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‘Foreign woman’ would have been a familiar term in the post-exilic Jewish context, evoking ideas of corruption and apostasy central both to a recent controversy (described in Ezra and Nehemiah), and to the longstanding Deuteronomic/ Deuteronomistic theme that probably provoked the controversy. The presentation of this character in Proverbs 1-9 is consistent with an origin in such earlier ideas, and the motif of corruption is also linked with path imagery in other literature. There, we find associations between deviation from a path and apostasy, along with other detailed correspondences to the figure in Proverbs 1-9. It is difficult to ignore such materials when considering the origins of the characterizations and images in our work.

This chapter takes up the growth of pre-millennial thought in the fundamentalist movement of the 20th century. By the late 1800s, modernism had hit full stride. Rapid advances in the natural sciences, the emergence of the social sciences such as psychology and sociology, and the startling discoveries of biblical scholarship combined to create a new intellectual climate that fostered secular humanism. Many conservative Christians, however, were quick to recognize the work of the Prince of Apostasy in these seductive teachings. By 1920, a new coalition of pre-millennial Protestants emerged with a fully articulated and biblically based chronology for the end times. Known as fundamentalists, they were called upon to do “battle royal” for Christ in his urgent quest to eradicate the modernist, secularist, and humanistic forms in which the Antichrist proudly paraded across American intellectual life. What distinguishes fundamentalism from mainline Protestant denominations is its opposition to the 20th century's principal intellectual trends.

This chapter is a case in point, focusing on the problem of Jewish conversion under Islam. In 1834, Sol Hachuel, a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl from Tangier, was beheaded, having been charged by a Shari'ah court in Fez with accepting Islam and then reverting back to Judaism—an accusation which she denied. Backed by source material in French, Judeo-Arabic, and Hebrew, hitherto untapped, this study analyzes Judeo-Muslim relations based on the concept of ridda (apostasy). It defines Hachuel's execution as martyrdom in the collective memory of Moroccan Jewry, while myths about her abounded. Thereafter, Jews in significant numbers regarded the Muslim court judges, Muslim witnesses who incriminated her, and even the Sharifian Sultan Abd al- Rahman as “losers,” “immoral men,” and “dishonest.” Whereas this chapter does not rule out that her sources may well be regarded as “apologetic literature” favoring Hachuel, there can be no doubt that her beheading affected Jewish-Muslim relations adversely in precolonial Morocco with long-range consequences.

The introduction outlines the paradoxes in LDS conceptions of the past by introducing the narrative construction of a boundary between apostasy and restoration, a binary categorization that has defined Mormonism as set apart from other religious traditions. It introduces the collaborative project that generated this volume and summarizes the contributors’ assumptions about the narrative and ethical dimensions of historical representations and their method of dialectical and charitable conversation with the past.

This chapter identifies B. H. Roberts, James E. Talmage, and Joseph Fielding Smith as the formulators of the LDS Great Apostasy narrative in the early twentieth century. It traces the sources of these church historians and identifies methodological limitations of their sources, particularly in light of shifts in academic historical paradigms about periodization, progressivism, and metanarration at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century confessional histories, Roberts, Talmage, and Smith absorbed the arguments of Jacob Burkhardt and John Addington Symonds, who created a firm distinction between the “dark” Middle Ages and the “light” Renaissance. This periodization remains one of the central features of Mormon historical consciousness.

This chapter traces the development of and changes in LDS narratives of the Great Apostasy during the twentieth century and argues that while these narratives helped the LDS church maintain its distinctive identity during two significant institutional transitions, they also fostered a tradition of exclusive historical consciousness and interfaith relations. Using three narratives composed in Judeo-Christian communities during historical periods marked by transition—the Hebrew Bible’s Exodus, Prudentius’s Psychomachia, and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen—as examples, it suggests that revising the social boundaries, cultural relations, and search for origins enacted in LDS historical narratives may contribute to the next phase of the church’s development in the twenty-first century.