(11:35 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Book Review: The Book of Mormon

I have been reading the Book of Mormon lately. I received one for free from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints my sophomore year of college, but I never got around to really reading it until now. A few things came together to motivate this -- conversations with a Mormon PhD student at CTS, a discussion about Mormonism in Ted Jennings' class, together with all the latent interest in Mormonism from Mike Hancock's "Mormon Phase" during high school (a surprisingly common phase). Before I begin the review proper, I must say that I have only read 1 Nephi through Words of Mormon (in other words, the prophet Mormon's transcription of the shorter plates of Nephi, containing mainly spiritual matters). I still have to read about two thirds of it. I probably will end up doing so eventually.

The prose style of the Book of Mormon is like an unfunny parody of the King James Bible. It was admittedly written ("translated") in the 1820s, which can account for some of the antiquated language, but the style is excessively ornate -- it's as though Nathaniel Hawthorne has finally decided to stop being so straightforward and get down to the business of some serious circumlocution. At times, five consecutive verses will begin with "And it came to pass that...," even when all five of them are describing a continuous series of events that happen within minutes of each other -- Verse 1: "Someone hit me." Verse 2: "And it came to pass that I was in pain." There are also many awkward moments where the word "loins" occurs more than three times in one sentence. Overall, though, this is something that one can get past. At least the atrocious prose style is consistent, and in fact it probably helps one to read more speedily.

The characters are thin, to say the least. In this respect alone, the Book of Mormon compares unfavorably with the Bible. Whereas in the Bible we get morally complex characters like Saul, David, Peter, Paul, etc., in the Book of Mormon we get people who are basically either irredeemable moral monsters or completely admirable men of faith (and I do mean men -- in terms of homosociality, the shorter plates of Nephi give The Lord of the Rings a run for its money). The closest we even get to a real character is Nephi himself, and many of the most affecting moments are the ones that are ripped off from the story of Joseph: his older brothers despise him because he has these pretensions to holiness and leadership, for example. His best moment, in terms of humanity, is when his brothers tie him up while they're sailing for three years to America ("the promised land"). It came to pass that his ankles and wrists swelled up, and it came to pass that he was in much pain. Once he arrives in America, however, he forms a faction, including some younger brothers, and from then on, vulnerability and emotional immaturity have no place.

In terms of plot, it's difficult to judge so far -- Nephi does explicitly state that he has one set of plates (the ones I read) for spiritual matters, and one set for historical matters. Nephi's story of how he struggled with his brothers and secured the plates (see below) from the evil guy in Jerusalem is the best story we get in any detail, and in my opinion, it's not really that impressive. I can't imagine a situation in which I would want to discuss some detail of the story, in the same way that I would discuss details in novels or in the story of Jeremiah, for example. I'm sure if I were raised with the Book of Mormon as part of my holy scripture, I might see things differently.

Yet the success of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is evidence enough that people are willing to put up with a lack of character and plot if they can be assured of a satisfying game of identifying allusions. On this front, the Book of Mormon performs very strongly. Much of 2 Nephi is chapter after chapter of quotations from Isaiah, with notes that make it clear that everything is about Christ. In fact, in the Book of Mormon, prophecies work just like people expect them to work: every "prophecy" from before Christ is a detailed, verifiable prediction of what will happen when Christ comes, with some view of later history. In fact, the prophecies are so strong and detailed that the prophets expect that people will begin following Christ right then, even though he's not supposed to come to earth for 500 more years. The search for justice characteristic of many of the prophets seems to be mostly absent from the prophecy in the Book of Mormon, but perhaps adherence to the teachings of Christ, who is predicted in the prophecies, takes care of that part.

Other biblical allusions are not so satisfying. The book of Jacob contains a lengthy "lost prophecy" from the extra-biblical prophet Zenos. He starts with the basic groundwork of Paul's analogy of the vine from Romans (the "wild branches" of the Gentiles are, contrary to nature, grafted into the "domesticated root" of Israel), and then takes it to such ridiculous lengths that I started to wonder what the point of the metaphor was -- the Lord of the vineyard cuts off the domesticated branches, but he throws them somewhere else so they can take root on their own, and meanwhile the engrafted wild branches start bearing (surprise, surprise) wild fruit, and the Lord gets upset, then he remembers those one branches he threw aside.... On and on it goes, for 80+ verses, and verses of the Book of Mormon are long.

My theory, however, which I've already floated to a few of my dear readers, is that the Book of Mormon is basically what people have been set up to believe the Bible should be. As absurd as the idea of keeping documents on metal plates might be in itself, insisting on metal plates is a way of insisting that Joseph Smith had the original documents, as hand-written by the original authors -- which is what most naive Christians believe we have in the case of the Bible. Also, the translation is itself divinely inspired, such that we can trust it completely and don't need to consult the originals. It contains some stories, together with some more or less clear prophecies about Christ and his teachings, all of which are fulfilled. Most Christians seem to view the Old Testament as some kind of extended foreshadowing of Christ, which is a perfectly good theory until you start actually, you know, reading the Old Testament.

Even though the historical events and historians in the Book of Mormon are obviously just made up, the narrators are fairly explicit about what they're doing, why they're recording these particular events, why other things didn't make it in, etc., in sharp contrast to the rather bewildering presentation of history in the Bible -- ironically enough, a book that surely contains no historical events is more in the style of modern historical writing than the Bible, which contains at least a couple real historical events here and there. Finally, since the Book of Mormon was written pretty much at one go (or, in its own self-presentation, with a very small number of authors and editors), it can be much more consistent than the Bible, even than the New Testament. And finally, the Book of Mormon basically answers the kinds of questions that modern readers ask, which is perhaps to be expected since it was written during the modern era, generally speaking.

Overall, I have to recommend the Book of Mormon, or at least some part of it. It is fairly interesting just in itself, to see what it looks like to write new scripture in the 1820s, and it also sheds some interesting light on the false expectations people have when approaching the Bible. I would contend that unlike the Bible, the Book of Mormon is probably a book that you can base a religion on -- meaning a book from which you can derive consistent practices and doctrines. Of course, since they have still more books in their canon, maybe I'm wrong about that.

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