An Other Testament: On Typology by Joseph M. Spencer

[tagriffy]

Has anyone here read this book? A review in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies piqued my interest for what will be obvious reasons for some people.

[OGHoosier]

I have not. Link to the review?

[tagriffy]

https://www.academia.edu/87030150/Review_of_An_Other_Testament_On_Typology_by_Joseph_M_Spencer

It's probably available on BYU's site as well, but the academia.edu site is where I originally read it.

[Kevin Christensen]

I've read it and quite liked it.  

FWIW

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

[gav]

9 hours ago, Kevin Christensen said:

I've read it and quite liked it. 

I'm reading it thanks to Kevin's article referencing it Twenty Years After Paradigms Regained, Part 1 at Interpreter

It's detailed and offers a new way to look at the Book of Mormon with the author going to great lengths to delineate his proposed methodology. The authors own comments and review of the Book itself are given in the preface to the second edition.

Quote

Only two and a half years later, in 2014, I find that I am still wrestling with this book, seeing to its republication after Salt Press was acquired by the Neal A.
Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Thankfully, I will close a decade of work by adding only a new preface to the text, rather than by undertaking
a complete rewriting of the book—tempted though I am by the latter possibility. Rather than attempting to fix what I now see as the flaws of the book, I will say just a few words about where this preliminary study of the Book of Mormon will take my research next.

A page or two later he expands with a gem of a perceived flaw.

Quote

If there is a determinate direction my work will go from here, drawing on the best of what I have done in An Other Testament, it will be to look more
closely only at structure in scripture and to be all the more rigorous about the theological implications of all such structure. Indeed, as I have revisited the Book of Mormon texts I worked over in An Other Testament, my largest regret is that I missed so many clearly intentional structures and that I focused on
too many flimsy hints at structure in my analyses.

Two structures he missed, but points out in this second preface are astounding. Well, at least from my perspective, since I have been doing a lot of "information architectural" analysis in the OT and Revelation and haven't quite got the BoM in detail yet. They correlate very nicely with my IA findings from the OT and Revelation so far.

So, my comment thus far is, even though the author admits to missing out on some clear "gems", his methodology is recommendable and worth learning if "structural analysis of scripture" is your type of thing. 

Edited November 30, 2022 by gav
typo