One of the markers of being the cool intellectual member is that you know where all the bodies are buried. I remember as a middle schooler cross-checking The Godmaker’s Journal of Discourses references and feeling like I was the recipient of arcane, secret knowledge. Of course, now the Internet has shouted everything from the rooftops and most people knows about the big tough issues (e.g. pretty much all Latter-day Saints know about Joseph Smith’s polygamy now). But still, there are some more niche issues that are still primarily the purview of the more well-read class.
And with the Internet it is becoming easier to become part of said class. While in the past you essentially had to have access to a university library to be well-read in Church issues, now primary sources abound on the Internet–if you can filter out all the noise, at this point organization is the primary hindrance. To this end, I have found the BH Roberts Foundation’s Mormonr pages very useful both in summarizing these issues and presenting scans of the actual primary sources involved so that I can read them for myself and make up my own mind.
[Full disclosure, I very occasionally do some work for the BH Roberts Foundation with their surveys, but they don’t know that I’m writing this].
As I’ve schlogged through these primary sources there are a number of “tough issues” that I realized I had misperceptions about since I only had a passing familiarity with them and never did a deep dive like I have for other “hard issues.” So, in the spirit of humility, here is my list of misconceptions that were corrected. Some of them were in the direction of “this is worse than I thought,” some of them were in the direction of “this wasn’t as bad as I thought,” and some of them weren’t in any direction in particular.
Before I thought Adam-God was an eccentric doctrinal hobby horse of Brigham Young that was mentioned a few times. I since realized that It was more deeply incorporated into Church teachings (including in the St. George Temple) than I thought; it wasn’t an occasional oddity in General Conference.
One more thought on this; I know this is controversial, but we believe much more eccentric things (not that eccentric is bad or inaccurate) than Adam-God, we’ve just gotten used to them.
I didn’t know that Brigham Young distanced himself from Blood Atonement later in life, but by the same token I didn’t know that versions of it were taught into the 20th century.
Changes to the Temple Endowment
I didn’t know that in the 19th century the washings and anointings involved a lot more water and were done in tubs.
I wasn’t aware of the speculation that Sirius is Kolob.
I learned what has become one of my favorite Joseph Smith quotes of all time: “I suppose John saw beings there, that had been saved from ten thousand times ten thousand earths like this, strange beasts of which we have no conception <all> might be seen in heaven.”
I didn’t know about Junia, the “female apostle.”
Black Saints and the Priesthood
I didn’t know there were Black Branch Presidents pre-Revelation who didn’t hold the priesthood. Potentially interesting precedent in regards to the women’s leadership question.
Black Saints and the Priesthood (Joseph Smith era)
I didn’t know that Elijah Abel was of predominantly European ancestry. In my mind’s eye I always envisioned him as being primarily Black.
I didn’t know that the “caught in the barn” episode was a very late, third-hand account.
Joseph Smith and Fraud Allegations
I didn’t know there were so many contradictory accounts about the outcome of the glasslooker trial.
Joseph Smith’s Pre-1830 Education
I had accepted the line that Hyrum Smith briefly attended Dartmouth (not that I dove really deep into the subject), so it was interesting to see that wasn’t actually the case.
Joseph Smith’s Polygamy and Multiple Accounts of the First Vision
I didn’t learn anything substantive that was new, but I just thought I’d call these articles out for their excellent use of summary tables. They provide a fairly definitive and easy to follow listing of various aspects of Joseph Smith’s polygamy and multiple accounts of the first vision.
Not to downplay the significance, but 1) there were fewer slaves in Utah than I thought, and 2) I assumed slavery in Utah was more or less the same as Southern slavery; I wasn’t aware of the legal differences in terms of rights given to slaves. Again, this isn’t to downplay this particular mark in our history.
Latter-day Saints and Nazi Germany
The Church comes out better looking than I thought. I had this vague idea that the Church never condemned Nazism because they wanted to keep an even keel with the German governing authorities, but that’s incorrect, and there’s much more to be credited for in regards to the Church’s behavior than I thought. Of course “what did you do in WWII” legacies can be complicated for religious leaders (e.g. see the controversy about Pope Pius). A pet peeve of mine is when people who have never had an off-diagonal, edgy, or unpredictable political opinion in their life insist that they would not have thought twice about giving the finger to the SS and being marched into the camps. On the other hand, I did not know that J. Rueben Clark was into The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. (And I read Quinn’s biography right after my mission, so I somehow missed that).
Before I had this vague notion that there was a reasonable chance that BH Roberts was a non-historicist in regards to the Book of Mormon, but after reading through the sources I really don’t think that’s a defensible position.
I didn’t know that versions of [blood atonement] were taught into the 20th century.
Versions were being taught at least until the execution of Gary Gilmore.
That’s a handy website, thanks!
While I was at BYU, I would occasionally go to the library and read the Journal of Discourses. Anything that smelled of Adam-God theory felt like a hobby horse of one or two of the speakers. It was more like they enjoyed using vague allusions to the next. Of course this isn’t thorough academic work, but it did leave me with the feeling that church leadership was trying to be more like Joseph Smith and changing things.
I’ve long suspected that Brigham Young and early Church leaders expected they had to fill Joseph Smith’s shoes in terms of esoteric textual interpretation.
One of my favorite Joseph Smith anecdotes is when Wilford Woodruff writes about Joseph speculating on what Paul meant in 1 Corinthians 15:31-32. The conventional understanding is that Paul is talking about dying to his sins, mortifying the flesh, and I think that’s right. Joseph was spitballing, though, and asked “what if the beasts at Ephesus actually come and kill him every day and God brings him back? What if he’s just being literal here?” He never brings this speculation up again, and the JST wording actually forecloses this interpretation imo, but Joseph sought revelation by interrogating the possible meanings of biblical texts outside of conventional interpretations.
And I think Brigham Young and some of his immediate successors who had known Joseph Smith and that method tried to use it as they assumed his mantle, which leads to esotericism like blood atonement and Adam-God as sort of speculative hobby-horses which decline as distance from Joseph and the reinterpret-prooftexts praxis increases.
Kudos to Hoosier’s exposition of a possible explanation for ‘prophetic inspiration’. Very interesting; can somebody (or Hoosier him/her self) expand a bit more?
Sure, a little bit. I’ll have to go track down the source for that anecdote. I’ve just had this thought for a while after reading about the JST and how Joseph got revelation from it. And it sent me back to thinking about the First Vision and how the whole thing got launched by Joseph reading James 1:5 and taking it very, very seriously. “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not, it shall be given him.”
Now, the verse is situated in the middle of James’ discussion of temptation and persecution. It doesn’t make much sense here for James to casually say “God will answer your questions” in the middle of a sermon on how suffering refines the individual. He’s talking about wisdom, which is more experiential. But Joseph is reading this and the phrase, stripped of context, penetrates to the core of his soul, and leads him to his great theophany in the Grove.
So here we have a young Joseph who has to compare the utter failure of the traditional religious interpreters and their methodical study and hermeneutics (though of course he didn’t use such terms) with the singular success of decontexualized proof texting! He did what the wise and learned say not to do, read out of context! And it worked!
(We’ve since learned that the Gospel authors, when quoting the Old Testament, do this too. See: Matthew.)
You see this sort of thing all throughout his ministry. What has Christianity made out of Paul’s reference to baptism of the dead? What about the multiple references throughout the scriptures to multiple heavens? The terminology of celestial (heavenly) and terrestrial (earthly) bodies in 1 Corinthians 15:40 applied to the glories of celestial bodies in the very next verse? A lot of our most distinctive doctrines seem to arise from Joseph Smith looking at scripture and seeing within larger narratives seeds of inspiration which God seizes on. Sometimes the point is the argument of the text – other times the point is the words or phrases in the text which serve as triggers for inspiration.
Which, as I notice, is pretty much exactly what Nephi says he plans to do with Isaiah in 2 Nephi 25:1-6. The original context of Isaiah’s writings aren’t the point. Scripture’s role is to serve as a jumping-off point for the spirit of prophecy, like a seer stone. Hence the later comment he makes (through Brigham Young) that a living oracle is worth more than the entire volume of scripture.
And then he dies, and his successors have to figure out how to lead this church. And they were taking their cues from Joseph – if a text jumps out at you as saying something out of step with traditional interpretations, follow it for a bit and see where it leads. And I think that’s how you get Brigham Young’s interest in Adam-God, for instance. But that doesn’t take in the same way, so this sort of thing just sort of declines until you have the modern model of prophecy which is a lot less trailblazing.
Is that satisfactory?
@ Last Lemming: I actually talk about that in my review of Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song”: http://archive.timesandseasons.org/2022/08/the-gospel-psychopathy-and-the-executioners-song/index.html. I knew that some people posit a connection between Utah’s relatively late (21st century) use of firing squad and blood atonement, but I still haven’t seen anything concrete connecting the two. There does appear to be some evidence for some kind of a connection in early 20th-century Utah, and evidently Joseph Smith is on the record saying he prefers bloodletting to hanging for capital punishment (as do I, incidentally, but not for soteriological reasons), But I didn’t know that “Mormon Doctrine” and “Doctrines of Salvation” explicitly see some merit to the idea of Blood Atonement, that was the later support I was ignorant about.
Frank: You’re welcome!
Jader3rd, Hoosier, Raymond Winn:
Similar to Hoosier’s pointI think Adam God came around during a time when the Church was undergoing the classic transition from a charismatic revolutionary movement to a more bureaucratized, theologically systematic faith. While back in the JS’ day there was more openness to theological novelty within the Church, gradually things settled down (as they had to as the Church transitioned from a small movement to a larger one), and the radical innovations of yesterday became the conservative strictures of today. During Brigham Young’s era things started to solidify, and interestingly one of his pet issues found itself outside of orthodoxy when the dust settled.