Rational belief in Book of Mormon historicity III: Why I believe

In the last two posts, I’ve argued that a limited chronology model primarily focused on Mosiah-3 Nephi 7 doesn’t excessively strain historical plausibility, and then turned around and argued that 1 Nephi-Enos was a living text that was adapted to reflect the state of the Nephite coalition around the time of Benjamin and later. But what does this have to do with a rational belief in Book of Mormon historicity?

One reason I believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon is because the existence of Mormon, Nephite records, and a century or so of Nephite culture seems like the least unlikely explanation for a number of things that are otherwise difficult to explain. To be fair, the translation of even a century’s worth of ancient records by Joseph Smith certainly puts a strain on plausibility, but so do the alternatives. I understand the attractions of seeing the Book of Mormon as ahistorical. And yet…

 

The 19th century

Joseph Smith possessed at least two tangible artifacts, the plates and the Nephite interpreters, whose existence isn’t easy to explain. Numerous witnesses, including multiple unofficial witnesses, attest to the physical existence of the plates. Even more saw the Nephite interpreters, whose display was not prohibited, and their descriptions are strikingly consistent. If you reject an ancient origin for these objects, it raises some difficult questions: Where would Joseph Smith get the material to produce them? Where would he get the time? In a context where metal is expensive, most people are poor, and working was essential to avoid starvation, putting together a stack of inscribed metal plates weighing dozens of pounds is a difficult project to pull off. I’m aware of the alternative explanations, but they don’t strike me as inherently more plausible. For me, the simpler explanation is that someone else handed these artifacts to Joseph Smith.

There’s also the social factor. It’s easy to dismiss the official witnesses as insiders, except most of them didn’t stay insiders. If Joseph Smith constructed the plates, he was either unassisted, or the leader of an airtight conspiracy that never leaked, even though all of Joseph Smith’s early supporters seem to have become disaffected at some point.

Then there’s the Book of Mormon as an intellectual project. Stephen Fleming and others are doing interesting work on intellectual influences on the Book of Mormon. It’s fascinating stuff! But you still have to draw a line with some material plausibility. Is an idea specific enough that influence could have only come from that source? If so, by what medium does the motif or idea or phrase get to Joseph Smith? What books contained it that he could have accessed, and how did he get the time to read all those books? It’s hard to find a solution that doesn’t require turning Joseph Smith into either a voracious scholarly reader with plenty of leisure time and access to a first-rate antiquarian library, or, again, the figurehead of an airtight conspiracy. (It seems like Stephen is avoiding those pitfalls, and I look forward to seeing where his work leads.)

This has all been rehashed many times, but one element that hasn’t gotten as much attention is related to Joseph Smith’s mentality. As Stephen has argued, Joseph Smith’s belief in the historicity of the Book of Mormon was sincere. An additional consideration is the continuity of revelatory method involving ancient characters that links the Book of Mormon, the Pure Language project, the incident with the Kinderhook plates, and the translation of the Book of Abraham – in other words, Joseph Smith also sincerely believed that ancient characters could convey divine knowledge, and that he was capable of translating them. To me that would seem to rule him out as the figurehead of an airtight conspiracy.

A recent theory has it that Joseph Smith needed the plates so that he could deceive his closest associates, but I find the argument unconvincing. Constructing plates that you don’t let anyone else see (except for a brief time with two small groups) seems like an effort that far exceeds what it accomplished (most of his associates still fell out with him at some point) when there were much simpler solutions available (gazing in rapture at the ceiling as you take dictation from the angels is the usual approach).

I understand the hesitancy, because claiming to reveal the translation of an angel-provided set of plates is inherently weird, but as Joseph Smith moves through history, interacting with his surroundings and other people, he looks and acts very much like a man in possession of a set of metal plates that he believed were of divine origin and that he was able to translate. Some people will weigh the evidence differently, but there’s enough there for some rational observers to conclude: Someone handed Joseph Smith a stack of metal plates, and the text of the Book of Mormon, and then the mastermind (however you interpret that term) behind the Book of Mormon continued to influence Joseph Smith’s prophetic work for years afterwards. The identity of the mastermind can be debated; for me, “Moroni” works reasonably well.

 

Philology

But! Those are all historical issues, while I’m an interloper from language and literature. Maybe the historians will eventually figure out a solution for all those issues.

My province is not ancient history or nineteenth-century American religion. I work with old books and texts, and what I do have some understanding of is what happens to texts that get copied and adapted by multiple hands for decades or centuries. What most rationally convinces me of the Book of Mormon’s historicity – which is quite separate from my spiritual conviction of its divinity – are all the ways it looks and acts like a text with considerable history of use, development and adaptation.

I’m not primarily thinking of chiasmus, although chiasmus is an interesting example of surplus textual complexity that’s easy to overlook for a hundred years or more, until it becomes impossible to overlook and demands explanation. Closer to what I have in mind are the passages where the Book of Mormon comments on key texts that are themselves only recorded later, such as the commentary in 3 Nephi 18 on the sacrament prayers that don’t themselves appear until Moroni 4-5. It’s not an easy trick to pull off.

What I principally have in mind are the numerous passages that look very much like later insertions and accretions, the traces of textual tectonics left by the collision of an earlier text with a later one. Quotations that are reported twice get expanded in different ways, suggesting that each had its own history of transmission and reception.

The things I’ve mentioned in the last few posts are also very much what I have in mind, including the retelling of Nephite tribal politics at a particular moment of Nephite history as the family drama of eponymous ancestors (but largely without modern readers noticing what was going on). As I’ve argued here, the small plates look very much like a compilation that was expanded and supplemented with various smaller texts (such as the book of Jacob) over time. And the book of Jacob itself clearly seems to have been expanded two times, resulting in the present book with three different conclusions. Hebraisms or chiasmus might be explainable as Biblical influence or the hallmarks of oral composition, but adding repeated colophons while expanding the book of Jacob is a literate practice requiring people, texts and time. So the foundation of my rational belief in the historicity of the Book of Mormon is its philology, the fact that it’s amenable to historicist reading at all.

Textual philology hasn’t been a hot area of scholarship in over a century, unfortunately. There are certainly scholars of various kinds who make regular use of it, but it’s not a skill that most graduate students learn, even in the historical fields of the humanities. Without spending a few months of your life doing the painstaking work of puzzling out the relationships between a dozen versions of a text based on countless minute differences between them, it’s easy to get the impression that it really isn’t all that hard: Apply a little Lachmann, a little lectio difficilior, add a dash of New Philology, and you get a neat stemma that answers all your questions.

That’s not how it works at all. What you initially end up with is a bewildering mess riddled with contradictions where you have to make your best judgment about textual affiliations. But with enough experience, you do get a sense for the kinds of things that tend to happen. And when I look at 1 Nephi to Enos, what I see are dents and scars acquired during a long textual history.

Admittedly it’s an awkward situation for everybody. For devotional use or scriptural exegesis, 1 Nephi is supposed to be what it claims: an autograph etched in metal by its author, transmitted unchanged to Mormon a thousand years later – not a malleable text shaped by a century or two of active use and development. For those who see the Book of Mormon as ahistorical, there isn’t supposed to be a textual history prior to Joseph Smith at all. But the Book of Mormon, especially 1 Nephi-Enos, has a surplus textual complexity that’s obvious once you look for it, but subtle enough to largely escape notice (despite millions of people scouring the book for nearly 200 years as if their eternal salvation depended on it), and which is very difficult to explain without a history of active use prior to its translation.