Does anybody else consider the Book of Mormon to be fiction?

[clarkgoble]

4 minutes ago, churchistrue said:

OK, that's fair.  I feel that kind of view has less power than the non-historical "sacred story" version.  But I'm happy whenever someone reads and studies the Book of Mormon.

I think I'd say fundamentalist ways of reading the text are always wrong. They lead to bad theology just as much as they lead to bad historicity.

[Rajah Manchou]

20 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

In terms of the details of the translation we receive, it's a very imperfect book. As God put it to Mormon, the translation is a weak thing. If we read it the way the Lord asks, in meekness, and look to what we can learn even if in the details there are problem, then the Lord can do great things with us.

Not to mention we only have 1/3rd or so of the Book of Mormon. We've no idea what was in the 116 pages and the, as David Whitmer called it, "other installment" that was withheld.

Joseph and the early saints didn't resign themselves to a closed canon like we do today. For them the Book of Mormon was one of many narratives of the Jaredites, Lehites and other related tribes. So we're making a lot of assumptions about these people and where they came from and where they lived, without knowing the full story.

The early Saints seemed to acknowledge that the translation of the Golden Plates (and other records) was a work in progress and that the Book of Mormon that was published in 1830 was just a portion.
 

[Brant Gardner]

4 hours ago, hope_for_things said:

1.  This sounds like a tight translation model, in which case a person believes that Joseph is more of a passive vessel than an active participant.  I thought you personally don't find the tight translation model persuasive.  

It is taking a very long time to shift the focus of translation discussions into something that works better that tight/loose--particularly since Skousen doesn't use those terms to describe the relationship of the English text to the plate text. You are correct, however, that I see a functional equivalence in the translation. That means that the content and meaning are reasonably well preserved, but that we Joseph's vocabulary and at times his mannerisms. There is some evidence for times when something more like a revealed expansion happens rather than a translation (of any type), but those appear to be relatively limited (and the topic for a very different conversation). I think Joseph used his language and understanding to produce a text that communicated the essential history and message of an ancient text, including structural forms (structural poetry relies on parallels rather than word-end rhyming and therefore is much more likely to be preserved in translation).

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2.  If tight translation, then Joseph's other revelations are on equal playing field with the BoM text, therefore the revelations of preaching to the Lamanites, building a temple among them, even the Zelph story, all have equal revelatory weight.  How can you dismiss them? 

The way Joseph used vocabulary doesn't define whether or not something is a revelation. For example, it is pretty common to use Lamanite as a generic (something that begin in Jacob, of course). In that sense, any Native American is a Lamanite by definition just as any non-Jew may be defined as Gentile. As a gentilic, it does not depend upon genealogy. So when Joseph has a revelation, the use of the term is part of the vocabulary in which it is expressed, and not a definition of terms.

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She talks about some of the problems we have today with our legacy of labeling peoples in the pacific region specifically, but also all native peoples in the Americas as Lamanites.  The church's quiet and uncomfortable moving away these specific references, still leaves a complicated legacy of misappropriating the cultural identities of so many people.

The difference between how the text was written and how it has been used is very important. Reception history, and the history of the Book of Mormon as a missionary tool are different topics from reading the text to place it in a historical context. It is theorized that over the space of 300-600 years, virtually everyone is related to everyone else. That can't be precisely true, but the mathematics are such that it is hard to deny even a conceptual connection. Where that allows people to see themselves in the Book of Mormon, that can be good--unless it is so much of a personal/social identity that it leads to hard feelings of the assumed privileged position is threatened. We are seeing the reverse of that by a large group of North Americans (actually, just in the USA--not even Canada seems to count) who want to reclaim the Book of Mormon as their special book. For a book discussing a world with no "-ites," the racist purposes for which the Book is being used are particularly disheartening.

[probablyHagoth7]

1 hour ago, Brant Gardner said:

...For a book discussing a world with no "-ites," the racist purposes for which the Book is being used are particularly disheartening.

While I understand/appreciate your valid concern:

Hearts. Children. Promises. Fathers. Lest.

Edited March 21, 2017 by probablyHagoth7