If your parents or grandparents die of Covid-19, please make sure the disease appears as the cause of death in their obituaries.
Author: Jonathan Green
Radical Orthodoxy
I swore off writing manifestos 20 years ago as bad business with no profit in it. Why would I sign this one?
Use of the gold plates in Book of Mormon translation accounts
It’s become something of a communis opinio doctorum that Joseph Smith didn’t make use of the gold plates while translating the Book of Mormon.
Concealment and divine prohibition in Book of Mormon translation accounts
How the Book of Mormon was translated: a proposal
Learning from Kinderhook
Machine Translation
Two attitudes about translation are on my mind. One is about Joseph Smith: “Seeing words appear in a seer stone is magic, not translation. Translation is when you have the equivalent text in a foreign language, like Google Translate.” The…
Interpreters, visions and seer stones
The Interpreter has recently published two reviews of William L. Davis’ Visions in a Seer Stone. The two reviews, by Brant Gardner and Brian Hales, exemplify what I think are positive trends in Latter-day Saint contributions to Mormon Studies.
Perils on every side
Our unhappy political moment has unfortunately corrected a longstanding asymmetry in ideologically-driven exit options.
They’re not wrong
What I miss about home church—and why I need to go back to sacrament meeting
I’ve heard multiple people say how much they’ve enjoyed the last five months of home church. Studying the scriptures however they want, and worshiping each Sunday as a family? More, please. Now that my ward has resumed meeting, there’s a lot to miss about home church.
“By his own admission”: a one-footnote review
John Hammond’s Quest for the New Jerusalem: A Mormon Generation Sagastates that Sidney Rigdon, “by his own admission, ‘made up’ religious experiences in his youth,” which seems like something worth looking into.
Notes on Book of Mormon Philology. Vb4. The utility of philology: Jacob and Sherem
Imagining the Book of Mormon as a complex work reflecting numerous steps of compilation and abridgment helps explain some curious features of the encounter with Sherem in Jacob 7.
Notes on Book of Mormon Philology. Vb2-3. The utility of philology: Nephite origins
Thinking of the Book of Mormon as the result of a series of textual accretions and combinations might help make sense of how curiously overdetermined the account of Nephite origins is.
Notes on Book of Mormon Philology. V.The permissibility and utility of philology for studying the Book of Mormon
Is philological deliberation useful for studying the Book of Mormon? Is it even permitted?
Notes on Book of Mormon Philology. IV. The Puzzle of 3 Nephi
Why is 3 Nephi, which records the central event in the history of Nephite salvation and destruction, located between Helaman and 4 Nephi?
Notes on Book of Mormon Philology. IIIc. The source structure of the Book of Mormon
If you trace the history of a text from earlier manuscripts to later ones, it’s not unusual for the text to be extended in various ways.
Notes on Book of Mormon Philology. IIIb. The material culture of Nephite literacy
The material culture of Nephite literacy is the one aspect of Nephite civilization about which we have any kind of historical evidence.
Notes on Book of Mormon Philology. IIIb note 1. A note on the uniformity of the Golden Plates
Notes on Book of Mormon Philology. IIIa. Nephite literacy
Unless someone gets lucky with a spade or a metal detector, the full extent of Mormon’s sources will remain unknown. To keep even tentative answers on the side of plausibility rather than fantasy, how we think about Mormon’s sources should be informed by any information we have about Nephite literacy and textual culture.