The Gay Research Professor of Egyptology wrote:Bokovoy's larger argument is that members of the Church need not view their scriptures as historical, because, after all, the Israelites did not see their scriptures as historical. He sees Latter-day Saints who view their scriptures as historical as holding a problematic view
Like an average Freshman in a first-year composition course, Gee does a mediocre job demolishing an argument that his opponent doesn't actually make.
Bokovoy argues that Biblical books are not about propositional faith (to borrow a theological term), i.e. whether or not the stories they tell really happened is not their primary concern. They are thus not history at all.
Gee, on the other hand, wants to argue that Israelite writers and readers had a very similar conception of history to that of modern Mormons. But he seems oblivious to the fact that the citations from the Books of Kings he musters for his position actually argue against that position. Picking at random one of those citations:
"And the rest of the acts of Amaziah, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?" (2 Kings 14:18)
Gee wants this to be evidence that the Israelite writer of 2 Kings conceived of history much like a college-educated, tithe-paying Mormon: you assemble sources and cite them in the process of making your argument. Therefore, for Gee, the Israelite writer and his readers were just as concerned that the deeds of Amaziah actually happened as recounted in 2 Kings as believing Mormons are that 1 Nephi happened as Nephi says it did. This is why, for Gee, the writer of 2 Kings references the "book of chronicles" (whatever that means): it's a footnote, as it were, that supports his argument by referring to an authoritative source. Thus are the facts established and every Israelite can go on believing that Amaziah was a true king. And that 2 Kings is a true book. And that Judah was a true bronze age polity.
But if you read this in context, this isn't a citation meant to support a historiographical argument; it's a signal that the Amaziah story in Kings should not be read annalistically because it is not going to give a full account of Amaziah's deeds--go to the annals for that--and his very long reign (25 years) in fact gets a cursory treatment (20 verses maybe?). The only thing that matters in the 2 Kings account is what happens to an Israelite king when he starts worshiping Edomite idols.
The Amaziah episode is, in sum, a morality tale about worshiping the wrong god(s). It doesn't depend on the putative annals; pace Gee, this is a not a case of a historian citing his source to support an argument. What this verse shows is that the Israelite writer is consciously eschewing the Israelite conventions of history (annalistic as it seems to have been) for some other, non-historical purpose--which is exactly what Bokovoy says. Did the Israelite writer believe the events surrounding Amaziah really happened? Probably, but that is not his main objective. A closer reading of the texts that Gee cites shows that they support Bokovoy's reading, not Gee's.
More generally, Bokovoy's argument that historicity shouldn't be the primary concern of devotional readers is hardly a secular position. And thus we see the comic irony of the whole Maxwell Institute melee: the supposedly secular academics who run it now are being attacked for pushing new, non-historical readings that actually provide an intellectual space for theological readings, and their attackers are the supposedly faithful traditional FARMSians who, it turns out, think the only valid way to read these texts is through the same Rankean, positivist lens that we would expect from Richard Dawkins, not faithful priesthood holders--except, of course, when post-modernism becomes more convenient, as Gadianton reminds us.
Bokovoy is trying to construct new ways to think about the Book of Mormon theologically; and FARMSians insist that the only proper way is to read it empirically.
So, I ask you, who are the real secularists here?
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
—B. Redd McConkie