Book of Mormon 1st Edition – A Motley Vision

Introduction to Textual Criticism
Part VI

Somewhere in some book I perused about existentialism is the comment that any philosophical movement that can contain both a devout Christian like SÃ¸ren Kierkegaard and a devout anti-Christian like Friedrich Nietszche must be very broad indeed. I mentioned that once to Jim Faulconer, from whom I took several philosophy classes, and he said, “Nietszche wasn’t an anti-Christ. I don’t believe in the same God Nietszche didn’t believe in.”

As Jim said several times in class, the god of philosophers and theologians is wholly other than we are, so radically different that it makes no sense to suppose that we might someday become like God, and yet eternal life depends on knowing this radically unknowable being. If the radically unknowable version of God is the only version you know it may make sense to call yourself an atheist. For one thing is God is so radically different from you how do you have any way of knowing that your worship is authentic or acceptable?

Jim suggested that if Nietszche had had a different definition of God available to him, he might have had defined his relationship to that God differently–perhaps if he had known Kierkegaard. Continue reading “Gadianton the Nobler, Reflections on Changes in the Book of Mormon”

Introduction to Textual Variants
Part III

In Part II I discussed John Gilbert’s omission of two letters to justify a line. In this part I want to look at two other instances that may involve missing letters.

Joseph Smith began his discourse of Sunday October 15, 1843 with a comment on his love for the Constitution and its guarantees of religious freedom, but said there was one defect, that there was no way of ensuring that the people who were administering our freedoms would actually protect them, so that the US president wouldn’t say “Your clause is fully justified but I can do nothing for you to get those last two letters into the line.”

Joseph’s transition from speaking about Constitutional protections to speaking about textual errors is almost that abrupt. There’s a one-paragraph transition, and I think the transition is Joseph’s way of telling why his religion is unpopular:
Continue reading “Gadianton the Nobler, Reflections on Changes in The Book of Mormon”