Physics Guy wrote: ↑Sun Dec 10, 2023 8:27 am
Are the Book of Mormon and the Bible really equally mythical? Perhaps, by some definitions of "myth". Places like Egypt and Jerusalem really existed, but Biblical stories like the Tower of Babel and Noah's Flood are as fictional as anything Smith made up. If the only question about Scripture is whether or not it is as literally true as the fundamentalists would have it to be, then the Bible and the Book of Mormon both get the same answer, No.
That's not the only question that interests me, though. To me it's important that the Biblical stories actually come from a very long time ago. They may only be stories, but they are authentically ancient stories. They offer a glimpse through the eyes of our ancestors, from a time when mud bricks seemed like such a wonderfully powerful technology that they would let us do anything. As an origin myth for the diversity of human languages, the Tower of Babel myth isn't especially inventive, but it does let me know that people way, way back then were aware that different human groups spoke different languages, and that they thought of this as a problem, and wondered why it was so.
What really impresses me about the Tower of Babel story is not the language diversity origin myth itself (God just did it) but the connection it makes between language and human capability. Somehow, so long ago, somebody set down the insight that we still need today: what's going to limit us isn't going to be our technology. It's going to be our ability to communicate with each other.
Noah's great global Flood didn't happen, either. All life on Earth does not descend from the Ark. The story does contain some keeper features, though. There's the insight that a lot of animal populations owe their existence to human cultivation. Humans really have changed the biosphere on a large scale—and this was already sufficiently apparent in ancient times that a story about humans preserving all animals wasn't too ridiculous to tell. And although it's easy to focus on the Flood itself, much of the story's drama is about Noah laboriously building an enormous ship on dry land, because he has an insider tip about an upcoming deluge. The Biblical story doesn't build this up as much as it could; the popular idea that Noah's neighbours all mocked him, for all his work on a ship on dry land, isn't in the Bible. It is in the Quran, though. It's a natural addition to the story. Sometimes crazy ideas turn out to be good; sometimes long shots pay off.
When your collection of myths is one that has been filtered and curated over many centuries, what survives tends to have valuable stuff in it, even if not every part of it is valuable. And even the crud that comes along with the good bits through history is still at least ancient crud, that tells us a bit about how things were at a distant waypoint along the path from primitive humanity to us.
Joseph Smith's fabrications, in contrast, are from 1830s New England. That place and time are of some historical interest, all right, but the stream of human culture had already broadened into a pretty wide delta by that point, and only a small fraction of today's human world has to be traced back through Smith's world. As a glimpse of a vanished world from which we all came, Mormon Scriptures are less valuable than the Bible.
Furthermore the fictional content in the Mormon Scriptures, even where they don't just echo the Bible, was curated by only one guy—or perhaps a small group of collaborators—and not by the wisdom of crowds over centuries. It's not the treasure of ages. It's just the treasure of Smith. Even if Smith had been doing nothing but sincerely writing down the best inspirations he had, he'd have been drawing on a much more limited source of inspiration than all the many lives that produced the Bible. In fact I don't think Smith was that sincere. He may have had a few good ideas, but I think he was mainly just trying to imitate the Old Testament so he could set up as Prophet. So I think he was less original than he could have been. He couldn't afford to be so original that people would notice how different his product was from the Bible.
The specifically Mormon Scriptures may be no less literally true than most if not all of the Bible or the Quran or the Bhagavad Gita. This is only a decisive point for fundamentalists, though. By other significant standards, the Books of Mormon and Abraham are really quite different from genuine ancient Scriptures. The Mormon Books don't preserve as many gems from the past, and they don't even show us real crud from the past.