I love it when different books I’m reading come together in interesting ways. That happened recently while rereading Joseph Spencer’s 1st Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction and restarting (this, time, in English) Jacques Ellul’s The Humiliation of the Word. In this post, I want to take up a distinction that Spencer makes in his book, suggesting that:

Question’s about the Book of Mormon’s truth tend to be of two sorts. First, we want to know whether it all really happened. Second, we want to know whether it really shows us who God is.

I remembered liking this book a lot when I first read it five or so years ago, so it was actually kind of disappointing to reread it now. There was a lot of it that didn’t feel relevant to me or that I felt I disagreed with. That said, I appreciate Spencer’s work a lot, and there are some great observations in here, so I’m trying to give it some grace in my rating.

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.

I have recently been (slowly) getting back into my exploration of what a modernized Book of Mormon might look like, which has meant spending some time in the opening chapter of the Book of Mormon and some commentaries on that chapter. One of the most interesting things about I Nephi 1 (by the original and Community of Christ chapter breaks—LDS editions split this into 1 Nephi 1-5) is that the reader is almost immediately forced to deal with a tension between our protagonist and narrator Nephi’s insistence that he is a good guy of whom God approves and Nephi’s willingness to murder a passed-out drunk to steal his clothes and con his way into taking control of some of his property. One of my favorite things to come out of critical readings of the Book of Mormon is trying to understand this episode: not to dismiss it or to justify it, but to wonder how there might be more to the story than our narrator might be letting on.