And every author who attempts to imitate a particular genre puts a lot of effort into making it conform to expectations for the genre. That makes the imitation an issue. Starting with the assumption it is legitimate scripture without considering the possibility it is not scripture is a bad starting assumption that can only weaken the resulting analysis.
If you write in the scriptural genre, you follow the conventions of the genre. I don't think that is too difficult to understand.
Here's an example of what I mean by 'whataboutism':
Does it bother you that Genesis, Job, Daniel, and Revelation are not history? Does it bother you to know that while Jesus most likely lived, and that Pilate most definitely did, we really don’t know how much of what Mark wrote actually happened?
And a definition:
Whataboutism is an argumentative tactic where a person or group responds to an accusation or difficult question by deflection. Instead of addressing the point made, they counter it with “but what about X?”.
The arguments so far haven't gone beyond multiple statements containing similar 'whataboutisms' to explain why the B of M should be considered actual 'scripture.' Just assuming it is isn't sufficient, especially when we know so much about the history of the author. I'd be interested in an argument as to why it should be considered scripture, rather than just an attempt to imitate scripture, which the historical record overwhelmingly suggests that it is.
Hmmm. So, you would not think it was appropriate to judge two texts in the same genre by the same standards. OK! I don't agree, obviously.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
In one way of looking at it, the sermons of David Koresh were also scripture for those who followed him. For children raised within the compound, the world of those sermons was every bit as real as the world of a child attending Catechism or a child singing "Book of Mormon Stories" in primary. You can't say the subjective mythological quality of Koresh's visionary landscapes were any less profound for his followers than for people raised in a large conventional church with rich history and tradition. Possibly even more, given the isolation and constant exposure.
On this level, the Book of Mormon, the Bible, and the sermons of Koresh are equal. My question would be, is there an objective way to compare the Book of Mormon and the sermons of David Koresh? Can the Book of Mormon be shown in some objective way to be mythology of better quality than Koresh's sermons? I have no suggestions on how to do it. But suppose we come up with a method, then that study would be a calibration of the method in order to compare the Book of Mormon with the Bible. If there is a consistent way to show the Book of Mormon superior to Koresh's sermons while equal to the Bible, then that would be what we're shooting for.
This is a great post. In other words, our moral judgment of the author of the scripture is immaterial. Good. Now we are getting somewhere. You also recognize that what is considered scripture by a group is one criterion for what might be considered to belong to the genre of scripture. I would also add, that scripture as a genre is really a Christian invention, although it does borrow much from earlier textual traditions in which the author was considered inspired and the text was considered a bottomless font of divine truth.
But, I have to confess that I know very little about the sermons of Koresh. I would guess they might be compared to New Testament epistles to an extent. His followers probably do see him as inspired and his words a font of divine truth.
Thank you for bringing this up. In bringing up a person who is clearly objectionable to most people other than his few followers, one might expect me to get worked up and try to avoid the obvious similarities with special pleading (definitely the kind of thing Marcus expects of me). But I am guessing that you realize that arguing for the scriptural status of the Book of Mormon is not (for me) part of defending Joseph Smith as a great guy that others should follow. Instead, I think the question of what fits the genre of scripture is entirely separable from our agreement with its teachings or esteem for the character of the author.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Say the earth was about to be destroyed and we had a small capsule to shoot into space and there enough room for one more document, would we send the Bible, the Book of Mormon, or the sermons of Koresh? Obviously, the Bible.
However, the Bible has nothing to do with Christian beliefs per se.
Take someone of high intelligence who has never heard of Christianity and give them a Bible in their language from Genesis to Revelation without footnotes or commentary, and ask them to read it and explain what God's message is, and nobody would ever come up with anything in Christianity as we know it.
The sermons of David Koresh (and the Book of Mormon) probably have far more in common with the average Christian than the Bible does, as Koresh was a direct product of Christianity. The Sermons of Koresh are probably more "scripture" than most of the Bible, based on the average believer's expectations of what scripture is.
I've read the Old Testament, there is no coherent message or moral insight anyone would take seriously without substantial commentary and situating. But why would there be? I used to read the Gathas and totally incomprehensible. Same thing. Why wouldn't it be?
If Christianity invented scripture then there isn't really a such a thing as scripture. It's a completely fictional construct, because what Christianity says the Bible is and what the Bible actually is, is night and day. Scripture then, is a myth of its own.
Absolutely. Go research the definition of scripture in scholarship and there is no real consensus. It is obviously a made-up thing, or, to be more precise, a construct that evolved in conjunction with Christianity itself, that subsequently was spuriously applied to the important texts of other traditions. But, it does exert a generic influence on Western literature, of course, and the Book of Mormon is one example of that influence. It is designed to be a new Bible, new scripture, and yet it is its own thing as well, not being perfectly like the Bible.
But for those who value it, it is inspiring. Just as people find meaning in the Bible. In both cases religious communities tell their members what to think of and how to interpret these texts. People are always happy to tell their neighbors what a text “really means.”
In any case, the Book of Mormon seems to do its job well enough for the groups that use it. I still enjoy it. It is definitely the rough-cut work of a single author. I do think it is a lot more interesting and complex than it generally gets credit for or is understood by most of its readers. Complex meaning that more thought and knowledge went into its composition than one might think.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
...If Christianity invented scripture then there isn't really a such a thing as scripture. It's a completely fictional construct...
Apparently so. If the definition of 'scripture' is this broad, then any writings that any type of community finds of value can be called 'scripture,' regardless of any knowledge of the writer, and even regardless of content. The Pilgrims Progress, Tolkien's series, the serialization of Star Trek or Dr Who episodes, the Unabomber's Treatise, Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, The Chronicles of Narnia, any and every group meeting at Comic Con, every channeled word ever, etc., etc., etc.
If, by this rule, we consider any writings to be 'scripture' without considering the situation of the writing or the attributes of the writer (which I believe was your point with the Koresh example) then the definition of scripture becomes meaningless.
Just because a con artist can adequately imitate the language and style of 'scripture' doesn't mean his writings should be taken as scripture. The situation is more complex than that.
In any case, the Book of Mormon seems to do its job well enough for the groups that use it. I still enjoy it. It is definitely the rough-cut work of a single author. I do think it is a lot more interesting and complex than it generally gets credit for or is understood by most of its readers. Complex meaning that more thought and knowledge went into its composition than one might think.
Kishkumen, I think I understand and respect this observation. I may not share the feeling but understand others may value the book in a variety of ways. I can find myself considering what responsibility I have in respecting the book. Respect for what others find valuable says I should hold some dimensions of respect for the book. I do not think "God Makers" uses that respect. I think It is more difficult to judge Tanners' balance between investigation, understanding, and respect. I would not claim their approach to be ideal.
I somehow doubt that your reading is governed by what others tell you the Book of Mormon must mean. You might not find Benson inspired John Birch messages in it as some do. I have encountered people who saw in the Book of Mormon the opposite sort of message. My observation is from a limited sample and the sample individuals did not remain active in the church.
Last edited by huckelberry on Mon Dec 11, 2023 9:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
...If Christianity invented scripture then there isn't really a such a thing as scripture. It's a completely fictional construct...
Apparently so. If the definition of 'scripture' is this broad, then any writings that any type of community finds of value can be called 'scripture,' regardless of any knowledge of the writer, and even regardless of content. The Pilgrims Progress, Tolkien's series, the serialization of Star Trek or Dr. Who episodes, the Unabomber's Treatise, Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, The Chronicles of Narnia, any and every group meeting at Comic Con, every channeled word ever, etc., etc., etc.
If, by this rule, we consider any writings to be 'scripture' without considering the situation of the writing or the attributes of the writer (which I believe was your point with the Koresh example) then the definition of scripture becomes meaningless.
Just because a con artist can adequately imitate the language and style of 'scripture' doesn't mean his writings should be taken as scripture. The situation is more complex than that.
Marcus, I found myself thinking about the same question as I hear you presenting here. I was thinking one definition would be things people find either revealing or containing revelation not to be lost.
I notice the Stranger in a Strange Land mention. I read that book, I think still in high school, and thought it a life giving revelation. Now that feeling did not really last well and I have a hard time thinking of why it should have been significant in a large sense. Later in a difficult time of life I found the Iliad to be a source of spiritual strength, scripture. I read it several times finding it more solid that the Heinlein book. I found no obligation to believe the theology of course.
Thinking about what is scripture I found myself thinking that what is most revealing of Jesus is not he did this or that but the stories he told. As a teller of fictional stories he created scripture and inspired a world religion. Well he enacted his stories in some ways as well.
Kishkumen, I think I understand and respect this observation. I may not share the feeling but understand others may value the book in a variety of ways. I can find myself considering what responsibility I have in respecting the book. Respect for what others find valuable says I should hold some dimensions of respect for the book. I do not think "God Makers" uses that respect. I think It is more difficult to judge Tanners' balance between investigation, understanding, and respect. I would not claim their approach to be ideal.
I somehow doubt that your reading is governed by what others tell you the Book of Mormon must mean. You might not find Benson inspired John Birch messages in it as some do. I have encountered people who saw in the Book of Mormon the opposite sort of message. My observation is from a limited sample and the sample individuals did not remain active in the church.
Respect that others find the book valuable. Yes. In that way you might indirectly respect the book, or maybe you just don’t bother denigrating it. And I don’t think you are the kind of person who would go out of their way to denigrate, anyway.
As for the meaning, well, I have spoken mostly about the community consensus of the significance and meaning of a text, which shifts over time and has a changing and somewhat unmoored relationship with the text’s contents. This can be good or bad.
On a personal level, I think there should always be room for the oracular use of scripture. In other words, scripture is a book that one searches for new divine meanings in.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Deciding what counts as Scripture—what the term even means—probably slides inevitably into trying to decide how words in general even work. Maybe it's worth just jumping to the end of that slide.
Sound waves hit your eardrum, you hear something. Most of the time you ignore it; sometimes you react. You might react as if to the nearby roar of a tiger, even though the sound is just some words—for example, if the words are, "Ahhh, a tiger!" In our easy times the words might be about a chance to make a killing on BitCoin six months from now, and you're probably better off not reacting, but you could.
Language only works because of a lot of pre-conditioning in our brains, and that infrastructure starts before we even start learning the meanings of words. It starts with learning to recognise the sounds that make a difference in your language, which really means learning not to notice sound differences that aren't meaningful in your language. That way everything that's kind of close to a "t" sounds to you like a perfect "t", and you extract the signal from the noise, automatically. This is a part of language learning that is much harder to get when you learn a language as an adult. My comprehension of German drops abruptly to zero above a certain level of background noise, whereas I have no trouble at all hearing English at the same background noise level.
Trying to jump all the way back from phonemes to Scripture, I'm thinking that pre-conditioned tendency to see some things, and ignore others, is probably part of human perception fractally, on all levels. If someone grows up with the Book of Mormon, they're probably going to see things in it, and not see other things, in different ways from how I'm going to read the same Book. Maybe their minds just skip right past things that jar me, the way I don't even notice an English speaker's small verbal stumbles, but in German they stump me. So maybe someone to whom the Book of Mormon is Scripture is still making out spiritual content when the background noise of awkward archaic English and nineteenth-century tropes has turned it all into gibberish for me.
And maybe you don't even have to grow up with a Scripture to have that kind of conditioning for it. Maybe you can become conditioned to resonate well with a particular text through life experiences before you ever encounter the text. Heck, it might be genetic.
Scripture isn't just a Christian invention, though the particular Christian concept of Scripture may be a special one. Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists all have holy texts that they read in different ways, and with different expectations, from the ways they read other texts.
Is it a good idea to have special texts like that? I don't know. The idea that something must be true, just because a particular book says it is, is bizarre to me. On the other hand it isn't just stupid to attribute authority to a source. Sometimes it's smart to decide that some particular person is worth trusting on some topic; even if you don't trust them enough to just believe them, you might put a lot more effort into trying to make sense of things that those people say than you would in trying to unravel weird statements from others. Anyone can be wrong, but with some people, on some subjects, the odds that I just misunderstood something are higher than the odds that they really said something stupid.
So some books get that kind of status, from some people. That's what I think Scripture means. I don't think it's an inherently ridiculous concept.
Exactly why any particular text might deserve that kind of extra respect, that's another question. I don't see how any book could deserve that kind of status just by default—though if you grow up with a Scripture, you probably do give it that status just by default. There ought to be standards. Just because all kinds of different texts could be Scriptures for different people doesn't seem to me to mean that all claims to Scriptural status are equally strong.
All kinds of brands advertise to build brand identity and customer loyalty, and many competing products really only differ in how they appeal to different tastes. Some products really are lemons, however, even if their unfortunate buyers tell themselves that they're great. At the end of the day people decide for themselves what to do with their own money; I love my Edsel and I don't care what you think. Just because people prefer different brands doesn't mean that there's no point in comparing the price-performance ratio of different products, though. Is the Quran a better Scripture than the Book of Mormon? It's a subjective question to a great degree, certainly, but I don't think it's an entirely subjective question, or a meaningless one.
