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Abstract: Grant Hardy has shown that Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni have distinctive personalities, rhetorical strategies, implied readers, and thematic concerns. Mormon lived within history and wrote as a historian. He focused on the particulars of time and place and person, on political and military matters. But, Hardy says, Mormon lacked audience awareness. I argue Mormon’s historiography was well adapted to the needs of his initial envisioned audience, the Alma family. Moroni, who lived most of his life outside of history, wrote intertextually, in dialog with voices speaking from the dust. And he wrote as a theologian especially attuned to the tragedy of human existence without God. Unlike his father, Moroni was a reluctant and, initially, untrained writer. His initial lack of confidence and competence and his growth as a writer and as a person are apparent in the five different endings for the Book of Mormon that he successively inscribed over the course of his life. Moroni’s ultimate model as he so effectively closed the large-plates record was Amaleki, last author of the small plates. This article critiques Hardy’s assessment of Mormon’s and extends his account of Moroni’s rhetorical effectiveness.





Human beings choose the world they live in. The choice is not wholly unconditioned, unconstrained. Many features of the chosen world—for example, many connections between acts and consequences—exist as brute facts. But the overarching mental map of the world is always chosen. It is an interpretation. One can choose to live in a world created by God and full of miracles. One can choose [Page 192]to live in a godless world in which everything is reduceable to inert matter in motion. And while these two worlds each have numerous inhabitants, there are many other worlds in which human beings may and do choose to live, many of them being subsets of these two overarching worlds. While all get to choose their world, none has a choice about choosing. God or the universe confronts all of us with a choice and respects our agency. For now, we live in whatever world we and our culture have co-created through interpretation.

The world we choose to live in determines, among many other things, how we read scripture. Those who have chosen to live in God’s world read a different Bible and Book of Mormon than those who have chosen to live in a godless world. Dan Vogel and Dan Peterson do not read the same Book of Mormon. For Vogel, the Book of Mormon is a purely naturalistic product of Joseph Smith’s nineteenth century. For Peterson, the text has both ancient and nineteenth century provenance, being composed anciently and translated in the nineteenth century. For Vogel, Joseph Smith was the sole, purely naturalistic, human author of the book. For Peterson, the book has multiple authors and, since most of those authors are prophets, God strongly influenced the book’s construction and content. While those living in these alternative worlds may sometimes agree, e.g., about the Mosiah-first composition/translation of the text we now have, for the most part, their interpretations are not just incompatible but incommensurable. It is, thus, noteworthy when a scholar identifies a way of reading the Book of Mormon that is equally valid for those who live in these incompatible and incommensurable worlds. In Understanding the Book of Mormon, Grant Hardy has accomplished that difficult and noteworthy task.1

Understanding the Book of Mormon was published by Oxford University Press and is meant to address readers in both worlds, both faithful Latter-day-Saint and secular non-LDS readers. Hardy makes the book relevant to both groups by bracketing the main issue that divides them, the question of the book’s historicity. Hardy is able to bracket this contentious issue ...

Kerry Muhlestein spoke at the 2021 Tracing Ancient Threads in the Book of Moses Conference on Saturday, April 24, 2021.

We often think of the Book of Moses as one set of revelations given to Joseph Smith, and the Doctrine and Covenants as a different set. In reality, they were eventually divided into these categories but the Prophet and the Saints experienced them as one continuous flow of revelations that interacted with each other. This steady stream of revelations affected the Church’s understanding of beautiful and impactful doctrines. We understand the doctrinal development of the Church best when we see how various revelations built one upon another. In particular, an understanding of what it meant to be a prophet, of the Fall, and of Zion were doctrines that developed as the translation of the Bible and other revelations and events built upon each other

All of the conference presentations were filmed, and both video and audio recordings of each presentation are available. Videos, audio recordings and transcripts are available at https://interpreterfoundation.org/conferences/2021-book-of-moses-conference/videos/. The videos are also available on the Interpreter Foundation YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/c/theinterpreterfoundation. A YouTube playlist is available at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRMn4gyXMWLtulXZ-y4mAph138aNdAWlw.





Presented at:

2021 Tracing Ancient Threads in the Book of Moses ConferenceSaturday April 24, 2021https://interpreterfoundation.org/conferences/2021-book-of-moses-conference/





Conference Proceedings:

Tracing Ancient Threads in the Book of Moses: Inspired Origins, Temple Contexts, and Literary Qualities, Volumes I and II at https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/ancient-threads-in-the-book-of-moses/





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This week, we have lectures 33 through 36 from Hugh Nibley’s Book of Mormon classes at Brigham Young University, covering Mosiah 10-18.

During 1988, 1989, and 1990, Hugh Nibley taught Honors Book of Mormon classes for four semesters at Brigham Young University. The lectures were video-taped and audio cassettes and printed transcripts were made of the lectures. We believe these recordings will be interesting to listen to and valuable to your Come, Follow Me study program this year. Each week, we will include the lectures covering the Book of Mormon chapters being studied that week.

All 112 lectures are immediately available in PDF, audio, video, and electronic formats, as well as in paperback books that are available for purchase. Links for all of the available online sources can be found in the Complete Bibliography for Hugh Nibley at https://interpreterfoundation.org/bibliographies/hugh-w-nibley/lectures/.

 



Lecture 33: Mosiah 10–11.

Also called “War and Defenses.“We are on Mosiah 10:8, and things begin to happen that have a familiar ring. They try again here. Zeniff sent out his spies, and [the Lamanite king] is watchful and doesn’t miss a thing. This attack doesn’t go so well, but notice the situation and how they do it.

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Lecture 34: Book of Mormon—Mosiah 12–14.

Also called “Abinadi’s Message.“We are on chapter 12 of Mosiah where Abinadi comes among them. He gains entrance in disguise, and once in the midst of them, he throws off the disguise. That is a common device of the prophets.

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Lecture 35: Mosiah 15–16.

Also called “The Fulness of the Gospel; Human Nature.“We are told that the Book of Mormon contains the fullness of the everlasting gospel. That has often been challenged. Does it have everything in it? Well, what is the gospel? What is a fullness of the gospel?

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Lecture 36: Mosiah 16–18.

Also called “Abinadi and Alma.“Now with Mosiah 17 comes a series of extremely interesting and significant stories. He really pours it on here. After Abinadi gave his sermon, what was the reaction? “The king commanded that the priests should take him and cause that he should be put to death.” And it’s very obvious why.

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