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Theological Publications |
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Prophecy and Palimpsest Resurrected Texts In
2 Kings chapter 22 the priest Hilkiah
sends word to Josiah the King, "I have found a book." Hilkiah had been busy locating certain funds to be used to
compensate the crews of workmen hired to refurbish the temple, when suddenly
the shrouding dust and shadows disclosed a surprising secret, nothing less than
the Book of the Covenant, or what we today refer to as the Book of Deuteronomy
(or at least the core of it, chapters 4-33). The passage provides priceless information
about the emergence of the Book of Deuteronomy. We only wish we had such
revealing clues at other points in the history of the biblical canon. We may
suppose, however, that the story of Josiah, Hilkiah,
and the Book strikes deeper resonances for Latter Day Saints than for any other
Christian group. This is because of the similarity to the conditions in which
the Book of Mormon came to light. It, too, is said to be an ancient scripture
long buried in a time of religious and national crisis, only to resurface long
afterward, when its forgotten message should be heard anew. Today virtually all
critical scholars agree that the tale of Josiah and Hilkiah
hints at the very thing it tries to hide: that the Book was not discovered and
dusted off, but actually created by Hilkiah, Huldah, Jeremiah, and others of the "Deuteronomic
School" who thus sought to win the impressionable young king Josiah to
their religious agenda. What is set forth in 2 Kings as reactionary (restoring
the past) was really revolutionary (pressing on into a new future). Again, virtually all critical
scholars agree that Joseph Smith did not discover the Book of Mormon but rather
created it. His goal would have been as analogous to that of Hilkiah as his methods had been: in the face of confusion
over which 19th century version of Christianity to embrace, none seeming to
have any particular advantage over the others, all seeming to be severely in
want of something, Joseph Smith tried to make a clean break with the recent
past and to go on into
a new future by invoking a more distant past. And in so doing he had created
something new, an imaginary Sacred Past, the way it should have been. Seen this way, the roots of the
Latter Day Saint movement among the Campbellite
Restoration movement makes new sense. When the other Campbellite
sects blazed a trail "back to the Bible," i.e., to the early church
of the New Testament, they were unwittingly retrojecting
onto the past their own ideas of how the church ought to be. Obviously
Alexander Campbell and the others had derived their ideals from a
selective reading of the New Testament documents (noticing certain things and
ignoring others), so it was not as if they had created their scriptural
prototype of Christianity out of thin air. And, by the same
token, neither had Joseph Smith. Assuming he was the author of the Book
of Mormon, Smith's fabricated picture of a pristine ("Nephite"[="neophyte"?])
American Christianity was in fact his own biblically-informed ideal of what
American Christianity in his own day ought to become. And, for a great many
Americans, it did. Joseph's Smith's creation and retrojection
of an artificial, superior biblical past is thus seen to be simply the most
dramatic and thorough-going of all "restorationist"
creations. Narrative Worlds Without End What
Joseph Smith did, as historical critics understand the matter, is exactly what
all ancient pseudepigraphists did, and he belongs to an illustrious company.
Smith belongs among the authors of the Book of Daniel, the Book of Deuteronomy,
the Book of Zohar;
the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy, Titus), not to mention a greater or
lesser number of other epistles attributed to Paul; 1 and 2 Peter; 1, 2, and 3
Enoch; 1, 2, and 3 Baruch; the Apocalypse of Moses, Madame Blavatsky's
Book of Dzyan,
and a number of "rediscovered" Tibetan Buddhist texts. But is this
group a company of saints or rather perhaps a rogues' gallery? Traditionally
apologist and polemicist alike have equated "pseudepigraphist"
with "fraud" or "liar." And there is a trivial sense in
which such a characterization is correct. It is that same sense in which a
fiction writer is a liar and a deceiver. That is, even though the book jacket be labeled "Fiction," the writer strives to woo
the reader into that state of "temporary willing suspension of
disbelief" that Coleridge called "poetic faith." For the time
being, the reader of a novel, the viewer of a play, allows himself or herself
to be drawn into the events of a fiction, to be moved by the fortunes and
misfortunes of the characters, etc. One enters a fictive world, a narrative
world, in order to feel and experience things one would never otherwise
experience. We now recognize, as Aristotle did, the wholesome and edifying
function of temporarily suspending disbelief. But it has not always been so.
Shakespeare and others were obliged to reassure their audiences that what they
were about to see or read was "The True History of Richard III," or
whomever. Some were not able to
understand the difference between fiction and lying. The problem was that of
"bifurcation," the reduction of a complex choice to an over-simple
one. One's alternatives are not either "fact or deception,"
"hoax or history." Were the
parables of Jesus either factual or deceptive? Did he intend anyone to think he
was talking about the case of a real prodigal son of whose improbable
homecoming he had yesterday read in The
Galilee Gazette? Of course not; he knew that his audience knew he was
making it up as he went, as an illustration. And this is pretty much the same
kind of "deception" practiced by the scriptural pseudepigraphist,
whether ancient or modern. It may help at this point to remind
ourselves of the distinction between the author of a story and the narrator of
the story. The author is the actual person composing and producing the text.
Let Herman Melville serve as an example. The narrator, on the other hand, is
one of the characters in the story, chosen by the author as the one from whose
viewpoint the story is to be related to the reader. So the textual
self-designation "I" refers not to the author but to the narrator.
"My name is Ishmael." Does this mean that Melville is trying to
deceive us as to what his name is? No, of course not.
We are once again temporarily suspending disbelief, entering into a narrative
world. While inside it, we are listening to the narrator, a fictive construct
of the author. For the meantime, the author is forgotten in favor of the
narrator. "Ishmael is certainly a tough old salt!" one reader may
remark to another. But when they have both laid the
finished novel aside, they will begin to speak of Melville's, not Ishmael's,
strengths and weaknesses as a writer.
Accordingly, we ought to realize that for Joseph Smith to be the author
of the Book of Mormon, with "Why Is it that You Ask My
Name?" Envision
the situation that led to the production of pseudepigrapha in the ancient world
and in the modern alike. It all begins with the process of the closing of the
canon of scripture. Josephus informs his readers that the authority of the
Jewish priests and scribes had come to substitute for that of the ancient
prophets, since the voice of prophecy had long ago fallen silent. Christians
reading Josephus often read him naively at this point. They cite Josephus and
then point to John the Baptist as a renewal of prophecy after centuries of
silence. They fail to realize that Josephus was giving a prescriptive account,
not a descriptive account. The priestly and scribal establishment position had
officially closed the canon of prophecy. It wasn't that new prophets were no
longer forthcoming. Rather, the point was, they were no longer welcome. In fact, the Bible makes clear that
prophets had never been particularly welcome. Like Homer's Cassandra, their
voices usually went unheeded and were often silenced by force. If a prophet
were sufficiently popular, the authorities had to appear to take him seriously
to maintain credibility with their flock (c.f., Mark In view of this situation, what was
a new visionary to do? He had a message to declare to his contemporaries, but
there was no point in simply announcing it publicly, only to be carried away
and executed. Then who would hear the message? So pseudepigraphy was born.
Whereas the old prophets had spoken their messages, the new ones, the pseudepigraphists,
wrote down their oracles and circulated them in this form as an underground samizdat. But they knew it was
important, even when speaking in the name of the Lord, to be speaking also in
the name of a famous prophet. One might have established one's own prophetic
charisma by personal appearances, as Isaiah and Jeremiah had, but then personal
appearances were needlessly dangerous. So, in order to gain a hearing, to have
their oracles taken seriously, they wrote fictively under the names of ancient
worthies such as Enoch, Moses, Daniel, Baruch, etc. Oh, the words themselves
would ring with their own truth if they first managed to be read, and that was
the trick. So one puts Daniel's or Moses' name on it, and then the reader soon
finds himself recognizing the Word of God no matter the name of the human
channel through which it may have come. Did it matter much to an ancient Jewish
reader that the Word of God had come through Isaiah or through Jeremiah? No
more than it does to most modern readers of either prophet. All that matters is that is one is reading the prophetic Word of God.
And then it ought hardly to matter whether the real writer
were Isaiah of Jerusalem or a later visionary appropriating his name (as
in the cases of the Second and Third Isaiah and the Ascension of Isaiah). Loose Canon The
closing of a canon is a momentous event in the history of any religion. It
signals that the establishment (who caused the canon to be closed and who
decided what belonged in it and what did not) has decided that the formative
period of the religion is over and that the religion must be standardized and
consolidated. You are setting about the laborious task of building the ark of
salvation, and you don't want anyone rocking the boat after you've built it. You
don't want to hammer out a doctrine of the Trinity, only to find some prophet
popping up who announces the revelation of a fourth person in the Godhead! So
the guardians of the newly-minted orthodoxy, disdaining the doctrines taught in
this or that gospel or prophet, cross these off the canonical list. And they
claim the prerogative of rightly interpreting the contents of what remains:
"First of all, you must know this: no prophecy of scripture is a matter of
one's own interpretation" (2 Peter In fact these very oracles are found
in a section of the book that critical scholars dub Deutero-Zechariah.
The original Zechariah was some sort of cultic prophet attached to the temple
and its hierarchy, the very group who were trying to clamp the lid on populist
prophecy. And in order still to have a chance to be heard, someone, one of
those later prophets "ashamed of his vision," i.e., not daring to
publish it under his own name, retreats behind the pen-name of one of the old
prophets. Having discovered his imposture, though not his real name, we still
call him "Deutero-Zechariah," "the
Second Zechariah." But the name
hardly matters; the content does, and this is why "Deutero-Zechariah"
set pen to paper. If the sharp edges of the old prophets and seers have been
smoothed out by harmonizing exegesis, then it is the pseudepigraphist's
aim to sharpen that edge again by introducing new and harsh words under the
prophets' names. All right, the new visionary may not dare appear in public,
but the authorities will not dare to condemn new, "newly
rediscovered" writings by the old, canonical prophets. In this way, the
newer prophets sought and managed to slip under or over the fence built around
the scriptural canon. It may seem a great irony that a
religion whose leaders claim the authority of the prophetic word as their
charter of authority will at the same time be so opposed to receiving any new
prophecy! But it is no irony at all, for the very notion of a canon of
scripture denotes that the living voice of prophecy has been choked off and
replaced with scribal authority, exercised by the official exegetes who will
make the old oracles ring, not with God's voice, but with their own. "I
have no word from the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the grace of
the Lord has been found trustworthy" (1 Corinthians In short, both the new prophets and
the establishment are trying to hide behind the names of the ancient, canonical
prophets, in order to claim their authority for what each side is saying. The
establishment scribes are using the corpus of the scriptural prophets as
something of a ventriloquist dummy to spout their own views, but just as
surely, the pseudepigraphists are impersonating the old prophets, speaking with
their own voices while donning the deceptive Esau-mask of pseudepigraphy. The
question is: who wears the mantle of the old prophets? We see exactly the same situation
repeated only a couple of centuries later when both orthodox bishops and
heretical dissidents alike claimed apostolic succession. If the Pope of Rome claimed
to be the successor of Linus, Peter's appointed
successor in Even so, Joseph Smith,
bitterly disillusioned by the strife and confusion of rival Christian sects in
his own day, each claiming the authority of the Bible as the warrant for its
distinctive teachings, finally decided to cut the Gordian Knot of Bible
exegesis by creating a new scripture that would undercut the debating of the denominations
and render them superfluous. He sought to found a new Christianity on a
completely new basis: a new scripture from the old source, more Bible. A third
Testament called the Book of Mormon. And just as the theologians of the
Protestant sects followed the example of the scribes and Pharisees of old,
resting their claims upon the scribal authority of exegeting
ancient revelation writings, Joseph Smith was wise
enough to adopt the old strategy of putting forth his own revelations in the
outward form of an ancient manuscript, a pseudepigraph.
If only writings of old prophets are to be taken seriously, then by all means
let's write one! It's the only way left to gain media access! But Joseph Smith hardly intended to
reopen the gates of prophecy to all who might feel themselves inspired. His own
pseudepigraph served rather as a new and ready-made
canon, an authoritative pedigree to root his new community in the holy past, to
give it instant venerable equality with the established Protestant sects, even
superiority. Prophecy would continue, but only through his own mouth, as he
soon stipulated. The Same Thing So
far we have tried to indicate how, far from being a mischievous or malicious
hoaxer, Joseph Smith as the author of the Book of Mormon would simply have been
doing the same thing the authors of the various biblical and extra-biblical
pseudepigrapha were doing. If we still wish to dismiss Smith as a hoaxer and a
liar, or, to put it another way, if we feel entitled to decree that God could
never sink to inspiring a pseudepigraph (and if we
think we are privy to the literary tastes of the Almighty, we are claiming to
be prophets ourselves!), then we have no option but to dismiss the biblical pseudepigraphs along with the Book of Mormon. What's good
for the goose is good for the gander. What's good for the stick of Ephraim is
good for the stick of Such apologists/polemicists
professed to see no problem in accepting the claim of the Book of Daniel to
have been penned in the Babylonian and Persian periods and then sealed away to
be discovered by Jews living at the time of the events predicted in the book
(Daniel 12:4, 9), i.e., the period immediately preceding the ejection of the
Seleucid tyranny from Judea. No matter that the "historical"
descriptions nearer the ostensible of time of Daniel are filled with linguistic
and historical anachronisms while the sections closer to the end are eagle-eyed
in their "predictions" of Antiochus IV Epiphanies, even of his troop
movements in But in the wake of historical
criticism (which one cannot keep out as long as one resolves with Martin Luther
to admit the Grammatico-Historical Method to the
study of Scripture, reading Scripture as any other human writing), most
theologians have come to accept that God might inspire an authoritative pseudepigraph as easily as he might inspire a parable. Thus
there no longer seems anything incompatible between a book being scripturally
inspired and authoritative on the one hand and being a historically spurious
but fictively edifying pseudepigraph on the other.
Deuteronomy and its theology are probably taken with much greater seriousness
than ever before in Christian history now that its
true character (and thus its intention) can be truly understood for the first
time. In the same way, a new treasure house of riches may be disclosed in the
pages of the Book of Mormon once one comes to recognize the skill and the goal
of the theological artistry exercised by Joseph Smith as the author, not just
the translator, of the Book of Mormon. Seer or Secretary? We
have already indicated that Joseph Smith as the creator of the Book of Mormon
had simply used the same strategy as many biblical writers, adopting the
outward form of an ancient manuscript as a metaphor for saying that the coming
of this Word was "from of old, from ancient days" (Micah 5:2). If we
are going on that basis to dismiss the Book of Mormon as a spurious fake, we
are showing we have the same theologically tin ear the opponents of Jesus had when
they said, "How can this man say, 'I came down from heaven'?"
"You are not yet fifty years old and you have seen Abraham?" Presently we will attempt to demonstrate that
Joseph Smith also followed pretty much the same method of composition as that
employed by the various biblical pseudepigraphists. Thus he will come to look
more and more like what we are suggesting he was: a writer of new Scripture, not merely a discoverer
or translator of ancient Scripture. But we must first pause to ask if, however
consistent with the goals and methods of biblical pseudepigraphists, such a
role for Joseph Smith would not be impossibly incompatible with his own claims
for himself and Latter Day Saint claims about him. In a word, No.
We have already recalled the fact that, after setting forth the Book of Mormon,
Joseph Smith began to prophesy in his own voice. The Mormon canon obviously
contains many such inspired speeches by the Mormon prophet. The work of a
prophet is not that of a transcriber or translator. To equate the two is to
deny the vast gap between Moses and the latter day scribes, the distance
between the Prophet Jeremiah and his secretary Baruch, or between the Gnostic
Revealer and the shepherd Muhammad 'Ali al Samman who
chanced upon the Nag Hammadi texts while hiding from
his enemies in an Egyptian cave. According to the traditional story of the
origins of the Book of Mormon, when read the traditional way, the role of
Joseph Smith was more like that of John the Baptist, hardly that of a prophetic
revealer in his own right, but rather simply the herald for another (in Smith's
case, Mormon and Moroni) who would be a prophetic
revealer. And yet this picture blatantly belies the central importance of
Joseph Smith as revealer, prophet, and Moses-like founder of the Latter Day
Saint community. He was a living prophet whose voice was the mouthpiece for God
to issue regulations for the fledgling nest of faith. So clearly Joseph Smith
is supposed to be on Jeremiah's level, not Baruch's. If Smith were simply
equivalent to Baruch instead of Jeremiah, then we would have a problem
accounting for the full prophetic dignity subsequently ascribed to him. Would
not his "new" character as a prophetic revealer have to be understood
as a self-exaltation against the ostensibly sufficient revelation of Mormon and
Reformed Egyptian as Glossolalia The
clue to this as the true scenario lies in Smith's supposed use of the magical
oracular glasses of the Urim and Thummim.
These are said to have enabled him to find clear meaning in a text that was to
him but a "field of signifiers" (Roland Barthes)
or perhaps to create meaning there. The metaphor of the Urim
and Thummim glasses is exactly parallel to Paul's
characterizing glossolalia not as a human language
unknown to the speaker, an indefensible and absurd claim, but as the ecstatic
"tongues of angels" which sing the glories "which man may not
utter." While no mortal may render their meaning exactly, it is
nonetheless possible, Paul says, to "interpret" them. But this is
closer to interpreting omens or dreams (nonverbal) than it is
to translating a text. Apollo's oracle at If we have ears to hear, we will
recognize the Urim and Thummim
tale as a metaphor for Smith looking at Even the designation of the supposed
original language of the Book of Mormon can be taken as a clue to the real
state of affairs: the term "Reformed Egyptian" carries resonances,
first, of the biblical exodus of Second, the enigmatic term
"Reformed Egyptian" signifies the new start Christianity was making
in To say the Book was rendered from
"Reformed Egyptian" was, then, to carry both the foundation myths of
biblical Latter Prophets and Latter Day Saints Specifically,
the Book of Mormon conforms to the genre of "the Latter Prophets"
rather than that of the "Former Prophets." The difference between
these two species of biblical books is that the Former Prophets are collections
of prophetic oracles or speeches, gathered and recorded by their hearers and
disciples (think here of the Book of Isaiah, the Book of Jeremiah, the Qur'an). The Latter Prophets, on the other hand, are a
series of edifying (and usually semi-legendary) histories written from the
moralistic standpoint of the prophets: when the people are faithful to God,
God's reward follows them. But when the nation is unfaithful, they have only
God's wrath to look forward to. Since the experience of the Babylonian Exile
made it clear that the prophets had been quite right about all this, the exiled
scribes and priests of It may help to remind ourselves what
sort of book the Book of Mormon is not. For one thing, it is not a Gospel, does
not even contain a Gospel, even though Jesus Christ appears as a character in
the Book of Mormon. He appears there almost in passing, just as the
Deuteronomic historians found space for several long and short episodes of
Elijah and Elisha and their miracles and disciples. There are epistles, at
least letters, but these are embedded (or "imbricated"--Roland
Barthes) in the surrounding narrative, playing a role
analogous to that of a Greek chorus in a play, commenting on the action as it
moves along, so the reader can keep up with the flow. Luke uses such letters
throughout the Book of Acts. Luke has much in common with the Old Testament
Deuteronomic History, as recent scholars have noted. And so does the Book of
Mormon. Sacred Combinations The
ancients erroneously supposed that the stories of the Bible were historical
reports recorded by witnesses to the events. Once scholars
recognizes the absurdities entailed by this premise and cast it aside,
they simply put a bit more distance between the supposed original events and
those who recorded them. Scholars surmised that those who wrote down the
stories were just fixing in writing the substance of oral traditions. This
would allow for considerable legendary development and other difficulties which
had ruled out eyewitness authorship. But in recent years some scholars have
questioned even this presupposition. There seems to be less and less need to
posit a traditional basis for biblical narratives, or rather perhaps, one may
minimize the extent to which the biblical narrators were dependent upon any
prior sources they may have used. In the latter event, the biblical authors
would have simply derived ideas from traditional stories but retold them
entirely from their own standpoint, just as one finds today comparing Hollywood
Bible epics with the underlying Bible stories. It may be, say scholars like Randel
Helms, Thomas L. Brodie, and John Dominic Crossan, that the Gospel writers did
not so much employ oral traditions of Jesus as the basis for their work as they
have perhaps rather taken Old Testament texts, disregarded the plots, and
reshuffled various descriptive details and
narrative sequences abstracted from the larger story to use as building
blocks for their own new stories, which are then provided with a definite
biblical ring, and yet without recalling a particular story. Helms, Brodie, and
Crossan all break down numerous Gospel stories into various phrases and motifs
derived from this and that Old Testament story. Crossan isolates all the Old
Testament passages which the Gospel Crucifixion narratives cite as prophetic
predictions of the death of Jesus and proceeds to demonstrate how the Gospel
stories seem to have been composed, not from historical memory of the events,
but by connecting the dots provided by the Old Testament passages.2 It is not
that Mark 15's account of Jesus' crucifixion is simple reportage of events that
mirrored the "predictions" of Psalm 22. Mark does not even refer to
Psalm 22 as a prediction. It begins to appear as if Mark possessed no
traditional story of Jesus' death, only the bare preaching that Jesus had died
on the cross. The rest he had to fill in. As his material he used the
collection of Passion "testimonia" drawn by early Christian preachers
from the scriptures, especially the Psalms.
Brodie, to take but a single
example, derives Luke's story of the anointing of Jesus (Luke 7:36-50) from the
tales of Elisha in 2 Kings 4:1-37, the
episodes of the widow with the vessels of oil and of the Shunammite
woman.3 As Brodie sees it, Luke derived the character of Simon the Pharisee,
Jesus' rather chilly host, both from the Shunammite
who is pictured as initially wary of Elisha and from Elisha's
disciple Gehazi who fails in the healing mission
assigned him by Elisha. The sinful woman who anoints Jesus is a character
combining traits of the Shunammite woman and the
widow of the guild prophet who, at Elisha's
direction, pours out the self-replenishing oil to pay her creditors. The two
creditors in Jesus' parable of the two debtors (contained in the anointing
story) were suggested to Luke by the creditors of the prophet's widow who
threatened to take her two children as collateral for her debts. Simon's
invitation to Jesus was derived from the Shunammite's
invitation of Elisha to stay with her. Her miraculous conception of a son led
Luke to imply (Brodie thinks) that Simon the Pharisee had a change of heart, a
sort of rebirth. The debt of the sinful woman is a moral one, while that of the
guild prophet's widow is a financial one. Both debt crises are mediated by the
prophet, Jesus in the one case, Elisha in the other. Thus the Jesus story has
been derived from the two Elisha tales, while not actually modeled upon them. Helms concentrates on the Gospels,
but here is an example of his work on another biblical narrative, one from the
Acts of the Apostles.4 Helms traces a series of probable connections between
the opening chapters of Ezekiel (in the
Greek Septuagint translation) and the story of Peter's vision in Acts 10:9-16.
Ezekiel has a series of visions which teach him what he will have to endure as
a prophet of God. In the first one (Ezekiel 1:1) Ezekiel sees heaven opened (enoichthesan hoi ouranoi),
while in Acts While this sort of cannibalizing of
old texts to fashion new ones may seem arbitrary to some readers, we must note
that the technique is not merely the product of modern theory, as if modern
scholars had simply inferred that the Gospel writers must have been doing
something of the kind. These practices of recombining bits and pieces from this
and that separate passage to create, in effect, a new Bible verse have long
been familiar as a standard exegetical procedure of the old rabbis. For
instance, Mark's citation of Isaiah (in Mark 1:2-3, "As it is written in Isaiah the
prophet, 'Behold. I send my messenger before thy face, who shall prepare thy
way; the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.'") turns out in fact to be a conflation of three
Old Testament passages, Malachi 3:1 ("Behold I send my messenger [the word
translated "angel" from both Hebrew and Greek originals] to prepare
the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple;
the messenger [or angel] of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is
coming, says the Lord of hosts."), Exodus 23:20 ("Behold, I send an
angel [or messenger] before you, to guard you on the way and to bring you to
the place I have prepared."), and Isaiah 40:3 ("A voice cries: 'In
the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a
highway for our God.'") Notice the effect produced by the
silent juxtaposition of the three verses. Mark's "my messenger" comes
from Malachi 3:1. Mark's "to prepare thy way" comes from Exodus
23:20, while "Behold, I send [my] angel/messenger before..." is common
to both of these texts, and it was this similarity that had already led Jewish
scribes to conflate the two verses even before Mark's time. The citation of
Isaiah 40:3, reemphasizing it to make it say "a voice crying in the
wilderness, [saying] 'Prepare the way of the Lord" instead of, as
originally, "a voice crying, 'In the wilderness prepare the way of the
Lord,'" denoting the preparation of a clear path for the Jewish exiles
from Babylon back through the desert to Canaan also occurs in the Dead Sea
Scrolls. None of the three passages originally meant anything like what Mark
makes of them in combined form. We might question whether this sort of
treatment of the biblical text even counts as exegesis, but in fact it was
characteristic of Mark's time and of esoteric Jewish exegesis for long
afterward. The presupposition was the
distinctly un-Protestant notion that, being a divinely inspired book, the Bible
was susceptible to all manner of clever manipulation. Whatever one might make
it seem to mean, it meant, since it could be no coincidence that the text
should yield up such fortuitous recombinations. God
must have intended any message the imaginative exegete could squeeze out of it
by hook or by crook. There are various
well-known Kabbalistic methods including Temurah (reading the Hebrew text from left to
right, like a word search puzzle, to find hidden "backward masking"
revelations), Notarikon (reading each letter of a word as the
first letter of each word in an implied sentence of cryptic revelation), and Gematria (reading the letters of a word as if
the digits stood for numbers, so that that word would be considered
interchangeable with any word elsewhere in Scripture that added up to the same
sum). New revelations excavated by such methods were called
"combinations," and to devise striking new ones was a mark of
spiritual enlightenment. In Isaac Beshevis Singer's novel Satan in Goray, one particular Kabbalistic
guru, Reb Gedaliya, is
acclaimed for this: "he... adorned his speech with mystical combinations
and permutations." An angel proclaims, "All the worlds on high do
tremble at the unions he doth form. The power of his combinations reaches even
to the heavenly mansions. From these combinations seraphim and angels twist
coronets for the Divine Presence."5
The Same Way Thus
far it appears that the Book of Mormon is the product of the kind of process
discussed by Helms, Brodie, and Crossan: the scrambling of motifs and
distinctive phrases from previous literary texts in order to produce a new text
of the same basic type. If the Book of Mormon is the literary creation of
Joseph Smith, who wrote new biblical-sounding stories by combining familiar
biblical vocabulary and motifs, then we may do exactly the same sort of
comparative redactional analysis on the Book of Mormon that scholars have been
doing on the Bible. Joseph Smith's fundamental source material still survives:
the Bible. And like the Gospel writers as understood by Crossan, Brodie and
Helms, Joseph Smith seems to have created new holy fictions by running the old
ones through the shredder and then reassembling the shreds in wholly new
combinations. His method appears to be precisely that of the old rabbis and of
the New Testament evangelists. So not only did Joseph Smith do the same sort of
thing biblical writers themselves did to produce new Bible text, he even did it
the same way. All of which allows us to propose a
way in which mainstream biblical scholars and students of the Book of Mormon
may come closer together. Biblical scholars ought to realize (as many no doubt
do) that the Book of Mormon is much the same sort of thing as the Bible they so
love and ought to be accorded the same sort of respect. It is no more a hoax
than Deuteronomy. Mormons ought to be more open to the possibility of the Book
of Mormon having originated as a modern pseudepigraph,
the work of Joseph Smith himself. As we have seen, this would only serve to
enhance his prophetic dignity, not to debunk it as literal-minded critics of
Mormonism have always jeered. The most important boon thus gained would be the
quantum leap in interpretative possibilities. With the aid of tools like
redaction and literary criticism, we may disclose theological riches in the
text that, on the presupposition of literalism, have remained as buried in the
text as the Golden Plates themselves were in the earth until Joseph Smith
disclosed them according to the foundation myth of Mormonism. Notes 1.
Gordon H. Fraser, What Does the Book of
Mormon Teach? An Examination of the Historical and Scientific
Statements of the Book of Mormon (Chicago:
Moody Press, 1964). This is not to deny the great value of
Fraser's research and historical conclusions. I mean only to suggest that his
theological-apologetical conclusions may be
premature. 2.
John Dominic Crossan, The Cross That Spoke: The Origins of the
Passion Narrative (San Franscisco: Harper &
Row, 1988). 3.
Thomas L. Brodie, "Luke the Literary Interpreter: Luke-Acts as a
Systematic Rewriting and Updating of the Elijah-Elisha Narrative in 1 and 2
Kings." 4.
Randel Helms, Gospel Fictions
(Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 21. 5. Isaac Beshevis Singer, Satan in Goray (NY: Fawcett Crest, 1980), pp. 140, 146-147. |
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