Since its founding, the LDS Church has used the King James Version of the Bible. Is it time to dump KJV? Many people find the old English tough to read & understand. Is it time to upgrade to a more modern version? Will that cause ripple effects with the Book of Mormon? Dr Joseph Spencer weighs in on the issue. We’ll also discuss his other books and upcoming projects. Check out our conversation…
Don’t miss our other conversations with Joseph: https://gospeltangents.com/people/joseph-spencer/
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Time to Update Bible/Dump KJV?
GT 00:32 Well, I mean, I like this. Because, can I say that I hate reading Isaiah?
Joseph 00:40 A lot of people say it.
GT 00:43 And so, that was one of the good things, I was like, okay. Een though I hate Isaiah, I hear Nephi, we need to study Isaiah. But it doesn’t make any sense to me.
Joseph 00:55 Yeah.
GT 00:56 That was one of the things that I really liked about your book was to dive into there. I’ve talked to Thomas Wayment. He’s got his own New Testament, which is fantastic. You really need to get it. But one of the things that Latter-day Saints struggle with, and a lot of other churches have gone to other versions of the Bible. I’ve heard that Revelation and Isaiah and other books, which are hard to read, aren’t so hard when you update the English.
Joseph 01:34 Absolutely.
GT 01:35 Why does our Church stick [with it?] Even the Book of Mormon to a lot of degree is King James English.
Joseph 01:45 Archaic, yeah.
GT 01:47 So first question, would you support if the Church updated and got rid of King James and got something that was easier to read so that we can read Isaiah and understand what he’s talking about?
Joseph 02:01 Yeah, I mean, would I support it? Yeah, of course. But I also…
GT 02:06 You’re not going to advocate.
Joseph 02:08 Well, advocacy is not how we work in the Church.
GT 02:14 You have to advocate very quietly.
Joseph 02:15 Very quietly, very gently. But no, I mean, I think for one, it’s official church policy that people can and should use other translations in their personal study. Right?
GT 02:26 It is?
Joseph 02:27 That’s right in the Handbook of Instructions. It’s right in the Handbook of Instructions.
GT 02:31 Everybody get’s mad when I’ve [used other editions.] I’ve taught Gospel Doctrine and I’ve pulled out other versions and people are like, “That’s not King James Bible.”
Joseph 02:39 Yeah. Pull out the handbook. Show them. Yeah, the handbook is very explicit about this. When I make recommendations to my students, or in my writings, and so on, I’ll say this. Read Isaiah in the King James. Read it in the Book of Mormon as it stands. But also get out a good translation and read it side by side. The NRSV, I think, is probably the handiest, good one. But also, there are lots, just so many good translations. Just pull those out and read it. And yeah, Isaiah comes down to earth a whole lot. But I think there are other things that are in the way, as well. It’s not just a translation issue, though, that is a huge issue. There’s plenty of Isaiah that’s understandable in the King James Version without a better translation or more modern translation.
Joseph 03:27 The other issue is that we don’t know what we’re looking for. Latter-ay Saints tend to read scripture looking for two kinds of things. One, just insight into doctrine; tell me what the doctrines are. Or we tend to look for just straight, personal application. Neither of those is what Isaiah is going to give you. So, we’re just looking for the wrong thing, if that’s what we’re looking for in Isaiah. He’s not a doctrinal exponent. That’s just not what he does. He’s not trying to think about everyday application. He’s thinking about big picture, historical things. He’s living through the disaster of the destruction of the northern kingdom and thinking about what this means for God’s promises. But you have to have a lot of history and a lot of big scope stuff to really get your head around that. So yeah, I think the thing that’s so hard for us is we’re trying to read a verse and get something out of it. But he’s telling you a story. We have to read four or five chapters together, and get the basic picture and then we might be able to go, “Ah, yeah, I see how that might apply to my everyday life or something.” So, I think that’s actually the biggest thing for us. It’s not even so much translation. It’s that we’re looking for the kinds of things Isaiah is not trying to give us.
Joseph 02:41 Which is why he is so hard to understand.
GT 02:41 Okay.
Joseph 03:14 So hard to understand. Yeah, you can read 2nd Nephi 28, and you can, literally, just take a verse and be like, “How does that apply to me? No problem.” But you’re reading Isaiah 12, you’re like, “What does that have to do with me?” I don’t know. But yeah, it’s because there’s a bigger story.
GT 04:57 Okay. Well, are you on the Correlation Committee or anything?
Joseph 05:01 No, not remotely. {both laughing}
GT 05:03 I remember Dan Peterson said that he was making the Sunday School manuals. And I was like, “Can you twist the brethren’s arm to do NRSV or Harper Collins or whatever. But I think a lot of it is because King James is public domain now. So, you can make your own version and do what you want.
Joseph 05:24 Yeah.
GT 05:25 Can’t we get an old NRSV or something?
Joseph 05:28 It’s definitely not public domain. I mean, I think there are a number of things there. To be clear, all of this is way above my paygrade. I have no institutional authority whatsoever. So, I don’t have any orders to offer. But I do think that there are reasons that are motivations that have led decision makers here, whether that’s leaders of the Church, or committees, or whatever, who’s making these decisions, that led them to be slow to adopt new translations as official. I think part of it is maybe nervousness about who the translators are. I think I can understand how people get there. But more importantly, it’s that the Doctrine and Covenants and the Book of Mormon are in King James English. If we suddenly have a different Bible translation, we would start to miss the elusiveness and the interactions, and so on and so forth. So, I know if I were on a committee, I won’t be. But if I were on a committee, and we started talking very seriously, about let’s really promote, say, the NRSV to the English-speaking church, I would probably be thinking also about, then how do we create an updated language version of the Doctrine and Covenants, and of the Book of Mormon. We need a set of scholars to go through and find all the allusions and make sure that those are still being kept up. I think that’s actually a massive task. It’s not an overnight, drop the NRSV on the Church, update the language of the Book of Mormon, and we’re good. I think this actually calls for a lot more work.
GT 05:36 Wow. That was my next question. Once we do that Bible, can we do that to the Book of Mormon, too?
Joseph 07:04 Yeah, it’s worth saying people have. There are modern language editions of the Book of Mormon.
GT 07:08 Well, and Grant Hardy just gave an interview. I really should pay attention to which podcast I’ve listened to. Because if I remember right, it was Cultural Hall podcast. Richie Steadman was like, “Hey, Grant, you’ve already done two books on the Book of Mormon. Why don’t you do it?” And he’s like, “Well, that’s not really my job. It’s the Prophet’s job.” But I like what you said. Because even if we look at like the Septuagint, I mean, the ancient Jews got 70 scholars together and said, “Hey, let’s make a better Bible. a Greek version of the Bible, right?
Joseph 07:47 It’s a lot of work.
GT 07:47 We’ve got $100 billion dollars right? Give a billion to the BYU guys and go do it. Right?
Joseph 07:55 Maybe, I don’t know.
GT 07:56 You could take a chunk of that billion, Grant Hardy and some other people.
Joseph 08:01 Yeah, then we’ve got to get the scholars to agree. That’s going to be the tricky thing. Yeah, it’s a lot harder than it sounds at first. I will say this. I mean, I’ve spent a lot of time with the various modern language editions that people have done. People have made easy to read ones and children’s Book of Mormons and two-hour Book of Mormon and then he got really kind of wacky ones like Mike Hicks’ Street Legal Edition of The Book of Mormon. Have you seen this? It’s all slang. There are a lot of these, but what I have found universally in reading modern language editions of The Book of Mormon is I’m like, you lost that part of the text. There’s something there that Nephi is doing, and you lost it in your modernization. So, this is the thing. You really have to get to the bottom of the Book of Mormon before you decide how to update the language I think. It’s so easy to be like, “Oh, I think this is what it means.” And then you’ve not gotten it, and then we end up in trouble, I think.
GT 08:57 Because it just seems like, let’s take Shakespeare. I know, people love Shakespeare and if you love Shakespeare, it’s fine. But when I took it in high school, we had in an English class, we had to say, well, this is what it really meant.
Joseph 09:15 Right.
GT 09:15 For those of you who love Shakespeare and love King James Bible, knock yourselves out. For us dumb people, we could use some updated language.
Joseph 09:29 I think that’s right. I think that’s absolutely right. I think getting there is harder than it sounds. Yeah. If you just take a simple–I should just give an example so that this is concrete. But you take something like the phrase, tender mercies. How do you update the language on there? Are you missing something if you do?
GT 09:48 They talked about that in Conference all the time. We don’t have to change that.
Joseph 09:50 Okay, so maybe that one’s fine. But, I mean, an example here is a scholar recently sent me a draft of some chapters of the Book of Mormon. They were doing an updated language version. He sent me 1st Nephi 1. I wrote back and this is a lovely soul. We had a really good exchange about this. But as I said, here, like 20 places in this first chapter where I think you’ve ended up changing Nephi’s meaning in updating the language. It’s beautifully written the way you’ve done it, and it’s very understandable. But I think you’ve lost Nephi. Nephi is doing something there, and he’s doing something there. He’s doing something there. I think that can be fixed. We had this conversation. He’s like, “Oh, I see how I would tweak this,” and so on. So, I think it can be done. But that’s also just my opinion. Now, put that same translation or translation updating in front of Grant Hardy and he’s going to be like, “No, but you missed this, this and this, and this and this. He’s going to be like, ” Joe is wrong about missing that.” That’s not what Nephi is doing. It’s hard. It’s hard.
GT 10:44 It is hard. But isn’t that what modern Bible translators do?
Joseph 10:50 They’re working from the original language. That’s a totally different game.
GT 10:53 Is it?
Joseph 10:55 Oh, yeah. If we had the original language, this would be a totally different game. What we’re doing is taking 19th century English, which is, if it’s Joseph’s language, there are various theories of translation, but if it’s Joseph’s language, it’s upstate New York dialect 19th century English. Then we’re deciding what that means in 21st century English. That takes that takes some work. That’s a different kind of project than understanding the Greek. Plus, if you’re working on the New Testament, and you’re like, boy. What do I make of this Greek passage here? You can go to the 2000 years of history of people reading that and giving scholarly analysis. If you’re trying to make sense of one passage in Nephi, there may have been a scholar who’s written on it.
GT 11:45 Well, but even still, you could take some of these Isaiah passages, since we’re talking about Isaiah, you could say, well, if this was the original Greek, can’t we update this? Because one of the things that I love—I know there are Bible versions and now there are Book of Mormon versions. I can’t remember his name. One of the things they do is, especially in Psalms or even in Isaiah, where there’s poetry, they write it as poetry. It gives you a completely different feeling.
Joseph 12:24 Totally.
GT 12:24 And so, especially, and I’m going to use a crass word of where Joseph “plagiarized” the Bible. Couldn’t we go back to those original Greek texts of Isaiah and take advantage of this scholarship and say, “Well, this is how we would write this today.”
Joseph 12:45 Yeah, we certainly could. There are some tricky things even there. Tricky [things,[ not impossible. But if you take the Isaiah texts in the Book of Mormon and lay them side by side with the King James Bible, there are differences. Then you have to ask the question, “How important are those differences?” If you just take the NRSV version of this text, how do those differences function? It’s not just a simple, oh, just replace it with the NRSV. The Book of Mormon has got its own version of Isaiah. So, then we’ve got to figure–like I say, it’s tricky, not impossible. But there are questions that have to be answered and issues that have to be addressed.
GT 13:21 That’s why we have scholars. Right?
Joseph 13:23 I don’t know. I like to do my scholarship thing. But I don’t know if the Church cares about what I do. I certainly don’t have any demands. But it’s something that scholars could help with, yeah, for sure.
Joe’s Other Book of Mormon Books
GT 13:37 Well, cool. So I know, this is not your first foray into the Book of Mormon.
Joseph 13:46 No.
GT 13:47 I think I have a two-volume work of yours.
Joseph 13:51 Anatomy of Book of Mormon Theology.
GT 13:52 There we go. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Joseph 13:56 Yeah.
GT 13:56 Because I think that’s not the only other thing.
Joseph 13:59 That’s correct. Yeah.
GT 14:01 You’re like Mr. Book of Mormon.
Joseph 14:02 I have. I’ve written six books on the Book of Mormon.
GT 14:04 Six, so this is one, this is your newest.
Joseph 14:08 This is my newest.
GT 14:08 And then the previous one was the two volume.
Joseph 14:11 Correct.
GT 14:11 So let’s dive into that.
Joseph 14:13 So, Anatomy of Book of Mormon Theology, it’s a collection of essays I wrote over the course of 10 years. Some of them had been published before. Some of them had not. But a lot of what I was trying to do there was, here’s 10 years of my not book work of on the Book of Mormon and gather it and reflect on a change that I watched happen over those 10 years. When I first began writing about the Book of Mormon, there was no such thing as doing theology with the Book of Mormon. No one did that. That wasn’t a thing.
GT 14:42 Chris Thomas hadn’t jumped in.
Joseph 14:43 He hadn’t jumped in. I mean, when I wrote my very first essays on the Book of Mormon, the response was the same every time. It was, “Who would do this?” Literally editors would say that to me, when I submitted an article for publication. “Who would write about this?”
GT 14:56 You’re a philosopher. That’s what you do.
Joseph 14:58 Right. Like, why would anyone do anything like this? I don’t know what this is. It was kind of like, oh. We, I say we, because I and others doing similar kinds of things, we just kept running up against this wall, and going, this is apparently of no interest to the established conversation around the Book of Mormon or around scripture generally. But 10 years later, there’s a field of Book of Mormon theology.
GT 15:25 They have a conference.
Joseph 15:26 And there’s a conference that does this, and you got the brief theological introductions to the Book of Mormon, and you’ve got the Latter-day Saint theology seminar. So, what I’m doing in that book, essentially, is gathering the work that I did over the 10 years, where at the beginning, there was no such thing. By the end, there was a thing, and then just reflecting on my own journey along the way. So, the essays are things I wrote during that time. But each of them begins with a little introduction, where I say, “Here’s where this was at, and why I was raising these questions as we were just trying to figure out what does it mean to do this theology?”
GT 15:54 Now one of the things that I chuckled at, because I’ve read part of that. I think, I should have gotten you on the show way sooner than I have. I’m repenting. But one of the things that made me chuckle, I think in the introduction to the theology book, it said, I used the word Mormon when it was okay and I haven’t changed the essay. So, if you still don’t mind, it’s a good book for that. You didn’t change those essays.
Joseph 16:25 I didn’t.
GT 16:26 Even though President Nelson said, “We’re not Mormons.”
Joseph 16:28 Yeah, it’s an archive. So, there it is. When I do when I do another volume, yeah, it’ll be Latter-day Saints all the way through. (Both chuckling.)
GT 16:39 All right. Are there any big theological nuggets out of your theology, of those two volumes?
Joseph 16:47 It’s all over the place, deliberately, because it’s all the work I was doing over 10 years. But there are several essays on Bible in the Book of Mormon, so a lot of stuff on Isaiah on there. You can see places where I’m working out ideas that ended up in this book. But there a handful of essays I did in the context of the Latter-day Saint theology seminar, that I co-direct with Adam Miller. Those ones are this nitty gritty, we’re looking at the tiniest details in the text and seeing what we can do theologically with them. They’re kind of ridiculous essays, but I think they’re also some of the most fun I’ve ever had with the Book of Mormon. There are scattered things on method, trying to think about the nature of apologetics with the Book of Mormon, which was a very intense conversation at the time. It still, sometimes is, but for the most part it has been a little calmer in the last few years. Then just various other things that I wrote and was thinking about over those years. I mean, a lot of different things.
GT 17:46 So one, two, three, talk about your other three books.
Joseph 17:51 Yeah. So there are four because I was counting Anatomy as one volume. My very first book I wrote was called An Other Testament on Typology, published by Neal A Maxwell Press.
GT 18:02 I haven’t read that one.
Joseph 18:03 Then a second edition came out from the Maxwell Institute, eventually. That’s actually, in a lot of ways, kind of the rough draft of A Word and Season. I am looking at Isaiah in the Book of Mormon, Abinadi versus Nephi. I’m trying to think about those things. I was not trying to think about the long history of Isaiah’s interpretation at the time, just what’s the Book of Mormon doing. But using all of that to think about the nature of reading, which is why it’s on typology. What does it mean to talk about types and shadows and interpretation? That was my very first book. Now I’m very embarrassed by that book, but I’m sure it’s fine. My second book was not on the Book of Mormon. My third book was called the Vision of All: 25 Lectures on Isaiah in Nephi’s Record.
GT 18:48 Oh, so you were Mr. Isaiah.
Joseph 18:50 I’ve been doing Isaiah stuff a long time.
GT 18:52 If anybody has any questions, Joe’s the guy.
Joseph 18:54 That one is aimed. I call it 25 Lectures. I didn’t actually give them as lectures, but I wrote them as lectures. So they’re chatty. They’re snarky. It sounds like me standing in front of a classroom. It’s supposed to be as down to earth as can be, just trying to explain what Isaiah is doing in Nephi’s record. That one I published in 2016, with Greg Kofford Books. Then my next book, I wrote 1st Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction for the Maxwell Institute series. So, 1st Nephi: Brief Theological Introduction, half of which I’m looking at, what is Nephi’s project in 1st Nephi? The other half of which I’m asking the hard questions people have about 1st Nephi. What do we do with Laban’s death? What do we do with the lack of women here? What do we do with Nephi’s relationship to his brothers? Is he just…
GT 19:42 What do we do with the lack of women?
Joseph 19:43 Yeah, you’ll have to read the book.
GT 19:46 We can’t get the Cliffs Notes here?
Joseph 19:47 Cliffs Notes version is, I think the Book of Mormon is actually saying something about women. It’s not simply, oh, no, there are no women. That’s a problem. The Book of Mormon is, as a whole, drawing attention to the lack of women’s voices in Nephite culture and contrasting that with what’s in Lamanite culture. I use that frame to make some sense of 1st Nephi. I’m working on a project on that right now, a book project on gender, domesticity, these kinds of questions in the Book of Mormon, generally. So that was my fourth book.
Joseph 20:20 Then the only other one I’ve written on the Book of Mormon was, I wrote with a few colleagues of mine. It’s an introduction to Book of Mormon studies. It’s called Book of Mormon Studies: An Introduction and Guide. It’s literally aimed at an undergraduate student reader, or average Latter-day Saint sitting in the pew. It’s just like, what’s the shape of this field? What should you be reading? Where did it come from? What’s happened over the years? It introduces you to Nibley and it introduces you to FARMS [Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies,] and introduces you to Terryl Givens and Grant Hardy and where they all fit in this conversation. What are the major questions people are asking? How do people come with those questions? It has a series of appendices at the back just saying like, here’s all the books you should buy. Here’s all the things you should read. It’s just literally just a guide to the field.
GT 21:07 Oh, wow, that sounds interesting. Because that was the next question I had. I mean, I know you’re Mr. Book of Mormon. You’ve written six books. But who is out there? I think Grant Hardy is probably the most obvious one. But are there others besides Grant Hardy that you really recommend? I know David Ridges. He’s very popular at Deseret Book.
Joseph 21:29 Sure, yeah.
GT 21:31 Can you talk about some other Book of Mormon scholars?
Joseph 21:34 Yeah. I mean, if you’re going back in time, there is, of course, a whole host of people to read. Hugh Nibley is, I think, an absolute must. There’s no question that…
GT 21:42 He’s not dated now?
Joseph 21:45 It depends what you’re looking for. Yeah. I mean, there’s no question his sources are older because he’s been dead for 20 years. His work on the Book of Mormon, mostly was done before 1970. He mostly didn’t write about the Book of Mormon after that. So, his work is older in that sense. But it’s also very vibrant and interesting. The work he did on the Book of Mormon in the late 60s and early 70s, just as he began to turn his attention to the Book of Abraham, is, I think, still Class A, really great work. He’s thinking about political issues, and the Book of Mormon, and I think does amazing stuff.
Joseph 22:22 Then, of course, you’ve got Sidney Sperry [who] is one of the major founders of Book a Mormon Studies and his work is still there. There are things there that are very, very dated, but there’s also stuff there that’s really useful. He’s trying to look at genre and so on in a way that did a lot of work that’s important. The FARMS guys, in the 1980s, and 90s, produced just boatloads of work on the Book of Mormon. I’m never super excited about apologetics. I already believe this. I don’t need to be convinced that it’s intellectually defensible. But they also do so much good work on the Book of Mormon on the way to making defenses of the book’s historicity. So, I think there’s a lot of good work there. Jack Welch wrote so much that I think remains very important on the Book of Mormon, especially when it comes to law, but also on all kinds of other things.
GT 23:14 Because he’s a lawyer.
Joseph 23:14 Yeah, exactly. That’s his training. Then others are in that crowd, as well in some of those volumes. The old FARMS volumes are, I think, really excellent. There’s lots to learn from them. Then, of course, there’s what’s happened in the last 20 years. So, I think here, the absolute must read is obviously Grant Hardy’s Understanding the Book of Mormon. Now he’s got this recent annotated edition.
GT 23:41 Yeah, I just bought that.
Joseph 23:44 Other essays that Grant has written that are scattered here and there are all worth reading. He’s a really remarkable reader of the Book of Mormon. Terryl Givens is not regularly a writer about the Book of Mormon, but his By the Hand of Mormon is absolutely required reading.
GT 23:58 I agree.
Joseph 23:59 It’s such an important book. It’s a complicated book. It looks like it’s doing one thing, but it’s actually doing several other things as well. I think that’s a must read. Then the Brief Theological Introductions, that Maxwell Institute published, 12 volumes from 1st Nephi through Moroni. I think that whole series is phenomenal. Some of those volumes, I think, are just some of the best stuff that’s ever been written on the Book of Mormon.
GT 23:59 Besides you, who are some of the other authors?
Joseph 24:32 There are 12 authors, let’s see if I could do it in order. So it’s me, I wrote 1st Nephi. Terryl Givens wrote 2nd Nephi. Diedre Green wrote Jacob. Sharon Harris road Enos, Jarom, Omni. Jim Faulconer wrote Mosiah. Kylie Turley did the first half of Alma. Mark Wrathal did the second half of Alma. Kim Matheson did Helaman. Daniel Becerra did 3rd and 4th Nephi.
GT 25:01 Fourth Nephi didn’t get its own book?
Joseph 25:02 It didn’t. Adam Miller did Mormon. Rosalynde Welch wrote Ether and David Holland [wrote] Moroni. So it’s a pretty amazing lineup.
GT 25:13 Like the Quorum of the Twelve.
Joseph 25:14 Right, I mean, the volumes that I would absolutely say are must reads, I think Kim Matheson’s volume on Helaman is dynamite. It’s just so, so good. Adam Miller, unsurprisingly, wrote an unbelievable eco-theology of Mormon, which I think is incredible. I think Sharon Harris does some remarkable work with taking these tiny little itty bitty, itty bitty books, Enos, Jarom, Omni and draws them out and finds all kinds of cool things there. Yeah, the whole series is great. I’d highly recommend that. Those are some of the names to be reading. Adam Miller is not usually writing on the Book of Mormon, all the time, but,,,
GT 25:52 He’s just writing all the time.
Joseph 25:54 He’s just writing all the time. Book of Mormon is playing a role in his thinking.
GT 25:57 I need to get him on.
Joseph 25:58 Kim Matheson, I think, is one of the brightest Book of Mormon scholars we’ve ever seen. She wrote the Helaman volume. But she’s writing other things, and she is always worth reading. She’s also one of the vice presidents of the Book of Mormon Studies Association. Then and then you’ve got some interesting things going on out there if you want to get out into the weeds a bit. I say out in the weeds, but it’s actually mainstream scholarship. But it’s out in the weeds for average Latter-day Saints. You’ve got Americanist Approaches to the Book of Mormon, which is a collection of essays on the Book of Mormon. Half of them are by non-Latter-day Saints and half are by Latter-day Saints.
GT 26:32 Oh, wow.
Joseph 26:33 But written in a totally secular vein. What does it look like to read the Book of Mormon in the context of the 19th century? I think it’s a really important volume, edited by Jared Heckman and Lizabeth Fenton. That’s a really remarkable thing. Then lots of other things going on. The Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, of course, has lots of interesting things. Then Dialogue occasionally publishes interesting things on the Book of Mormon. BYU Studies occasionally publishes on it, Religious Educator, etc. For people still really excited about apologetic stuff, of course, The Interpreter is always publishing stuff about the Book of Mormon and historical contexts. So, there’s lots of stuff going on in lots of places.
GT 27:11 I’m trying to remember what Brent Metcalfe’s book is. Do you recommend it?
Joseph 27:18 What’s it called? New Approaches…
GT 27:20 New Approaches to the Book of Mormon.
Joseph 27:21 New Approaches to the Book of Mormon: Explorations and Critical Methodology. And also American Apocrypha, which I think Vogel edited.
GT 27:28 Oh, he did.
Joseph 27:29 But it’s also a collection of essays.
GT 27:30 What about them?
Joseph 27:30 It depends what you’re looking for. I think average Latter-day Saints would tend to feel a little like, well, what am I looking at here? This is really hypercritical or something like that. I, of course, have found lots of value in those things. There’s also lots there that I’m like, [maybe not.] But that’s true of, literally, everything I read. So yeah, I find those to be really important volumes, really valuable volumes. But I also think they have to be read with a grain of salt, like most everything. But there’s some remarkable stuff in there. Brent Metcalfe’s priority of Mosiah’s essay, in particular, is a really important, really important contribution.
GT 27:40 And he also talked about the wherefore, therefore.
Joseph 28:11 Exactly, yeah, really important stuff there.
GT 28:13 For people who don’t know what we’re talking about, what is the wherefore, therefore?
Joseph 28:17 What he shows is that if you take the Book of Mormon in dictation order, it privileges therefore starting in Mosiah over wherefore. But eventually you start to hear wherefore more often than therefore. If you read in dictation order, then there’s a really clear pattern of that. Whereas if you read it in final form, then it changes suddenly. It changes from wherefore to therefore and then back to wherefore. He uses this as evidence that this is the order of dictation. As translator or dictator, at least in the Book of Mormon, Joseph is privileging therefore first and then shifts into wherefore. That tells us something about the order of dictation.
GT 28:53 Okay. Well, cool. I’m running out of questions, what are we missing?
Joseph 29:01 I mean, there’s lots of things to talk about here. There’s Isaiah in the Book of Mormon.
GT 29:04 You’ve got your new book that you’re not going to talk about.
Joseph 29:07 Well, I’m working on too many books, that’s the problem. The book I’ve just finished a first solid draft of is not on the Book of Mormon. My next book is not on the Book of Mormon.
GT 29:16 Oh, wow. What happened?
Joseph 29:18 Well, there are other things I think about once in a while. So, my next book is not actually the one about the lost manuscript, etc. This is a little study of Hugh Nibley.
GT 29:29 Oh, okay.
Joseph 29:30 It’s a little book. It’s for the University of Illinois Press. Introductions to Mormon Thought series.
GT 29:33 Oh, one of those little thin ones?
Joseph 29:35 Yeah.
GT 29:35 I love those because they’re fairly easy to read.
Joseph 29:38 I’ve written the one on Nibley in draft form. I’m going to try and tie it up over the summer and then send it off. That’s what I’ve been buried in Nibley for last few years. Then I’ve got a few projects on the Book of Mormon I’m working on. There will be book projects.
GT 29:52 Did I hear one was on the lost 116 pages?
Joseph 29:54 It’s not just on the lost manuscript. It’s not like Don Bradley. Don’s done the work of figuring out what we can say about what was in that manuscript. What I’m writing is something on how to make sense of the shape of the Book of Mormon with respect to the lost manuscript, beginning of the Book of Mosiah. How do we read Words of Mormon? It’s all that kind of thing. I think I’ve got a very different conception of this than everyone else that’s written on it.
GT 30:18 Well, I can’t wait. Because I swear, maybe it’s just from Don Bradley, but I swear from others, that there have been this, Mosiah 1 is really Mosiah 3 and I you’re like, “No.”
Joseph 30:34 I think it’s not, yeah. There are lots of different ways people have read that. Some people read it as we’re actually beginning in Mosiah, Chapter Two. Some have read it as we’re beginning in Chapter Three. Some have argued very stringently, that we’re in Mosiah Chapter One. So, there have been various opinions. But I think I’ve carved out a very different position on this for a host of reasons [that] I’m going to have to make clear. I’m working on that. But working on other things, as well. I had mentioned, I’m working on a book on men and women in the Book of Mormon. How do we think about gender, relationships and so on in the Book of Mormon? I’m working on that with Kim Matheson, and then some other things, too. I’ve got other things on the burner. It’s too many projects at once.
GT 31:20 Well, let’s remind people, because I’m a huge fan of BOMSA. Do you know the dates, because I don’t know the dates.
Joseph 31:28 Off the top of my head, it’s the second weekend of October.
GT 31:31 Second week in October, so right after conference.
Joseph 31:34 It’s always the week after General Conference in October. That’s how we always do it, so rather than look it up. That’s the easiest.
GT 31:39 Okay, that’s easy. Then, if I remember, Chris gave me a hard time because he didn’t watch conference. He’s like, “Aren’t you supposed to be watching conference? We’re doing this interview?” I’m like, it just ended. We’re okay.
Joseph 32:00 Yeah, it’s great.
GT 32:02 So, all right. Well, Dr. Joe Spencer, once again, show everybody your book again.
Joseph 32:07 A Word in Season: Isaiah’s Reception in the Book of Mormon.
GT 32:13 It’s available on Amazon or all your major bookstores, Deseret Book, I suppose. It must be time to go. The lights are going out.
Joseph 32:21 Yeah.
GT 32:25 All right. Well, thanks again for being here on Gospel Tangents.
Joseph 32:27 Thanks, Rick.
{End of Part 3}
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