caspianrex

In case anyone here is interested, here's an interview I did a couple weeks ago with Steve Pynakker and KC Kern on Steve's Mormon Book Reviews YouTube channel. Steve is an evangelical Christian who is interested in Mormonism, I am a mainline Protestant who is interested in Mormonism, and KC Kern is an LDS member who created the website, bookofmormon.online. It was a great discussion among three people of differing faith traditions, talking about a subject that interests them. I really enjoyed it!

Hey y'all, As some of you know, I am not a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but I am a collector of editions of The Book of Mormon. I was watching the first episode of Under the Banner of Heaven, about which I have some mixed reactions, but that's not my point here. As a BoM "enthusiast," I noticed in one scene that one of the Laffertys is shown reading a passage from the BoM, but it's not the familiar missionary edition from the 1980s, or a quad combo, but rather a facsimile edition of the 1830 BoM (see screencap below). Does anyone have any idea if fundamentalists like the Laffertys would really have read the 1830 edition instead of the Church's Salt Lake City edition? I mean, in the series (which, I know, is not exactly historically accurate) they consistently refer to themselves as "LDS," so I would have expected to see a conventional LDS edition of the BoM. Anyway, that detail stuck out to me. Please understand, I am neither endorsing nor condemning the series, and I don't want to get involved in a discussion of the show's merits or lack thereof. I'm just interested in this particular detail. I would like to hear anyone's thoughts about it.

I'm asking because I honestly don't know the answer: isn't the readership of Deseret News mostly Utahns? And wouldn't the vast majority of Utahns, even those who aren't actually Latter-day Saints, be fairly familiar with LDS terminology? I mean, I'm fairly familiar with a lot of LDS terminology, and I'm a non-member from IL who lives in TN. (Neither of those states have very large LDS populations.)

As a non-LDS reader of The Book of Mormon, it wasn't until just a few years ago that I realized that the Title Page of The Book of Mormon is considered a part of the inspired text. (I think my first inkling of that concept may have been when I first began looking at the Restored Covenant Edition, published by the Zerahemla Research Foundation. Anyway, I have long been fascinated by various historical editions of the BoM: the 1830, the 1840, the 1879, the 1920, etc. And looking at the development of the formatting of the Title Page is particularly interesting to me. So I was quite pleased to discover this fascinating article by Daniel H. Ludlow about the Title Page: https://rsc.byu.edu/book-mormon-first-nephi-doctrinal-foundation/title-page Yeah, I know it's kind of a weird thing to geek out on, but it made me happy. Well worth reading, I thought.

Or just to listen to it on YouTube Music: YouTube Music

Happy to be of assistance! I think both of those books will suit your needs very well.