We’re continuing our conversation with Jonathan Neville discussing similarities between theologian Jonathan Edwards and the Book of Mormon. What are some of these Edwards phrases found in the Book of Mormon? Neville will also discuss his critics about his work on Jonathan Edwards. Check out our conversation…
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Edwards Phrases in Book of Mormon
Jonathan 00:37 For me, it’s like you have the Book of Mormon, and the Bible opens up parts of it. There are allusions in the Book of Mormon to Moses, and so on. And then on the other side, I have these allusions to Jonathan Edwards, that are just beautiful and awesome. And they expand the Book of Mormon in that direction, too. So, you have the Book of Mormon. You have the Bible, in one direction. You have Jonathan Edwards in the other direction that enhances it. Especially, and this is one of my key reasons for publishing this book. The Jonathan Edwards connection puts the Book of Mormon squarely in Christian tradition. It’s part of Christianity, because, for the most part, evangelicals and maybe even Catholics, (probably not Catholics,) but that non-Catholic Christians look to Jonathan Edwards as one of the great spiritual leaders. Right? He articulated a lot of really key concepts about Christianity. So, to see the Book of Mormon as the fulfillment of what Edwards was seeking is really a fantastic way to understand the Book of Mormon.
Jonathan 01:40 For example, Edwards talked about, I had mentioned earlier, the restoration of the Church in the latter days, and how the Church would have this worldwide beauty and influence and so on. That’s all happening in the LDS Church. It’s not happening anywhere else, really. There’s no other church that is really focused on preparing for the Second Coming, for example, like we are. Elder Christofferson gave a phenomenal talk about that a couple of years ago in General Conference about how nobody else is really preparing for the return of the Lord the way we are. And that’s fulfillment of what Jonathan Edwards was anticipating and hoping for and seeking and trying to establish. So, I see that there’s this idea that there was an apostasy, and then Martin Luther, and Calvin and others, and then it progressed to the Restoration. But they omit Jonathan Edwards, a key portion of that whole development. And I think he was kind of the impetus, or I’ve said he was like an Elias for Joseph Smith, because he laid the foundation, or the premise for the Restoration of the Church, in the latter days. He used that terminology.
Jonathan 02:51 So when Joseph was reading Jonathan Edwards and understanding these concepts, he was prepared for a restoration. And there’s a lot more I can say about it. But let me mention one other thing that dawned on me recently. And it’s related to this, because there’s a lot of criticism about the First Vision. Right? Joseph never told anybody about it until later in life and all that. Well, I wondered about that a lot, because there are lots of people who have claimed to have seen God and to have this born-again experience. But Joseph was reluctant to talk about spiritual things. And the way we know that is even after Moroni visited him three times, he went out to the field. He wasn’t going to say a word to anybody. And the angel had to come to him say, “No, you have to tell your father.” Right? “Because he’ll believe you.”
Jonathan 03:42 Joseph’s big thing was he was afraid people wouldn’t believe him, so he didn’t want to talk about it. And when I realized that that message from Moroni, “You have to tell your father.” That’s an angel telling you to tell your father, to overcome his reticence to talk about these things. And so it made sense, for me, that he didn’t talk to about the First Vision, except to that one guy that rejected him. So, he kept it to himself. I don’t think he even talked about it in the early days of the Church. I don’t think he talked about it to Oliver Cowdery. He didn’t talk about it to his mother. His mother, in her history, never said anything about it. When she did the history of Lucy Mack Smith, she went right to Moroni’s visit, nothing about the First Vision. And then when they did a second version of her history, they inserted Joseph Smith’s testimony about the First Vision. They never had Lucy say it, because he never told her about it. But I understood. That makes sense to me because of [how] Moroni had to tell him to tell his father, because he wasn’t going to do it, otherwise. And I think that Joseph himself said, “No man knows my history.” Right? So, everybody who says, “Well, Joseph did this or thought this.” To me, that’s just speculation, including with the stone in the hat stuff.
Jonathan 04:59 So, I Just went back with a fresh slate. I said, “I’m going to start from scratch. I’m going to look at the text of the Book of Mormon, (getting back to where we started a little bit,) and see if I can figure out how Joseph, if he really translated like he said, he had to acquire that language somewhere.” And I think I’ve shown that that language was readily available to him, not just the words, like some of my critics said, “Well, intertextuality is more than just a word here and a word there.” And I agree. It’s a couple of things. It’s a word. It’s terminology, but it is phrases, and it is concepts that are intertextual. And I use this one, “the natural man is an enemy to God,” because that’s a really clear one that anybody can see. But there are many others in there, as well.
GT 05:45 So, “The natural man is an enemy to God,” that’s Jonathan Edwards phraseology.
Jonathan 05:49 Totally, yeah. It’s an allusion to that sermon, I think, anyway. “A continual scene of wickedness and abomination,” that’s a Jonathan Edwards saying. I have a long list.
GT 06:02 So just looking at the table of contents, you can see some of the Edwards phraseology. We’ve got “Infinite Goodness,” which is the title. Let’s see natural man is the enemy to God, fire and brimstone, preparatory state. I mean, you’ve got a lot of the phrases right in there. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Well, not only that, but it seems like even the First Vision uses a lot of Edwards phraseology.
Jonathan 06:37 Yeah.
GT 06:37 So, I mean, the critics are going to say that Joseph Smith’s just ripping off Jonathan Edwards.
Jonathan 06:43 Yeah. Well and that’s why I mentioned earlier that Joseph didn’t adopt Edwards’ theology at all. And so, that’s a key point, I think. Because if he was ripping off, or plagiarizing, Jonathan Edwards…
GT 06:58 We’d still be trinitarians. Right?
Jonathan 07:00 Yeah. And he would have used Edwards’ theology as well.
GT 07:05 Because there’s another point of view. Dan Vogel, among others have said Joseph’s theology changed. The First Vision changed to support his newer theology, because a lot of people read the Book of Mormon and say it’s Trinitarian, or you could even say, modalistic if you’re being technical.
Jonathan 07:30 It’s mainstream Christian.
GT 07:32 Yeah, mainstream Christian. And so, let’s take the Dan Vogel argument for a minute. The Book of Mormon is modalistic let’s just say, or Trinitarian, essentially. Joseph’s theology evolves. So, at the beginning, he was using Jonathan Edwards. And then he started having these other revelations and things. And then he basically discarded it. Could we argue that?
Jonathan 08:02 Yeah, well, don’t forget Brigham Young. I don’t remember the date. But it was 1850s to 1870s, [Brigham] said that if the Book of Mormon was translated today, it would read much differently than it did originally. And that’s because when Joseph Smith translated it, like any translator, he used his own lexicon and his own concepts to render what the Nephites had said. I don’t think the Nephites used, as I said, the phrase “natural is an enemy to God.” That was Joseph’s translation of what they actually said. And so, he was limited in that sense, to what his own lexicon had. The Bible says, that the Holy Ghost will bring all things to your remembrance. Right?
Jonathan 08:45 So that’s how inspiration works. The Lord draws on your own mind, and your own words, to express things to you. That’s why, if you’re a member of the Church in France, and you get an answer to prayer, it is not going to be in English. Right? It’s going to be in French, because that’s what your mind is, or Chinese or whatever your language is. And so, for Joseph Smith to receive revelation, or to translate a text, the Lord had to speak to him after the manner of his own language, like the Scriptures say. And so, when he was a 17-19-22-year-old, young man, his understanding of the gospel, let’s say, or of God, was confined by the Christian context that he was living in. But, as he received more revelations after that, his understanding expanded. So, I think if he had retranslated the Book of Mormon in 1844, it would read differently. Forget what Brigham Young said. But Brigham Young was right. I think if the Book of Mormon was translated today, it would read differently still.
Jonathan 09:49 And so Vogel’s argument was that Joseph, as I understand it anyway, he was kind of absorbing ideas that he heard from Swedenborg or whoever, and was developing a new theology as he went. That’s one way to frame it. You can take the exact same evidence and frame it as Joseph Smith growing in spiritual understanding and having greater insights.
Jonathan 10:13 Now, the interesting thing about the First Vision is–I started getting into that. I haven’t published a paper I’ve done on this.
GT 10:20 Well, you did talk a little bit about it in here.
Jonathan 10:22 A little bit, but there’s more to it. And so, for example, when his first [account in] 1832, he says, the business of angels, I think he said. And he was tentative about talking about that whole experience with other people. And it wasn’t until 1838, where he said, “Okay, here’s what happened. There were two personages, God, the Father, and Jesus Christ. And here’s what they said,” and all that. That was at the point where the Church was big enough, and he felt safe enough that he could tell the whole experience. Prior to that–he was familiar with what happened to Steven, the martyr, who said he saw Christ or…
GT 11:00 Jesus on the right hand of God.
Jonathan 11:01 Yeah. And he got stoned to death, right? And it had to have been in Joseph’s mind as he thought about, “What do I tell people?” Because he had been shut down when he talked about the First Vision the first time. And I could see how, Joseph, in his own mind, but even the Lord, inspiring or guiding him, would tell him, “Don’t get too explicit about this until the Church is big enough.” The Doctrine & Covenants talks about ]how] the Church has reach a state; what was the terminology? Anyway, the Church has to grow big enough to be solid before a lot of things could happen. It was a fledgling little group that could have been extinguished, easily, in the early days. So, taking the same facts that Dan Vogel uses for his narrative, I would take the same facts and say, “Here’s another narrative.” That Joseph had the First Vision experience that he described in 1838. But, he was reluctant or prevented from talking about it in detail, until the Church had reached a point where it could survive without him. And sure enough, a few years later, he was killed. Right? So if the first thing he had done, was [to have said,] “God, the Father, Jesus Christ, two separate beings, they came to me, they told me all this,” maybe he would have been killed. Who knows?
Jonathan 12:18 And so I think it was wisdom, for him to be wise as a serpent, so to speak, to not disclose everything he knew at the outset. But [it was] a line upon line thing. We’re going to introduce the Book of Mormon as a new scripture, some additional revelations, and then the Doctrine & Covenants came out of that, the whole Joseph Smith translation, which he never finished anyway, the Book of Abraham, to the extent that he intended that as scripture, that’s unknown, because he certainly never published it as scripture. So, a lot of things were progressing as he learned more. And what I really like about this approach is Joseph Smith was not this blank slate that the Lord told him everything. But he was just like you and me. He became the Prophet and translator, because he spent all those years studying Christian terminology, practicing to be a preacher, like you said, preparing himself, really. And how much of that was directed by the Lord and how much was internal to Joseph Smith? He just had this inborn, innate kind of sense of mission, maybe, that caused him to do it.
Jonathan 13:30 Maybe it was his early near-death experience with the leg surgery that prompted him to be a religious seeker, wanting to know more, having a more intense desire to know, than other people. I know I had a near-death experience, myself, and I know how much that can really change your perspective and your outlook on reality, even, much less just religion, reality itself. It gives you a whole different understanding of it. And so, I see Joseph Smith as a completely viable, credible, believable source in everything that he did. And it all makes sense to me the way I frame it.
Jonathan 14:11 What I don’t like is people who promote a narrative by excluding certain facts. And that’s where I object a lot of the stuff that the stone in the hat people say or even some of the Dan Vogel critics. Because they say, just as example, I keep hitting on this in my blogs and stuff, is that everybody ignores what Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery said. They say, “Well, Joseph said, he translated by the gift and power of God. That’s in the Gospel Topics essays,” and that’s all they say. They omit that he said, “By means of the Urim and Thummin on that came with the plates.” They just totally omit that. And the critics that wrote about me in The Interpreter, there’s a group of them that got together and criticized everything. I read through that, and I said, “These guys are missing the entire point.” I mean, you have what Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery said, it’s as clear as words can be. And then you have what other people said. And how do you reconcile those two? I reconcile it by saying [that] I believe what Joseph and Oliver said, because I think the evidence that the Book of Mormon is a translation, not a composition is pretty compelling with the Hebraisms and all that. But, also, I can understand why other people would have said what they said about the stone in the hat, because they never saw the plates. They never actually observed the translation. And so, they inferred that they saw it. They believed they saw it, whatever, and they reported what they saw, combined with their inferences.
Jonathan 15:46 For me, it’s easy to reconcile the two narratives. Other people say, like Royal Skousen, for example. I brought Royal’s book here. This is The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon, Part Five: the King James quotations in the Book of Mormon.
GT 16:02 Wow.
Jonathan 16:03 And this is a great book. I really like it. I think this is one that–he didn’t sign this one, but he signed some of the other ones that I got, because I love these books. But I read them with a little bit of skepticism, because he just assumed that the biblical language in the Book of Mormon came from the King James Version. That was just a bald assumption. He didn’t consider that it may have also come from Jonathan Edwards and other Christian writers.
GT 16:31 Oh, I was going to say David Hall had mentioned an earlier version than King James. I’m trying to remember what the name of it was. But there’s an earlier than King James.[1]
Jonathan 16:44 Yeah. I know what you mean, it’s the Early Modern English thing? I don’t know if it’s earlier than King James. Anyway, I know what you’re talking about. I haven’t thought about it for a while. So, I don’t remember exactly which one, but because of Stan Carmack’s thing about early modern English.
GT 17:04 Right.
Jonathan 17:06 And, I understand that, and I think what he and Royal did was important to show that Joseph didn’t just plagiarize The Late War, for example. In that sense, it was an important contribution. And I appreciate what he did here, his analysis of the King James. But right in here, he says the English translator was not Joseph Smith, because he says it was this mysterious, unknown, incognito. He doesn’t use that term. But, he said, Joseph didn’t translate the Book of Mormon into English. Someone else did. And Royal has also said that Joseph and Oliver deliberately misled everybody. And to me, that’s a non-starter, because if they misled everybody about that, then all bets are off. He might as well go with William on his thing about the…
GT 17:54 Or stone in the hat.
Jonathan 17:55 Or stone in the hat! Well, those guys go with the stone. And that’s the thing that really surprises me is that the whole Church has shifted away. Well, not the whole Church, the scholarly section, the tiny handful of scholars have moved away from believing what Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery said, to believing what David Whitmer said. So that’s the real dichotomy between those two. So, some people like Michael McKay tried to bridge that gap by saying when Joseph and Oliver talked about the Urim and Thummin, they really meant the stone in the hat, because that Wilford Woodruff journal entry. But if you look at Brigham Young’s journal entry from that same meeting, he made a clear distinction between the Urim and Thummim and the seer stone. So, even using their source, it doesn’t fit. But worse than that, David Whitmer and Emma both clearly distinguish between the Urim and Thummin and the stone. They were two completely separate things. So, to say that, while everybody else made a clear distinction, but Joseph and Oliver didn’t, really doesn’t make sense to me.
Response to Critics/Anachronisms
GT 19:03 Let me ask you one other thing, because I know I wasn’t able to attend your MHA session. I think you were with Mary Ann Clements and another fellow.
Jonathan 19:13 Yeah.
GT 19:15 And what I heard was, the respondent didn’t like your explanation. Can you talk about what they objected to?
Jonathan 19:25 What I understood they objected to was they thought that I was only presenting a chapter out of this book. And the idea of MHA is you’re supposed to present new material. And what I didn’t explain clearly enough was I had released the database behind this book. And that was the new thing I was supposed to talk about at MHA was the database. Because in here I have just a few examples. I have a table in here of a few examples. There’s a few hundred, actually. In this book, there’s a list of 1,142 words and phrases that are non-biblical that are in Jonathan Edwards’ work. But this is just a list with numbers. The database, I have the actual scriptures, and I have the quotations from Jonathan Edwards. And it’s far more extensive than this now. So, I wanted to make that public. So, I released it in connection with Mormon History Association. But I didn’t make that clear enough, I guess, or something. But I was introduced, because I hadn’t spoken about this at MHA before. So, in order to explain the database, I had to explain why Jonathan Edwards was important, which was stuff from this book. So, the criticism I got in the short term was, “Well, you’re not supposed to come here and talk about your book. You’re supposed to talk about new material, because this is an academic conference.” Then the commentator said something. I don’t remember it all. I haven’t watched it again. That was in June, I think. But he said something like, “Well, just because there’s a few words in common doesn’t mean intertextuality.”
GT 21:06 Right.
Jonathan 21:06 And I said, “Well, yeah, I know, I said that right in the book that some words is not intertextuality.” Because it’s a common language. Everybody uses those words or it wouldn’t be a common language. So, my focus was on non-biblical language. So, I was limiting it to that. But it was more than just words, it was concepts and phrases. I don’t even remember the name of the moderator, but he works in the Church History Department.
GT 21:36 Was it Ash, or?
Jonathan 21:38 Mark Ashhurst-McGee, I think.
GT 21:39 That’s who it was.
Jonathan 21:40 It might have been him. I don’t remember. Sorry, Mark, if it was you. But he did acknowledge that if there’s longer phrases like this natural man is an enemy to God, then that’s more indicative of intertextuality. And so that’s what I’ve been focused on. Well, I have examples in the book. But there’s other examples that I’ve come up with since. And I totally agree, I understand intertextuality and what that means. And that’s why I think that the idea of the plagiarism from The Late War is ridiculous, because they did, they were taking isolated phrases, and combining them to make them look like they were one text. And I have never done that. That doesn’t even make sense. But it’s an example of if Joseph Smith was translating war chapters, he would draw on his own lexicon about war, which was the War of 1812, of The Late War. Naturally, I mean, I don’t see how anyone could expect a translator to come up with terminology that he was not familiar with. This doesn’t make sense. And it didn’t happen. And so, all these indicia that other sources that Joseph drew upon to translate, to me or evidence that he translated. I acknowledge, it could be, also, evidence of composition. But any evidence of composition that Dan Vogel comes up with is also evidence of translation. That’s how it works.
GT 23:06 I remember you said that last time.
Jonathan 23:07 Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I’ve read Tolstoy only in translation. I’d never read the Russian, because I don’t understand Russian. [I understand] a little bit, but not enough to read. And so, for me, if I read a translation of Tolstoy, whoever the translator is, as far as I’m concerned, is the author, because those are the words that I’m reading, right? And the author had to draw on his or her own lexicon themselves. So, I look at the Book of Mormon as one of the best examples of a translation we have, because it was written, was dictated in the language of the translator, and the Lord even said, “After the manner of his language.” I just don’t see how more explicit this could have gotten. The only thing I wish Joseph and Oliver had done was to say–they did say that that book, Mormonism Unvailed was a bunch of lies. They specifically said that about that book. But I wish they had said, this page in that book was a total lie. And they didn’t get that explicit about it.
GT 24:12 I know I need to let you go here pretty quick, but what about anachronisms? Horse versus tapir and silk and gold?
Jonathan 24:24 Well, horse versus tapir, tapir has nothing to do with anything, as far as I’m concerned.
GT 24:28 Well, there are no horses in America, are there, before the Spanish?
Jonathan 24:33 Well, that horse thing, that’s a little bit of a tangent again, but we can talk about that a little bit. Because, you know that study, there’s an article in BYU Studies that explained that there’s no explanation for how the horses that the Indians were riding came from the Spanish, because the Spanish primarily brought stallions, I think. And there weren’t enough horses to produce the variety of horses that the Native Americans had. Do you remember that?
GT 24:57 No.
Jonathan 24:58 Yeah, there’s an article in BYU Studies about that. And there’s a whole narrative about how there were horses here before the Spanish came. And there’s evidence of dead horses here. I mean, dead horse…
GT 25:15 Prehistoric.
Jonathan 25:16 Prehistoric, let’s say, or at least pre-European colonialism horses. The question is, when did they go extinct? And that’s a difficult thing to decide. Because the only time a scientist ever knows that a particular dinosaur lives in a particular place is if they find a fossil. Presumably, there were dinosaurs all over the place, but there aren’t that many fossils. They’re kind of rare, actually. But the dinosaurs weren’t rare. Just like today, if you go out in the forest, if bones lasted a long time, it’d be littered with deer bones and possums and raccoons and everything, because bones dissolve and go away. They’re only preserved under a few finite circumstances. That’s what makes fossils. And so there could have been horses here that died, their bones dissolved. So, we don’t have evidence for them. It’s like proving a negative to say that there were no horses here.
GT 26:11 Silk.
Jonathan 26:13 There’s lots of silk. I mean, in the Hopewell things they had silkworms. I mean, that’s pretty common.
GT 26:18 Really?
Jonathan 26:19 Yeah, sure. And what’s the other one? Pearls. They had freshwater pearls.
GT 26:27 Chariots?
Jonathan 26:28 What is a chariot? You get into that whole discussion. To me, that gets into this idea of it not being a literal translation. The only thing we know is a literal translation was the title page. But an example is, since I’m an artist, I’ve been interested in the history of Biblical Art. And In the Middle Ages, Rembrandt and those guys would paint art, biblical scenes using contemporary costumes and people, right? So, they didn’t travel, at least he didn’t travel to the Middle East and see what it was really like. He read the Bible and interpreted according to his own culture. And there’s lots of examples of that. So, whatever was in the original plates, Joseph translated according to his syntax, let’s say or his lexicon is a better word. And so, whether it was a chariot or a procession kind of thing, or they would holding the guy up, or some other mode of transportation, he translated as chariot. But I’d like to have anyone tell me what that chariot looked like. Dan Vogel can’t tell you what the chariot looked like. Right? It’s just a word that has to be interpreted. And it was a word Joseph used to translate whatever the Nephites were using. Dan Vogel likes to talk about this mound builder myth, too. And I promised Steve Pynakker I would tell him about the myth of the mound builder myth.
GT 27:54 The myth of the mound builders?
Jonathan 27:56 Yeah, I understand where Dan’s coming from on the mound builder thing, but now we’re kind of digressing away from the Jonathan Edwards. But let’s say it’s just relevant to the translation. So, any of the objections that you list that are listed in the CES Letter, or in Dan Vogel’s works about the Book of Mormon, for me they’re easy to resolve once you accept Joseph Smith as a translator. Or you could even say if he composed it would have read the same way. Like I talked about before.
GT 28:28 Author and proprietor.
Jonathan 28:29 Yeah, yeah. And any evidence of composition is evidence of translation, as well. But is there evidence of translation that contravenes the idea of a composition? I think there’s plenty of it, not just the Hebraisms, which I know people have explained away as well. But the sophistication of the whole narrative is pretty remarkable. The evidence, for example, that he would not have to have it read back to him the next day, when he was starting to translate again. That’s evidence that he was translating a manuscript, so he didn’t need anyone to read it back. He didn’t even have to remember what he translated the day before, because he was translating something new the next day.
Jonathan 29:14 What are some of the other objections? Well, you mentioned anachronisms. To me anachronisms are easy to explain, if it was a translation. Now, here’s the thing with the stone in the hat. If it was a stone in the hat and some supernatural person whether John Wesley, or whoever, or some Moroni learned English and did it or whatever. Whoever was the supernatural translator should not have had anachronisms and errors of grammar and all that stuff. To me, that’s a contradiction. It is self-contradictory to say that this divine all-knowing translator produced all these errors in the text. That makes no sense to me at all.
Jonathan 29:59 But, if Joseph Smith was a translator, you would expect to have those errors. And furthermore, you would expect him to go back in 1837 and 1840 and correct those, to the extent he had time to do that. And so that’s what a translator does. You know, even me as an author, when I go back and correct it, I try to correct errors that I find. I found a few in this edition, but since I was the author, I’m allowed to do that. If I had translated it, I’d do the same thing, only the nature of the changes would be different, I think, if I was the translator, as opposed to the author. Because when you when you read through it, you see the corrections that he made, and they look like the kind of corrections that a translator would make. A translator would say, “Oh, you know, I translated it that way. I should have done it this way.” Or he was using “ which” instead of “who,” those kinds of things. One other, just tangentially, I think it’s in this book, and maybe the other one, where it says, “Or in other words,” often, the Bible never uses that phrase. But the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants uses it quite a bit. But Joseph also used it in his own writings. And Jonathan Edwards used it a lot, too, that phrase. And that’s another example of someone, I think, is translating ancient records, or receiving revelation and trying to think of different ways to say what the impression is. And so, whenever I read–I know some people say, “In other words,” was Mormon, changing, making a change on the plates, right? And I’m not saying that’s not possible or not plausible or possible.
GT 31:33 I hate to say this, but John Hamer always says, “Or in other words.” That’s one of his key phrases.
Jonathan 31:40 Yeah. Well, it’s a good way, it’s a good thing. Because our language is so imprecise, it’s helpful to say, “Or in other words.” And to me, that was one of those little indicia of Joseph as a translator, translating it one way and then realizing he didn’t get it right, saying, “Or in other words.” And the funny thing to me, I can see Oliver Cowdery sitting there writing, “Or in other words,” when Joseph was thinking, “Don’t write the first thing I did. Write the second.” But he was just taking it verbatim.
GT 32:08 Right.
Jonathan 32:10 And I think I talked about that in this book, or the other one, about the indicia that it’s a translation, not a composition. And so, for me, the Jonathan Edwards stuff is awesome, because it just expands the text and gives us a better context. And hopefully, it makes the Book of Mormon more acceptable to non-LDS, or let’s say non-Restoration Christians. Because I think Christians in general, can benefit from the Book of Mormon. And I’ve said this before, but I feel like, not that it’s a mistake, but maybe it was a little bit of a mistake, to focus on it just as a missionary tool, because the title page doesn’t say, “Join any church.” It says, “To remind people of the covenants,” the Lord’s covenants, “And to convince people that Jesus is the Christ.” As long as people are convinced Jesus is the Christ, I think it’s fulfilled its purpose, whether they join the Church or not. Now, obviously, the covenants are in the Church, and that’s an element of it. But Moroni never said you had to join a particular church. And so, I think that if we can help Christians understand that the Book of Mormon is another testament of Jesus Christ, number one, maybe number two, number three is evidence of the divinity of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But number one, it’s a testament of Jesus Christ. We should all embrace that. And there’s no reason to fight against it, really.
GT 33:36 You sound like Steve Pynakker.
Jonathan 33:38 I mean, we agree on a lot of things.
Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia
Jonathan 33:43 And then I was going to show this, too. This is a Jonathan Edwards encyclopedia.
GT 33:47 Okay.
Jonathan 33:48 So because there’s books like this, I don’t need to write one for LDS people. But let me just mention one other thing about Jonathan Edwards. People don’t realize that…
GT 33:57 By the way, for those who are audio listeners, only, they don’t know what the name of that book is.
Jonathan 34:01 Okay. It’s called The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia, by Harry Stout. [He] was the general editor. And it’s awesome. I mean, if you start looking at Jonathan Edwards, there’s voluminous books written about him, as well as his own books. But early on in this, I was talking to Richard Bushman about all this stuff. And people don’t realize that his {Bushman’s] first two published papers were on Jonathan Edwards. That’s who he studied early on. And hopefully, this isn’t an off-the-record, but he told me that when they were starting the Joseph Smith Papers, they engaged the people from the Jonathan Edwards Papers at Yale to consult, because Jonathan Edwards project in Yale is one of the world-class, exemplary studies of a particular person’s work.
GT 34:49 Oh?
Jonathan 34:50 And they wanted to use their knowledge and experience to help with the Joseph Smith Papers. In fact, one of those Yale editors is still on the board of the Joseph Smith Papers. And Richard told me, “You should have been around here 15 years earlier when we started this, because we had considered doing a combined database of the two. But we didn’t know there was a connection. And now you’ve shown the connection here.” And he introduced me to the people at Yale. And one of the things that I found in doing this research is their database omits a big section of Edwards work, at least the search function.
GT 35:25 The Yale database?
Jonathan 35:26 The Yale database. And so I told them about it, and they had no idea, and I gave them some examples. This is why I do cross-referencing all the time because I would do my search of my 1808 original book, and then I would look at the Yale database, and I would find stuff in here that wasn’t in the Yale. And so, I told them about it. And they thanked me, and they said, “Yeah, we’re revising our search function. Hopefully we’ll catch all that,” and so on. I don’t think LDS people generally understand the significance of this connection between Jonathan Edwards and Joseph Smith. It’s really exciting, for me, anyway, and for me, It’s faith affirming. Of course, critics can twist anything, right?
Jonathan 36:20 But I think the idea that the early Church artwork was false, is false, itself. I think the early artwork was based on what Joseph and Oliver said, what’s a better source, right? And now we see all this artwork from these BYU artists and stuff with the stone in the hat. To me, they’re illustrating Mormonism Unvailed. I mean, why? So it’s just a question of what makes sense? I have a new book coming out, hopefully before the end of the year, called The Rational Restoration. I summarize all this stuff, but I point out that everybody can agree to the base facts. And then we make assumptions. Based on those facts, we build assumptions, inferences, our theories, and our hypotheses, which the acronym is FAITH. It’s called the FAITH model. And I hope that I can explain it well enough for people to take any critic, any faithful argument, whatever, and plug it into this formula and see how it was derived. For example, with Dan Vogel, I mentioned earlier, you can take the same facts and have different narratives. Right? And it’s the same with the stone in the hat material. We can all agree that David Whitmer said this. I totally agree, he said that. But does that mean that what he said actually happened? Does it mean that what he said was not a combination of what he inferred and what he observed? And I tried to tease those two things apart. Because what someone observes is completely legitimate to discuss an observation. What someone infers or believes or heard from someone else, or whatever, is less credible, let’s say. And if you make that distinction, then it’s easy to reconcile what they said with what Joseph and Oliver said.
Jonathan 38:05 And I think, in my view, the Jonathan Edwards stuff totally supports the translation narrative, and refutes this stone in the hat, unless the stone in the hat was quoting Jonathan Edwards, I guess. If we knew the identity of the stone the hat teleprompter guy, whoever wrote the teleprompter for the stone in the hat, that would help a lot. Right?
GT 38:26 (Chuckling)
Jonathan 38:27 But I don’t agree with Skousen and Carmack on that. I love their data. All their data is phenomenal. But their conclusions, to me, don’t make sense. But it’s another example of, there’s a set of facts, and then you make assumptions. Skousen’s assumption is [that] Joseph Smith didn’t translate it. Mine is he did. And everything that flows from that is based on those assumptions. We agree on all the facts. I don’t know if he agrees with me on the facts of Edwards’ influence on the Book of Mormon, because I don’t think he’s ever even considered that. He’s never even heard of it before. Because he just assumed it was from the Bible. But that’s an assumption, again, that is unstated. And it’s just a bald assumption that it all came from the Bible. And that’s the kind of thing I like to probe and examine and think about.
Jonathan 39:24 And I’m perfectly willing to say [that] I was wrong, if someone shows that I’m wrong about something. I was wrong about believing Mesoamerica for 30-40 years, right? And I used to teach it. I used to be an advocate of it. I went down to Central America and saw all this stuff. So, I’m susceptible to making mistakes, like anybody else. And I just like to put out these new ideas, have people consider them, but mostly I want to employ this FAITH model, so that we can assess these multiple working hypotheses and understand where they came from. And in the case of Richard Bushman, his book, Rough Stone Rolling that you mentioned at the beginning, make the distinction between what he says is a fact and what is actually a fact. And that’s, I guess, the takeaway of this whole thing is for people to make up their own minds based on the facts, and assess people’s assumptions, motivations and so on, to support their hypotheses, and make up your own. I think everybody that I’ve shown that isn’t just out to criticize me, no matter what I do, really likes this Jonathan Edwards stuff. And I say stuff informally. But it’s really a beautiful, exciting new approach to the Book of Mormon from my perspective, and I hope people take a look at it.
GT 40:42 And you’ve said Richard Bushman, endorses it, or I don’t know if endorses is the right word.
Jonathan 40:46 No, not this one. We’ve talked about this book, privately. That’s all I’ll say about that. But the book that is coming out soon, on the translation, he’s given us a blurb for that.
GT 40:59 Oh.
Jonathan 41:00 Yeah, and you’ll see that on the book.
GT 41:02 I’ll have you back on as my guest.
Jonathan 41:03 Yeah, me or Jim Lucas. He is my co-author on that. And he’s much more accessible, because he lives in Salt Lake now.
GT 41:10 Yeah. I’ll have to get you and him together at the same time, I guess.
Jonathan 41:15 Yeah. Sure. That’d be great.
GT 41:16 Well, cool. I know I’ve kept you for too long. But, you know, that’s what happens when we get talking here.
Jonathan 41:20 That’s what happens. You’re a good questioner. You’re an indulgent questioner.
GT 41:25 (Chuckling) Okay. All right. Well, Jonathan Edward Neville, I appreciate you being here on Gospel Tangents.
Jonathan 41:31 Well, thanks for having me. And I hope your listeners enjoyed the discussion.
GT 41:36 Thanks.
Jonathan 41:37 Okay. Sure, anytime.
[1] William Tyndale version.
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