Dr Rosalynde Welch is co-author with Dr Adam Miller of “7 Gospels: The Many Lives of Christ in the Book of Mormon.” We’ll discuss Christ’s role within the Book of Mormon from the eyes of 7 different vantage points. Check out our conversation…
Don’t miss our other conversations with Rosalynde: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ih_Fh585xk&list=PLLhI8GMw9sJ7ftt9c-Ndta9jcDH0NOQyr
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Meet Rosalynde
Interview
GT 00:30 Welcome to Gospel Tangents. I’m excited to have, I think you’re the Associate Director of the Maxwell Institute.
Rosalynde 00:32 Yeah. That’s right, Associate Director.
GT 00:32 Could you go ahead and tell us who you are and where we are?
Rosalynde 00:32 Yes, I am Rosalynde Welch. I am the Associate Director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, which is housed here on the BYU campus. We’re sitting in the beautiful library of our facility here in the West View Building in Provo, Utah.
GT 00:56 Nice. Now I always like to get people’s academic history. Where did you get your Bachelor’s and Master’s and all that stuff?
Rosalynde 01:03 Yeah. I started as a freshman here at Brigham Young University in 1992. I was an English major here, and I served a mission in Portugal along the way during my undergraduate studies. Then I moved to San Diego, where I did a Ph.D. in early modern English Literature at UCSD, University of California at San Diego and loved it. I had an amazing experience there studying. When we say early modern English literature, people sometimes think like early 20th century. No, this is like early, early modern. So, Shakespeare, Sidney, Spencer, and 16th century English writers. And then we moved to St. Louis, where I worked as an independent scholar, and unaffiliated scholar writing and participating in conferences and all the fun parts of academia until 2022 when we moved here, and I started this job.
GT 01:57 Oh, well fantastic. This is a permanent job, because it seems like they do have some positions here where they’re [for] two or three years or something.
Rosalynde 02:05 That’s right.
GT 02:05 But you’re the—can we call you like the vice president?
Rosalynde 02:10 Something like that. Yeah. I’m the Associate Director. We just have a new executive director here, J.B. Haws, who has been with us for a couple of months.
GT 02:20 J.B. has been dogging me. He hasn’t come on my podcast. Can you twist his arm for me? {Rosalynde laughing}
Rosalynde 02:25 Well, he’s my boss. So, I don’t know. But he’s wonderful. We love having him here. Before J.B. we had the beloved Spencer Fluhman who had been in this role for about six or seven years before he left us this year in 2022.
GT 02:42 Okay. Well, fantastic. You know, I’m a math guy. And I feel like I’m pretty good with technology and things like that. But when I get around people who majored in English, I know they’re speaking English, but sometimes it goes over my head. {both laughing}
Rosalynde 03:00 I will talk to you like you’re a five-year-old.
GT 03:03 There you go. That works. Anyway, well, fantastic. How long have you been here at Maxwell Institute?
Rosalynde 03:10 Over a year, I started in July of 2022, so almost 18 months now.
GT 03:16 Okay. Well, very cool. I remember seeing you at the Book of Mormon Studies Association. In fact, Joe Spencer, I need to get him on, too, as well. I’m going to have you be my official arm-twister. How’s that? He doesn’t have anything to do with the Maxwell Institute, though. Does he?
Rosalynde 03:35 Well, he’s not permanent faculty here at the Maxwell Institute. But we’re fortunate to have collaborators across campus here. So, we do work with professors in other departments. Joe Spencer has been deeply involved with us here at the Institute, most notably as the editor of the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, which has been a publication of the Maxwell Institute. Joe was the most recent Editor in Chief of that journal. We appreciate that. He’s also affiliated with the Latter-day Saint Theology Seminar, which we sponsor. And he just edited a wonderful book that we’ve just published here at the Maxwell institute called, “Approaching The Tree.” He’s got his finger in lots of pies, even though he doesn’t have an office in the building.
GT 04:21 Oh, and he just became the new president of The Book of Mormon Studies Association.
Rosalynde 04:24 That’s right. That’s a big deal. Congrats to Joe.
GT 04:25 So that’s another three years.
Rosalynde 04:26 Yeah.
GT 04:27 So he replaced Dr. Christopher Thomas, my favorite Pentecostal pastor.
Rosalynde 04:32 Chris is the best. Chris is also a friend of ours and often comes to do a visiting fellowship of a couple of weeks during the wintertime. So, we love Chris.
GT 04:40 Well, very good. So, Chris, we need to get together again. Well, fantastic.Well, you’ve got a new book out. Why don’t you show it to everybody here. Tell us what the name of it is.
Rosalynde 04:51 Yeah, this is our new book that I have co-authored with my friend, Adam Miller. It’s titled Seven Gospels: The Many Lives of Christ in the Book of Mormon, and it was published by Deseret Book and just out about a month ago.
GT 05:06 Yeah. If we can get this out before Christmas, get it for Christmas. If it’s after Christmas, get it anyway.
Rosalynde 05:12 Go get it. Yeah. I would agree.
GT 05:16 We mentioned that Adam is your co-author. Can you give us a little background on him. Because he doesn’t even live here in the state. Where is he? Give us more about Adam’s background.
Rosalynde 05:27 Yeah. Adam also went to BYU in the 90s, and graduated in Comparative Literature, and then went on to do a Ph.D. in Philosophy. For the last however many years, probably not quite 20, but probably at least 15, he has been a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College, outside of Dallas, Texas. He’s a Texan, through and through. He, early on, became interested. His dissertation and his first book was a covertly Latter-day Saint reading of the book of Romans. His great project has always been to understand theologically, Latter-day Saints’ materialism, these really enigmatic and powerful teachings from the Prophet Joseph Smith, that all spirit is matter.
GT 06:28 Right.
Rosalynde 06:28 And that in the end, God himself is material. God, Himself, has a body and is a body. So, all these things we were just saying about bodies, that applies to God, too. Now if you plug that into a traditional Christian creedal style theology, that just short circuits everything. Right? God cannot have…
GT 06:47 That is why Mormons aren’t Christian.
Rosalynde 06:49 That’s right, not creedal Christians in that way. And so, his great project has been to sort of—and yet, let me back up for a second. And yet, Jesus Christ, the member of the Godhead, the God who came to Earth, and took on a body and lived as a human being, that in and of itself short circuits the whole idea of a platonic idealism. And so, that’s been the project of traditional Christian Christology is to make sense of how God could be material. In the end, it remains a mystery. Right? There really isn’t a way for them to explain it. So, Latter-day Saints take the Christian provocation, which is that God can become material and say, “Let’s really go with this. Not only Christ is material, but God the Father is also material and has a material body. So it’s been Adam’s great project to understand Latter-day Saint materialism, and he starts out with his wonderful reading of the Book of Romans. So, he’s been working both on a kind of important and very sophisticated philosophical and theological track, but then also in a beautifully accessible and devotional track, as well. He has published a number of books with Deseret Book, and it’s always been very important to him to speak directly to the Saints and to bring the insights of his scholarship to bear on his life of discipleship. He’s been an inspiration to me. He’s taught me a lot. I’ve been deeply influenced by him, and I think he’s been influenced by me, as well. We’ve been friends and writing and reading partners, as I said, for many years now.
GT 08:37 Did you guys go to school together?
Rosalynde 08:39 No, we never did. We didn’t meet until after graduate school. We just missed each other here at BYU. And then he went to grad school on the East Coast. I was on the west coast. So, it was through the Latter-day Saint Theology Seminar that we became acquainted and started working together.
GT 08:56 Now, you said you went to UCSD right? Is that the same college as BYU in the West Coast Conference?[1]
Rosalynde 09:04 I couldn’t tell you anything about that. Sorry. You’re the Jazz man.
GT 09:08 I think it is. So, anyway, you probably still rooted for BYU over them. Right?
Rosalynde 09:13 Yeah. I was not at all plugged into UCSD sports when I was there, not even [a little.] I think we’re the Tritons. But that’s about as far as I could say.
GT 09:21 Well, the other question is Joanna Brooks, she taught at San Diego State. I think she was the department chair in English. Did you have any relationship with her?
Rosalynde 09:31 I didn’t cross paths with her at all while I was there. I think that she got there after we had left. We left San Diego in 2004, so we missed each other.
GT 09:39 Okay, you missed each other. Yeah, that’s a bummer. She’s a good friend of mine.
Rosalynde 09:43 Oh, yeah.
GT 09:45 So the other question I had, when you just said John Welch was your father-in-law, I’m like “THE” John Welch? {both laughing}
Rosalynde 10:02 Yeah, “THE” John Welch. Yes.
Rosalynde 09:54 Yeah, “THE” John Welch. Yes.
GT 09:56 Also known as Jack Welch? So, for those listeners who may not know who “THE” John Welch is, tell us about that. I was really surprised when I heard you say that. I didn’t realize there was a relationship there.
Rosalynde 10:08 Yeah, my father-in-law is John Woodland Welch, often known as Jack Welch, who in the early 80s, or late 70s, founded an extremely important influential organization called FARMS, or the Foundation For Ancient Research and Mormon Studies. And in a very roundabout way, FARMS, when it was brought into BYU, it originated as an independent organization. it was brought into BYU and was part of the umbrella organization that became the Maxwell Institute. So, it was a long and winding road. But there’s lots of FARMS books on the shelves around here. And that’s no accident. In a lot of ways, I see myself as building on the work of my father-in-law.
Rosalynde 10:54 So, he’s most known, he has a wonderful story about when he was a missionary in Germany, Heidelberg, I believe. And on his P-day, I’m sure his companion was thrilled about this, but he saw advertised a lecture at the University of Heidelberg, on Hebrew poetry in the Bible. He was like, “Well, that looks like something I should go to.” So, he dragged his companion to that. He learned all about, from a German professor, this poetic structure that shows up in Hebrew biblical poetry called chiasmus. That word will probably be familiar to a lot of people, where there’s this a series of elements, that are presented in order, and then the order is reversed. It kind of makes an X shape. And that’s where the name chiasmus comes from.
GT 11:40 So the Greek letter chi?
Rosalynde 11:41 Yeah, exactly. So, he thinks to himself, if it is in the Bible, it should be in the Book of Mormon as well, because the Book of Mormon was written by prophets who were steeped in the Hebrew poetry of the Bible. I should say this basic insight, the idea that the ancient character of the Book of Mormon will be displayed in its textual features, this was an insight that was originally had by Hugh Nibley, an incredibly important scholar in the mid-20th century. This was one of his great discoveries is that if we’re looking for evidence of the Book of Mormon’s ancient character, don’t look outside the text. Look inside the text, and you will see in its linguistic features. That’s where you’re going to find that type of evidence. And so, my father-in-law, I believe, was already familiar with Nibley’s basic thesis. And so then, he thinks to himself, well, chiasmus should be in the Book of Mormon, if it is in the Bible. He’s pondering that, and he has this great story of how he goes to sleep that night, and he wakes up in the middle of the night. He’s inspired to know where to look in the Book of Mormon. And indeed, he finds this beautifully developed passage of chiasmus. I believe it was in Alma 36. Don’t quote me on that. It could have been in a different chapter. But he finds it there.
GT 13:10 He is the father of chiasmus.
Rosalynde 13:12 He’s the father of chiasmus. And this was a founding insight for him. He comes home from his mission, finishes up his graduate training. He’s actually an attorney. So, he taught as a professor of law for many years at the law school here. But at the same time, he always was carrying out his Book of Mormon research and spun out, not only of course, chiasmus but many, many, ways in which features of the Hebrew Bible, it’s rhetorical and literary features, its liturgical, and theological features, are found in the Book of Mormon, itself. It was an incredibly fruitful way to study the Book of Mormon. He is, for sure, among the top handful of Book of Mormon scholars in the Church now or ever. He knows the Book of Mormon like the back of his hand. He loves it. And he’s done more than almost anybody, I think, to introduce Latter-day Saints to the Book of Mormon as a work of literature, as scripture, of course, but scripture that should be read for its literary features. I love him as my father-in-law. I love his work. I’m so grateful for it, and happy to be associated with him.
GT 14:21 I do not know why I didn’t make that connection before. {both laughing} I have another arm for you to twist.
Rosalynde 14:29 Okay.
GT 14:33 I just saw him this summer at BYU Education Week and introduced myself. But yeah, you can tell him I’m not a bad guy, hopefully.
7 Gospels of Book of Mormon
Interview
GT 14:42 Seven Gospels, tell us why there are seven gospels in the Book of Mormon.
Rosalynde 14:49 Well, Adam was approached by Deseret Book, and they invited him to write something about Christ in the Book of Mormon, which is a pretty broad prompt. Adam then invited me to co-author with him. We knew we wanted to go deep on a few passages, rather than doing an overall treatment of the Book of Mormon. We wanted to choose a handful of passages and go as deep as we could on them. So, I had this idea that I’ve been thinking about for a while. I had noticed that King Benjamin, in his famous sermon to his people, gives a little mini capsule account of the mortal ministry of Christ. He talks about Christ’s birth, his ministry, his death, and his resurrection. And then a few chapters later, in Mosiah 15, Abinadi does the same thing atanding before wicked King, Noah and the priests there. He also gives an account of the life of Christ. I had noticed these two passages and their similarities to each other. I started thinking about other places in the Book of Mormon, where we see a narrative of the mortal ministry of Christ, similar to the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the New Testament. Although in the Book of Mormon, of course, they’re much shorter, and they’re prophetic. They’re prophecies of the Messiah who will be coming. But they share some things in common with those gospels in the New Testament. So, I started to think of them as gospels. We picked out seven passages in the Book of Mormon that give an account of Christ’s life, his teachings, his ministry, his death, and his sacrifice. In each one of those, we just dive in as deep as we can. Some of them are very short, just a matter of a few verses. So, we set the challenge to ourselves to get as much out of those passages as we could.
GT 16:42 Yeah, I love the close reading. Val Larsen, do you know, Val? He came on my podcast last year, and talked about how you can pull a lot of information out of a little verse. That’s what you and Val and Don Bradley, and people like that excel in. It’s interesting to see how much you can pull out of here. I also thought it was interesting, in your book, it seems like you and Adam, it was as if you were pen pals, and you were writing to each other, like writing a letter. And then we just were eavesdropping in on your conversation. And I thought that was really interesting idea.
Rosalynde 17:21 Yeah.
GT 17:22 How did you decide to do that?
Rosalynde 17:24 Well, yes, when we decided to co-author, we thought about the form. Adam and I have been friends for a long time. We’ve collaborated on various projects, mostly through the Latter-day Saints Theology Seminar, for coming up on 15 years or more now. We met each other soon after we graduated from our respective Ph.D. programs: Adam in philosophy, myself, as I mentioned, in literature. But our reading and interpretive skills are very similar. We read in the same ways. We liked the same kinds of books. So, we’ve been reading partners for a very, very long time. And we had wanted to also be writing partners. And we tried to write a book together a number of years ago, where we would write in a single voice with the communal ‘we.’ That didn’t work out very well. It just didn’t gel. So, this time, we thought we’ll try something different. We’ll write to each other in letters. We’ll write letters to each other. So, we’re each writing individually in our own voice. We’re writing about the same passage, but we’re responding to each other. They’re quite personal in some ways.
Rosalynde 18:33 We share stories from our lives. We talk about times that we’ve shared together as friends. But each of us offers our own perspective on the particular passage under consideration in that chapter. It was really fun. They were quick to write. I hope they’ll be quick and enjoyable to read, and that that personal element is an inviting way to enter into the text of the Book of Mormon. And we also hope it inspires and models for people how much fun it can be to read Scripture together. We are used to reading in our families. But other than that, other than our hour of Gospel Doctrine, twice a month, most people probably read the scriptures on their own, but it is so much more fun to read them with a friend. So, we hope that that will be appealing and accessible to our readers as well.
GT 19:28 Yeah, it was really interesting, because every chapter started out with Adam, because you were writing first to Adam, and then halfway through the chapter, Rosalynde.
Rosalynde 19:38 Yeah.
GT 19:39 And so it was interesting to see. Because we always hear the admission to ponder upon the Scriptures. And this shows you two doing that in a book. And I think it’s really great. I started my podcast because I like to talk about stuff we don’t talk about in Sunday School. And so, it’s fun for me to get to talk to people like you. Because a lot of the people in my ward, it just feels like they want to just stay on the surface. And so, this is where we get to do the deep dives. And so, I feel like my podcast is kind of like your book, because we’re two people that really get into this stuff.
Rosalynde 20:25 Exactly right. We’re nerding out on the Book of Mormon. What could be better?
GT 20:29 And what’s better than hanging out with nerds. Right? {both laughing}
Overview of Gospels
Interview
GT 20:34 So, there are seven gospels, you’ve mentioned two. Can you kind of give us an overview of the seven gospels in the Book of Mormon? I thought it was really interesting that you went that way, because we don’t really think of gospels and Book of Mormon together.
Rosalynde 20:47 Yeah. Exactly. Right? We hoped that it would be intriguing and not confusing in that way. Again, we’re not talking about seven different teachings. It’s all the gospel of Jesus Christ. But we look for seven different accounts of Christ’s life. We start with 1st Nephi, Chapter 11, where, as you may remember, this is Nephi’s great, panoramic vision. As part of that vision, the angel shows him the tree that his father, Lehi, had seen in his dream, and helps him associate the tree with Mary. Then from Mary, [the angel] teaches him and shows him about the condescension of God in the Nativity and birth of Jesus Christ in a mortal tabernacle and a human body, and his ministry and his sacrifice for us.
Rosalynde 21:15 After that, we go to Mosiah 3, as I just mentioned, where King Benjamin prophesied to his people what an angel has just told him about the life of the coming God, the coming God in the form of Jesus Christ Then [we go] to Mosiah 15, which is Abinadi before King Noah and his wicked priests. Unusually, Abinadi hasn’t received this gospel from an angel or from the spirit, but he is interpreting scripture. So, he is interpreting Isaiah. His whole long spiel before Noah and his priests is all about how they’ve been interpreting Isaiah wrong. And he’s going to show them how to do it right. So, his gospel is drawn from the writings of Isaiah. After that, we moved to Alma 7, which is Alma, the younger, preaching in the Valley of Gideon. These have some of the most beloved passages about the Savior, teaching the Book of Mormon’s unique teaching about the atonement, which is that there is this empathic element to the atonement, that part of what Christ did was take upon him and experience all the sufferings, pains and sicknesses that we experience, so that he will know how to succor us and help us.
Rosalynde 22:48 After that, we moved to Alma 19. This might be surprising. This is the famous story of Ammon, in the court of the Lamanite King Lamoni. The best character in that whole chapter, of course, is the Lamanite maid servant, Abish. And so, we call this the gospel of Abish. And you have to read between the lines to find it there. But it was important to us to find women’s perspective. And so, we focus on Abish, and the way that her ministry in the court of Lamoni is, itself, a kind of gospel there.
Rosalynde 23:26 After that, we move on to Helaman 14, which is Samuel the Lamanite. you recall famously, [Samuel was] standing on the walls of Zarahemla, calling the Nephites to repentance. As part of that, he prophesies about the life of the coming Christ. And then finally, we end in Ether 3, with the brother of Jared. That falls in a slightly different category. But we felt that it was similar enough to include, because it’s a prophetic vision of the mortal body of Christ, the mortal Christ, which is really what all the others are, as well. So we end by considering Ether 3.
{End of Part 1}
[1][1][1] University of San Diego (USD) previously played in the West Coast Conference. BYU moved to the Big 12, and USD moved to the Pac-12 Conference.
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