When You Sum(As,e)--repost

The following post is a combination of three posts originally published on rationalfaiths.com. The graphics and formatting might work better on the rationalfaiths website. I encourage reading and commenting there (the posts are more manageable sizes, too), but I'm reposting the whole thing here primarily for and MTA members who might be interested. (As additional information, I will be posting the third Monday of every month over at rationalfaiths, and several of my projected posts this year relate to Mormon Transhumanism.)

http://rationalfaiths.com/when-you-assume/
http://rationalfaiths.com/multiverse-shapes-laws/
http://rationalfaiths.com/infinite-assumptions/
 

You've probably heard the saying: "When you assume . . . you make a sum of As and e." For you non-chemists, that would be arsenic plus one electron making an arsenic ion with a charge of negative one. That's not a very stable ion, so it's not really found in nature, thus the saying makes it clear that assuming is pretty unstable grounds for anyone to base life choices on.
You're telling me you heard a different version of that saying? Oh well, you get the point. Except that's not my point.

Everybody assumes. Assumptions underlie all our strongest convictions. No one is exempt. In fact, much of our war of words--the battle some wage between science and religion, between liberal and conservative, between literal believer and symbolic believer, between whole-hearted supporter and loving critic of the Brethren--is an often unrecognized war of assumptions. I want to frame for you, hopefully in a new way, different assumptions we make about the universe and about God. Many of the assumptions about the universe are currently discussed by working cosmologists. Many of the assumptions about God have been discussed for millennia. Most of the assumptions I favor are shaped by Joseph Smith and Mormonism. Some of the assumptions might be testable, soon, and others never will be directly testable. Why might you care about these assumptions? From certain assumptions, Science can disprove God. From other assumptions, Science can't teach you anything about God and Faith. From still others, Science reveals God, or at least aspects of God, to us. Do you want Science and God to be at war? Do you want Science and God to be separate realms of understanding? Do you want Science to prove or disprove God's existence? Do you want Science to reveal God's glory? Do you want Science to assist religion in teaching you to become gods? Do you simply want to know what's true, or what's good? What science does for (or to) religion depends implicitly on assumptions each of us makes about Science and about God.

In the following posts I'm not going to argue much for or against a particular set of assumptions, and I'll only give hints of the consequences of making certain assumptions, or of prioritizing certain assumptions over others. I am going to lay out, as best I can, some of the unproven, and in many cases unprovable, assumptions that we can and must make about the nature of existence. Which assumptions you choose affect such things as your belief in God, your willingness to learn new things, and your prioritization of ethical choices--like how you balance the giving of your time and resources to temple and missionary work or helping the poor. We all make these assumptions, even if we don't recognize or acknowledge them. They shape and are shaped by both our thoughts and our feelings. So take a walk with me through a tangle of assumptions and see if you can't figure out just what you take for granted about reality.

The Outline

I'm going to summarize my next three posts right here. Part 1 will appear over the next two days. Parts 2 and 3 will follow in a month. If I've piqued your curiosity, come back tomorrow for a second helping.

1. Assumptions about the Universe
   1. Universe or Multiverse?
   2. Finite or Infinite?
      • Flat or Curved
      • Finite numbers of forces and subatomic particles, or not
      • Big and Small (and Infinite) Infinities
      • Variation among universes
      • Something between/surrounding universes, or not
   3.  Assumptions about Evidence
      • Only objective, only subjective, or a mix
      • What mix is acceptable/admissible
2. Assumptions about God
   1. Limited or unlimited knowledge, power, or presence
      • What is the nature of the limitations
   2. Assumptions about God's purposes
      • Assumptions about the best ways to achieve those purposes
   3. One God or family of Gods
      • Nature of God's family
   4. Human interaction with God
      • How involved is God, and how is God involved
3. Conclusions: We all make assumptions, whether we identify them explicitly or not. Those assumptions bear on such important matters as our belief in God, how we react to new learning, how we feel about good and evil in the world, and how and where we devote our time and resources. For me, it's worth taking the time to explore and evaluate these assumptions consciously, and you are invited to join me or observe my exploration.

The three, nested Klein bottles shown in the image have only one side, like a Möbius strip--the outside is continuous with the inside (although a topologist would tell you that this is only an approximation and that a Klein bottle cannot really be made in our three dimensions--thanks, Dad, for the clarification). Our universe could be flat, or it could have an odd, topological shape like the Klein bottle, only in more dimensions. If this were so, with a powerful enough telescope, we might look off into the distance and see our past selves, just in a mirror image. If you want to learn more about this, I recommend How the Universe Got Its Spots by Janna Levin. It's a fun, accessible read about ideas in modern cosmology. She wrote it so her mother could understand her work.
In this second part of my discussion of cosmic assumptions, I introduce questions about the numbers, shapes, sizes, and compositions of universes. See the introductory post, here.

1. Assumptions about the Universe
   1. Universe or Multiverse?
   2. Finite or Infinite?
      • Flat or Curved
      • Finite numbers of forces and subatomic particles, or not
      • Big and Small (and Infinite) Infinities
      • Variation among universes
      • Something between/surrounding universes, or not
   3.  Assumptions about Evidence
      • Only objective, only subjective, or a mix
      • What mix is acceptable/admissible
2. Assumptions about God
   1. Limited or unlimited knowledge, power, or presence
      • What is the nature of the limitations
   2. Assumptions about God's purposes
      • Assumptions about the best ways to achieve those purposes
   3. One God or family of Gods
      • Nature of God's family
   4. Human interaction with God
      • How involved is God, and how is God involved
3. Conclusions: We all make assumptions, whether we identify them explicitly or not. Those assumptions bear on such important matters as our belief in God, how we react to new learning, how we feel about good and evil in the world, and how and where we devote our time and resources. For me, it's worth taking the time to explore and evaluate those assumptions consciously, and you are invited to join me or observe my journey through this and subsequent blog posts.

Assumptions about the Universe

The purpose of this post is simply to examine a number of assumptions made in the realm of physics. Theological assumptions and the practical and ethical consequences of various assumptions must be saved for later posts.

Universe or Multiverse?

An artist's representation of one mainstream model of the progression of universes. Many parts are generally accepted among physicists, while some details are extrapolated from current understandings.

The first question to answer is, what is the universe? Right from this point the language gets messy and the assumptions multiply. Most often, the universe is used to mean the space and time that we live in and can observe, and the stuff beyond our observation that can interact with our observable universe in "normal" ways. I'm going to call that the observable universe. Some people assume that the observable universe is all there is. Many other physicists think it likely that there is existence beyond our universe. They postulate many universes which they call the multiverse. These other universes could arise in a number of different ways, and be connected to or separated from our universe in various ways. There are a few groups of theories about the nature of the multiverse, and while we can't (currently) know which is most correct, just the concept itself influences what are the most logical conclusions about God and about the meaning of life.

Finite or infinite?

I think most modern people think about space and time as going on forever. Because of this you hear arguments like, "With infinite time and space, everything that can happen, will happen, someplace." This is then used to rebut "Intelligent Design" arguments that human life is too complex to have arisen by chance. It's a patently obvious argument. There are only four forces that govern our entire universe. There is a finite number of subatomic particles that make up everything in our observable universe (ignoring for now dark matter and energy, or at least assuming that they are made of a finite number of things). This means that if time and space go on long enough, literally every combination of the things that make up our universe will be tried by the universe just from randomly combining. One of the most peculiarly Mormon hymns celebrates our knowledge that "there is no end to space", and "no outer curtain where nothing has a place". But this argument is only true if our observable universe, or ones very much like it, are infinite. (Side note: I don't like Intelligent Design. Really. A lot. It makes God way too small for me. I also suspect this argument that everything will happen in infinite time and space is flawed, but that's mostly for a future post.)

Flat or curved?

Time and space could be infinite. They could also be finite. It can be argued that time, as we know it, had a beginning with the Big Bang, and that it will have an end with the end of our universe. What about space? Think about our earth. When you go for a long walk, or even drive across country, the world seems basically flat with a bunch of bumps and dips all over it. But we know that if you keep heading in the same direction for long enough you will come back to where you started. The earth is round. The earth is finite. The universe might be round, too. Or it might be a 3-dimensional Moebius strip, or doughnut, or any number of other shapes. The nested Klein bottles (or 3D representation of them) shown in the featured picture show how complex the shape of the universe might be, but living inside it the complexities could be hidden and hard to discern. When it comes to the observable universe, all we know is that it is close to flat for as far as we can see, but there are scientific reasons to ask if the universe might be curved just beyond what we can see, and even theories about what evidence we should look for to answer this question. Time and space in our observable universe might be finite or infinite.

How many forces and particles?

Only 17 known elementary particles. While there are a lot of ways to put these together--more than you or I could count in many lifetimes--the possibilities are still finite.

There are four (and possibly only one) forces that govern how everything behaves in our observable universe. There is a finite number of elementary particles that make up everything in our universe. Is our universe, even if it is infinite in space, time, and/or matter, finite in the ways space, time, and matter can be arranged and interact? Or is there infinitely more complexity as we get smaller and smaller and bigger and bigger, forever? I don't know. No one does, but we actually have some very plausible guesses as regards our observable universe. Unfortunately, that doesn't tell us much about other universes. Does every universe have the same four forces? And if they do, do the forces have the same strengths in the other universes? How about the numbers and types of particles? As far as I know, physicists have not arrived at a fundamental reason why our universe had to have these particular forces tuned just like they are, or these particular particles. And it's possible that intelligent life could emerge or exist in universes with other laws. How many sets of laws can result in intelligent life? Just one, or infinitely many? I lean toward believing the latter, or at least something a lot bigger than one. What do you think?

Tomorrow

I  apologize for cutting this post off in the middle, but I'm at the end of my wife's attention span (for this kind of stuff, anyway), and that is my rule of thumb for post length. Next time I'll continue with the discussion of the multiverse and some thoughts about just how big (and small) infinity might be.

In this third part of my discussion of cosmic assumptions, I explain that not all infinities are created equal. I discuss different sizes of infinity, variation among universes, and assumptions we make about evidence.  See the introductory post, here, and the follow up post, here.

1. Assumptions about the Universe
   1. Universe or Multiverse?
   2. Finite or Infinite?
      • Flat or Curved
      • Finite numbers of forces and subatomic particles, or not
      • Big and Small (and Infinite) Infinities
      • Variation among universes
      • Something between/surrounding universes, or not
   3.  Assumptions about Evidence
      • Only objective, only subjective, or a mix
      • What mix is acceptable/admissible
2. Assumptions about God
   1. Limited or unlimited knowledge, power, or presence
      • What is the nature of the limitations
   2. Assumptions about God's purposes
      • Assumptions about the best ways to achieve those purposes
   3. One God or family of Gods
      • Nature of God's family
   4. Human interaction with God
      • How involved is God, and how is God involved
3. Conclusions: We all make assumptions, whether we identify them explicitly or not. Those assumptions bear on such important matters as our belief in God, how we react to new learning, how we feel about good and evil in the world, and how and where we devote our time and resources. For me, it's worth taking the time to explore and evaluate those assumptions consciously, and you are invited to join me or observe my journey through this and subsequent blog posts.

Variation among universes

The questions I ended yesterday's post with are ones we have to ask about every possible universe, if there is more than one. Are the numbers of universes infinite, or finite? Is there stuff between the universes, or does nothing exist except where there are universes? Are other universes finite or infinite? Do other universes obey the same laws and have the same subatomic particles as our universe? All of these are currently unanswerable questions, but the ways we think about God, religion, and any number of other things implicitly affirm certain subsets of assumptions and deny the possibility of others. Extrapolating back to our implicit assumptions can reveal inconsistencies in our beliefs. One of the most disconcerting is revealed when we think about there being no end to time and space in our universe--something many of us assume--and also accept the idea that there are multiple universes. Is it even possible for there to be two, infinite universes? If a universe is infinite, doesn't it reach everywhere? And if it reaches everywhere, wouldn't two, infinite universes overlap each other in time and space, and be one universe? The answer to these questions is no.

A line can be infinite and still be infinitely smaller than a plane. This heirarchy of infinities has no end, in theory. Whether it has a practical end in our cosmos is an open question.

Big and Small Infinities

Different sizes of infinities is not an idea that cosmologists or mathematicians struggle with, but the rest of us don't always find it so natural. Infinities come in different sizes. They come in vastly different sizes. Imagine infinitely many libraries. How many books are in those libraries? How many pages? Letters? Ink molecules? Atoms? Getting the idea? But this doesn't begin to show the scope. There are infinities so big that other infinities might as well be zero, when you put them next to each other. In the limit approaching infinity (you probably can't really get there), some other infinities are zero. And there are potentially infinitely many sizes of infinity. Our Cosmos (that's what I'll call the sum of everything that is) might be made up of finities and infinities nested inside of each other, with some being so big that others vanish in insignificance, while others are so close in size that they have to share importance equally. The accompanying figure is intended to help you grasp this idea visually. First take an infinite series of points, sort of like counting by 1's from negative infinity to positive infinity. That's a lot of counting, but it doesn't compare to the number of points in a continuous line spanning that same range. And a line is infinitely smaller than an infinite plane. Add a third dimension, and you are infinitely bigger. Is there an end? I don't know. I think some really smart people would be surprised that their beliefs carry implicit assumptions about infinity that might not be true, or at least don't support their religious (or anti-religious) conclusions. What do your beliefs imply about the infinities of the Cosmos? I'll come back to that question in the future as we think about various understandings of Mormon Gods. Until then, maybe just try to get used to the idea that infinity comes in many sizes.

Evidence

Nearly certain knowledge results when all our sources of evidence agree. When various sources disagree or are silent, we can have many different reactions. A few of the possibilities are shown in this figure.

One key factor influencing individuals' beliefs is the nature of acceptable evidence. Most of us generally believe scientific data, with varying degrees of common sense scepticism. We are influenced by our expertise, our emotional investment in the subject, and our confidence in the practitioners or reporters of the science. Where we take issue is primarily in interpretation. Whether we can identify them or not, we are at least vaguely aware that scientific interpretation is influenced by human biases and methodological biases. For example, someone like me gives more weight to the professional opinions of LDS Egyptologists regarding the Book of Abraham than to Egyptologists who haven't shown a deep (or even passable) understanding of Mormonism. It's a bias I like. Another way we select our biases is in accepting or rejecting personal, subjective experience as credible evidence. Typically, people accept a level of subjective experience as evidence, but require checks and balances on its credibility. We require multiple witnesses in court. We require multiple labs to reproduce results on important findings. We require ourselves, as researchers, to replicate results multiple times in an attempt to reduce instrumental error and subjective, human error. Some psychological research must accept personal experience as real because that is the reality being studied. Where we divide is when scientifically objective reality and subjective personal experience conflict--or appear to.

I am not a cosmologist. I am not a climatologist. I am not an evolutionary biologist. I am a biophysicist, so I have many of the tools to understand and partially evaluate the explanations of these groups when their claims interest or influence me. So I make judgments about evolution, global warming, and the size and nature of the universe based on expert reports.

I am not a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator. I did not know Jesus or Joseph Smith personally. I am not a theologian, nor am I a historian of religion. I have received answers to prayers and had experiences where I believe truth was revealed to me. My grandparents' grandparents knew Joseph Smith, personally. I've read a fair amount, including a modest amount of theology, philosophy, and history. In other words, I have some of the tools to evaluate the claims of professionals and prophets. I have my own witness, but I also trust my grandfather's testimony who knew and trusted his grandfather, who personally knew and trusted Joseph Smith. It's third hand trust, but it's trust earned by lifetimes of demonstrated goodness, intelligence, and love. I trust these personal, subjective experiences. I claim them as evidence, for me. There are at least two other ways to treat these evidences: claim them as evidence for everyone, or reject them as evidence for anyone. Rejecting them for the purposes of scientific study does not require me to reject them as true, only as objective. What evidence do you accept? What checks and balances have you applied to it? These are questions I think you can't ever stop asking if you aspire to eternal progression.

Unsettl(ed/ing) Science

Most of the assumptions I've identified so far are real, undecided questions in Science. Many of them will possibly never be decided, because pushing back the boundaries of the unknown will only reveal another level that leaves the same questions open--just in a different way. This can be unsettling and disconcerting enough that people react with strong emotion. Some doggedly assert that, even if there is reality beyond what we can observe, it is unethical to use that reality as grounds for deciding what we should do here and now. Others tell themselves, if scientists can't even agree amongst themselves, I don't need to pay any attention to them. I can just decide that my church, or my personal experiences are right without any reference to what has been measured scientifically. I hope most of us make an effort to find the most productive, middle ground to live in, even if it is harder or less certain.

Next Month

I'll give those interested a little time for these ideas to settle. Next month I'll pick up with assumptions we make about God and how God interacts with the observable universe, and I'll try to connect the assumptions we make about the Cosmos to real, everyday ethical choices that confront us.

My Mormon response to biblical authorship hypotheses

After writing this three different ways, here is the best and least dogmatic. I don't give references, but I will identify or insert them upon request.

Here are some dominant hypotheses on biblical authorship:

The Pentateuch was written by at least three authors, J, E, and D, and it was edited during or after the Babylonian captivity.

Isaiah was written by two and possibly three authors, with at least one of them during or after the Babylonian captivity.

The Sermon on the Mount was constructed from a sayings document and wasn't ever give by Jesus in one place (or maybe at all).

What problems does this cause me as a Mormon?

I have to explain 2^nd Isaiah in the Book of Mormon. I have to explain the Sermon on the Mount in the Book of Mormon. This has contributed to some interesting and intelligent analyses of what Joseph Smith meant when he thought he was translating. One is Blake Ostler's expansion hypothesis—the Book of Mormon really had ancient records, but while Joseph Smith was translating, God inspired him to insert other passages that weren't on the plates. It's also contributed to Brandt Gardner's view that the translation process was rather loose, with God communicating ideas that were on the plates into sometimes completely different language than the ancient authors would have used. I've heard other people reconcile these, and other, problems by viewing the translation process as channeling. I think this is supported at least superficially by Joseph's translations of other documents.

I don't happen to like any of these explanations. I believe too many things about the Book of Mormon. I believe it was written by real, ancient prophets. I believe that Nephi actually had the writings of Isaiah and copied them over onto his plates. I believe Jesus really visited the Americas and gave a sermon like the Sermon on the Mount. I believe that Joseph Smith really believed he was transcribing into English the writings of the ancient prophets and that, even though he mostly never looked at the golden plates, he believed he was communicating what was on them. He says he took the title page from the last plate.

Why is it a problem for me to give up these beliefs in favor of something that's more symbolic and agrees with predominant scholarly views of biblical authorship? Here are three reasons:

1. The best objective, statistical, language use analysis of the Book of Mormon (performed by multiple authors only one of which was LDS) shows that Nephi and Alma, at least, are two different authors and that neither is Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, Sidney Rigdon, or Solomon Spaulding. Criticisms have been published of this work that leave a small amount of room for error, but do not effectively refute the results. Other published studies contradicting the conclusion of multiple authorship, or supposedly supporting 19^th century authorship, have easily identified and demonstrated flaws in their methodology. I understand enough statistics to come to this conclusion myself, and I'm willing to help anyone else who wants to read the papers see how I arrived at my conclusion and come to their own better informed conclusion. That's a serious offer, but I warn you that you will have to do homework.
2. Royal Skousen's work on the original and printers manuscripts of the Book of Mormon best supports a tight control over the translation, where Joseph Smith was given the words and phrases that he should speak, sometimes including the specific spelling of names, and other times including really awkward English constructions that were removed in later copies.
3. The historical evidence is that Joseph Smith and his contemporaries believed he was translating the actual words written on golden plates, even though he wasn't looking at the plates most of the time. They also believed that these words were written by real, historical people. Joseph said he met Moroni, at least, and stories are that he met other ancient prophets. Multiple witnesses attest to the existence of golden plates with writing on them. Joseph's enemies believed he had the plates and went to some lengths to relieve him of them.

None of these evidences rule out the views of Blake Ostler, Brandt Gardner, or others, but they do give me reason to doubt them. They also give other Latter-day Saints reason to doubt these more symbolic views of the translation process. I fall, at least superficially, into the conservative, Sunday School view of Book of Mormon translation. To me it seems to make God as much of an elaborate deceiver as he would need to be for the earth to only be 12,000 years old. Why make it appear to Joseph Smith like he was translating an ancient text from multiple authors, and put in statistical and historical evidence to back that up, when what was really happening was God was constructing a book in some other way? I don't like that God any more than I like the God of Intelligent Design.

So I've put in a little effort to understand just how seriously I should be taking the biblical scholarship. I haven't come to a final conclusion, yet, but what I have concluded is that someone else is going to have to do this job if they want me to believe differently about Book of Mormon and Biblical authorship. Here, in brief, are my current hypotheses for biblical authorship:

Some single author wrote the Pentateuch (carefully crafted from older, oral traditions) and it was edited during or after the Babylonian captivity.

Some single author wrote Isaiah and it was edited during or after the Babylonian captivity.

Jesus really gave the Sermon on the Mount.

What biblical scholarship do I have to ignore to believe this? None that I'm aware of. There are serious scholars who believe each of these things, even if they are in the minority. I just have to believe a minority view, not ignore a majority one. Believing these things also allows me to not hypothesize documents that no one has found. I don't have to invent original Jahwistic and Elohistic authors who haven't left any records behind. I don't have to look for a 1^st Isaiah without a 2^nd Isaiah (although I'm fine if people keep looking. Ancient documents are cool). I don't have to invent a sayings document that hasn't been found. I also don't have to reject Joseph Smith's more literal view of how he translated the Book of Mormon.

So what's my point? To you believing LDS biblical scholars—don't assume that you can rely on the authority of predominant scholarly views to convince thoughtful, well read, academically inclined Latter-day Saints to view the scriptures as you do. You have your work cut out. If you think we would benefit from believing the Documentary Hypothesis or one of its offshoots, you need to do a lot better job of making explanations of the hypothesis more accessible to interested Mormon readers. That's a harder job than for an audience that doesn't believe in the Book of Mormon. You aren't just fighting fundamentalist prejudices, you are fighting statistical and historical evidences that are about as strong as they come. You may be able to deal with these evidences and preserve the dominant source critical hypotheses, but you can't rely on non-Mormon scholars to do that job for you. Alternatively, you could take these evidences of the Book of Mormon seriously in the ways I and some Book of Mormon scholars do, and let it shape your biblical scholarship. I know of at least one Isaiah scholar (Avraham Gileadi) and one New Testament scholar (Wilfred Griggs) that have done this and made successful careers of it. I don't know that they were right to do so, but they've impressed me. You'd be exploring minority views, and you'd have to work a lot harder to get anyone to listen to you, publish you, or give you tenure. That said, if I were a betting man I'd bet that scholarship that goes against a mostly literal view the Book of Mormon won't last. I'll keep reading biblical scholarship, when it interest me, but if you want me, and others like me, to keep listening to you, you've got to meet us more than half way. I tried going the other way, and it's too much work for too little reward.

Christ in the New Testament

My third biblical studies book review is An Introduction to New Testament Christology by Raymond Brown. I love it, so this is going to be a very long review. I'm going to focus on the approaches we take to scripture as illustrated in the book. If you want to know what else it talks about, you'll need to go read the book. I give it two thumbs up. Now on to my disjointed review.

Raymond Brown begins quite early to describe different approaches to understanding Christ, or Christology. Besides identifying High and Low Christology (High discusses the divinity of Christ, while Low rejects or ignores it), Brown sweepingly categorizes approaches into five categories: Nonscholarly Conservatism, Nonscholarly Liberalism, Scholarly Liberalism, Bultmannian Existentialism, and Scholarly (Moderate) Conservatism. Of course these don't capture all the nuances that Brown is aware of, but they describe some trends and camps that it can be useful for the student to understand. I'll provide a few excerpts about the various groups.

The Divisions

Nonscholarly Conservatism

Even though the Gospels were Written some 30 to 70 years after the ministry of Jesus, they are assumed to be verbatim accounts of what was said in Jesus’ lifetime.

In other words, everything in the Gospels is assumed to be exactly what happened. While most of us Mormons aren't fundamentalists--particularly not regarding the Bible--this is an approach we often implicitly take, unless we have somehow been trained or trained ourselves to look more critically. Fortunately, it works for understanding lots of good things.

Nonscholarly Liberalism

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the view that there is no continuity between Jesus’ self-evaluation and the exalted Christology of the NT documents. Such liberalism dismisses NT christology as unimportant or as a distortion, and has often been closely associated with the thesis that Jesus was just an ethical instructor or social reformer who was mistakenly proclaimed to be divine by overenthusiastic or confused followers (with Paul sometimes seen as the chief instigator).

These two camps have had much rather unfortunate interplay that we see in many, if not most, public presentations of religion.

On the conservative side, as I have explained, many Protestants reflect the reaction of an earlier generation to the destructive aspects of radical biblical criticism; and most Catholics remain unaware that their church and its scholars have moved beyond views taught in catechism in the first part of the 20th century. On the liberal side, there is a tendency to invoke what the latest scholars are supposedly saying, according to reports in the media. Despite the differences among scholars I shall desciibe below, their efforts pay tribute to the truth that christology is so important an issue for religious adherence that one should not express judgments without seriously looking at the evidence.

Scholarly Liberalism

This differs from nonscholarly liberalism in several important ways. It recognizes that the NT is shot through with christology from beginning to end and that its authors claimed far more than that Jesus was a moralizer or a social reformer. Nevertheless, as the classification “liberalism” implies, it does not accept the high christological evaluations of Jesus in the NT as standing in real continuity with his self-evaluation. In short, high christological evaluations are regarded as mistaken.

I should explain what Brown means by continuity. He means, did Christians in the time of Paul believe the same things as Christians in the time of Jesus, and did Jesus actually teach the things (and mean the things in the way they were interpreted) that the first Christians believed? The question is, did Christian thought change (it did), and if so, how did it change?

Scholarly liberalism has also influenced many who lean toward the views of nonscholarly liberalism. This is the kind of thinking that is pervasive in internet discussions of Mormonism, with varying degrees of usefulness.

Somewhere in between nonscholarly liberalism and scholarly liberalism is the view of those who have read scholarly liberal works (the weaknesses of which they do not subject to suflìcient criticism) but whose view of Jesus is really determined more by their reaction to the suffocating fundamentalism in which they were raised.

I'm sorry to say this flatters neither the individual nor the culture that raised them.

Returning to the scholarly views, Brown makes this observation regarding their beliefs:

The historical Jesus was, in fact, a preacher of stark ethical demand who challenged the religious institutions and the false ideas of his time. His ideals and insights were not lost because the community imposed on its memory of him a christology that turned him into the heavenly Son of Man, the Lord, and Judge of the World-indeed, into a God. Without that aggrandizement he and his message would have been forgotten. But if in centuries past such a christological crutch was necessary to keep the memory of Jesus operative, in the judgment of the liberal scholars that crutch could now be discarded. Modern scholarship, it is claimed, can detect the real Jesus and hold onto him without the christological trappings.

Brown, himself, doesn't fall into this camp (he's a Catholic Monk), but he takes their scholarship seriously and has sifted through it--I like to think on behalf of those of us who believe and are unwilling to wade through the sludge of unwarranted assumptions made by unbelievers. My thanks go out to him for this work.

Bultmannian Existentialism

It's hard for me to describe this coherently, although Brown and Sanders both taught me something about it in their respective books. Bultmann (and some of his contemporaries and followers) accepted the methods of the 19th and early 20th century liberal scholars, but rejected their rejection of high christology. They downplayed, however, the literalness of much of the NT message in favor of emphasizing the importance of what we Mormons might describe as the Atonement in modern life. It doesn't really matter if certain events or sayings literally happened or came unmodified from Jesus. The challenge to find salvation applies to us, today, and Jesus and his message (whether from Jesus or from the early Christians) are powerful messages to help humanity. Will we accept the great things God has done for us, rather than rely on our own powers as advocated by scholarly liberalism? (That's my best attempt at translating what I learned, but I warn you it may be seriously flawed)

Scholarly (Moderate) Conservatism

. . . they posit a christology in the ministry of Jesus himself. They would be divided on whether that christology was explicit or implicit. Explicit christology would involve a self-evaluation in which Jesus employed titles 0r designations already known in Jewish circles. Implicit christology would relegate such titles and designations to early church usage but would attribute to Jesus himself attitudes and actions that implied an exalted status which was made explicit after his death.

Explicit christology, which seemed to be fading, got new life in the late 20th century. “Son of Man” remains a title that many scholars think Jesus used of himself. “Messiah” remains a title that others may have used of him during his lifetime, whether or not he accepted the designation.

These scholars may only be conservative relative to liberal scholars, but the ongoing differences of opinion among scholars about such fundamental views of Christ is something to keep in mind. When people claim "broad scholarly consensus" on a New Testament issue, unless they are talking about something very specific and limited, it seems like good advice to take some care in accepting the assertion--even if it comes from an expert. To quote Brown:

This survey shows that scholarship has come to no universally accepted positions on the relationship of Jesus’ christology to that of his followers, except that the extreme positions on either end of the spectrum (no difference, no continuity) have fewer and fewer advocates.

Topics

Jesus' Omniscience

One of the most interesting discussions early in Brown's book was that of Jesus' knowledge of things. Since Jesus was God, did he know everything during his mortal life? As Mormons we don't find it hard to answer no because Joseph Smith put Jesus' growth in wisdom and stature, line upon line, into the Doctrine and Covenants, giving us a second witness on the subject. The New Testament doesn't provide such a simple solution. Brown illustrated how what is shown in the New Testament can be used to answer this question. He showed passages where Jesus displayed knowledge beyond what could have been available to his senses, and passages where Jesus seemed to lack knowledge. I'm still getting used to how scholars like Brown and Sanders collate and interpret the various evidences in such potentially meaningful ways. Brown doesn't answer the question, but he does show the New Testament evidence that one must deal with to come up with a intellectually responsible answer, and gives some hints as to how different people have answered the question. Here is part of Brown's summary:

This chapter has reviewed a range of the ordinary and religious knowledge manifested in the Gospel accounts of Jesus, and throughout there were signs of limitation. Those who depend on a theological a priori argument that, because Jesus was “true God of true God,” he had to know all things, have a difficult task in explaining such limitations. They must resort to the thesis that he hid what he knew and deliberately manifested limitations in order not to confuse or astound his hearers. That explanation limps, for his hearers are portrayed as confused and amazed in any case. Since there is at least one recorded statement where Jesus says that the Son does not know, most biblical scholars will not accept such an explanation and will query the validity of the a priori claim for omniscience.

On the other side of the picture, even in the partial range of Jesus’ sayings considered thus far, there is real difficulty for those who assume that Jesus presented himself as just another human being. Under (A) we saw traditions that Jesus manifested knowledge beyond ordinary human perceptiveness, and under (B) We saw Jesus’ authority in interpreting Scripture and his absolute conviction that God would punish Jerusalem and the Temple and make him victorious despite his sufferings. All this corresponds well to the repeated evaluation of him during his lifetime as a prophet, one of those specially sent by God to challenge the covenanted people. Probably most a priori approaches to Jesus from the “true man” side of the spectrum would accept “prophet” as a historical self-estimation of Jesus, but would argue that he could have been no more than that. However, in the last elements that we discussed in this chapter (B ##8-10) there were already indications that the truth may have been more complicated. Jesus saw himself as so important that rejection of him (not only of God’s message) would constitute the cause for divine action against Jerusalem and the Temple. Indeed he was remembered as saying “I will (or am able) to destroy.” Jesus claims that he is not only to be made victorious (translated by his followers, perhaps post factum, in terms of the resurrection of the Son of Man) but also to have a final role (as the coming Son of Man) when God completes what was begun during his ministry. This goes beyond the claims of OT prophets and manifests a uniqueness in Jesus’ self-estimation. He is not simply one of those whom God sends but the one to bring God’s plan to completion.

For the believer, like me, in Jesus' divinity, it appears that the Gospels really are filled with evidence that Jesus was limited in mortal ways. For the nonbeliever who would explain away Jesus' divinity by saying he never claimed it for himself, you will have to explain away more than just a couple of disconnected sayings. It appears that actually reading the New Testament limits the possible scenarios more than many people would like.

Brown's Approach

One of the main reasons I love Brown's book is his approach to Christology. He says it thus:

In opting for a desciptive approach to the NT evidence without embracing “cannot have” or “must have” presuppositions that stem from emphasizing one side ofthe “true God, true man” issue, I am not denying that proponents of such presuppositions have something to Contribute to the overall christological picture. Objections raised by philosophers and scientists on one side and corollaries drawn by theologians on the other must be considered seriously, but they must not be allowed to determine what the NT reports.

In other words, the evidence doesn't care if you believe it or not. Christ was reported by both his adherents and his enemies as having performed notable miracles. That is evidence, whether you believe the miracles really happened or not. You can look for naturalistic explanations of the miracles (Jesus didn't really multiply the loaves and fishes, that's just a story introduced later), but you have to actually explain the evidence and not just wish it away. Conversely, you can't just pretend that contradictory passages in the Gospels aren't contradictory. You have to face the evidence that is there and not pretend that some of it doesn't exist, or doesn't matter, just because it doesn't agree with your presuppositions. This doesn't mean that Brown doesn't allow wiggle room for honest differences in belief. What he doesn't allow is arbitrary picking and choosing of what he himself will examine when trying to understand the Christ of the New Testament. The implicit invitation is for us to do likewise and really examine the books that we've had in front of us all our lives.

Brown is intimately aware of a number of prejudices found in approaches to New Testament christology. He highlights a couple more in his chapter on Jesus' views of his own mission:

We come now to the most difficult area for the discernment of Jesus’ own christology-difficult because of the lack of evidence. After Jesus’ death Christians reflected intensely on Jesus’ identity, particularly in terms of titles that expressed their faith: Jesus is . . . Messiah/Christ, or Lord, or Son of God, or Son of Man, or even God (APPENDIX III). . . here we confine ourselves to the very limited evidence for Jesus’ application of the titles Messiah, Son of God, and Son of Man to himself or his acceptance of them when applied by others.

Before I begin, some cautions are in order. First, were we to decide that Jesus did not use or accept one or the other of these titles, that would be no decisive indication that Christians were unjustified interpretative combination of several passages. Yet any affirmation that all this development must have come from early Christians and none of it came from Jesus reflects one of the peculiar prejudices of modern scholarship. A Jesus who did not reflect on the OT and use the interpretative techniques of his time is an unrealistic projection who surely never existed. The perception that OT or intertestamental passages were interpreted to give a christological insight does not assign a date to the process. To prove that this could not have been done by Jesus, at least inchoatively, is surely no less difficult to prove than that it was done by him. Hidden behind an attribution to the early church is often the assumption that Jesus had no christology even by Way of reflecting on the Scriptures to discern in what anticipated way he fitted into God’s plan. Can one really think that credible?

Brown passes lightly over the prejudice of many believers, this time. We must be careful and realize that there isn't much solid evidence regarding what Jesus thought of himself. Brown is less gentle with the scholarly prejudice that assumes all high christology postdated Jesus' life and words. Once again, here is the double edged sword of detailed New Testament study.

Interesting Excerpts

Jesus' claim to authority:

Worthy of note is that the oracles are uttered with first person authority, “I say to you,” quite unlike the prophetic custom of having God speak (“The Lord says . . .”: Isa 1:24; Jer 2:12; Hosea 11:11; Amos 3:1 1; etc.). Why Jesus can speak with such personal authority is never explained in the Synoptic Gospels; indeed that silence over against the prophets’ explanation that word of God came to them implies a very high christology wherein the authority to make demands in God’s name simply resides in Jesus because of who he is.

This certainly never was obvious to me. It seems you can convincingly argue that Jesus' not claiming authority from God as earlier prophets did is, when put together with the things he said and did, a claim to greater authority that the prophets of old.

The resurrection:

The developing sequence from the way in which Jesus presented himself during his lifetime to the way in which those who believed in him presented him afterwards is more complex than such a sequence would be for any other figure. In the case of others one might find an adequate explanation for development in logical, psychological, and other familiar diagnosable factors; but in the tradition about Jesus a unique factor massively intervened that goes beyond human diagnosis, namely, the resurrection. In the publicly received tradition of Israel (i.e., what a later generation would dub canonical) no one had hitherto been raised from the dead to eternal life, and so this claim of faith about Jesus had an enormous import. Besides heralding a victory over death, God’s raising of Jesus to glory vindicated both the origin and the truth of the authority/power that he had claimed and manifested. His followers who saw the risen Jesus realized that he was even more than they had understood during his public ministry. The resurrection, therefore, makes it very difficult to explain away as romanticized creation the more explicit christology attested after the resurrection.

I always thought of the resurrection as one of those things that, while there are plenty of supposed witnesses, it's something there really isn't much proof for, and that scholarship could choose to ignore--even if I wished they couldn't. What I'm seeing as I begin to read is that scholars have to take the resurrection seriously. As a minimum, they have to deal with the fact that early Christians believed it happened. As a maximum, they have to explain why the tomb was empty, and they have to do that by guessing. The historical sources (if they say anything) seem to universally agree that it was empty, but nobody can produce the body to prove how it was emptied. Brown doesn't go into this, but there are entire popular books on it (that I'm not inclined to read) that have collected the historical evidence. I still think it's not provable, and even if we proved Christ was risen, that wouldn't prove everything else we believe, but I was surprised to see how central central the resurrection is to all biblical scholarship, not just the religious.

The tension between Servant and King

All the Gospels present a Jesus who was clearly Messiah, Son of Man, and Son of God (and sometimes specifically Lord) during his public ministry. Gospel readers immediately know this because they are made party to a revelation connected to the baptism of Jesus where God speaks from heaven and calls him “My beloved Son” (Mark 1:11; Matt 3:17; Luke 3:22178). In the two-step resurrection chrístology discussed at the end of the preceding chapter, the ministry of Jesus from the baptism to the cross Could without difficulty be presented as one of lowliness (Phil 2:7 speaks of Jesus in “the form of a servant”) since exaltation came only with resurrection. In ministry christology, however, where exalted status and lowly service coexist, there is inevitable tension.

Let us consider one way in which that tension was handled by the evangelists. A resurrection christology passage, such as Acts 13: 33, can apply Ps 2:7 to Jesus without qualification: “You are my son; today I have begotten you.” The Synoptic baptismal designation, “My beloved son; with you I am well pleased,” has modified Ps 2:7 by combining it with words (italicized) from the description of the Servant in Isa 42:1. By this combination the evangelists indicate that to understand Jesus as the messianic king during his public ministry one must recognize that he was simultaneously both the

Messiah/Son and the Servant who did not cry out (Isa 42:2) and was pierced for our offenses, bearing the guilt of all (Isa 53). Since it is not clear that in preChristian Judaism the ideas of the Messiah and the Suffering Servant had been joined, Jews who did not accept Christian claims might well point out that a Messiah whose life terminated in suffering was a drastic Change of the concept of the expected anointed Davidic king. Christians would reply that Jesus threw light on the whole of the Scriptures and showed how once separate passages should be combined.

Beyond this common approach, in describing the ministry of Jesus individual NT writings treat differently the tension between the exalted Messiah/Son image and the lowly Servant; and this difference contributes greatly to the distinctiveness of each of the four Gospels.

Mark preserves the greatest amount of lowliness by describing a precrucifixion ministry in which no human being recognizes or acknowledges Jesus’ divine Sonship. Thus the christological identity of Jesus is a “secret” known to the readers (who are told at the baptism) and to the demons (who have supernatural knowledge; Mark 1:24; 3:1 l; 5:7) but not to those who encounter him or even to those who follow him as he preaches and heals. Mark 8:27-33 shows how little even Peter, the most prominent disciple, has understood Jesus. He has come to recognize that Jesus is the Messiah, but his understanding of messiahship would not allow Jesus to suffer. He is like the blind man of 8:22-26: Jesus has laid hands on the man, and he has come to partial sight (people look like trees); but it will take further action by Jesus before he sees clearly. If Mark’s readers or hearers wonder why Jesus does not reveal his christological identity clearly to his disciples, the scene of the transfiguration in Mark 9:2-8 supplies an answer. There Jesus is transfigured before them and the glory that has been hidden throughout the ministry shines forth brightly.

The Gospels are easy to read. Thank goodness, or I never would have read them the few times I have. Apparently I missed a few things in my reading, though.

Jesus gives Judas permission to go off to betray him (13:27-30). When he says “I am,” the party of Roman soldiers and Jewishpolice that have come to arrest him fall backwards to the ground(18:6). The disciples of the Johannine Jesus do not flee as he is arrested; he arranges for them to be let go so that it may be seen that he has not lost any of them (18:8-9). This Jesus does not die alone and abandoned; not only is the Father always with him (16:32), but at the foot of the cross stand his mother and the beloved disciple (19:25­-27)-symbols of a believing community that he has gathered.

Therefore, knowing that he has accomplished all that the Father has given him to do and has completed the Scripture, he can decide “It is finished” and give over his spirit (19228-30). Obviously, as last words, this is a far cry from the “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” of Mark and Matt.

These examples suffice to show that despite the four evangelists’ agreement that during his ministry Jesus was already Messiah and Son of God, the way in which they balance that with a picture of him as rejected and misunderstood varies so that very different Gospel pictures of Jesus emerge. For those who accept the later church confession of Jesus as true God and true man, the different picture in each Gospel, while supporting overall that confession, gives its peculiar insight into one or the other side of that mystery: Mark, for instance, more insight into Jesus as true man; John, more insight

into Jesus as true God. No one Gospel would enable us to see the whole picture, and only when the four are kept in tension among themselves has the Church come to appreciate who Jesus is.

I always thought the evangelists described the same events. I still accept it as a matter of trust that they did, and that they each came fairly close to things that really happened, but even if I accept that, they were telling stories with agendas, and I can learn more if I can see their agendas.

Conclusions

Once again, I have both found new thoughts to enrich my understanding, and plenty of room to remain the kind of believer I am. Scholarship places limits on what I can responsibly accept as true. I need to adjust to those limits. I can work on that. Still, an understanding of Christ arrived at without the evidences of the Book of Mormon and modern scripture fails to address the divine Jesus I know. I look forward to when a Mormon Raymond Brown tackles the New Testament and helps me see Jesus with new eyes. If you know of one, tell him or her to get writing, please.

Jesus is dead, I Presume

Jesus was a failed, apocalyptic, Jewish prophet--and not a prophet in the sense of actually making true prophecies, but just in the sense of saying things about the future.

Apparently, if I correctly paraphrased Bart Ehrman from one or more of his many Youtube appearances, this is a broad scholarly consensus regarding the historical Jesus. In his popular books, Ehrman isn't presenting anything that is new to scholars, he is just conveying it accessibly to a broader audience. Of course he will admit that there is disagreement on any number of details, and that there is room for some variety of interpretations. He also admits that history can not comment on the miraculous. By its nature, the discipline of scholarly history can't tell you anything conclusive about one off, miraculous events. But he is convinced enough of his basic analysis of Jesus that he is willing to go around preaching it. He is willing to make claims about Christian belief in the divine based on historical research.

This disconnect between scholarly history and religious experience seems obvious enough to me that for years I couldn't be bothered to pay serious attention to unbelieving scholars. I feel about it a lot like I feel about the psychology of religion. It is worth learning about because it is likely that we each hold false beliefs. Understanding scholarship can help us weed out some of our errors and can enrich our understanding. But when the scholarship goes beyond its limits, it isn't worth much. False hypothesis, arbitrary conclusion. I know revelation happens and God lives. I have data sources I accept that demonstrate this conclusively to my satisfaction. These are not data sources that I could or would use in a chemistry paper, or that I would presume prove these truths to anyone else's satisfaction. We each have to weigh evidence, and personal, internal experience (including trust in specific people, like my ancestors, or Joseph Smith) is not something you can pass on academically. I have this evidence, so I've been happy mostly limiting my scholarly intake as regards religion to scholars who share these beliefs.

My entry into biblical scholarship.

Then I started having friendly and trusting feelings (maybe it's a friendship, but it is really rather one-sided, since I know him much better than he knows me) with a New Testament scholar who is LDS but seems to believe roughly what Bart Ehrman does about Jesus. It made me want to understand, and begin to wonder if there was something more compelling in the dominant conclusions of biblical scholarship than I had imagined. How far do the limits of biblical scholarship extend? Had I been assuming those limits were too narrow, and that scholars really could say more about Jesus' life and teachings than I was giving them credit for? Of course, I knew they could say more about Jesus than I knew, but I mean did they really have something that seriously challenged the validity of my religious views of Jesus? I asked my friend for some substantial recommendations. He gave me several. I'm working my way through the recommendations, now. What follows is my emotional/logical response to one of these books:

In Jesus and Judaism, E. P. Sanders presents an attempt to understand the historical Jesus in the context of 1st century Judaism. If you want to understand the methods behind a scholarly approach to understanding Jesus, and you want an overview of major arguments made from about 1900-1975, the introduction alone is well worth reading. Honestly, I'm not much past it, but there are so many things in it that I have to write now, before I've finished the book. I'm going to give you a few examples of things I found valuable or informative.

Apparently there are only a few agreed on facts about Jesus. "The almost indisputable facts, listed more or less in chronological order are these:

1. Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist.
2. Jesus was a Galilean who preached and healed.
3. Jesus called disciples and spoke of there being twelve.
4. Jesus confined his activity to Israel.
5. Jesus engaged in a controversy about the temple.
6. Jesus was crucified outside Jerusalem by the Roman authorities.
7. After his death Jesus' followers continued as an identifiable movement.
8. At least some Jews persecuted at least parts of the new movement, and it appears that this persecution endured at least to a time near the end of Paul's career. 

End quote.

The problem(s)

The problem scholars face is tying as many of these things as possible together into a coherent story that fits the external facts of history. One difficulty in trying to tell this story is that almost every saying attributed to Jesus is suspect. This will begin to have practical consequences in the very first section of his book where Sanders discusses the temple controversy. I almost laughed aloud at this gem of a sentence on the first page of chapter 1: "Despite all this, it is overwhelmingly probable that Jesus did something in the temple and said something about its destruction." Sanders' discussion is much better than that sentence suggests, but he has really put himself, and all scholars, in a very difficult position. Before anyone can make any claims about Jesus' teachings--the very best potential window into Jesus' thought and intention--he or she must make long, detailed arguments about what Jesus actually said.

Getting back to the introduction, the problems with sayings are essentially insuperable. To summarize Sanders' stance: 1. We know the sayings have been transmitted by the church, and so have been altered, or at least maintained, in a way that biases them in favor of the church institution (this means the early Christian movement, not a specific denomination). I'm going to pause here for a little preaching about the value of taking scholarship seriously. Latter-day Saints should respect the fact that scripture has changed. According to the Pew Research Center's survey on religion, the majority of Mormons do believe this. While accepting scripture as the word of God, we do not believe in scriptural inerrancy. We save that for modern LDS interpretation as implemented in our policies, lesson manuals, and General Conference. That's from the Pew survey, too, although they didn't ask exactly that question. They asked if there is only one correct interpretation of our doctrine. About half of Latter-day Saints believed there is only one correct interpretation, despite ample evidence that interpretations of many doctrines, both central and peripheral, have changed over our 150 year history. These changes have happened even with our ample access to historical documents and our access to the printing press. Here's a clear case of, if we don't learn history we are likely to repeat it. I'll leave you to judge what we will be repeating.

Back to Sanders. 2. Tests people have used to attempt to objectively determine the original forms of sayings are unreliable. Here's another aside. We do not have sufficient documentary evidence upon which to base truly objective analyses of Jesus' teachings. You can't plug his words into a statistical program designed for assigning authorship and determine anything at all. In fact, you can barely think about doing it with Paul, and I don't think you can even do it with Paul. It's hard enough with Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, and there are many more thousands of words in documents we have from Joseph Smith. So you can't do it with statistics, but textual critics claim they can do it objectively from inferred original sources that have no direct documentary evidence. I have to say, if there weren't so many of us who revere the Bible, we'd have a lot of out of work scholars.

Sanders again. 3. "In a few instances there is indisputable evidence that a saying has been altered or perhaps created after the death of Jesus, but we can give nothing like a catalogue of the kinds of changes that may have been introduced." In other words, we know a few things changed. We have no evidence of changes in most of the sayings (other than, perhaps, a different way of paraphrasing the same message). About the only thing that can be shown (almost) conclusively is that for the few sayings where changes are clearly documented, Jesus didn't say the later version. So for most sayings we are making our most educated guesses. We are extrapolating, and extrapolating based on subjective criteria. One of Ehrman's favorite Youtube arguments is that since we know a few changes happened later, between 100 and 200 CE, the changes that happened before then must have been much bigger. I say, maybe you're right. My chemistry experience has shown me that extrapolation is the least accurate type of prediction, so show me the algorithm you used to do your extrapolation, and don't assume I'm too dumb to understand the details. This is why I wanted to read the real stuff. I wanted the best, nitty-gritty reviews of what biblical scholars know.

What would Jesus say?

What are some of the ways scholars argue authenticity? Sanders describes one type of test for authenticity of sayings called "double dissimilarity". If a saying is different from what Jews taught, and is different from what later Christians taught, then it pretty confidently came from Jesus. Sanders concludes that this is a little helpful, but not very. I think I agree, so I won't go into his discussion of the problems with this approach.

Another question that biblical scholars have to address is whether Jesus had a plan, and whether he himself knew what that plan was. They have to figure this out without knowing exactly what Jesus said, too. I don't envy them this task. In fact, Sanders claims that all of the major attempts to define this plan and draw connections from it to Jesus' death at the hands of the Romans have major flaws. The flaws he points out seem pretty convincing. I will note here that Sanders does not include among the possible hypotheses the plan as Christians (any Christians, early or late) came to understand it. Apparently it is self-evident that such an understanding was imposed after the fact and could not have been held by Jesus. In defense of Sanders and other scholars, I agree that they can't consider this possibility in their publications and be true to the standards of their profession. I should say, that is true if their funding is secular. I would not permit into a scientific journal a chemistry article that argued based on revelation, on miraculous healings, or on the resurrection of Jesus. I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't even want it as a basis for argument in Book of Mormon studies, necessarily. You can discuss these things as people's experiences, but not as a basis for rational argument. I just don't agree that the resurrection hypothesis is unworthy of examination. Thankfully, there are religiously funded scholars who can entertain and examine hypotheses that incorporate the literal resurrection of Jesus, but Sanders isn't among them (I'm not assuming he wants to be).

The resurrection

I noticed in the introduction that the resurrection of Jesus is a key part of understanding the success of early Christianity. Whether or not it happened, scholars recognize the importance of the resurrection experience as understood by early Christians. This experience (real or perceived) changed how Christians understood Jesus' sayings. Whether it also caused them to modify or invent sayings is a question that must be asked. Ah, how the waters get muddier! Already in the first chapter, this will become a problem, and the implicit assumptions of scholarly history will hijack Sanders' discussion of Jesus. He will still have interesting things to say, but their appeal to someone like me will begin to wane.

Implicit assumptions

Scholarly history requires naturalistic explanations. Jesus may have healed people, or people may have thought they were healed by Jesus, but the explanation that is not allowed is that Jesus did it inexplicably. As Latter-day Saints, we can go along with that because of people like Brigham Young who taught that all miracles obey the laws of nature, but that's not really what scholars are assuming. They are assuming Jesus couldn't have done his miracles (or perceived miracles) through the power of God. So they are rejecting the Mormon view of miracles, too. Another example. Jesus died, and the tomb might have been empty on the third day. Jesus' followers might have experienced his resurrection (hallucinations, lies from power or fame seeking leaders, self-delusions, or something), but His actual, physical resurrection cannot be part of the scholarly discourse. Let's look next at prophecy. Jesus might have had good foresight, and he certainly was a prophet, because he said things about what would happen in the future. However, Jesus can't have known that he would be resurrected (he wasn't resurrected, so he couldn't have known he would be), so the statement that the temple would be destroyed and built again after three days can't have been referring to Jesus' death and resurrection. In his first chapter, Sanders doesn't discuss this possibility. The result is an entire chapter that can't conclude anything. Sanders' conclusion is that every major naturalistic explanation of Jesus statement about the destruction of the temple is even more flawed than the one he favors. Sanders is quite good about recognizing weaknesses in his own arguments, but as Sherlock Holmes says, when you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the answer. The hypothesis that remains is that Jesus thought the end of the world was coming quick. Someone would destroy the temple, and three days later (maybe) God would bring down a newly built temple (made without hands).

I got to this point and thought, wow, I'm done. We've already proved that Jesus was a failed (his prophecy didn't come true), apocalyptic (he thought the end of the world was almost here) prophet. All that's left is to show that he's a product of 1st century Judaism, and I don't really care if that's true once I know he failed. I know Joseph Smith was a product of 19th century America, so why should it bother me if Jesus was a Jew? As you might imagine, my interest in this book declined, at this point. Sanders ignored as a possibility the very interpretation of this saying given in the Bible--namely that Jesus knew he would die and be resurrected. He was forced to ignore it by the historical method, even if it wasn't his inclination (I can't speak to that). It is possible that Sanders was right. What is not possible is that his scholarship has anything to say about the resurrection of Christ. He assumed a priori that the resurrection did not occur and that prophecy can't be more than intelligent foresight or wishful thinking. And he's not doing it in some clever mathematical way, like assuming A and showing not A, so A can't be true. He's assuming not A and showing not A. I think the word for that is tautology. As far as I know, tautologies are only proof that definitions exist. Maybe there are going to be more relevant, thoughtful discussions of the resurrection hypothesis later in the book, but I doubt it. You see, Sanders laid out his plan. He would start from the agreed on event that is most revealing of the historical Jesus--the controversy in the temple--and build on that to create the most accurate depiction of the historical Jesus. Already at his foundation he has ignored the hypothesis I favor. I'm skeptical about my ability to respect his subsequent conclusions, and there isn't really anything Sanders can do about it. His professional standards prevent it. Maybe his hypothesis is better than mine--it's certainly better informed--but they weren't ever compared.

I want to step aside and make some things clear. I am really liking the care with which Sanders presents his arguments. He has put all his cards on the table and is not shy about pointing out the limitations of his own conclusions. The one thing he hasn't said is that all his arguments are founded on this strict, atheistic naturalism. I believe in natural explanations for things. I'm committed to it, professionally. I'm also committed to it as one of those Mormons who thinks all truth, religious and scientific, can be reconciled into one great whole. I suspect we might be children of evolved Gods that came into being, innumerable generations ago, through semi-random events. But Sanders' strict naturalistic explanation has already led him away from even discussing any possibilities I could believe in. It looks like most of the rest of the book is dedicated to supporting the hypothesis that Jesus is a failed, apocalyptic, Jewish prophet, but without comparing it to the hypothesis that Jesus was a successful deity. If, at the end of the day, he concludes that he has accurately shown who the historical Jesus was, all I can say is, you didn't even examine the Jesus I know.

I'll finish with Sanders' own conclusion to his introduction:

That the problem we have posed is not susceptible of a rock-hard answer which absolutely excludes all others is shown not only by the difficulties which can be brought against any hypothesis, but also by the very large number of hypotheses. It is almost a foregone conclusion that a fresh attempt to unravel the problem--or rather set of problems--which we have posed will not come up with a totally new answer. There are no totally new answers (except for fictional constructions) to be offered. We shall, however, investigate the most pertinent points in an effort to come up with the best answer. One is looking for a hypothesis which explains more (not everything), which gives a good account (not the only one) of what happened, which fits Jesus realistically into his environment, and which has in view cause and effect.

Is it beating a dead horse to add, a hypothesis that fits the naturalistic assumptions of the historical method?

My conclusions

• I like the care with which Sanders approaches his work. I assume many other biblical scholars take similar care.
• If something in the Bible or in our beliefs is subject to measurement, we should not only be unafraid to measure it, it is incumbent upon us to do so. The Gospel is all truth, so if we want to believe the Gospel, we better be willing to throw away falsehood as we uncover it. This means that we should be looking to these careful scholars for answers where their methods are justly applied. Growth requires restraining our defensive instincts.
• Biblical scholarship is inherently limited by naturalistic assumptions. So is science. That shouldn't stop us from doing it, but Reader Beware when you turn to history asking it to speak on subjects outside of its scope. If you assume Jesus is dead, it should be no surprise that your conclusions agree with your assumptions.
• If you can't identify the assumptions behind the scholarship, you don't understand the scholarship. It may not be your fault. The experts may not have told you what they assume. Some assumptions may be such integral parts of their thought that they don't even recognize them anymore. That's what makes them experts. If they had to start from the ground up with everything they wrote, no progress would be made. But don't think that because there is scholarly consensus it means that the story is over. Especially when the scholars themselves are giving answers to questions they say that scholarship can't conclusively answer.
• I don't think I have the patience or interest to seek out the good in biblical scholarship and reexamine it in light of the things I "know" about God, revelation, the temple, and the plan of salvation.
• I hope Latter-day Saints who do have the patience and the interest will carefully examine the work of these scholars and communicate the best of it to me. I can't imagine that my religious experience and understanding will be anything but enriched by such efforts. 
• To scholars: if it's important to you that I understand the work of scholars, don't tell me to go read a synthesis by an unbeliever. I'll see his assumptions and constantly be fighting suspicion of his conclusions. I'll be wondering  Write it yourself with assumptions of unbelief weeded out. Show me how your conclusions aren't predetermined by unbelieving assumptions. I'll hear it better.

I'll continue a while longer working through my reading list. There has already been lots of interesting stuff in the first parts of the first two books (I haven't written about the other). Maybe the books my friend says are from "a more faithful perspective" will be more interesting to me. I don't have time or patience for scholars who look for the historical Jesus while assuming He's dead.

Parenting, Childhood, and Separation

A repost from Rational Faiths for my personal blog readers.

An Australian working mother and BBC reporter, Madeleine Morris, is producing a series of short documentaries on childcare around the world. She's asking, "Who's left holding the baby?" She began with Australian nursery, or daycare. (Unfortunately, I can't find a link to the podcast.) Her child goes to nursery, and lots of parents really like it; however, it can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year for a family. It seems that a good daycare can avoid most of the reported negatives of daycare, and can even provide some benefits that a typical home can't, but it's still hard for many children and parents to be separated. It's especially hard when children can go into daycare as young as 6 weeks old. From Australia she went to Fiji, where communal child rearing is still practiced. Children are watched over and disciplined by everyone, but are also left to play their own games and work out their own conflicts, most of the time. The Fijian children show a resilience and confidence that is attractive to Madeleine, and her three year-old joins right in with their play, but they aren't as well prepared to deal with the particular rigors of the kind of schooling that Australian children are prepared for.

In the second installment (I hope it stays available) she visits an elite kindergarten boarding school in China. I get the impression these schools were developed for some very good reasons--for helping with orphans and for families where both parents have to work very long hours. The school that was visited evaluates applicants and encourages families to put their children in daycare only, if possible. During the day, the children seem happy. There is a lot to do, and they are helped to play and learn based on their interests, not some fixed curriculum. These programs were started many years ago. Many of the adults deal with aftereffects of feeling abandoned, and don't know how to interact with their families. Others have adapted well, but China is largely phasing out these boarding kindergartens. The painful part was when the reporter described bedtime. Some of the children are three years old. Bedtime means lights out with 20 children and only two--admittedly loving--teachers. Most children won't cry for even a half hour before going to sleep. That's all. They're resilient. Yeah.

I have a four year-old and a two year-old. They don't go to sleep without one of their parents. We probably could have trained them to go to sleep on their own, but I'll tell you, even if it were a good thing, it doesn't work for everyone. As a baby, our four year-old didn't just fall asleep after crying for 15 minutes. The times we had to set him down by himself because we couldn't hold him, he would cry for half an hour and then throw up and keep crying some more. I want to cry just remembering. As a four year-old, he chose to stop going to playschool because he doesn't like saying goodbye to us. He loved playschool some days. Some days he didn't want to come home (they have a playground), but after two months of twice a week, he said he didn't want to go anymore. Just recently my two year-old woke up early. We ate breakfast together, him sitting on my lap, but then I needed to go to work. There I was, putting on my bike helmet and closing the door on my child--the child who loves going outside, loves riding in the bike trailer, loves his dad, and has never spent more than a couple of minutes alone and awake in his entire life. I saw the tears and panic forming in his eyes. I saw the undefined sense of abandonment and questioning on his face as I closed the door between us. I was crying and doing my G-rated version of cursing in my head as I rode away. (Maybe you are getting the sense that I cry a lot. I do, recently, but it's good for my mental health, so don't worry.) Tying this all back in to the BBC documentaries, I agree with Madeleine Morris's conclusions. Children are resilient, parents and families have to make the best choices they can, and lots of different choices can be good parenting. Judging parenting styles is not the point of my writing. I'm headed toward another analogy.

I find LDS theology all-consuming. I have Heavenly Parents. They shut the door between us, and sometimes I feel alone and panicked. I don't know how long it is going to go on. I don't know what scary things will happen while we are separated. I do trust in two things: my Parents didn't shut the door until I chose to walk out it--until I thought I was ready to leave the garden--and my Parents cry for my pain and wish I didn't have to feel alone and abandoned.

I'm Mormon. It's just who I am. There isn't a specific why. Maybe I'm not simply a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but the Plan of Salvation is my story. I live it, I breath it, I think about it. I struggle with it, I'm a product of it, I'm a perpetrator of it. I live the pain of separation and sin, I strive for exaltation. I believe the Gospel is everything that's true and real (and not anything that is false or fake), and I don't know what it means to exist outside of that. So I'm Mormon.

Before Abraham Was and the Book of Mormon

Heads up: 3000+ words. I plan to post a 1500 word version of this review on rationalfaiths.com sometime next year. Only read if you are really interested.

I believe the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be and that we got it in the way Joseph Smith says we got it. You shouldn't assume too much about the details of my belief from that statement, but in broad strokes I am a literal believer. Here is my current model of how the Book of Mormon came to be:

• Ancient prophets kept records, and Mormon, with help from Moroni, compiled, edited, and preserved these records as described in the Book of Mormon itself.
• Joseph Smith received gold plates which contained this record. (See contemporary, first hand witness accounts of the existence of these plates.)
• Joseph Smith translated this record by inspiration, not by reading the words and using a dictionary. Joseph Smith dictated the entire Book of Mormon without notes or outside reference. (See first hand witness accounts.)
• The translation was tightly controlled, but not ironclad. God inspired Joseph with the ideas to write, including some specific wordings and spellings of names. Joseph contributed his own language only as any other faithful translator would. (See works of Royal Skousen on how studying the original and printers manuscripts illustrate tight control rather than loose or ironclad control. See the non-contextual word analyses of John Hilton and his collaborators for objective evidence that large portions of the Book of Mormon do not match Joseph Smith's use of language.)
• The King James Version wording of biblical passages was inspired so that we could make rigorous connections between ancient Hebrew and Greek biblical words and the language of the Book of Mormon. If Joseph had presented a new translation of the same passages, or if he had used 19^th century language instead of KJV language in non-biblical Book of Mormon passages, we would not be able to make direct connections between biblical meanings and Book of Mormon passages. The exact quotations tell us that when the Book of Mormon uses KJV words, we can with confidence examine biblical meanings of those words to better understand the Book of Mormon, and we can use Book of Mormon meanings of those words to more fully comprehend the Bible. (See Legrand Baker and Stephen Ricks, Who Shall Ascend unto the Hill of the Lord, for an example of the potential fruits of this approach for a believing reader.) Subpoint: Errors present in the KJV of Joseph's day were only corrected when there was an important difference in meaning. Other anachronistic errors were ignored, or Joseph made mistakes in his translation because of prejudiced knowledge of the passages—the errors of men, which the Book of Mormon itself claims to have.

This view of the Book of Mormon means that I believe the Isaiah passages were copied by Nephi from the Brass Plates. This means that I believe that Jesus actually gave the Sermon on the Mount, and that it wasn't compiled later from collections of wisdom sayings. This means I believe that Mormon compiled the whole thing (almost), and that it wasn't put together through some inspired conglomeration of 1. ancient stories revealed to or invented by Joseph Smith, 2. selections from the King James Version of the Bible, and 3. nineteenth century wisdom and sermons. This view apparently leaves me open to scholarly criticism. It seems that the Bible, as seen through the Book of Mormon, doesn't line up with the Bible as seen through 150+ years of biblical scholarship. I'll be up front about what does and doesn't bother me. Rejecting biblical inerrancy works for me. Recognizing inconsistencies that need explanation works for me. Recognizing editorial changes, especially in the selection of which texts are recognized as canon, works for me. Making educated guesses about how editorial changes might have happened and what was changed works for me. Claiming that because biblical scholarship has 150 years of consensus, so I should accept that and do mental gymnastics to explain how Joseph Smith could have put deutero-Isaiah into the Book of Mormon seems crazy to me. So before I invent new explanations of the Book of Mormon translation process that stretch the historical record, I'm going to need to be really convinced.

I'm not a biblical scholar, but I 'm a trained scientist. I figured I was smart enough to understand the biblical scholarship if I found the right stuff and put in enough time, and I decided it was time to find out for myself. I had two problems with continuing forward on the authority of my favorite Latter-day Saint scholars and friends: 1. I'm a chemist with a healthy respect for the academy. 2. I'm a Mormon who engages with other Mormons who don't accept the positions of the LDS scholars as readily as I do. So I picked up some available biblical scholarship for a general audience. It was depressing. Most of it was too shallow to judge the scholarship on its merits. Of the more serious books, I found one author who explained how different verses in the creation account in Genesis could be assigned to three separate sources. I'd heard of the Documentary Hypothesis, and read that it was the dominant working theory in Old Testament studies (and I think New Testament, too, in a different form), but no one had ever really explained it to me. The summaries and books I somewhat randomly picked up didn't help. I couldn't take them seriously.

I have some professional biases regarding evidence. I'm a biophysical chemist which, in my case, means I do research relying heavily on numerical data and the laws of thermodynamics—a bit like we imagine physicists do. I also deal with approximations and qualitative data—a lot like many biologists. So I view myself as having a pretty good grasp of the problems involved in trying to relate exact data to approximate conclusions. When biophysicists make assumptions and approximations, I expect them to state the assumptions clearly, discuss potential sources of error, and evaluate how big those errors are likely to be. I wanted to hold biblical scholars to these standards and see how their conclusions measured up. I'm still working on the New Testament, thanks to some great recommendations from a friend. As for the Old Testament I might have gotten lucky with one book I found.

Before Abraham Was: The Unity of Genesis 1-11, by Isaac M. Kikawada and Arthur Quinn, sells itself as “A provocative challenge to the documentary hypothesis.” At the time it was written (1985), both authors were professors and the University of California at Berkeley, so I suspected they didn't fit into the camp of conservative Christians who oppose the documentary hypothesis, or Mormon scholars who dismiss it on various grounds. I was not disappointed with the book. In fact, it was a wonderful read.

The first thing Kikawada and Quinn did was convince me that the scholars who argue for and elaborate on the documentary hypothesis aren't universally idiots or ideologues (something I suspected, but my unsystematic initial approach had not confirmed). They did it by separating out the entire flood account into two stories. I'll give you a piece. Notice how you can read one and then read the other and it really sounds like two complete, and different, tellings of the same story:

The waters prevailed and increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark floated on the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed so mightily upon the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered; the waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep. And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, birds, cattle, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm upon the earth, and every man. And the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days. But god remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed. At the end of a hundred and fifty days the waters had abated; and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest upon the mountains of Ararat. And the waters continued to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen. In the six hundred and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried from off the earth. In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dry. Then God said to Noah, “Go forth from the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons' wives with you. Bring forth with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh—birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth—that they may breed abundantly on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply upon the earth.” So Noah went forth, and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives with him. And every beast, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves upon the earth, went forth by families out of the ark.

The flood continued forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth. Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. He blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the ground, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark. The rain from the heavens was restrained, and the waters receded from the earth continually. At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made, and sent forth a raven; and it went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth. Then he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground; but the dove found no place to set her foot, and she returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put forth his hand and took her and brought her into the ark with him. He waited another seven days, and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark; and the dove came back to him in the evening, and lo, in her mouth a freshly plucked olive leaf; so Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth. Then he waited another seven days, and sent forth the dove; and she did not return to him anymore. And Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and behold the face of the ground was dry.

If you leave out the chapter and verse numbers, you could read the first account and think, “Yep, that's the incredibly boring Old Testament that I made myself slog through so I could say I read the entire Old Testament in Seminary.” If you read the second account, you'd think, “Yep, these are the Bible stories I heard in Sunday School when I was a kid.” That's an oversimplification, but it's how I now understand the motivation behind making the documentary hypothesis. It turns out you can split up nearly all of Genesis 1-11 in this way, and you can use fairly consistent clues in the text itself to tell you how to divide it. Of course it doesn't work perfectly, but it works so well that biblical scholars have been able to argue for it, and about it, for 150 years or more. I was actually relieved that it finally made sense to me. My emotions would now let me start taking mainstream biblical scholars more seriously. But Kikawada and Quinn were just doing this to set up their main argument.

The central premise of Kikawada and Quinn's arguments is that the presumed sole author of Genesis 1-11 is at least as clever and conscious of form and content as other great authors throughout history. This contrasts greatly with assumptions implicit (and at times explicit) in the documentary hypothesis. You see, the Old Testament is littered with seemingly nonsensical contradictions and questionably moral stories. In elaborating the documentary hypothesis, scholars have carefully picked apart these inconsistencies and suggested that an (apparently sloppy or careless) editor or editors put the Pentateuch (and other books) together from at least three different sources. Only by splitting it up in this way can you explain all the textual difficulties. This approach has also fostered the view (popular with a number of my Transhumanist friends) that the Old Testament is morally backward and that modern morality is much more evolved. Kikawada and Quinn have taken what seems to me a humbler approach (although they've taken it with great pride in how they have seen more than 150 years of previous biblical scholars). Instead of assuming carelessness and moral smallness, they assume intelligence, rhetorical skill, and great feeling for humanity. It appears you can use this perspective to reinterpret many of the same passages that were evidence of the documentary hypothesis. Overlooked evidence of careful craftsmanship starts turning up everywhere you look, with hints that further study will reveal even more.

The primary example of conscious craftsmanship is found in a pattern belonging to another pre-biblical work, the Akkadian Atrahasis Epic. The pattern is:

1. Creation
2. First Threat
3. Second Threat
4. Final Threat
5. Resolution

This pattern is found in the story of Adam and Eve, the story of Noah, and the story of the tower of Babel. It appears again with Moses, and arguably with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and with David and Solomon. It's almost fractal like, or nested in its appearances, with the pattern being recognizable on the level of individual stories, and also at the level of the entire Pentateuch. Kikawada and Quinn demonstrate how the several stories that the documentary hypothesis splits apart actually contribute to faithfully reproducing the pattern. It is very possible Kikawada and Quinn are reading too much into the text, but I find the fruits of Kikawada and Quinn's approach more rewarding than those of the documentary hypothesis, so for now I'll work from there.

What are some of those fruits? First they give me increased respect for Book of Mormon scholarship. I see critical scholars (and simply critics) pooh-poohing the work of Jack Welch on chiasmus in the Book of Mormon. Kikawada and Quinn rely heavily on evidence and interpretation of chiasm in Genesis and elsewhere in the Bible, quoting and citing biblical scholars who use chiasm as evidence. It appears that to ignore Welch's work would require rejection of a common element in mainstream biblical scholarship, and the scholarship of ancient literature more generally. I see Book of Mormon scholars making great efforts to pay close attention to the Book of Mormon text and to incorporate evidence from outside—looking at biblical scholarship, 19^th century scholarship, mesoamerican and near eastern studies, and language and rhetorical analysis. Kikawada and Quinn criticize proponents of the documentary hypothesis for Genesis of remaining too closely in their narrow, reductionist textual analysis and thus arriving at unsubstantiated conclusions—conclusions that have been discarded elsewhere in classical studies because of a greater availability of external data for comparison.

The second fruit is a continued respect for the moral authority of the Bible. I don't find the Old Testament backwards. I don't find modern humanity so incredibly superior. Many Old Testament stories are violent, nationalistic, racist, sexist, etc., but the moral messages found in these stories most often seem complex, human, and humane, to me. Maybe I'm just seeing what I want to see, but when Kikawada and Quinn assume intelligence and humanity in the authors, they are able to find what seems to me substantial and coherent evidence supporting that hypothesis.

The last fruit is my own synthesis of an explicit theme running throughout the book. Kikawada and Quinn see in Genesis, and much of the Old Testament, a rejection of cities and civilization and a glorification of the nomadic lifestyle. With cities and civilization come problems of overcrowding, overpopulation, overutilization of resources, and a resulting devaluing of new births. The Bible, on the other hand, praises and commands the spreading of children over the whole earth, praises the nomadic lifestyle not controlled by kings or by the trappings of civilization, and emphasizes the movement and action of God himself. By the end, they managed to convince me that this theme might really be there. And I like it. As you read on, you find that it isn't simply a “nomads are more righteous than city folk” morality, but it does highlight two virtues that really attract me. First, God and all of his chosen people are expected to keep moving. I see in this shades of eternal progression. Second, having lots of children is a good thing. I see in this a morality that fits with an evolutionarily successful God.

Where does this leave me? I'll give a comparison a biblical scholar friend of mine used when describing Book of Mormon apologetics. He called it, “All the evidence we don't have agrees with us.” I admit a little delight in turning it back on biblical scholars. Where are the separate documents? There are, according to the documentary hypothesis, at least four, and some argue more, separate sources necessary to maintain the documentary hypothesis for the Pentateuch. My understanding is that none of them have been found. The only documents we have already have all of the sources mixed together. No one has found the stories split apart, or combined in ways that only use two of the sources but not the third or fourth. In this regard, Kikawada and Quinn's hypothesis is much simpler. They don't have to postulate unidentifiable sources, but instead provide an extant ancient source as a text which the author of Genesis may have used as a model and may have been responding to. They postulate a single, skilled author, which seems to me more typical of literature that has lasted to our day than does composite editing. So what do I say to critics who would have me defend the Bible quotes found in the Book of Mormon? I'll read your arguments and try to understand them, if you've made them accessible to me. But you need to show me first and second Isaiah. Show me the wisdom literature that was pieced together into the Sermon on the Mount. Then I will feel a need to defend and explain the Book of Mormon. Until then, I'm not the one claiming that all the evidence we don't have agrees with me. I'm the one providing the hard evidence. The Book of Mormon is right in front of you. The history is there to show that it was dictated entirely by Joseph Smith. The objective statistics are there to show that large parts of it were written by authors other than Joseph Smith. Address some of these data in a respectful, scholarly, and compelling way and then I will feel compelled to respond. Until then, I hope you're having fun. I'll do my best to be respectful of those who blindly trust your authority, but don't be surprised if I roll my eyes when I hear you rehash the same old material.