interact with the text and world of the Bible, “borrow[ing] cultural authority from the Bible to stake their own claim to religious value.”22The inclusion of the Book of Mormon in American Scriptures is a mixed blessing, both for academic proponents of Book of Mormon studies and religious believers in the book's divine origins. On the one hand, it validates (and perhaps elevates) the Book of Mormon's status as “scripture” to a non-Latter-day Saint audience, a clear step up from humbug or fraud. It brings the book into the purview of religious studies discourse and analysis. But with the exception of Mary Baker Eddy's writings that have been scripturalized by Christian Scientists, none of Maffly-Kipp's other selected texts would be considered by most people (or even scholars) today to be “world scripture” on par with the Bhagavad Gita, Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Qur'an.So whose company does the Book of Mormon keep? Is it best categorized alongside the Bible and Qur'an, or Alexander Smyth's The Occult Life of Jesus of Nazareth and Levi Dowling's The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ? Or is scripture the wrong category altogether? Is the book better put in conversation with Ethan Smith's A View of the Hebrews and Herman Melville's Moby Dick? Does the Book of Mormon belong to the followers of Joseph Smith (then and now), to nineteenth-century American history and literature, or to the world? Calling the Book of Mormon “American scripture” makes it out to be simultaneously more and less than most observers have traditionally claimed for it.Oscar Wilde said, “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” To be sure, studying the Book of Mormon in a secular academic setting invites complexities. But what Bushman, Shipps, Hatch, and Maffly-Kipp did, collectively, is to make the Book of Mormon a topic for religious studies scholars and American historians to talk about. Indeed, the advent and maturation of Mormon studies has come about in recent decades as scholars (Latter-day Saint and otherwise) have increasingly recognized that studying the Restoration tradition helps us understand things bigger than the tradition itself.Careful historical and theoretical consideration of the Book of Mormon have played an important role in contemporary Mormon studies. Take, for instance, two books published in the 2010s that helped their respective authors land jobs at Harvard and Princeton. In Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America, intellectual and religious historian David Holland charts the cultural and religious meanings of debates about the biblical canon in the seventeenth- through mid-nineteenth-century United States. He traces the “borderlands” of scriptural authority and examines a variety of statements of and challenges to the notion of a closed canon. Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon naturally enter the equation, but alongside a welter of other cases; the Latter-day Saint experience is illustrative and formative, not determinative, for Holland's arguments. That the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith's revelations signified different things to different people is clear. But Holland emphasizes that the book's content made important interventions in substantive theological debates over God's sovereignty, the inscrutability of the divine will, revelation, the scriptural canon, and natural law.23In Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States, religious historian Seth Perry reconsiders the authority of the Bible not as “a timeless, abstract, inviolable truth,” but rather a “process” to which numerous individuals, communities, institutions, and texts contributed. Here, too, Mormons play an important role; in fact, the book's culminating chapter, on “scripturalization in early national America,” uses Mormonism as its case study. The Latter-day Saints scripturalized new texts, beginning with the Book of Mormon, at an astonishing pace, and in turn constituted their own self-identity through understanding these texts in relationship to the Bible. In an age of political, cultural, and religious anxieties, Smith's revelatory texts sought to provide newfound stability and gave the early Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints an outsized confidence about its role on the world stage and in salvation history.24 Both Holland and Perry exemplify the trend in which expert analysis of the Restoration tradition and its constituent parts (such as the Book of Mormon) are deployed in the service of answering larger questions that originate from outside the tradition.In the contemporary academy, few subjects are of greater interest than issues related to race. Though the scholarship on race in Latter-day Saint history goes back to the 1960s, scholars have brought new sophistication to their study of the topic in the past two decades, and the Book of Mormon has often played a leading (if not necessarily heroic) role. Consistent with the work of Bushman, Shipps, and Hatch, this new scholarship recognizes the Book of Mormon's role as substantial if not always decisive. Armand Mauss's 2003 book All Abraham's Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage was both the culmination of previous scholarship (much of which Mauss had produced) and it set the table for what would follow. He persuasively demonstrated that “the full-fledged racialist framework of modern Mormonism . . . was not the product of any particular revelation but of a social and intellectual movement among some of Mormonism's most powerful and articulate leaders.” These leaders synthesized what they found in Restoration scripture, including the Book of Mormon, along with influential racial theories of their time such as British Israelism and Anglo-Saxon triumphalism. Significantly, Mauss recognized that race has never been simply a black-and-white issue within the tradition, and this is where the Book of Mormon has been determinative. Africans and their descendants do not appear in the Book of Mormon. Instead, its eschatological view is dominated by three groups—Jews, Gentiles, and Lamanites—whom Latter-day Saints mapped onto modern-day Jews, white Euro-Americans, and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas (and eventually the South Pacific and even Japan). The Book of Mormon also typified the tension that has always existed in Latter-day Saint theology between universalism and favored (and unfavored) familial-ethnic-racial lineages.25 When it comes to understanding Latter-day Saint conceptions of race and lineage, Mauss demonstrated, the Book of Mormon is unavoidable.This has been the pattern ever since. Sample any of the significant scholarly works on race and the Restoration from this century, and it is almost assured that you will encounter the Book of Mormon—sometimes superficially, but usually as a text that contains multitudes and possesses real agency. Scholars have documented that the Book of Mormon's readers have always understood it to have much to say about racial origins, identities, and destinies. The book influenced generations of Latter-day Saints—of all races and nationalities—in reflecting on where and how they (and others) fit into God's plan of salvation. Indeed, some of the most interesting of this recent scholarship has considered how non-white populations around the globe have received, read, interpreted, and enacted the Book of Mormon, including its distinctive racial schema.26 The scholarship has often followed Mauss's lead in examining the internal particulars of Mormonism's complex racial legacies.27 But other works have gone more the way of Holland and Perry, using Mormonism as one case among many in thinking about race in America and beyond.28 In all of this literature on race, the Book of Mormon has emerged as an essential and complex source for two centuries of Latter-day Saint thought, practice, and identity construction.The tendency of using the Book of Mormon to illuminate larger themes is both freeing and limiting. On the one hand, it liberates the Book of Mormon from being merely the province of scholars associated with or primarily interested in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It more readily allows for comparative and contextual studies, and opens up new scholarly vistas that are not constrained by the questions and debates generated by the religious movement and its critics. On the other hand, viewing any subject through a particular lens will necessarily sharpen analytical focus in certain respects while obscuring or ignoring other angles. This is the promise and peril of any disciplinary or subject-driven study. Viewing the Book of Mormon through the respective lenses of sc