The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction
Language: English
Pages: 152
ISBN: 0195369319
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
With over 140 million copies in print, and serving as the principal proselytizing tool of one of the world's fastest growing faiths, the Book of Mormon is undoubtedly one of the most influential religious texts produced in the western world. Written by Terryl Givens, a leading authority on Mormonism, this compact volume offers the only concise, accessible introduction to this extraordinary work.
Givens examines the Book of Mormon first and foremost in terms of the claims that its narrators make for its historical genesis, its purpose as a sacred text, and its meaning for an audience which shifts over the course of the history it unfolds. The author traces five governing themes in particular--revelation, Christ, Zion, scripture, and covenant--and analyzes the Book's central doctrines and teachings. Some of these resonate with familiar nineteenth-century religious preoccupations; others consist of radical and unexpected takes on topics from the fall of Man to Christ's mortal ministries and the meaning of atonement. Givens also provides samples of a cast of characters that number in the hundreds, and analyzes representative passages from a work that encompasses tragedy, poetry, sermons, visions, family histories and military chronicles. Finally, this introduction surveys the contested origins and production of a work held by millions to be scripture, and reviews the scholarly debates that address questions of the record's historicity.
Here then is an accessible guide to what is, by any measure, an indispensable key to understanding Mormonism. But it is also an introduction to a compelling and complex text that is too often overshadowed by the controversies that surround it.
About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.
of the familiar and the unexpected more striking than in the place of Jesus Christ in the Book of Mormon. Many claims surrounding the Book of Mormon—its inscription on plates of gold, its delivery to Joseph Smith by an angel, its miraculous translation involving seer stones and Urim and Thummim—are remarkable to say the least. The most striking claim within the Book of Mormon is undoubtedly its insistence that the Jesus born in Bethlehem in the reign of Caesar Augustus was worshipped in the
family, friends, nor ‘‘whither to go,’’ the successive chain of Zion-building finds its definitive end and the record closes thereafter. The Book of Mormon of the volatility and fragility of lands of refuge, a testament of the portability and ceaseless transmutations of Zion, with the only constant being the eternally present promise of a special relationship to God, and direct access to his power and truth. The original dislocation signified by Lehi’s exodus becomes a prelude not to a new
Nephites,’’ and doing so ‘‘for the benefit of the Lamanites.’’ Just whom Mormon is addressing in his direct invocations of audience is not at first clear to the modern reader. Mormon’s audience, it turns out, took shape as a result of the visit of the postresurrection Christ to the Nephites. On that occasion, Christ indicates that the record of the Nephites is destined to be read by a future remnant of Israel, but that it will reach them through the Gentiles, serving as intermediaries. Nephi’s
of Mormon interdependent propositions. If the Book of Mormon is a verifiably true revelation from God, the logic runs, then Joseph Smith, its translator and promulgator, must be God’s appointed prophet. If that is the case, it justifies Smith’s claim to have the authority to restore the priesthood and the church described in the New Testament but subsequently lost through apostasy. Within the Mormon faith, then, the Book of Mormon has operated upon the souls of its adherents primarily by virtue of
his son Nephi that the principal themes already outlined are reiterated and reconfirmed. First, the very circumstance of the vision’s duplication for Nephi’s benefit emphatically attests to the desirability and worthiness of the quest for personal revelation. The apparent redundancy of the vision, and its bestowal on an individual outside the channels of prophetic leadership or patriarchal direction, point to a more egalitarian, decentralized, less priestly version of revelation than is typical of