The Book of Mormon Site
A Brief Note
What makes the Book of Mormon unique, at a meta-level.
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The author claims that he didn’t write the book, but merely claims he translated it, without producing the materials from which he claims to have translated it. (This is not unprecedented, see Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 1764, considered the first Gothic novel, originally published as a translation of a story by the invented elder author Onuphrio Muralto.)
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Yet the English text of the book itself (as that is all we have, no original record to speak of) tells us who wrote it and when it was written, at every turn. But this requires some pretty intense sleuthing, as approximately two hundred years have passed since the book was published, and we no longer live in the same pre-publication print world. It takes some work to discover all these myriad possible influences that are brought together in the text itself, influences ironically hidden in plain sight. (It also takes some familiarity with the Old and New Testament text, specifically the phraseology of the King James Version of the text, the biggest and most obvious influence on the book.) A lot of the scholarly work about the Book of Mormon is scattered across various narrow-interest books and articles and is not brought together in a single place, across the chapters of the book itself, where it can be presented in context.
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(As pointed out by Fenton / Hickman) The book is dense enough and weird enough (and a mix of boring enough, and a slog, really) that almost no one but the already-true-believers actually read the book. (And former believers with the requisite background knowledge usually feel betrayed enough that they no longer take the book seriously. It takes a weird animal to endure a sort of masochistic pleasure at slogging through the text phrase-by-phrase to reverse engineer it in ways that only believers might even care about, but with the opposite attitude to the believers, “reading it against itself” so to speak.)
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The framing of the book as divinely inspired puts off critics outside the Mormon community (anywhere on the believing spectrum), who might feel that defending a mainstream position (that it was not divinely inspired) is hardly worth their time (and makes them a target for the ire of the believing community, another problem most books aside from the Bible or maybe the Quran don’t have). That framing usually leaves them with a clear understanding that there is probably no large non-believing audience for people to read works about the Book of Mormon, who are not already willing to simply slog through the book themselves, namely self-selecting believers.
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Most of the people (with few exceptions, such as Grant Hardy) who have read it or defend it also have no interest in diving deep and understanding the text itself (beyond taking the book at its word that it must be of ancient origin, or defending that position with Olympic-athlete levels of mental gymnastics). Most of the people who are willing to spend the time reading it kind of don’t care (or actively don’t want to know) what the text itself tells us from a historical-critical and textual-critical perspective, or understand deeply the 19th-century context in which it was written, down to the level of phrases and ideas unabashedly and unrelentingly anachronistically lifted from both Biblical and post-Biblical material.
In other words, this is one of the most interesting, widely-circulated, and unread books in history, second only to the Bible (Fenton / Hickman again), or perhaps other holy books—sharing with them the intimidating length, impenetrability (without proper guidance), and uneven density, often alternating between the soporific (genealogies, proper names, battles) and the titillating (”she-bear came and tear twenty and four children,” George R.R. Martin-levels of murder, incest, Ammon chopping off arms, etc.). The Book of Mormon also shares the same problem with the Bible: most guides who take us through the text generally have a devotional or apologetic aim, a very specific angle, instead of aiming to show us where the books’ influences are poking through the seams, in the text itself.
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