Dr Moore wrote: ↑Sat May 15, 2021 6:08 pm
On topic of the paper itself: man, apologists have sure found creative ways of seeing impressive things that aren’t all that impressive. Alma reads like a sermon on faith. I bet that’s because Joseph heard just such a sermon on faith, somewhere.
Yes, I'm trying to read Ostler's very long review of a work that attempts to constructs a coherent exposition of whatever it is that Alma 30-42 says. I'm inclined to agree with Dr. Moore, but even clichéd sermonizing can have a stable worldview to present and argue to an audience, so I can easily agree with our esteemed Reverend, as well. Without a deep knowledge of Alma or New York sermonizing in the 1820s, I offer only a few observations on Ostler's review.
First, this jumped out at me:
Blake Ostler wrote:There is not even a hint of expertise or discussion of ancient context — or any context beyond the text for that matter. All of the reviews of the books in this series should be called: “A Review of Texts Without Context.” Or perhaps we should call them textum solus. There is no attempt to situate the text in space and time beyond what the text says self-referentially.
Isn't this the guy who claimed to have read all of Saint Thomas's
Summa in Latin over a summer? I'm sure he read the words, but this makes me wonder whether he understood any of them, because "textum solus" is the kind of mistake a student in his/her first few weeks of Latin would make. Not first-year, not first-semester but first few weeks. It should be
solus textus, and he means this as analogous to
sola scriptura, which is good Latin: the noun-adjective pair linked by gender agreement, and the adjective of size/quantity comes
before the noun (this would be the case even in Italian—
solo testo—which I assume to be the foreign language Ostler knows best as a former missionary there). Not just peer review but the informed eye of a competent editor would have seen this.
Ostler wrote:Wrathall does a marvelous job of clarifying what is at issue so that we can see the genius of Alma’s position. He begins by defining terms and making key distinctions. A state of justice is a situation in which each receives what he or she deserves (96). In contrast to the state of justice that is the goal of the law, Wrathall defines a just act: A just act is an action where person A gives to person B what B deserves and in which A is motivated by a desire to produce a state of justice (97). In contrast to both a just state and a just act is a merciful act: A merciful act is an action whereby A relieves person B’s suffering without regard to what B deserves, and A is motivated by compassion to relieve B’s suffering (97). Thus, merciful acts are in direct contravention of just acts and destroy a state of justice.
Wow, this is remarkably like the classical definition of justice going back to Cicero, in turn derived from certain assumptions of Stoicism. The great and sadly much forgotten Roman jurist (and murdered praetorian prefect) Ulpian formulated it best:
Domitius Ulpianus, iuris peritissimus wrote:Iustitia est constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum cuique tribuendi. ("justice is the will firmly and continually to render to each what they deserve")
In one of his books of rules, quoted in Justinian's digest, we also find:
Domitius Ulpianus, iuris peritissimus wrote:Iuris praecepta sunt haec: honeste vivere, alterum non laedere, suum cuique tribuere ("the principles of justice are these: to live honorably, not to harm another, to render to each what they deserve")
This is utterly unlike anything you will find in Biblical law or any legal system of the ancient near east, though it does look a lot like Wrathall's reading of Alma, as relayed by Ostler. In fact, while you can find parts of this scattered in Plato, you won't even find this sort of encapsulation in Greek discussions of what justice is, let alone in Greek law. Law was an area where Romans truly were the innovators—for obvious reasons! This kind understanding of justice arose out of the courts of the praetor—Ulpian even wrote a commentary on the praetor's Edict—and the provincial governors, who had to deal with the rights of Roman citizens against the claims of provincials in light of Roman conceptions of natural law and especially their notion of the "law of nations" (the
ius gentium, which was, basically, the general assemblage of customs common to any human society) and the "civil law" (the
ius civile, or the set of laws particular to a given polity, whether it be Rome or some other city).
Now, the reason I mention all this is because it was the peculiar confluence of the Roman legal tradition, the influence of stoic ideas about nature, and the circumstances attendant to managing and governing in empire from the third century BCE onward that necessitated a meta-theory of justice that would be workable in practice. You didn't need that in a Greek city-state, where statutes and votes decided cases, and you certainly didn't need it in the near eastern petty monarchies of the near east, to say nothing of conquest state of Assyria.
So, assuming Wrathall is correct, how did this kind of thinking get in the Book of Mormon? We can see how it arose out of circumstances unique to Rome but not to ancient Costa Rica, at least to judging from the Book of Mormon. How is it possible, then, that the Nephites became part of the natural law tradition? Did an ancestor of Hagoth build ships that sent promising young Nephite scribes to study with Publius Mucius Scaevola in Rome?
Ostler insists on tackling the empirical questions, so let's get some goddamn empirical answers on this one.
