Historical and Cultural Context

The Book of Mormon in the Real World

			The basic decision on how one should accept the Book of Mormon is one of faith. The analysis of the historical and cultural contexts of the Book of Mormon should be seen as efforts to deepen understanding of the book not as a means of "proving" the book to anyone else. Even with the eyes of faith, however, the examination and understanding should be based on sound investigative principles. In that light, I would like to propose some ground rules for examining the Book of Mormon. These provide a consistent foundation for a critical approach to the text. The Book of Mormon should be analyzed as a text. The text proclaims itself to be ancient, therefore it must be held to scrutiny as an ancient text. This is a criterion which has two sides. On the one had, the text must represent an ancient culture and time. On the other hand, we cannot require of the text historical concepts and modern perceptions of what it "ought" to have said. For better or worse, it must be seen in the context of ancient documents, with all of their good and bad qualities. As with any ancient text, it must be understood on its own terms, and in its appropriate context, regardless of what anyone present or past has believed about it. As an text, the composition and transmission of the text are important to the understanding of the current version of the text. In the Book of Mormon we have multiple sources underlying Mormon's account, but a single editor pulling them together for that editor's purposes. In addition, we have the sections from 1 Nephi to Omni which are original text without editorial alteration. The effect of translation on the Book of Momon While many might consider it obvious, the Book of Mormon was originally in another language, and the current text is not the language in which the original is written. As a "translator", Joseph Smith was not a linguist, and it is unlikely that he would have created a translation which would meet linguistic standards had we the plates today and could make a scholarly translation. It is possible that the translator had as much effect on the current text as Mormon did as editor of the large plate material. From a technical standpoint, the term "translation" causes more difficulties than it resolves. The Book of Mormon does not read like the translation that all but the most professional translators would create from an underlying document with differing syntax and concepts. I have translated Nahuatl documents, and my first translations are quite crude, maintaining a lot of the structure of the language. I can smooth them out, but cannot do so until I have worked out the rougher form. The smooth syntax (or relatively smooth syntax, as Joseph was no expert in early English verb forms) belies a translation which is faithful to an underlying text which is in a language of greatly different syntax than English. With the smooth read of the text, I see no indication in the text of the Book of Mormon to indicate any support that the Book of Mormon is a literal, (nearly) word for word representation of an ancient text. The normal process of translation (I use the term here in its most common linguistic sense) requires significant input from the translator. Even in well known languages, two translators of equal competency may arrive at different translations of the same text. This is compounded when the language is not well known. Interestingly, the total background of the translator can also come to play. I distinctly remember being given a Greek passage from the New Testament, along with the rest of the class. When the "translations" were read, there were 20 translations that were virtually identical to the KJV rendition of the passage. This is in spite of Greek being a case language rather than word order dependent, and in spite of the fact that some of the words had better translations than those in KJV. In the best of circumstances, when we recognize similarity, we produce similarity. Since the process of creating an English language version of the BoM may have had only a tenuous relationship to the specific words and word orders of the underlying text, emendations by Joseph Smith are not surprising, and leave room for artifacts other than 19th century vocabulary. The "translation" of a concept might also easily be made in terms more familiar to Joseph without violating the presence of the concept on the plates. The proposed tenuous relationship of English text to the underlying text implies that certain correlations are problematic. Finding Hebraisms in the BoM rests upon very shaky conceptual underpinnings. Not only on the basis of the nature of translation, but the text itself specifically states that it is not written in Hebrew. The assumption that reformed Egyptian is defined as Hebrew language and syntax in a different orthography is the result of modern apologetical reasoning, not the text itself. The Book of Mormon should be plausible in a real world setting appropriate to the text's time and place In spite of a real tradition within the LDS church to see the Book of Mormon as the explanation of all indigenous peoples on the entire hemisphere, it is historical, scientically, and demonstrably impossible for the peoples mentioned in the text to be the sole progenitors of the various peoples of the New World. The Book of Mormon must be seen as limited in scope for both geography and time. If the book proclaimed anything different, it would be suspect. As it does not, it is then incumbent upon us to know how to understand that limited context. The current limited scope which marshals the best evidence places the Book of Mormon in Southern Mexico/Central America, and is represented by Sorenson/Hauck geographies. Until as strong a case is made for another area, correlations with the real world should take that atha into account. Tying the Book of Mormon to a geographical area and time requires methodological rigor in discussing correlations with the real world. Civilizations with tempting features that are not part of the proposed location must not be used as corroborating evidence unless they can be shown to have close ties to that area. Correlations made to the real world must also fit the BoM time periods in the defined geography. Interesting possible correlations which are too early or too late for Book of Mormon times cannot be seen as demonstrating the cultural context for the book. Above all, this eliminates beautiful ruins that are way too late for the Book of Mormon (armchair Mormon archaeologists have developed a curious syndrome where it seems that pretty ruins are Nephite and ugly ruins are Lamanite). Examining the potential impact of the Book of Mormon peoples on established populations When we posit the Book of Mormon as describing events of a limited time and geography, the know archaeology of the New World clearly indicates that the Lehites arrived in a land which was already populated and culturally defined. Into this established population, the Lehites were a definite minority. The impact of the Lehite's imported culture on the indigenous population must be examined, but it must also be possible that the impact was minor. It is entirely possible that the Lehites received much more culture than they transmitted. Preference for the Book of Mormon peoples simply because they "should" have been influential are insufficient arguments for cultural impact. From the standpoint of discovering Book of Mormon populations "in the dirt," we must remember to hold the Book of Mormon's ancient populations to the same standards and procedures that we do other populations. For instance, while we know of the Hebrews, there are points during which it is difficult to discern their physical culture from their neighbors. Likewise, were a future anthropologist to examine modern US cities, it would be difficult to detect the LDS homes from the neighbors (assuming books had perished and that none of us kept the plastic grapes). Critically approaching the Book of Mormon What critical methodologies can we apply to this text? Most of them, judiciously applied. For instance, historical/critical methods are of very limited use because they require multiple variant texts in an attempt to trace an original. Those methods are best used in the development of the critical text. Redaction criticism is certainly an elucidating model. Analyzing the way in which the BoM was written can pull out a number of interesting features. Redaction criticism can be applied on two levels, the first to examine Joseph Smith as author, and the second to examine the authors within the text. I couldn't name a critical method for Book of Mormon archaeology, except that until Sorenson began circulating his work, there was laughably little of it. The shotgun parallel approach is weak, and tighter control over both the BoM and the dirt archaeology is required. Gardner's rule of critical methodologies: Any rigorous method provides insights within the limitations of the goal the method pursues. Shotgun application of methods, without a correlating rigor is only a half-step away from no method at all.
			by Brant Gardner. Copyright 1998