IRRATIONAL LDS SCHOLAR CONCLUSIONS
INTERPRETER A Journal of Mormon Scripture
Volume 19 · 2016 · Pages 1-16
Joseph
Smith, the Book of Mormon, and the American Renaissance: An Update
Robert
A. Rees
Abstract:
This is a follow-up to my article, “Joseph Smith and the American
Renaissance,” published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought in
2002.1 My
purpose in writing that article was to consider Joseph Smith in relation to his
more illustrious contemporary American authors — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry
David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. In that
article I tried to demonstrate that in comparison with these writers, Joseph
Smith did not possess the literary imagination, talent, authorial maturity,
education, cultural milieu, knowledge base, or sophistication necessary to
produce the Book of Mormon; nor, I argued, had he possessed all of these
characteristics, nor was the time in which the book was produced sufficient to
compose such a lengthy, complex, and elaborate narrative. This addendum takes
the comparison one step further by examining each writer’s magnum opus and the
background, previous writings, and preliminary drafts that preceded its
publication — then comparing them with Joseph Smith’s publication of the Book
of Mormon. That is, each of the major works of these writers of prose, fiction,
and poetry as well as the scriptural text produced by Joseph Smith has a
history — one that allows us to trace its evolution from inception to
completion.
I was fortunate as an undergraduate at BYU in
the late fifties to have had Robert K. Thomas as a teacher and mentor. After taking “Introduction to Literature” from Bob,
I recognized him as an unusually gifted teacher, one who made his subjects and
his students come alive.
As an
undergraduate at BYU, I have had a few great teachers in my life, including
Hugh Nibley, Parley A. Christensen, and J. Reuben Clark Jr., and as a graduate
student at the University of Wisconsin, Madeline Doran, Helen White, Ricardo
Quintana, and Frederick Cassidy, but none spoke to my mind, heart, and soul as
clearly and as forcefully as did “Brother
1 Dialogue
35:3 (Fall 2002), 83–112.
2 • Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 19
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Thomas.”
I took every class he taught, and it was essentially because of his influence
that I became a professor of literature and a serious student of the Book of
Mormon. I was pleased during my first year in graduate school to nominate Bob
for the Teacher of the Year honor at BYU, which he won.
I say
I was fortunate in having Bob as a teacher because he introduced me to the Book
of Mormon, the Bible as literature, and the writers of the American
Renaissance, including especially Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau
(the latter the subject of Thomas’s Columbia University PhD dissertation). When
I published “Joseph Smith and the American Renaissance” in Dialogue in
2002, I was aware of how much that article was indebted to Bob’s insight into
scripture and these great American writers.
What
I attempted to show in that article, as summarized in the headnote to this
article, is that in comparison to the major writers of the American Renaissance
— that rich outpouring of imaginative expression Van Wyck
Brooks called the “flowering of New England”2 — at the time he produced the Book of
Mormon, Joseph Smith lacked the compositional skills, literary gifts, and
cultural background necessary to write a book as structurally complex,
rhetorically varied, and culturally “strange” as the Book of Mormon (by
strange, I mean the Egyptian, Hebrew, and New World elements one finds in the
history of these Promised Land peoples). That is, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne,
Melville, and Whitman all had educations superior to Joseph Smith’s education,
all lived under more substantial and more stable socio-economic conditions, and
all had much greater family, community and cultural systems to support their
writing than he did.
Since
writing that article, I have continued to think of Joseph Smith in relation to
his distinguished fellow authors. Recently in working on a dramatic script
about Emerson and his contemporaries while at the same time teaching the Book
of Mormon at Graduate Theological Union and the University of California,
Berkeley, I realized there was an important dimension of the comparison between
the American prophet and his contemporaries to which I had not given sufficient
consideration in my original article: the biographical and bibliographical
context in which each writer produced his magnum opus. This article is an
attempt to address that dimension because it completes the picture of these
writers
2 Van
Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England:
1815–1865 (Mattituck, NY: Amereon Ltd., 1981).
Rees, Joseph Smith,
the Book of Mormon, and US Renaissance • 3
and
their places in this incredibly fertile chapter of American literary history in
relation to the Mormon prophet and the book with which he is most closely and
famously identified.
Over
the past century, scholars have been divided over the authorship of the Book of
Mormon as well as its literary merits. Some have argued that the book is
clearly the product of Joseph Smith’s mind and imagination while others have
contended that it could not possibly be so.3 Various theories have been advanced
to show that Joseph Smith was the sole author, that someone else wrote the
book, that he had considerable help from others in writing it, that he
plagiarized large sections of it from the Bible and other sources, that he
produced it by some mysterious or miraculous process, or that he had a colossal
capacity to both compose, memorize and dictate its contents—and to do so over a
surprisingly brief period.4 More recently, critics have argued that Smith wrote the book
but did so under divine guidance. For example, Anthony Hutchinson feels “the
Book of Mormon should be seen as authoritative scripture.” He adds, “God
remains the author of the Book of Mormon viewed as the word of God, but Joseph
Smith, in this construct, would be the book’s inspired human author rather than
its inspired translator.”5
3 The
most recent argument in favor of Joseph Smith as the sole author of the Book of
Mormon is Earl M. Wunderli’s An
Imperfect Book: What the Book of Mormon Tells Us about Itself (Salt Lake
City: Signature Books, 2013). See my review of Wunderli’s
book in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 12 (2014), 33–47. See
also Wunderli’s response to my review, “Book of
Mormon on Trial: Wunderli,” at
http://rationalfaiths.com/book-mormon-trial-wunderli/. My response to Wunderli’s response, “Book of Mormon on Trial,” is found
at: http://rationalfaiths. com/book-mormon-trial-bob-rees/.
4
Louis Midgley has summarized the various attempts to explain the book into four
categories: 1) “Joseph Smith wrote the book as a conscious fraud,” 2) “Joseph
Smith wrote the book under the influence of some sort of paranoia or demonic
possession or dissociative illusion,” 3) “Joseph Smith had the help of someone
like Sidney Rigdon in creating the book as a conscious fraud,” and 4) “Joseph
Smith wrote the book while under some sort of religious inspiration.” “Who
Really Wrote the Book of Mormon? The Critics and Their Theories,” in Noel B.
Reynolds, ed., Book of Mormon Authorship Revisited: The Evidence for Ancient
Origins (Provo, UT: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies,
1997), 104. As I summarized in my original article, “Taken together, these
explanations show Joseph Smith as a country bumpkin and a brilliant
sophisticate, as a simple self-delusionist and a complicated conspirator, as an
idiot and a genius, and as Devil-inspired and God-inspired.“
5
“The Word of God is Enough: The Book of Mormon as Nineteenth-Century
Scripture,” in New Approaches, to the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City:
Signature, 1993), 1, 2.
4 • Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 19
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In my
original article, I spoke of what Melville scholars refer to as his “try
works.”6 The
image found in Chapter 96 of his great novel, Moby-Dick, refers to the
two large kettles or “try pots” situated on the decks of nineteenth-century
whaling ships that were used to “try out” or reduce whale oil by boiling the
blubber. As with many of the elements and episodes in the novel, try-works can
symbolize various things and Melville clearly intended that as readers we see
into his multi-level symbols and extended metaphors whatever we are able to
bring to them of our imagination and experience. In fact, Melville includes a
specific episode to illustrate his symbolic intention. As I explained in
another article,
Ahab,
in his megalomaniacal quest for the white whale, nails a gold doubloon to the
mast of the Pequod as a reward to the first man who sights the whale. As
they seek the elusive leviathan, each of the characters on the ship comes up
and looks at the doubloon, and each sees something different. For Ahab it is the
prophetic emblem of his quest; for Starbuck it is a Puritan sermon; for Stubb it is an almanac of the zodiac; for Flask, the
pragmatist, it is “but a round thing made of gold. ... worth sixteen dollars”;
for Queequeg it is merely “an old button off some
King’s trousers”; for the dark and ghostly Fedallah
it is the sign of the Devil; and, finally, for the mad black boy Pip, it is a
reflection of the mad world itself: “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye
look, they look. And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats.” As
Ahab says, “This round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like
a magician’s glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own
mysterious self.”7
One
of the ways in which try works functions is as a symbol of the process
of writing, the fire of discipline and imagination necessary to boil away the
rhetorical blubber that plagues most authors, especially in their early years.
In this sense, it stands for the process a successful writer must go through in
order to refine and perfect his or her writing. Thus, for Melville, the five
novels he wrote prior to Moby-Dick (Typee,
Omoo, Mardi, Redburn and White-Jacket), constitute
the try works that prepared him for the more complex rhetorical style,
universal themes, and timeless scope of Moby-Dick as well as the
subtleties and other stylistic felicities that constitute the novel’s amazing
ontological density.
6 See
Kingsly Widmer, “The Learned Try-Works: A Review of
Recent Scholarly Criticism of Melville,” Studies in the Novel, Vol. 5,
No. 1 (Spring, 1973), pp. 117–124.
7
Robert A. Rees, “Forgiving the Church and Loving the Saints,” Sunstone 16:1
(February 1992), 18–27..
Rees, Joseph Smith,
the Book of Mormon, and US Renaissance • 5
Melville
was aware he had written a much deeper, more profound novel, which is evident
in his response to Hawthorne’s praise of Moby-Dick: “I have written a
wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities
are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome’s
Pantheon. It is a strange feeling — no hopefulness is in it, no despair. ... I
speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling. ... I
feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we
are the pieces.”8
My
intention in my original article as well as in this one is to consider the
respective intellectual, emotional, and cultural state of these writers and the
circumstances and conditions under which they created their most important
works — those for which history most remembers them. Let’s consider each in his
turn.9
Emerson
(1805–1882)
Emerson
was likely the most influential writer and thinker of his generation. Today he
is remembered as a poet and quasi-philosopher, but during the period in which
he flourished, he was recognized as somewhat of a prophet and sage, which is
why this period is sometimes referred to as the Age of Emerson. Emerson was
fortunate to be blessed with conditions conducive to producing an accomplished
writer. He had an excellent education at the Boston Latin School and Harvard
College (from which he graduated at age eighteen) and Harvard Divinity School
(age 22), published his first article at age nineteen, travelled to Europe when
he was twenty-nine, and gave his first public lecture when he was thirty. He
published his first major piece, Nature, when he was thirty- three. In
addition, he was an indefatigable keeper of journals (running to some ten
published volumes) and prolific correspondent, and he worked out many of the
ideas and expressions for his writing and speaking
8 Melville to
Hawthorne, 17 November 1851, ww.melville.org/letter7.htm.
9 While any
standard critical biography presents the facts of the compositional
evolution
for each of the respective authors of the American Renaissance discussed here,
the reader is referred to F.A.O. Matthiessen’s groundbreaking American
Renaissance (London: Oxford University Press, 1960). For more specific
information, the following are excellent sources: Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson:
The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Robert
D. Richardson, Jr., Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988); David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A
Cultural Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); Hyatt Waggoner, Hawthorne:
A Critical Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955); Hershel Parker,
Melville: A Biography: Vol 1, 1819– 1851; Vol 2, 1851,–1891. (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, 2005).
6 • Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 19
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through
such journaling. For the next nearly four decades he was the most popular
lecturer in America, delivering some fifteen hundred lectures throughout the
northern, New England, and midwestern states as well as in Europe over the
course of his lifetime.
Further,
Emerson lived in one of the most creative and intellectually stimulating
environments in American history. He was at the center of an amazing array of
poets, artists, philosophers, educators, innovators, explorers, adventurers,
and other luminaries. He was heralded not only in America but in Europe, where
he met other writers who influenced him — people like Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Eliot, and Carlyle. Although Emerson never produced a singular major work, his
collections of essays (1841, 1844, and 1846) and poems (1846) mark him as a
major American writer. Thus, Emerson had a long apprenticeship before he
produced his most mature work in his late thirties and early forties. In
addition, having been the recipient of two inheritances, he lived a life of
relative comfort and leisure, giving him the time to develop his expressive
talents. Since he was at the hub of a cultural revolution, he was also
fortunate in associating with luminaries in the political, social, and cultural
world of Boston and beyond.
Thoreau
(1817–1862)
Like
Emerson, his fellow and older townsman (by twelve years), Henry David Thoreau
was well educated, having attended Concord Academy (where he later taught) and
Harvard College. Like Emerson, he was an avid journal writer. However, in
contrast to Emerson’s extensive travel and lecturing, Thoreau was an autodidact
and immersive student of nature. Noting with intentional irony, “I have
traveled much in Concord,” he set out to know the microcosm of his own
environs. A wide reader and deep thinker, Thoreau published poetry and essays
as well as a memoir, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849,
age thirty-one), before producing one of the most important and
influential works of American literature, Walden Pond (1850), the
following year. Thoreau lived for a time in Emerson’s house and tutored
Emerson’s and (at Stanton Island) Emerson’s brother William’s children. He
enjoyed the association of a number of other writers and thinkers, including
Hawthorne and Whitman. He lectured in Concord and published several essays,
including the influential “Civil Disobedience.” Although in many ways different
from Emerson, Thoreau benefited from Emerson’s friendship, as Emerson did from
his. What one sees with Thoreau, as
Rees, Joseph Smith,
the Book of Mormon, and US Renaissance • 7
with
Emerson, is a significant apprenticeship as a writer from the time he was a
teenager until he published Walden Pond at age thirty-two. Hawthorne
(1804–1864)
Nathaniel
Hawthorne showed an early proclivity for writing when at age sixteen he wrote
and published The Spectator, a short-lived newsmagazine. The next year,
he entered Bowdoin College where he was classmates with Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow and the future US President Franklin Pierce. After graduation,
Hawthorne withdrew from the world to devote full time to becoming a writer. He
published his first novel, Fanshaw, at age twenty-four and began
publishing short stories under a pseudonym. His most famous and influential
collection of stories, Twice Told Tales, was published in 1837 when he
was thirty-three. In 1842 Hawthorne moved into Emerson’s ancestral home in
Concord with his new bride, Sophia Peabody, of the prominent Peabody sisters
and an excellent critic and editor of her husband’s works. For the next several
years Hawthorne had one of his most creative and productive writing periods,
producing additional stories, children’s stories, and a novel, Mosses From an Old Manse (1846). In 1849, Hawthorne began work
on his major novel, The Scarlet Letter, which he published the following
year (1850) at age forty-six. What followed were additional novels, The
House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale
Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860). In addition to writing,
Hawthorne served as US Ambassador to Liverpool for four years (1853–57) during
which time he interacted with distinguished British writers. Thus
the time between his first novel at age twenty-four and The Scarlet Letter
at age forty-six, was twenty-two years.
Melville
(1819–1891)
Herman
Melville’s formal education, which began when he was five, included attendance
at the New York Male School, Lansingburgh Academy,
the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, and Albany Academy. As pointed out
earlier, Melville had a long literary apprenticeship before he undertook to
write Moby-Dick. His life as a sailor and his extensive travel, often to
exotic places also prepared him to write about universal themes. In addition,
his formal and informal education provided both breadth and depth to his
writing, which began in his adolescent years. According to Merton Sealts, Melville’s “study of ancient history, biography,
and literature during his school days left a lasting impression on both his
thought and his art, as did his almost
8 • Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 19
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encyclopedic
knowledge of both the Old and the New Testaments.”10 One sees the influence of Melville’s
education in his fascination with Shakespeare. In a collection of the Bard’s plays he purchased in 1849, there are nearly five hundred
markings, and Shakespeare’s influence can be seen in many places, including
some prose passages in Moby-Dick that scan iambic pentameter. As David
Cope observes, “That Melville’s Moby-Dick contains nearly measureless
references to the reading of Shakespeare is an old story featuring the whaling
epic’s persistent Shakespearean verbal echoes, the composition and sequencing
of scenes, and the construction of Ahab as a tragic hero-villain. ... The
verbal echoes pop up so often that Shakespeareans may look forward to enjoying
the variety of uses to which Melville put the bard.”11
Perhaps
equally influential was Melville’s intimate, sustained relationship with
Hawthorne, the writer with whom he had the greatest affinity and whose imprint
on Melville’s imagination was indelible. The point is that in the long space
between the completion of his formal education (1837) and the publication of
his first novel, Typee (1846), Melville
had ample time to develop his skills as a writer of fiction. Additionally, in
the five-year span between Typee (1846)
and Moby- Dick (1851), he published four additional novels. What
is also relevant, after Moby-Dick, he continued to publish stories,
sketches, novels and poems (including a long poem, Clarel,
on the Holy Land). Two of his masterpieces, Benito Cereno and Billy
Budd, were written in his later years (although the latter was unfinished
at his death). Thus, from the beginning to the end of his career as a writer,
one can see the progressive unfolding of Melville’s literary gifts and talents.
Whitman
(1819–1892)
Unlike
Melville and the other writers discussed in this article, Walt Whitman did not
have a substantial formal education, a rich family culture, or intellectual
community in which he could develop his literary talent. His father took him
out of school when Walt was eleven, at which time he began working in printing,
journalism, and the various trades he pursued during his lifetime. In 1848–49
(age nineteen–twenty) he established and edited the Brooklyn Weekly Freeman,
which, among other liberal causes, opposed slavery.
10
Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville’s Reading.
Revised and Enlarged Edition (University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 18
11
David Cope, “Melville/Shakespeare.”
Rees, Joseph Smith,
the Book of Mormon, and US Renaissance • 9
Although
he was a journalist and dabbled in fiction, Whitman’s real love was poetry. In
1855 he anonymously published the first edition of his revolutionary
collection, Leaves of Grass, a work he would continue to revise and expand
throughout his life. During the Civil War, Whitman worked as a nurse in a
military hospital in Washington, D.C., was employed at several federal
agencies, and continued to expand and polish his great poem. After the last
edition (1892), Whitman exclaimed, “L. of G. at last complete — after 33
y’rs of hackling at it, all times & moods of my
life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace & war,
young & old.”12
Leaves of Grass, which Whitman expanded and revised almost
literally to the end of his life, from the dozen poems in the first edition to
the nearly four hundred in the last, chronicles the evolution not only of
American’s greatest poem but its most accomplished and most influential poet.
In a sense, Whitman spent most of his adult life as a writer.
Each
of the writers under discussion here had the ample time the writing of
significant literature takes. Thus Emerson, who was relatively wealthy, had
long periods of time for contemplation, reading, and writing. For the most part
he could choose to spend his time writing. Thoreau was an independent spirit
who came and went as he wished. He lived at Walden Pond with entire seasons
devoted to observation, reading, and writing.; Hawthorne secreted himself in
his mother’s house while he worked out his literary style and was reclusive for
long stretches of time during other periods of his life, which he devoted to
composition, including writing The Scarlet Letter. Melville lived his
life essentially as a writer although at times he struggled to find the time
and money to support his profession. As a single, independent man, Whitman was
able to devote substantial time to the writing and revision of his major work
throughout his life.
What
is true of the authors under discussion here could also be said of many other
literary figures of the period, including Edgar Allen Poe, James Russell
Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Emily Dickinson. Although none produced
a single major work on which his or her reputation rests, all produced a
substantial body of literary expression whether poetry or prose. In addition,
in comparison with Joseph Smith, all had superior educations, sustained periods
in which to develop their mature work, and, with the exception of Emily
Dickinson, enjoyed supportive critical environments.
12
David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman: A cultural Biography (New York: Alfred
Knopf, 1995), 5.
10 • Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 19
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Joseph
Smith (1805–1844)
Just
as we have with Joseph Smith’s contemporary writers, it is important to
consider his life in the years preceding the publication of the Book of Mormon
in 1830 when he was twenty-five years old. In other words, what was he doing
when Emerson, Thoreau, and their fellow writers during comparable periods of
their lives were keeping journals, going to school, starting their professions,
travelling, and mingling with the leading lights of their respective
intellectual and cultural communities? According to Richard Bushman’s
award-winning biography, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, two years
after the publication of the Book of Mormon, Joseph, speaking of his
family, wrote, “We were deprived of the bennifit
of an education. Suffice it to say I was mearly
instructed in reading writing and the ground rules of Arithmatic
which constuted my whole literary acquirements.”13 Bushman
adds, “Joseph may have attended school briefly in Palmyra, and a neighbor
remembered the Smiths holding school in their house and studying the Bible.”14 While some
have challenged the extent and degree of Joseph’s education or exaggerated what
his “home schooling” might have entailed,15 the contrast between his education
and those of the writers discussed above, with the possible exception of
Whitman, is striking. Harvard and Bowdoin, though not colleges or universities
in the sense we think of them today, offered the best classical education
available in the United States and exposure to gifted teachers, a rich library,
and other resources.
What
we find in the historical record is that the hardscrabble life of the Smith
family in general and of Joseph in particular seems to have left little space
or leisure for the kind of thinking and writing necessary to produce a
manuscript of the length and complexity of the Book of Mormon. Before Moroni’s
first visit in 1823 and Joseph’s
13
Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York:
Vintage, 2005), 41–42.
14
Ibid.
15
The anonymous author of “Could Joseph Smith Have Written the Book of Mormon,” Mormon
Think, http://mormonthink.com/josephweb. htm#introduction,
avers that Joseph, “was home schooled quite extensively,” without any
supporting evidence to either describe what such “schooling” might have
entailed or to back up such a claim. While it may have been true that the Smith
family had the rudiments of basic educational lessons in the home, what the
Smith children got was nothing close to what Emerson and Thoreau got at
Harvard, Hawthorne at Bodowin, Melville at the
various academies he attended, or likely even what Whitman got during his
curtailed formal education.
Rees, Joseph Smith,
the Book of Mormon, and US Renaissance • 11
acquisition
of the plates in 1827, Joseph was preoccupied with the family’s declining
fortunes, working the family farm and hiring himself out as a laborer, as, in
his own words, “it required the exertions of all that were able to render any
assistance for the support of the Family.”16 Thus, the idea that Joseph had time to
read broadly, undertake research, construct various drafts, and work out the
plot, characters, settings, various points of view, and multiple rhetorical
styles that constitute the five-hundred-plus page narrative of the Book of
Mormon is simply incredible (in its original Latin sense of “not worthy of
belief”).17
Further,
according to his wife Emma, who was well acquainted with her husband’s
compositional, expressive, and literary talents at the time he was translating
the Book of Mormon, Joseph was still somewhat of a rustic when it came to
writing: “Joseph Smith could neither write nor dictate a coherent and
well-worded letter; let alone dictating [sic] a book like the Book of
Mormon.”18
Although
some critics have suggested that Joseph was somehow composing and memorizing
the text he was dictating to his wife and other scribes, Emma testified, “He
had neither manuscript nor book to read from. If he had anything of the Kind he could not have concealed it from me.”19
Joseph’s
life just before and during the time he was translating was hardly conducive to
writing. As Bushman states, Joseph “was entangled with the money-diggers and
struggling to scrape together rent money for
16
Bushman, Joseph Smith, 41.
17 An
example of the uninformed, facile arguments about the composition of the Book
of Mormon all too common these days is: “Could Joseph Smith Have Written the
Book of Mormon?” The anonymous author argues, “First, translation of the BOM
did not take place in less than three months; it spanned a time period of over
a year and Joseph may have been working on the text for years. Second, the
‘most correct of any book on earth’ has undergone more than 3,000 textual and
grammatical corrections. Some of these corrections included significant changes
in doctrine. Third, a large portion of the BOM simply quotes the Bible,
including translation errors unique to the King James Version. Fourth, stories
in the BOM directly parallel stories from Joseph's life, such as his father's
dream of the tree of life when Joseph was five years old. Fifth, the BOM is no
more complicated than other works of fiction, such as Tolkien's Lord of the
Rings and related works. Finally, the ideas in the BOM bear strong
parallels to ideas popular in New England at the time and several other books.
Sixth, Joseph may have had help.” Mormon Think, http://mormonthink.com/josephweb.htm#introduction.
18.
18
Bushman, Joseph Smith, 70.
19.
19
Ibid.
12 • Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 19
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his
family.”20 Also,
during this period, as Bushman documents, “Joseph had to provide for Emma while
attempting to translate in a house that her parents reluctantly provided as a
place to work.”21
It was also during this period that “Emma gave birth to a son after an
exhausting labor.” Bushman reports, “Whatever happiness the child brought was
short- lived. The baby, named Alvin after Joseph’s older brother, died that
very day, June 15. ... Emma came close to death herself, and Joseph attended
her night and day.”22 It was shortly after this great sadness that Joseph was thrown
into despair over Martin Harris’s loss of the first translated pages of the
Book of Mormon. It is hard to imagine less ideal
circumstances under which one might try to compose a lengthy manuscript!23
Where
are the “try works” of the Book of Mormon? There are none that we know of or
evidence that there might have been. In other words — and this is important —
whereas we see copious journal entries, essays, letters, lectures, and other
writings revealing Emerson working out his mature expressions in poetry and
prose; whereas we see Hawthorne’s significant volume of early fiction (short
and long forms), journals, and other writings leading up to and illuminating
the writing of The Scarlet Letter; whereas we see Thoreau’s copious
journals, notebooks, essays, lectures, fields notes, and other writings as
preludes to Walden; whereas we see Melville’s many novels, stories, and
other writings preparing him to write Moby-Dick; and whereas as we see
Whitman’s journalistic writings, poetry, and numerous drafts of his major poem Leaves
of Grass, we have practically nothing of Joseph Smith’s mind or writing to
suggest that he was capable of authoring a book like the Book of Mormon, a book
that is much more substantial, complex, and varied than his critics have been
able to see or willing to admit. We need to remember that the Book of Mormon is
considered one of the most influential books in American history and one that
has occupied the serious consideration of scholars for over a century.
20 Ibid., 69.
21 Ibid., 63
22 Ibid.,
66–67.
23 In an
article entitled “For Authors, Fragile Ideas Need Loving Every Day,” the
novelist Walter Mosley says that interruptions and distractions (such as those
Joseph Smith had in abundance) cause the life to drain out of your writing:
“The words have no art to them; you no longer remember the smell. The idea
seems weak, it has dissipated like smoke.” He adds, “Nothing we create is art
at first. It’s simply a collection of notions that may never be understood. ...
But even these clearer notions will fade if you stay away more than a day. ...
The act of writing is a king of guerrilla warfare.” (New York Times, 3
July 2000, B2).
Rees, Joseph Smith,
the Book of Mormon, and US Renaissance • 13
Although
we have ample examples of early writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and other writers
of the time and a history of their evolving from immature to mature writers, we
actually have very little of Joseph’s writing before the publication of the
Book of Mormon. In other words, there are no writings that demonstrate that
Joseph was creating the major characters of the Nephite and Jaredite history
and working out the major themes and ideas found in the Book of Mormon, nor is
there any evidence that he exhibited any proclivity to compose large narrative
forms or differential styles or much of anything at all like the complex,
interwoven, episodic components of the Book of Mormon.
What
do we have from Joseph’s pen before the publication of the Book of Mormon in
1830? According to Dean C. Jesse’s The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith,
very little: a note summarizing Martin Harris’s experience with Charles Anthon,
possibly written in 1828, and a letter to Oliver Cowdery dated 22 October 1829.
His handwritten account of the First Vision written in 1832 is ungrammatical,
is written with little sense of punctuation or compositional structure, and,
though sincere and authentic, shows little evidence of stylistic or
compositional competence or confidence. Certainly, there is evidence of the
beginnings of an eloquent voice, but that voice is tentative and immature.
Because
the Lord directed him to begin keeping a record of his experiences, Joseph
commenced keeping a journal in 1832 following the completion of the Book of Mormon,
but he was anything but a regular or systematic record keeper. Joseph was more
likely to dictate his words to scribes. The reason, according to Jesse, was
Joseph’s insecurity in expressing himself in his own words. As Jesse explains,
using Joseph’s own language, “A complicated life and feelings of literary
inadequacy explain his dependence. He lamented his ‘lack of fluency in
address,’ his ‘writing imperfections,’ and his ‘inability’ to convey his ideas
in writing. Communication seemed to him to present an insurmountable barrier.
He wrote of the almost ‘total darkness of paper pen and ink’ and the ‘crooked
broken scattered and imperfect language.’”24 This is a stark contrast to the
articulate, fluent, and confident style of Emerson and other writers of the
period. Although Joseph eventually gained confidence as a writer, he continued
to rely on the words and rhetorical styles of others more than on his own.
Jesse provides an example of the significant contrast in rhetorical styles
between Joseph’s own writing
24
Dean C. Jessee, The Personal Writings of Joseph
Smith, (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1984), xv.
14 • Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 19
(2016)
and
that of his clerk Willard Richards, the one (1835) ungrammatical and unpolished
and the other (1843) quite the opposite.25
Over
the past five decades, a number of scholars have documented the complex,
complicated, and at times even convoluted structure of the Book of Mormon. In
his excellent study, Understanding the Book of Mormon (2010), Grant
Hardy has identified the reason the Book of Mormon cannot be read as critics
have been reading it for nearly two hundred years: rather than the book
revealing the style and point of view of a single author, it is instead told
through the point of view and style of three primary narrators/editors — Nephi,
Mormon, and Moroni — each of whom has a unique and distinctive expressive
style.
As I
summarized in a review of Hardy’s book, “By focusing on the three major
narrators of the Book of Mormon, Hardy is able to demonstrate that each has ‘a particular
point of view, a theological vision, an agenda, and a characteristic style of
writing, all of which can be found within the confines of the text itself.’
Such a ‘narrator-centered approach. ... opens up the Book of Mormon to literary
appreciation.’ Although it traditionally has been accused by outside critics of
extreme incoherence, what emerges from this approach is a clear demonstration
of rhetorical and spiritual coherence both within the sub-narratives as well as
in the book as a whole.”26
In a
previous article I have tried to demonstrate that the proposition that Joseph
Smith wrote the Book of Mormon under some kind of a spell or through the
process known as automatic writing simply does not stand up when one compares
the book with other texts claimed to have been written in this way.27 In another
article I tried to demonstrate that the Book of Mormon contains abundant
evidence of highly sophisticated rhetorical and dramatic irony, evidence of
which is absent in Joseph Smith’s known writing both before and after the
publication of the Book of Mormon.28 Elsewhere, I make an argument similar to the
one in this paper, although in addition to comparing Smith’s and Milton’s
education, cultural background, and literary talent, I address the further
25 Ibid.
26 Robert A.
Rees, “The Figure in the Carpet: Grant Hardy’s Reading of the
Book
of Mormon,” The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 31:2 (Fall/
Winter 2011), 137
27
Robert A. Rees, “The Book of Mormon and Automatic Writing,” Journal of Book
of Mormon Studies 15:1 (2006), 4–17, 68–70.
28
Robert A. Rees, “Irony in the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon
Studies (Fall 2003), 20–31..
Rees, Joseph Smith,
the Book of Mormon, and US Renaissance • 15
issue
of dictation, a process used in the composition of both the Book of Mormon and Paradise
Lost.29
While
one could argue that it is impossible to compare Joseph Smith and the Book of
Mormon with Smith’s contemporary writers and their major works, nonetheless
each constitutes a major compositional achievement, a major written
composition, whether autobiography, biography, fiction, history, philosophical
treatise, poetry, or some other genre, each with a significant cultural and
compositional history and context. This is why Emerson, holding a copy of
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass for the first time, could say, “I greet you at
the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground
somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam
were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty.”30
Had
Joseph Smith sent Emerson a copy of The Book of Mormon when it came off the
press in 1830, though perplexed by its content and style, Emerson might have
said something similar — it “must have had a long foreground somewhere.” He
certainly would not have believed that it was created out of whole cloth,
especially by a writer as uneducated, inexperienced, and unsophisticated as
Smith was at the time of the book’s publication. While the “long foreground” of
Leaves of Grass as with the other masterworks under consideration here
can be established from available historical and critical evidence, that of the
Book of Mormon cannot. Further, to explain the book as a consequence of its
author’s purported deep and thorough acquaintance with the Bible is to
understand neither the Bible nor the Book of Mormon.
Each
of the writers of each of the masterpieces under consideration here, with the
exception of Joseph Smith, had a long gestation period during which he “tried
out” his ideas, metaphors, allusions, coloring (tone), points of view,
personae, and rhetorical styles before tackling a larger, more complex, and
more sophisticated form, whether as a collection of poems and essays (Emerson),
an extended personal narrative (Thoreau), a novel (Hawthorne and Melville) or a
major poem (Whitman). There are no parallel try works for Joseph Smith, nor any
evidence of his apprenticeship as a writer. In fact, all evidence points in the
opposite direction. Unless and until some hitherto undiscovered record
demonstrating that Joseph Smith did in fact leave evidence of the
29.
Robert A. Rees, “John Milton, Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon,” BYU
Studies 54:3 (2015), 7-18.
30
R.W. Emerson to Walt Whitman, July 21, 1855
16 • Interpreter:
A Journal of Mormon Scripture 19 (2016)
reading,
thinking, writing, and imaginative expression — the try works — required to
write a book like the Book of Mormon, we are left with the choice of accepting
his explanation of the book’s origin or making the case for some alternative
explanation, which to my mind no one has done satisfactorily. Such a case would
seem to require consideration of the main argument of this paper, i.e.,
examining the biographical and authorial history of any proposed author or
authors in relation to what we understand of the compositional process required
to produce a book like the Book of Mormon.
Robert
A. Rees (born November 17, 1935) is an
educator, scholar, and poet. He teaches Mormon Studies at Graduate Theological
Union and the University of California, Berkeley. Previously he taught
humanities at UCLA and UC Santa Cruz and was a Fulbright Professor of American
Studies in Lithuania (1995-96). Rees is the author of No More Strangers and Foreigners: A Mormon-Christian
Response to Homosexuality (1998), “‘In a Dark Time the Eye Begins to See’:
Personal Reflections on Homosexuality among the Mormons at the Beginning of a
New Millennium” (2000), “Requiem for a Gay Mormon” (2001) and, most recently
with Dr. Caitlin Ryan, Supportive Families, Healthy Children: Helping
Latter-day Saint Families with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender
Children (2012). He is the editor of Proving Contraries: A Collection of
Writings In Honor of Eugene England (2005), The
Reader’s Book of Mormon (2008), and Why I Stay: The Challenges of
Discipleship for Contemporary Mormons (2011). Rees has served as a bishop,
stake high councilor, Institute teacher, and a member of the Baltic States
Mission Presidency. He is the co-founder and current vice-president of the
Liahona Children’s Foundation, which addresses malnutrition among Latter-day
Saint children in the developing world.
Scholar
Conclusion: Joseph Smith was totally uneducated and ignorant.
Webmaster
Opinion: Joseph Smith could not have written the Book of Mormon much less read
and translated the book. Moreover, the Book of Mormon cannot be of divine origin
due to over 4,000 changes in less than 200 years. In conclusion, the Book of
Mormon was a combination of the 1769 edition of the King James Version of the
Bible, a Solomon Spaulding manuscript as a story foundation, and Sidney Rigdon’s
theological ideas.
Prophet Mormon was much more than ‘abridger’ scholar says.
By R. Scott Lloyd
LDS Church News
Published: Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2008
SANDY, Utah -- Regarding the prophet Mormon as merely an "abridger"
of the Nephite record hardly does justice to what he did, a Book of Mormon
scholar affirmed at the closing session of the Foundation for Apologetic
Information and Research (FAIR) conference Friday at the South Towne Expo
Center.
"It would be much more akin to what Mormon did to say that (someone) went
back through every one of the royal records of the kings of England and tried
to discover how it is that the Magna Carta alters human nature," said
Brant Gardner, author of an acclaimed six-volume commentary on the Book of
Mormon.
Mormon was both "active" and "intentional" in his role,
Gardner said, selecting from extensive source material the very content that
fit his "meta-message" -- that Jesus, as the Messiah who in a
resurrected state visited the Nephites, "is the Eternal God, the Messiah
who will come."
Gardner presented several clues in Mormon's text "that he had at least created a full outline of his work before he began the task of committing it to the plates."
"Perhaps the most obvious evidence," Gardner said, "is
the chapter head notes, which were physically written on the plates prior to
the chapters they synopsize." He added that the extant portion of
the original Book of Mormon manuscript dictated by Joseph Smith shows that the
head notes were part of the original record and were not added later by Joseph
Smith or his scribe Oliver Cowdery in preparing the book for publication.
The head notes reflect that Mormon wrote them prior to writing the
respective chapters and therefore had to know the content of the
chapters in order to write the head notes, Gardner explained. They indicate
Mormon "had some clear plan of what he was going to include in each book
he edited. When Mormon switches to his own record, it's no longer part of the
planned text, and therefore does not have a synopsis in a head note."
Although there is evidence for an outline, Gardner said, "there is also
evidence that Mormon did not simply copy a previously written text." He
added, "We often see Mormon divert from his outline on a tangent
occasioned by thinking about the material that he was writing." When
Mormon did this, he often employed a device, sometimes used in the Old
Testament, called "repetitive resumption," wherein a key word or
phrase of the foregoing narrative is repeated after Mormon has inserted his
commentary and is returning to the narrative. An example of this, he said, is
in Alma 17:17.
Other clues Gardner said indicate Mormon was working from an outline include
apparent chapter divisions in the original record. He cited Royal Skousen, a
linguistics professor at Brigham Young University who studied the original Book
of Mormon manuscript. Skousen determined that "evidence suggests that as Joseph
Smith was translating, he apparently saw some mark, perhaps some extra spacing,
whenever a section ended but was unable to see the text that followed. At such
junctures, Joseph decided to refer to those endings as chapter breaks and told
the scribe to write the word 'chapter' at these places" without specifying
a chapter number, as Joseph saw neither a number nor the word
"chapter."
"Therefore," Gardner reasoned, "in the 1830 edition
of the Book of Mormon, the chapters represented Mormon's conceptual breaks into
chapters." Those chapter breaks are not in later editions of the Book of
Mormon, because in 1878, church apostle Orson Pratt revised the chapter
divisions, Gardner noted.
Webmaster
Opinion: Therefore, the modern BOMs have been mis-translated!