Search Results

The second half of Nephi's account consists of sermons and prophecies, many of which are derived from Isaiah. Several chapters from the King James Version of Isaiah are quoted at length, but with modifications. Within the narrative frame of the Book of Mormon, Nephi is presented as an interpreter of scripture, who adds glosses and reinterprets the biblical prophecies as applying to his own family. Nephi also lifts key phrases from Isaiah and works them into novel predictions concerning his descendants, the Book of Mormon, and the cultural context of its eventual publication (nineteenth-century America). Non-biblical prophecies ascribed to Joseph of Egypt are given particular weight as well, and Nephi reports a vision of his own that might be classified as an apocalypse.

This chapter presents ten relatively uncontroversial generalizations about the Book of Mormon's language, style, organization, and religious claims. It then discusses the often overlooked role of the narrators, with a focus on Nephi, who is portrayed as writing about events in his early life retrospectively many years later. The narrators in the Book of Mormon function quite differently from those of the Bible in that they are named individuals with particular personalities, ambitions, and perspectives. A note on methodology argues that the same sort of imaginative narrative analysis can be applied to both fiction and history, as has been asserted by theorists such as Seymour Chatman and Peter Lamarque.

The first hundred pages of the Book of Mormon are presented as the writings of Nephi, who is also a character in the action. This chapter examines the ways in which he, as the narrator, shapes his tale of family conflict through selective characterization. The story begins in Jerusalem about 600 BC and then continues in the New World. In his telling, Nephi shifts chronology, flattens the characters of his rebellious brothers Laman and Lemuel, and suggests that his own experiences are parallel to those of the biblical Joseph. In addition, his own frustrations and tensions with his father Lehi are implicitly communicated through inconsistencies in the narrative and obvious omissions, that is, places where readers’ expectations are unmet or deflected.

In the Book of Mormon, many narratives have parallels. These include 1) simple parallels, such as Abinadi's story being like that of Moses, 2) complex parallels in which a single story has multiple referents, as happens with Nephi and Lehi's deliverance from prison, and 3) contrastive narratives in series. Examples of the last category can be found in three pairs of incidents in which a remarkable success wrought by ordinary competence is immediately followed by a much more spectacular achievement brought about through faith. Mormon has employed selection, arrangement, and phrasing to construct these parallel narratives, but he wants to show that these are actual historical patterns rather than clever impositions by the narrator.

Of the three major narrators, Moroni is the most likely to use phrases previously employed by other Book of Mormon writers. Actually, as he brings the book to an end, Moroni provides three separate conclusions. In the first he alludes to the words of Joseph of Egypt (as reported in the Nephite record), and then to Nephi's paraphrase of Joseph's words, and then to the writings of his father Mormon. The second conclusion, at Ether 12, offers a Nephite adaptation of Hebrews 11, somewhat anachronistically. And Moroni's final conclusion, the last chapter of the Book of Mormon, is a virtual curtain call which alludes to the farewell addresses of several of the earlier record keepers.

Richard Bushman’s “The Gold Plates as Foundational Text” focuses on the making of the Book of Mormon. In contrast to the controversies over the recovery and translation of the gold plates, the translated text is detailed and precise in explaining its own construction. Even the complicated insertion of the “small plates” into a narrative based on the “large plates” is explained and rationalized as a cultural and political force within the story. First, Nephi was clearly a political document created to justify the division of the family and the nation. Furthermore, its spiritual and prophetic emphasis made it a model for Mormon’s abridgment of the large plates. The Book of Mormon, Bushman argues, comes through as a human text pieced together by human hands out of many parts.

Joseph F. Smith’s efforts to raise the profile of the first vision worked. In their wake, young Latter-day Saints needed only to evoke the vision to make several rhetorical points: that God was embodied and passionate and created humans in his image; that God and Christ were distinct, separate, yet unified; that the Christian churches and creeds were not Christ’s; that God continued to reveal himself; that Joseph Smith was his revelator. These ideas were collective knowledge among Latter-day Saints in 1900. And no story captured and conveyed their shared sense of God, their relationship to him and to other Christians, as potently as the story of Smith’s vision. Memory of Joseph Smith’s first vision was widely diffused among and deeply embedded in Latter-day Saints by 1900. It was widely retold in diverse settings and media and yielded great meaning as a cultural and theological resource.