Nephi's violence and Book of Mormon intertextuality

A number of years ago, I read this blog post, which linked to this podcast episode about intertextuality between the New Testament and the Book of Mormon. The post and episode both focus on the work of Nick Frederick, a BYU professor who argues that:

If we’re comfortable saying that the New Testament is an antecedent text for the Book of Mormon, for the King James English 19th century Book of Mormon, then that opens up some wonderful avenues of inquiry. We can look at how those passages were understood in the 19th century and say, “Okay, is the Book of Mormon pushing back against something? Is the Book of Mormon affirming one of these ideas? What was the impact of these passages on early converts? How might this have changed through trajectories of 19th century theology?” Whereas if we just say, “No, no, no. It couldn’t be. There’s no way the New Testament was on the gold plates,” that just ends the conversation. If we see these as two different texts that are related through translation, then I think that helps us bridge this at least question of the New Testament in the Book of Mormon a little bit easier.

This is a really interesting stance to take, and one that ought to be just as palatable for the more literal reader of the Book of Mormon as it is for me, who has a much more liberal approach. More importantly, it gets past superficial observations (or dismissals) of the fact that the Book of Mormon is heavily reliant on New Testament language to ask what kind of readings we can develop based on this. For example, the Book of Mormon contains a story of a miraculous revival that borrows a number of phrases from Jesus’s raising of Lazarus in John 11. Rather than try to downplay the similarities or point to them as undermining the Book of Mormon, Frederick (working with Joseph Spencer, whom I wrote about yesterday) develops a reading that draws attention to how if we take those parallels seriously, it’s one of the few named women in the Book of Mormon who plays the Jesus role in the story. As I wrote yesterday, the Book of Mormon is largely dismissive of women, and while this single story doesn’t make up for that, this does make the story way more interesting than it would otherwise.

I’ve been thinking about Frederick’s approach today as I’ve continued to think about Nephi’s act of violence in the very first chapter of the Book of Mormon. In particular, I’ve taken a recent interest in something that I believe my friend Elray introduced me to: The language that Nephi attributes to the spirit in telling him to kill a man (because it’s important to get access to the scriptural record that man possesses) is remarkably similar to Caiaphas’s argument for having Jesus killed in (coincidentally) John 11. Here’s I Nephi 1:115:

“It is better that one man should perish, than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.”

Here’s John 11:50 (KJV):

“Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.”

If we apply Frederick’s hermeneutic to these two passages, the intertextuality ought to trouble us some. Would the Holy Spirit try to convince us using the same logic that Caiaphas will later use to argue for Jesus’s death? Arguably, someone familiar with John 11 ought to see this language as a yellow flag! Now, this isn’t a slam dunk argument. I Nephi 1:114 uses language also found in Isaiah 11:4 to suggest that God does indeed have wicked people killed to further divine purposes, so we also have to wrestle with conflicting depictions of God in scripture. Nonetheless, combined with other close observations in the Book of Mormon text, we can use this intertextuality to support a reading of Nephi as unreliable narrator, who mistook his violent actions as divinely approved when that is not clearly the case.

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