We’re discussing 2 of the 7 gospels in the Book of Mormon: Gospel of Abinadi and Gospel of Samuel the Lamanite. 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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Gospel of Abinadi
Interview
GT 00:26 I feel like we’ve given a little bit of short shrift to the Gospel of Abinadi. I mean, we went from Benjamin to Abinadi, and we didn’t really introduce Abinadi. Can you give us an introduction to the Gospel of Abinadi?
Rosalynde 00:37 Yeah. The Gospel of Abinadi, again, is in Mosiah 15. It’s Abinadi at an extremely, just as you know, Benjamin presents his gospel in this very iconic, dramatic scene. In the same way, Abinadi presents his gospel chained, as a prophet and chained. In a lot of ways, Abinadi is an Old Testament prophet. He’s like a prophet, straight out of central casting, from the Old Testament. He’s an outsider. He’s a gadfly. He testifies and harangues the rich and the powerful on behalf of the poor, and the suffering. So, in so many ways, Adam calls him a prophet’s prophet. Here he stands speaking truth to power, before King Noah, chained and bound, and as we know, very shortly headed to his death. Not surprisingly, then, the gospel that he presents, again, as an interpretation of Isaiah, emphasizes the gentleness and the meekness of the Savior. Abinadi really focuses on the way in which Christ willingly gave himself up to his death. He talks about how he was silent and passive in the face of those who would kill him. Of course, we see in a beautiful way, how that is played out in Abinadi’s life just a couple of chapters later, as he, himself, too, goes to his death as a type of Christ. As I said before, the Book of Mormon is teaching us, reiterating what we already see in the Sermon on the Mount, which is that the power of God is the power that returns love, gentleness, and meekness in the face of coercion and violence. That’s something that’s a theme that we see repeated over and over in each of the Seven Gospels in the Book of Mormon.
Gospel of Abish
GT 02:48 Well, very good. I’m trying to remember what else, we’ve gone through Mary, Benjamin.
Rosalynde 02:55 Abinadi. We talked pretty good about Alma and Alma 7, the model of atonement there.
GT 02:59 Okay. Is Abish next?
Rosalynde 03:03 Yeah, Alma 19.
GT 03:05 Now this is the one that has the fewest verses in the Book of Mormon are about Abish. Right? {Rick chuckling}
Rosalynde 03:12 Yeah.
GT 03:13 So you had to do some digging on this one.
Rosalynde 03:16 We did. You know, I’m a little bit of a stickler for a pattern. So, I can say, there is, if we’re going to think about the gospel as a kind of literary genre in the Book of Mormon, we have the basics there, not in the mouth of Abish, but in the mouth of Lamoni. When he [Lamoni] awakens, from his kind of spiritual coma that he’s been in, where he’s been tutored in the presence of God, he testifies and says, “I’ve seen my Redeemer, that he will come forth born of a woman, and will suffer for his people and will redeem them from their sins.” So, that’s the bare necessity right there: the birth, the death, and the redemptive suffering of Christ.
GT 04:02 Is that how we define a gospel, basically?
Rosalynde 04:04 Yes.
GT 04:04 Those three things?
Rosalynde 04:05 Yes, well, that’s how we are. And I want to say, this isn’t a rigorous work of form criticism.
GT 04:14 We throw out Mark, because he doesn’t have the birth. Right?
Rosalynde 04:16 Yeah, that’s right. What the Book of Mormon is doing is quite distinct from the New Testament. So, I certainly wouldn’t want to put this in conversation with the extensive form critical scholarship on the genre of gospel in the New Testament. But we’re borrowing the word, because I think it’s evocative and apt, but the Book of Mormon has its own thing going on. So, Lamoni does speak kind of a Gospel of Christ. But what we really focus on is Abish and the way that she lives the Gospel of Christ. What Adam does in his letter is think about the ways in which Abish is a case study in Gospel minimalism.
GT 04:57 Okay.
Rosalynde 04:58 Abish had a vision that converted her to Christ, but she hadn’t had any ordinances. She didn’t have a church. She didn’t have any kind of formal liturgy or scripture. All of the things that we associate with our Christian formation and our Christian discipleship, she didn’t have. She simply didn’t have. So, Adam, asks, “What is the bare minimum that we need to be transformed in Christ, to find a life in Christ?” He looks at Abish as an inspiring example that we can do with a lot less than we might think that we need. I look at Abish in a different way. I suggest that we should see her as putting the gospel in action. So, throughout Alma 19, of course, everybody remembers that people keep on falling down and swooning in the spirit. They’re overcome with the spirit, and they fall down as if dead. And so, I talk about that as this type scene that harkens back to so many moments in the Gospel of Christ’s baptism. Of course, of his healing of the dead, or sorry, healing of the sick and raising of the dead in Lazarus. The Lazarus resonance is very, very strong; and of course, finally of Christ’s death and resurrection.
GT 06:20 And I’m realizing, I’m getting more non-LDS people here. They might not know who Abish is. So, I probably should not be doing the inside baseball, because of course you and I know. For those non-members that might not be familiar with the story of Abish, can you give us a brief background on that story first?
Rosalynde 06:42 Yeah, she is wonderful. I wish we knew more about her. Abish is a maid servant. She seems to be a servant to the queen in the court of King Lamoni. Lamoni is a Lamanite king. The Nephite Christian missionary, Ammon, in a very famous passage, comes to preach the gospel to Lamoni. There’s the famous scene that everybody knows where he presents himself as a servant. He first offers to serve the king, before preaching to him and he cuts off the arm….
GT 07:15 He’s a service missionary!
Rosalynde 07:16 He’s a service missionary. {Rick chuckles} This is extremely important thematically, as we’ll see. So, Ammon comes, and he wins the King’s trust through being his servant and preaches the gospel to him and the king is converted and falls into this the state of a coma-like spiritual revelation, where he’s being taught in the presence of God and…
GT 07:43 And people wonder if he’s dead.
Rosalynde 07:45 Yeah, exactly. Everybody thinks that he’s dead. But his queen, his wife, the Lamanite queen, doesn’t believe that he’s dead. She believes that he is still alive and comes to Ammon. Sure enough, Lamoni then comes to and awakes and testifies, but then…
GT 08:04 Because Abish touches his hand, right?
Rosalynde 08:05 That’s with the queen.
GT 08:07 Oh, that’s with the queen. Sorry about that.
Rosalynde 08:08 So the queen is there with the king. As he rises, he testifies. But then, the king’s testimony sets off this almost like a contagion, or this chain reaction, where everybody in the court is being touched by the Spirit. The way it’s manifesting for them, is in the spiritual swooning’s. Everybody else who’s looking on is really confused and actually starts to get terrified. And I would be, too, like, what is happening? Is there some kind of black magic going on?
GT 08:37 People are falling down dead.
Rosalynde 08:38 People are falling down dead. The only one who really knows what’s happening is Abish. Because in this very mysterious way, where we only have this one evocative phrase where we’re told that she was converted to Christ by a vision of her father, she knows what’s happening. So, she sees everybody falling down. And she actually sees this as an opportunity to testify of Christ. She runs out to gather the townspeople to come into the king’s throne room and show them the Spirit at work on the king and queen in their court. She runs and draws people in. This isn’t a part of my chapter, but I’ve been thinking about this recently. The meaning of the word church or Ecclesia is a calling out, a calling out: Ec is an out and clesia is to call out. So, a church is when we’re called out of ourselves into a communal body. In a way, we see Abish founding the Lamanite church by calling the people out of their homes to come and see what she is seeing. Unfortunately, when they get there, they don’t understand what’s happening. They actually think something nefarious is at work. So, there starts to be great conflict and confusion and violence, even. The Queen, herself, has been almost on the ground, slain in the Spirit.
Rosalynde 10:14 So, not knowing what else to do, Abish, in tears, kneels down beside the Queen, touches her hand, and that seems to call forth the Queen, and she rises. Then she, herself, testifies ecstatically of what she has experienced. That is able to calm the pandemonium and that then we see in this chapter, the founding story of Lamanite Christianity, which as we see in the rest of the book of Alma, and especially in the book of Helaman, is very soon to eclipse Nephite Christianity as the bearers of the truth. The Nephite church is already in decline, and very, very quickly goes into steep decline, whereas the Lamanite Christian church just grows and grows and grows until the point where in Helaman 14, we actually have a Lamanite missionary who has come to testify to the Nephites. So, all throughout Alma 19, this theme of reversal, where the low becomes high, the high becomes low, the first becomes last, the last becomes first. We see this played out in so many ways, in particular, as the maidservant Abish becomes a type of Christ, and becomes the most important figure in this story. She, herself, is the one who raises the queen from the ground. So, quite literally, we see the low become high, and the high become low. And then this theme of reversal, of course, will continue as we see the Lamanites and the Nephites, writ large, changing places.
Gospel of Samuel the Lamanite
GT 11:53 Okay. And so that sounds like a good segue right into the Gospel of Samuel the Lamenite.
Rosalynde 11:59 Yeah, Samuel the Lamanite.
GT 12:02 Maybe we should tell people who haven’t read the Book of Mormon, who is Samuel the Lamanite?
Rosalynde 12:05 Yes.
GT 12:06 Before we jump into his gospel. {Rick laughing}
Rosalynde 12:09 So he, like Abish, is very mysterious. All these Lamanite characters, we just don’t know very much about them, because…
GT 12:15 That’s because it’s the record of the Nephites, not the Lamanites. {Rick laughing}
Rosalynde 12:17 Exactly! Narratologically, that is exactly the case. We have here in the Book of Mormon, the historiography of a Nephite Tribal School. They simply don’t have access to very many Nephite records. We just don’t know that much about these characters. We don’t really know where Samuel comes from, how he’s learned the gospel, how he was called, all of that remains mysterious. Of course, after his iconic sermon, he disappears from the record, as well, except for—well, I’ll get to that in a minute. So, he appears to preach to the Nephites.
GT 12:57 This reversal again, The Nephites were teaching them. Now the Lamanites are coming to teach the Nephites.
Rosalynde 13:03 Yeah, the Nephite church has declined to such an extent that it’s now incumbent on the Lamanites to come and preach the true gospel and call the Nephites to repentance, because things are getting very, very dire. So, he’s expelled from Zarahemla. But the Lord, sort of like Jonah is like, you have to deliver your message. Find some way to make it work. So, he mounts the wall, and he preaches to the Nephites, from the wall of Zarahemla. And at the end, he’s shot at. They’re throwing stones and arrows to knock him off the wall. But from the wall, he delivers this iconic prophecy
Rosalynde 13:45 A lot of Latter-day Saints remember it best because Samuel is the one who prophesized about the three days of light, and the night of darkness that will mark the birth and the death of the Savior, respectively. So, those are beloved passages. In fact, this time of year around Christmas time, we often will read that as part of our Christmas observance. But the reality is that Samuel’s message is very dark, very, very dark. The Nephites are in a bad situation, in a bad place. And he has come with two distinct prophecies for them. One is in the near term. And that is that Christ will be coming relatively soon. So, he prophesies of Christ’s birth, and also of Christ’s death and of the great catastrophic upheavals that will accompany in the New World that will manifest the death of Christ. Then he has another timeframe, where he’s prophesying about the ultimate demise of the Nephite people several centuries in the future. And he talks about that as a sword hanging over your head. So, he has these two joint prophecies: There’s two things up in heaven that are hanging over your head Nephites. One is the Savior. He’s poised ready to come down. The other is a sword poised and ready to fall on you.
Rosalynde 14:02 So once I started thinking about it in that way, I started to see how these two prophecies are actually very similar. They have the same structure. There’s something in heaven that’s ready to come down. I started to wonder whether maybe in the end, they are the same prophecy. Maybe God’s message to all people at all times, is always a variation on the same message, which is that Christ is there. He’s waiting. He wants to come to you. I’m going to send him to you. Will you receive him? I think that’s always the prophecy. I think that’s always the message that God has for us. But we hear that message in very different ways. If we are open to God, and in loving relation with God, then that message to us is the best news. It’s the good news of the gospel that Christ is coming, and we welcome him into our hearts. And we experience God’s relation to us as one of love. But if we are in the grips of sin, then God’s love starts to feel oppressive. It can start to feel more than oppressive. It can start to feel threatening. I’ve experienced something like this where I know that I’m not in right relation to somebody. There’s something wrong in our relationship, and it’s my fault. And I need to rectify it, but I don’t want to. Yet if that person continues to relate to me with love, with unyielding love, I start to condemn myself. In some ways, it feels better if they treat you badly, because then you’re justified in your enmity. But when they respond to you with love, even in your wrongdoing, it can start it can be hard to take. It doesn’t always feel good. I think the same is true of our relation to God. When God continues to respond to us with love, even when we are in wrong relation to him, it can start to feel actually like a condemnation.
Rosalynde 18:17 And so I started to think maybe it’s actually one prophecy: the sword and Christ are one in the same. But whether we look to that prophecy and receive it from a position of love or a position of sin, it looks to us like a sword ready to fall on us and destroy us. What was so interesting is that when I started carrying out this hypothesis, digging into Samuel’s words to see whether it was the case, what I found, actually, it makes sense. Because ultimately, the destruction that the Nephites experience comes at their own hand. One of the worst moments in the whole Book of Mormon, one of the darkest, most violent and horrific moments, is when Samuel is describing what’s going to happen to the Nephite women at their ultimate destruction at the hands of the Lamanites in several centuries. And he describes this horrible moment where pregnant, Nephite mothers will be trampled in the mud. They and their children will be destroyed in this moment of horrific violence. That’s been always hard for me to read. And, in fact, for a long time, I really didn’t even like to read the Book of Helaman, because it is so violent. I just didn’t even like to go there. But when I had the courage to really go there and look at that what I saw is that, really, that punishment, did that come from God? No. It came from themselves in their own panic, in their own shame and in their own fear. They destroyed themselves. So, it was never a sword that God was going to drop on the Nephites from on high and punish them retributively for their sin. It was that they were going to destroy themselves in their sin.
GT 19:29 Very interesting. You know, when I think of Helaman, we always think of the 2000 stripling warriors but that’s not the gospel, I guess. {both laughing} Well, that’s interesting. So, anything else to add before we move on to the brother of Jared?
Rosalynde 19:47 Yes, I’ll say that, in Adam’s letter, he looks at the meaning of resurrection. Because Samuel’s Gospel is one where the soteriology or the theology of salvation is especially developed around and cocooning the gospel, the narrative gospel of Christ life. So, Adam talks about what it might mean to see resurrection as a coming into the presence of God, and as something that’s kind of always available to us, now and already, rather than something that we have to put off and wait for in the future. So, he has a very beautiful reading of that chapter as well.
GT 20:29 We’ll have to get Adam on. I feel like we are only getting half the book.
Rosalynde 20:31 I know. It’s true. You are.
{End of Part 3}
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