User:Hodgdon's secret garden/sandbox/Book of Mormon studies

Book of Mormon studies


 * 1) "understanding of the history, meaning, and significance of the scriptures and other sacred texts revealed through the Prophet Joseph Smith" - https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/
 * 2) "The only way that young LDS scholars can study the Book of Mormon in graduate school is to study it as a nineteenth century text in a secular religious studies program, or US history program. There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with this.  But what this means is that one cannot do graduate work anywhere in the world in ancient Book of Mormon Studies.  Unremarkably, young scholars are not doing ancient Book of Mormon studies.  Furthermore, no one teaching has at BYU has a PhD in ancient Book of Mormon Studies." Wm Hamblin http://www.patheos.com/blogs/enigmaticmirror/2015/09/08/how-byu-destroyed-ancient-book-of-mormon-studies/
 * 3) "The development of Mormon studies in some respects mirrors the academic study of other minority groups, which has typically begun with creating a basic account of their history and then moved toward theoretical approaches that bring the subculture into conversation with the bigger picture." https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/books/mormon-studies-attract-more-scholars-and-attention.html
 * 4) http://bomstudies.com/
 * 5) "the Biblical Studies Department is dedicated to training students to serve as biblically informed theologians, preachers, ministers, and scholars. Faithful interpretation of Scripture requires understanding the historical, cultural, and social context of the Bible and its world. Courses equip students with the critical skills for close reading of biblical texts, and teach a variety of interpretive methods, and students can study the text in English and its original languages. The faculty have wide-ranging interests and areas of expertise, including: biblical theology, biblical poetry and poetics, the history of ancient Israel, Greco-Roman religions and rhetoric, Second Temple Jewish texts (including Dead Sea Scrolls and related literature), historical Jesus, and contemporary interpretive methodologies. Some of their recent research addresses issues such as the Bible and environmental ethics and questions about death and resurrection." http://www.ptsem.edu/academics/biblical-studies/overview
 * 6) "Kurt Manwaring: What is Mormon Studies? Patrick Mason: Mormon Studies is the academic study of Mormonism – the religion and its people, history, theology, and culture.  It is an interdisciplinary field of study, drawing from and contributing to a number of different academic fields, including religious studies, history, sociology, theology, anthropology, political science, literature, and virtually any other that you can think of (primarily in the humanities and social sciences). Mormon Studies is academic and educational, not devotional, and is neutral regarding specific faith claims.  It does not seek to produce nor dissuade potential converts to the LDS Church or any other branch of Mormonism.  It is open to people of all faiths or no faith.  It is a scholarly enterprise, not a churchly one. Many people in the church find Mormon Studies to be useful or interesting, while others find it to be irrelevant or sometimes troubling." http://www.fromthedesk.org/10-questions-patrick-mason/
 * 7) "Book of Mormon studies have po- larized into two camps, one seeking contemporary parallels to show that the book is not an ancient historical document, and the other seeking ancient parallels to show that the book is ancient. The natural tendency, for both sides, is to disallow the other side's parallels as negligible." Todd Compton https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context=jbms
 * 8) "Hardy: Most previous LDS treatments of the Book of Mormon have been either devotional or apologetic. That is to say, they mainly paraphrase the text and focus on doctrinal points that are in harmony with current LDS teachings, or they attempt to defend the historicity of the book by countering common criticisms and identifying elements of the narrative that correspond to ancient phenomena that would have been unknown to Joseph Smith in 1829. (Terryl Givens’s By the Hand of Mormon was an important exception, but his work was primarily a reception history of the Book of Mormon rather than a study of the text itself.) Devotion and apologetics are important ways to read scripture within a faith community, and I tried to connect my work as much as possible to earlier Mormon scholarship in the endnotes—which offer a conversation for insiders that may not be of interest to every reader of Understanding—but I was primarily concerned with how the text actually operates: what are its constituent parts, how do they fit together, how does the book present itself, and how does it communicate its points? It was somewhat surprising how little even renowned LDS scholars such as B. H. Roberts and Hugh Nibley had to say on these topics. (I found more to work with in John W. Welch’s writings.) These are not terribly original questions, and I wondered why Latter-­day Saints had not been asking them in critical, systematic, comprehensive ways before. Part of the reason, surely, is that the current official formatting masks the inherent structure of the text and facilitates superficial readings. The 1920 edition adopted a standard biblical format in an attempt to make the Book of Mormon look like scripture—­like a book that deserved to be taken seriously. In the twenty-­first century, however, that same format makes the book easy to dismiss because it is difficult to see beyond the archaic diction and inelegant style. So the Reader’s Edition was not particularly innovative; the formatting was essentially adapted from modern translations of the Bible. Yet highlighting the different components and genres within the narrative offers a richer reading experience. In a similar way, I think that more widespread acquaintance with mainstream biblical scholarship would help Mormons see more in their own scriptures. We don’t have to reinvent the art of close reading. Rabbis and scholars have been doing it for centuries. Any number of standard textbooks introducing the Old and New Testaments would give Latter-day Saints new questions and new things to look for. I have particularly benefited from reading Alter and Sternberg, as mentioned above. Anyone willing to work through the footnotes to the New Oxford Annotated Bible or the Jewish Study Bible (also published by Oxford) will get a master class in careful scriptural reading. Such books are readily available, and it’s not difficult to get started. Soon you too could be spotting repetitions, patterns, inconsistencies, seams in narratives, intratextual connections, conspicuous absences, ideas that develop over time, and so forth. For instance, have you ever noticed that the Book of Mormon, unlike the Bible, has no examples of good men who go bad, though there are plenty of cases of the opposite? Whatever that might mean. JBMS: Can you point to some illustrative examples of your methodology in the book? Hardy: Generally, our practice was to notice as much as we could, and then assume intentionality. Someone, somewhere decided that the story should be told in just this fashion. When taking the Book of Mormon on its own terms, this line of questioning most often leads to the narrators, and in imagining them as rational moral agents, we tried to come up with scenarios that would make sense of what we had observed. Of course, it is also possible to try to explain the details of the text through the lens of Joseph Smith, imagining which aspects of his life and thought might have given rise to various Book of Mormon characters and incidents (as Dan Vogel does in his notable biography of Smith).2 This will be the way that many people approach the text, which is perfectly legitimate, but it is important to recognize that Smith never speaks in his own voice in the Book of Mormon; everything is seen through the narrators and their complicated scheme of plates and records. If Smith was a competent novelist—a rather minimalist assessment of such a successful work—he created characters that can be understood in deeply human terms, with comprehensible perspectives, intentions, and emotions. This is particularly the case when the narrators explicitly address the motivations behind their writing and editing, their responses to the events they are describing, and the lessons they perceive for their future readers—all of which happens regularly in the Book of Mormon. Some of what I draw attention to in Understanding might be seen as ambiguous. It is a subjective judgment as to how many shared elements two stories must have before we can conclude that they have been deliberately composed as parallel narratives meant to be read in tandem." https://publications.mi.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=5076&index=4
 * 9) "Joseph Smith told us how he got the book. You know the story. An angel appeared in his bedroom three times in one night. Later on, while he was climbing over a fence, it appeared to him again. A most insistent angel. Following the angel's directions, Joseph Smith went to a nearby hill where he found buried in it an artifact of an ancient civilization -- golden plates with words written on them in a language he did not understand. After four years of annual visits to that hill, Joseph Smith took the golden plates into his possession and proceeded to translate them with divine aid, dictating the words of the book to a scribe. We have witnesses of that process, the testimony of people who participated in the translation. Three witnesses were shown the plates by the angel and testified to its divine origin. Another eight witnesses handled the plates and swore that they were physically real. At the end of the prophet's translation, he returned the plates to the Angel Moroni. Therefore, they are not to be seen among us now. Either Joseph Smith's account is true, or it isn't. Either the witnesses who said they saw the plates lied, or they didn't. If the account he gave us is true, then the Book of Mormon must be what it purports to be, which is the record of an ancient people written by an ancient author, and Joseph Smith's role in providing us with the Book of Mormon was solely as translator. Therefore, we should find his influence in the book, or the influence of any other 1820s American, only where we would expect to find a translator's influence: that is, in matters of word choice, consciously or unconsciously linking Book of Mormon events to experiences that he and his American readers could understand, choosing the clearest language he had available to him, fitting ideas he found in the book into existing American concepts as best he could. Or he did not get the Book of Mormon the way he said, in which case somebody in the 1820s in the United States made it up, and in that case it is fiction, and we should find Joseph Smith's or someone else's influence there as author. In that case all of the ideas and events in the book should come out of the mind of an 1820s American, and it should reflect faithfully the kind of thing an 1820s American would do in trying to create a record which he was going to pass off as an ancient document." Orson Scott Card http://www.nauvoo.com/library/card-bookofmormon.html
 * 10) "In his brief overview to Understanding the Book of Mormon, Hardy gives us ten observations about the Book of Mormon: 1.It is a long book. 2.It is written in a somewhat awkward, repetitious form of English. 3.It imitates the style of the King James Version. 4.It claims to be history. 5.It presents a complicated narrative. 6.It is a religious text. 7.It is basically a tragedy. 8.It is very didactic. 9.It is a human artifact. 10.Its basic structure is derived from the three narrators. It is this last observation that forms the thesis for the majority of his work." http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/01/25/book-of-mormon-narrators-grant-hardy/

is the academic application of a set of diverse disciplines to the study of the Bible (the Tanakh and the New Testament). For its theory and methods, the field draws on disciplines ranging from archaeology, ancient history, cultural backgrounds, textual criticism, literary criticism, historical backgrounds, philology, and social science.

Many secular as well as religious universities and colleges offer courses in biblical studies, usually in departments of religious studies, theology, Judaic studies, history, or comparative literature. Biblical scholars do not necessarily have a faith commitment to the texts they study, but many do.

Definition
The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies defines the field as a set of various, and in some cases independent disciplines for the study of the collection of ancient texts generally known as the Bible. These disciplines include but are not limited to archaeology, Egyptology, textual criticism, linguistics, history, sociology and theology.

Academic societies
Several academic associations and societies promote research in the field. The largest is the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) with around 8,500 members in more than 80 countries. It publishes many books and journals in the biblical studies, including its flagship, the Journal of Biblical Literature. SBL hosts one academic conference in North America and another international conference each year, as well as smaller regional meetings.

Biblical criticism
Biblical criticism is the scholarly "study and investigation of biblical writings that seeks to make discerning judgments about these writings". Viewing biblical texts as being ordinary pieces of literature, rather than set apart from other literature, as in the traditional view, it asks when and where a particular text originated; how, why, by whom, for whom, and in what circumstances it was produced; what influences were at work in its production; what sources were used in its composition; and what message it was intended to convey. It will vary slightly depending on whether the focus is on the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, the letters of New Testament or the canonical gospels. It also plays an important role in the quest for a historical Jesus.

It also addresses the physical text, including the meaning of the words and the way in which they are used, its preservation, history and integrity. Biblical criticism draws upon a wide range of scholarly disciplines including archaeology, anthropology, folklore, linguistics, Oral Tradition studies, and historical and religious studies.

Textual criticism
Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in texts, both manuscripts and printed books. Ancient scribes made errors or alterations when copying manuscripts by hand. Given a manuscript copy, several or many copies, but not the original document, the textual critic seeks to reconstruct the original text (the archetype or autograph) as closely as possible. The same processes can be used to attempt to reconstruct intermediate editions, or recensions, of a document's transcription history. The ultimate objective of the textual critic's work is the production of a "critical edition" containing a text most closely approximating the original.

There are three fundamental approaches to textual criticism: eclecticism, stemmatics, and copy-text editing. Techniques from the biological discipline of cladistics are currently also being used to determine the relationships between manuscripts.

The phrase "lower criticism" is used to describe the contrast between textual criticism and "higher criticism", which is the endeavor to establish the authorship, date, and place of composition of the original text.

History of the Bible
Historical research has often dominated modern biblical studies. Biblical scholars usually try to interpret a particular text within its original historical context and use whatever information is available to reconstruct that setting. Historical criticism aims to determine the provenance, authorship, and process by which ancient texts were composed. Famous theories of historical criticism include the documentary hypothesis, which suggests that the Pentateuch was compiled from four different written sources, and different reconstructions of "the historical Jesus", which are based primarily on the differences between the canonical Gospels.

Original languages
Most of the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, which is the basis of the Christian Old Testament, was written in Biblical Hebrew, though a few chapters were written in Biblical Aramaic. The New Testament was written in Koine Greek, with possible Aramaic undertones, as was the first translation of the Hebrew Bible known as the Septuagint or Greek Old Testament. Therefore, Hebrew, Greek and sometimes Aramaic continue to be taught in most universities, colleges and seminaries with strong programs in biblical studies.