The Interpreter Foundation, Blake Ostler, and Actual Scholarship

[DrStakhanovite]

(Part I of III)

Hello there from the new post-doctoral steward and keeper of Cassius University’s Borgesian Archives of Moral Science! Alfonsy Stakhanovite at your service. Please forgive the dust, we are housed in the basement of the palatial Brutus Rectory as you see. Though there is a steady flow of students and faculty seeking the company and spiritual counsel of his Most Reverend Kishkumen, most seem unaware of my presence down here.

In fact my last visitor was Dr. Scratch himself. He made the journey to personally deliver a physical copy of Volume 43 of ‘Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship’ that he acquired on my behalf and falafel wrap from the kosher Greek Deli near the student union. “Men can’t live by words alone” he told me.

In any case, we got to discussing the recent book review authored by Blake Ostler ‘An Ingenious and Inspiring Literary Analysis of Alma 30–42’. While we mostly chatted about certain subterfuges no doubt present behind the piece and shared a good laugh at Professor Symmachus unceremoniously being made a shadow-editor of the journal, I never got to finish my thoughts before my esteemed guest had to depart.

I’ve recently been preoccupied by three books, one of them called ‘Philosophy of the Hebrew Scripture’ by the Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony. Overall I really like the project Hazony is trying to initiate and while there are definitely sections that I strongly disagree with in the particulars, I’m ready to sign on to where he wants to go. Now I must confess to you friends that while I was digesting the ninth chapter, I kept thinking about that Ostler piece.

I suppose the best place to start is with Blake’s opening remarks, which are a litany of complaints that followed some odd sounding praise about Mark Wrathall’s book:

This book is not a work of theology. There is no attempt to place the text in the context of any theology other than the a-theological (and even anti-theological) approach that Wrathall sees in the text itself. 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.

The failure to provide any context beyond text is both a weakness and a strength of this entire series. The authors of this series are brilliant textual analysts who provide ingenious insights into the text and how it operates. None of the authors has the education or training to comment on any ancient context or even the context of Joseph Smith’s Weltanshauung (roughly the contextual worldviews that dominate the thought of the time). A text that is an island in a contextual vacuum exists in a void of meaning.

I have to admit that doing a philosophical reading of the Book of Mormon that would conform to the expectations of the present day Maxwell Institute would be a tall order. Blake is correct to point out that every text has a context, but putting the text into context in the way Blake suggests puts a would-be author in a position between Scylla and Charybdis.

Any discussion about Joseph Smith’s “weltanshauung” invites by necessity a discussion on the occult. Now I would absolutely love to read a synthesis of the occultic practices of 19th century America and epistemology overlaid on the text of Alma, but reality is that such a book isn’t going to get BYU’s imprimatur. In fact the 19th century context would generate a legion of uncomfortable points of contact between the philosophical content of the Book of Mormon and the contemporary theology (such as it is) of the Salt Lake Church; one has to simply abandon the majority of it to stay safe.

By contrast the discussion of the ancient context suffers from a paucity of material to which to draw from. Is Mark Wrathall to begin his theological treatise with the admission that the Book of Mormon was composed in a purported language called “Reformed Egpytian”; a language that is only stipulated to exist by Mormons for which there is almost nothing known about? Should Mark follow that up with observations that Latter Day Saints themselves can’t even reach a consensus on which hemisphere of the New World the events took place? Any meaningful discussion about the ancient context of the Book of Mormon would undermine his project before it even began.

Naturally though Blake didn’t have the occult or reformed egyptian in mind when he wrote those complaints. Mopologists are, by their nature, a self absorbed lot, and Blake was most likely grousing about the fact that this series of books probably makes no mention of the works of he and his friends published. How can you discuss the text of Alma without first giving due praise to John Welch? How can you understand the armed conflict present in this book without the guiding insights of Billy Hamblin, God rest his soul, I ask you?

Turns out to be really easy, just focus on what the book of Alma actually says. Finding an appropriate justification to ignore what FARMS said in the past or what the Interpreter puts out today is a lot like finding a reason not to get involved with Amway. Getting some kind of philosophic insight from the text proves to be a bit more difficult.

I’d like to return now to chapter nine of Hazony’s book. As I mentioned earlier, Blake was in the back of mind when reading it and I think what Hazony says is very relevant to the rest of Blake’s essay. The ninth chapter is titled ‘God’s Speech After Reason and Revelation’:

At this point, I’d like to put my pen down and hear what others have to say, and especially to see what others can contribute to this, our joint project. But there is one other subject I should touch upon before closing—the question of whether we wouldn’t be better off discarding the reason-revelation dichotomy entirely in reading the Hebrew Bible.I will say a few words about this now.(p.259)

Before going any further I would like to point out that Hazony is an Orthodox Jewish believer living and working in Israel. This isn’t some secular biblical scholar trying to undermine conservetive Christian beliefs about biblical history or some hostile atheistic philosopher trying to attack theism; this is a sabbath honoring man who sees the systematic study of the Torah as an act of worship:

This book was written to answer the question of whether the Hebrew Scriptures can be profitably read as works of reason, rather than revelation. In the Introduction to the book, I wrote that if we are forced to choose between reading the Hebrew scriptures as reason or as revelation, we’ll get much farther in understanding what these texts were intended to say to us if we read them as works of reason. (p.259)

It was interesting for me to think about the attitude Hazony is displaying to the one Hugh Nibley presented in ‘The Ancient State’. I encountered Nibley late in my intellectual development so my experience differs drastically from those of Jeffery M. Bradshaw; he sees a master “taking ancient history and applying its lessons to our day” and I see a schoolman badly aping Nietzsche’s ‘Birth of Tragedy’ in the spiritual ghetto. I digress...

In reading the Hebrew Scriptures as philosophical works, whose purpose was to assist individuals and nations looking to discover the true and the good in accordance with man’s natural abilities, we unlock the texts in a way that immediately brings to light many ideas that had been largely invisible when these works were read as revelation. (p.259-60)

You may be thinking that Hazony is just being subversive by taking the side “Reason” over against that of “Revelation”, but he has a bigger point to make that bears on Blake’s essay:

The reason-revelation distinction is alien to the Hebrew Scriptures, and ultimately this framework is going to have to be thrown out as a basis for interpreting the Hebrew Bible. Even after we’ve come to understand the teachings of these texts as they appear when read as works of reason, there will still be a second step that needs to be taken…[one] that involves discarding the reason-revelation distinction completely, and learning to see the world as it appeared to the prophets of Israel, before the reason-revelation distinction was invented. (p.260)

One of the biggest hazards philosophers face when reading works temporally distant from the contemporary scene is that we automatically start framing what we are reading in terms of the modern philosophical lexicon. The most common example I can think of that plagues the profession today is the so-called “Euthyphro Dilemma”. I say “so-called” because the actual Greek text itself in no way supports the dilemma, it isn’t even a real dilemma properly speaking, it was an observation about grammar. Because Socrates wasn’t blessed with an entire field dedicated to the description and study of human language at his disposal, he had to make his point more ponderously and his efforts are not easily put into English.

What piqued my interest about Mark Wrathall’s book is his background in Heidegger. Mark is no doubt well aware of the studies Heidegger did on presocratic philosophers, going so far as to render the various fragments and testimonia into his own translation. Now what Heidegger had to say about the presocratics is important to understanding things about Heidegger and his philosophy, but his interpretations and translations are widely seen as just being terrible if judged in terms of Heidegger trying to accurately represent and elucidate what the presocratics were saying. I’m willing to bet that Mark is sensitive to these pitfalls and took some steps in making sure he was dealing with Alma as Alma is written and not Alma the reformed-pragmatic-internalist-epistemologist who would most certainly be posting on MD&D today if he were here. That second Alma is the Alma Blake that gives us.



The handsome 15th century Italian image above (LJS 419, fol. 42r) comes from Cassius University’s Borgesian Archives of Moral Science affiliate, the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at The Kislak Center.

[DrStakhanovite]

(Part II of III)

I get the feeling from Blake’s review that he is trying a little too hard to showcase his philosophical chops. There is this distinct impression that this entire book review is really just Blake explaining how he would have written the book instead, as if Blake’s audience really isn’t people who read the Interpreter but instead the Maxwell Institute itself. I wonder if perhaps Blake feels passed over because he has not been approached to contribute to the series? He has afterall, published four books explicitly on the theology and philosophical theology of Mormonism while Mark Wrathall has primarily been concerning himself with phenomenology.

If this was indeed some kind of overture or audition, I don’t think we can say Blake nailed it.

Returning to Hazony we can get a taste of what a proper philosophical analysis of a text, shorn of modern philosophical references, can start to look like:

What exactly is it that Jeremiah was experiencing on those occasions when God’s speech filled his mind? Unfortunately, his oratations are not intended to capture the phenomenology of prophecy. In fact, none of the prophets are much interested in sharing this kind of information with us. In Jeremiah’s writings, for example, virtually the only passage offering us an explicit account of what his exchanges with God are like is his description of his first encounter with God as a youth. (p.261)

Notice how Hazony disarms us of our preconceived notion that a prophet just suddenly hears a booming voice in his head and just starts to take mental dictation. What is it like? We don’t know. All we have is the text. What does the text say?

But when it comes to the actual content of the prophecy that Jeremiah is to deliver, the text shifts gears and we encounter something quite different. God now asks Jeremiah what it is that he sees… (p.261)

Since this is a Mormon themed discussion, here are the relevant passages from the KJV of Jeremiah 1:11-14:

11:Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Jeremiah, what seest thou? And I said, I see a rod of an almond tree.

12:Then said the Lord unto me, Thou hast well seen: for I will hasten my word to perform it.

13:And the word of the Lord came unto me the second time, saying, What seest thou? And I said, I see a seething pot; and the face thereof is toward the north.

14:Then the Lord said unto me, Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land.

Hazony spends some time unpacking these metaphors before making some observations:

If we consider his give-and-take between God and man as an example of prophecy as Jeremiah experiences it, a few points stand out. First, contrary to the common understanding of the prophet as a passive vessel into which God’s message is poured from on high, it is difficult to escape the emphasis on Jeremiah’s own role in the shaping of his prophecy. In the exchange between Jeremiah and God, the term used in describing what Jeremiah is doing is not a specific term for prophecy, but the Hebrew word ro’eh, which is the conventional term used for seeing. God asks Jeremiah not what he prophecies, but simply what he sees when he looks out at Jerusalem. Moreover, while this prophecy does begin with an approach from God, this approach is not in the form of God holding forth on a subject of concern to him. Rather, it is in the form of a question: God asks what it is that Jeremiah sees, and after Jeremiah has given an answer, God responds to what Jeremiah has said by telling him that he has “excelled in seeing.” Obviously there would be no point in God telling Jeremiah that he had “excelled in seeing” if Jeremiah’s role here were simply to look at ready-made images that God has placed before him. In that case, it would be God who had excelled in presenting. But here the emphasis is unambiguously on Jeremiah’s own capacity for vision, for seeing the truth when he looks upon the city. (p.262)

Notice here that Hazony is keeping anchored to the text? He isn’t running off to make comparisons with Alvin Plantinga or Søren Kierkegaard, nor is he manically introducing modern philosophical terminology. If you keep focused on the question “What does the text say?” you’ll find plenty of materials to work with.

For Jeremiah, it appears that argument by metaphor is not merely a convention adopted for the sake of the crowd. It is, as the report of his first prophecies suggests, the primary mode of his “seeing,” and that which permits him to cut to the heart of the reality before him and to see things as they really are. It is in seeing a man as a charging stallion, in other words, and a prophet as a watchman on the city wall, that he is able to see these things for what they really are, and to understand them as they should be understood. (p.263)

Paying attention to the text Hazony has a very rich idea to work with. What if the use of metaphor is intrinsically a part of Jeremiah’s epistemology? How could that potentially work? If we start fleshing out a possible framework for that, does it mesh well with the rest of Jeremiah’s writings? This really isn’t explored because Hazony is just giving a quick example, a glimpse of what could be.

I am not here suggesting that when Jeremiah hears God speak, this is not really revelation or miraculous knowledge—just as I was not trying earlier to suggest that when we incorporate sentiment, metaphor, and insight into our model of what the human mind is doing when we think straight, this means that we are no longer talking about reason. We may still wish to recognize God’s speech as revelation, and we may still want to call our normative thought processes, when they are doing what they’re supposed to do, reason. But without the metaphysical scheme that was used to underwrite the medieval conception of revelation, I’m afraid this term just isn’t going to be left with much meaning to it. Like the definition of reason, the definition of revelation looks as if it is in danger of slipping to the point where we no longer really know what we’re talking about when we speak. (p.264)

I selected this passage because I wanted to temper my enthusiasm with a little sobriety. Hazony isn’t trying to make the ideas of reason or revelation incompatible with the Hebrew Bible, rather he advises that if we want to have those concepts in play then we have to make sure those concepts are organic to and predicated upon the Hebrew Bible itself and not the canons of philosophy or the traditions of theology. A lesson Blake should take to heart.

Now of course everything I just shared would be very ho-hum to your average Ancient Historian or Classicist. This book really isn’t written for them because the lessons are already well known to that crowd, it is meant for the philosopher who really wants to engage the Hebrew Bible as they would a contemporary author. Someone like Blake.

Hazony’s book isn’t breaking new ground and he’d be the first to tell you that. It actually belongs to a bustling little niche genre where philosophers working from the field of the history of philosophy and ancient historians have begun to collaborate. It is honestly one of the most fascinating corners of scholarship I’ve ever discovered to date. To the readers of this forum the best description I can give is that they do the kinda work the Interpreter wished it could.

Another example I’d like to share with great enthusiasm would be ‘Philosophy Before The Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia’ by the Assyriologist Marc Van De Mieroop, an at the University of Columbia.

Who were the scholars, the philosophers whose ideas we will try to investigate here? Modern historians of philosophy essentially study a sequence of thinkers, great men (and some women) whose theories define a moment in time: Aristotle, Kant, Arendt...in the European tradition; Avicenna, Ibn Sina, Averroes, Ibn Rushd...for the medieval Islamic philosophy; Confucius/ Kong Fuzi, Mencius/Meng Zi,...for ancient China, and so on. When we turn to the ancient Mesopotamian material we are confronted by a blank in this respect: there were no acknowledged authors, only manuscripts. With very few exceptions this is true for all writings there, apart from letters and records of practical use. (p.19-20)

I am positively fascinated by this. I’m so used to the idea of studying a body of works attributed to someone in particular that stepping outside of that is uncomfortable. Even if the alleged author didn’t really exist or if it was falsely attributed to someone else, we still treat the body of works relatively the same.

Van De Mieroop offers some aid in helping orient myself to the task at hand:

What is an author, however? The idea that it is a human who can declare that he or she created a text is very modern; Roland Barthes claimed that this concept is “the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology,” something that shackles the text and that should be killed off. Michel Foucault’s essay on the question pointed out how the idea and competence of the author is historically determined and depends on what genre of writing is involved. The author is not an individual identified as are other persons, but a process of interaction with the discourse, which can entail a multiplicity of voices. It makes more sense to talk of the author function, he claims. (p.20)

Van De Mieroop grounds me here with the references. There isn’t a concern with giving a robust account of Foucault because the level of commitment doesn’t require it. He just wants Foucault in my mind as he begins to delve into scribal practices, which also helps me understand why he is going there in the first place.

Now the reader can be eased into discussion on the production of texts in ancient Mesopotamia, the transmission of those texts, and ultimately their preservation. Van De Mieroop can spread the modern notion of authorship across those who composed, those who copied, and those who collected. I should mention that Van De Mieroop takes pains to make sure the reader understands that these three categories are not rigid and a single person could belong to more than one category. The important point however, is that the origin of a text is not the sole domain of the author.

I can already feel Dean Robbers’ hand being gently placed on my shoulder as he prepares to ask me the question Mopologists like Blake always ask of critics when finding some vague connection between Joseph Smith and some facet of modern scholarship, “How could the ancient Mesopotamians have KNOWN Stak!?!”

Creators, scribes, and owners all contributed to the author function for a Mesopotamian text; but the texts were never completed, the authorial work never finished. We are in the unusual situation that for many compositions multiple versions are known to us, and that a textual record is available that documents its own genealogy through a continuous diachronic corpus. The contrast with other traditions is stark. Homeric and biblical scholars have long been engaged in drawn-out arguments about the prehistories of the texts they study. What were the sources, when were they dated, and what did they contain? Were there oral antecedents to Homer’s great epics? What sources inspired the multiple traditions that we can trace in the biblical text as we know it today? Compare these uncertainties to the history of the Gilgamesh Epic. Popular modern translations render the best known and most completely preserved version reconstructed from multiple manuscripts that were excavated in the ruins of Nineveh, penned down in the mid-seventh century on twelve multicolumn tablets. But we also know previous versions of many passages of this poem—as we do not of the Iliad or the book of Genesis—through numerous manuscripts. We know that some parts of the Epic had ancestors in the Sumerian language, written in the early second millennium. We know that the famous Flood story had developed as a separate composition in the second millennium before it became part of the Epic. (p.26-27)

When Blake speaks of providing an ancient context to Alma, people unfamiliar with the world of Mopologetics think of something like the above. There never can be an ancient context for the Book of Mormon that could ever hope to even be a simulacrum of that. I think we all know why.

Intertextuality (using the term in the broad sense it has acquired in literary criticism) can easily be extended further. Each text contains numerous internal references. This is most explicit in scholarly writings, which customarily elaborate paradigms according to multiple rules I will discuss in detail in several of the later chapters. When an omen based on the reading of the liver predicts a negative outcome because of a discoloration on the left, its full meaning is only clear when we realize that the same discoloration on the right is propitious. These references readily transgress the boundaries of individual texts and even of what we could call corpora of texts...The unity of discourse in Mesopotamian writings was thus never the individual text as attested in a single manuscript; it was the entire diachronic history of a text as well as its interactions with others.(p.27-28)

See how far Van De Mieroop was able to take the reader by only providing a smidgen of philosophical context before getting his readers acquainted with his field? Blake should seek to do likewise.


The above image was taken from a high resolution scan of an 1830 edition of Sir Walter Scott's 'Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft Addressed to J. G. Lockhart, Esq' bequeathed to the Borgesian Archives of Moral Science by a private donor.

[DrStakhanovite]

(Part III of III)

Franchesca Rochberg has quite the reputation for being the go-to source on Babylonian Astrology and so I was drawn to her book ‘Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science’ right away. I must confess that chapter seven (‘Observation of Astral Phenomena’) engrossed me in particular because of the union of ancient astronomical practices and philosophers of the 20th century.

Where Hazony stripped away modern philosophical presuppositions to better access ancient texts, and where Van De Mieroop used a modern philosophy to help his readers approach ancient texts, Rochberg brings modern philosophy in contact with ancient texts.

Some needed context here, Rochberg is talking about the philosophical concept of “observation statements” which has a history in early 20th century philosophy of science. There was a concentrated effort to try and come up with a logical language that captured the scientific method. Part of the process was an attempt to take statements about experiences, say laboratory results, that are expressed in a natural language and translate them into a formally constructed language that could then be integrated into a larger logical system. Think of it like feeding data into a program.

Rochberg wants to take this 20th century topic and bring it into conversation with the way ancient Mesopotamians went about observing and recording astronomical recordings or how they observed natural phenomena for omen readings:

It is therefore not only useful to isolate observation, that is, the systematic act of watching, for discussion in this context, but also to differentiate between observation and Empiricism. The two are obviously implicated in each other but can be separated both historically and philosophically. (p.202-203)

I was impressed with Rochberg here. Not many people would think to separate these two concepts. This Assyriologist has done her homework:

Subsequently, in the aftermath of Hanson and Kuhn, the observation statement, or observation sentence, as Quine had it, moved further away from the physicalism of the positivists and represented more of a learned rhetorical statement about experience. Observation statements, no longer representing a supposed raw a-theoretical perception of the world, but, being linguistic expressions, embodied cultural knowledge and understanding, thus “carving” the world in particular cultural ways. Quine called the observation sentence “Janus faced,” in that “it faces outward to the corroborating witness and inward to the speaker.” (p.203)

The W.V.O Quine insertion is spot on and directly relates to the issue at hand, which is how to bring the 20th century notion of “observation statements” into fruitful discussion on ancient mesopotamian scribal practices.

Empiricism, on the other hand, relates to a set of commitments about what science is, or what science can or cannot do with respect to describing and explaining the world. Strictly speaking, therefore, Empiricism can only be indirectly embedded within the aims of cuneiform observation statements, though this is in itself a feature worthy of consideration. (p.203-204)

I like the way Rochberg doesn’t fully bracket the issue of Empiricism here, she doesn’t have to resort to “putting it on the shelf” as it were and forgetting about it. It is still a factor, but removed enough so that it can’t interfere as much.

In taking the contexts of astronomical observation into account, the relationship of observation to Empiricism can be parsed with reference to cuneiform material without embroiling the Babylonians in the same conflict about rationality that was focused on the eighteenth-century Hawaiians…(p.205)

This folds back into Rochberg’s broader thesis in the book, which is that historically we have judged the Babylonians to be an “irrational” society based on our own notions of what it is to be rational. The solution doesn’t necessarily have to include separating out contemporary notions of rationality that have been historically conditioned, but rather through careful application our contemporary ideas concerning rationality can be used fruitfully in comparison with how the Babylonian scribes themselves understood what it was they were doing.

It is interesting to me that the virtues displayed by Hazony, Van De Mieroop, and Rochberg are conspicuously absent from Blake’s essay entirely. Blake starts off early complaining about a lack of historical context and then proceeds to give none himself and seems entirely content to drag in details about late 20th century epistemology from the analytic tradition and slap it over the text of Alma like so much paper mache. Does Blake take the task of epistemology to be fundamentally descriptive or normative? Readers are unsure because Blake doesn’t clarify and thus the relationship between things such as “reliabilism” and Alma’s words is prohibitively opaque. Perhaps more importantly, why should we even think such epistemology is even relevant to Alma anyways?

I do have to remark that Blake’s handling of basic philosophical concepts is executed so poorly that the reader’s confidence in his ability to conduct a book review is depressingly ground into dust. A short list of examples would be:

• Blake references and speaks about “Justified True Belief” (JTB) as if it is a tenable epistemological theory that has actual philosophers out there defending it. The reality is that JTB is only introduced as a definition of knowledge because it fails in its task to actually capture the meaning of knowledge and is used as a springboard to discuss broader issues that deal explicitly with those failures.

• Blake mistakenly identifies the reason Alvin Planting’s epistemology is considered moderately Foundationalist. Instead of accurately identifying “properly basic beliefs” as being non-inferential beliefs (thus acting as the “foundation”) Blake states: “Plantinga’s view is a form of foundationalism because it bases knowledge on having a reliable justification as its foundation”.

• Blake struggles to keep apart theories that address the shape and structure of knowledge (e.g. Foundationalism) and theories concerned with the justification of beliefs (e.g. Reliabilism).

• Blake's own version of Reliabilism that he forces onto the text of Alma keeps switching between language that seems to assume an Internalist view of epistemic justification and language that seems to assume an Externalist view of epistemic justification, thus making his formulation essentially useless in the contemporary context he has explicitly chosen to use in this essay.

• Blake makes a comparison between Korihor and Nietzsche that entails such a poor understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy that it would be indefensible within any meaningful context of Nietzsche’s works. Blake’s characterization is completely divorced from contemporary scholarship and is more in line with the polemics found in the classrooms of Hyles–Anderson College in Indiana or the storied halls of the Pensacola Bible Institute in Florida.

I’ve been working on a private thesis that a fundamental and unique aspect of Mopologetics which sets it apart from other examples of religious apologetics is that the execution of Mopologetics always has an element of ineptitude present. Reading the books by Hazony, Van De Mieroop, and Rochberg, provided this backdrop to reading the Interpreter that makes me legitimately wonder what it is the Interpreter Foundation is even trying to accomplish.

Look at the mission statement:

The Interpreter Foundation supports the Church in the following ways:

Promotion: We provide tools to encourage and facilitate personal learning by study and faith, and disseminate accurate information to the public about the Church.

Explanation: We make the results of relevant scholarship more accessible to non-specialists.

Defense: We respond to misunderstandings and criticisms of Church beliefs, policies, and practices.

Faithfulness: Our leadership, staff, and associates strive to follow Jesus Christ and be true to the teachings of His Church.

Scholarship: Our leadership, staff, and associates incorporate standards of scholarship appropriate to their academic disciplines.

Blake’s essay undermines almost all of the above. Why publish it? Does the editorial board labor under serious misconceptions about what constitutes scholarship? To that end, I’d be most interested in hearing what others think about the lack of quality control from the Interpreter and possible reasons for this. I’d be especially interested in hearing from those who disagree with me.

I always look forward to unannounced visits to my post at the Borgesian Archives of Moral Science!

[Sledge]

Oops, pardon me sir. Didn’t mean to bump into you. Just sweepin’ up. I’ve been appointed to the position of groundskeeper at Cassius, and it’s my first day.

[Doctor Scratch]

This is outstanding work, Dr. Stak. Like all great students, you've clearly exceeded your training. I'm not quite sure I know where to begin--perhaps the falafel is getting to me? In any event, I was struck by this observation:

I get the feeling from Blake’s review that he is trying a little too hard to showcase his philosophical chops. There is this distinct impression that this entire book review is really just Blake explaining how he would have written the book instead, as if Blake’s audience really isn’t people who read the Interpreter but instead the Maxwell Institute itself. I wonder if perhaps Blake feels passed over because he has not been approached to contribute to the series? He has afterall, published four books explicitly on the theology and philosophical theology of Mormonism while Mark Wrathall has primarily been concerning himself with phenomenology.

If this was indeed some kind of overture or audition, I don’t think we can say Blake nailed it.

Yes: I think this is very true. There is a core within Mopologetics of resentment. A defensiveness over the idea that they're always being laughed at, and that "real" scholars will never take them seriously. It's one of the reasons why the Hamblin-Jenkins debate was simultaneously so entertaining, and such a painful defeat for them.

But Ostler in particular seems very prickly when it comes to this kind of thing. You've provided him with what may very well be the only legitimate and serious peer review he's ever gotten in his entire life. Well, he's free to register here and respond, if he's up for it.

Blake makes a comparison between Korihor and Nietzsche that entails such a poor understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy that it would be indefensible within any meaningful context of Nietzsche’s works. Blake’s characterization is completely divorced from contemporary scholarship and is more in line with the polemics found in the classrooms of Hyles–Anderson College in Indiana or the storied halls of the Pensacola Bible Institute in Florida.

At least he wouldn't have to deal with as much "scientism" there, though, eh?

But of course your crucial point was this:

Blake’s essay undermines almost all of the above. Why publish it? Does the editorial board labor under serious misconceptions about what constitutes scholarship? To that end, I’d be most interested in hearing what others think about the lack of quality control from the Interpreter and possible reasons for this. I’d be especially interested in hearing from those who disagree with me.

Yes: they have always had an exceptionally distorted idea of scholarship. They sort of have to, otherwise Mopologetics couldn't exist. Again, I find myself leaning on Jenkins, who laughed in Hamblin's face about the idea of "Ancient Book of Mormon Studies." I mean, they had been struggling for decades to build this into something that would at least have legitimacy in the eyes of TBMs, and then poor Neal Rappleye got his ass handed to him, and publicly admitted defeat! But to even produce the Mormon's Codex and Brant Gardner stuff, they have to believe that what they're doing is worthwhile, and I really do think that they've at least partly convinced themselves that what they're doing is "scholarship." They use footnotes, right? They send the articles out to their peers for them to review, right? So what if nobody takes them seriously except their own small little fan club and one or two of the Apostles? Hey, people didn't take Einstein seriously at first either!

Which brings us right back to your observation about Ostler feeling "slighted" by the Maxwell Institute. I know that there are strong opinions out there concerning the work that the "new' MI publishes (I'm glad to pass the mic along to Symmachus on that topic), but the fact remains that, in the eyes of the wider scholarly world, the stuff that the new MI is doing has a lot more credibility. So, there is that core of resentment that has always helped to fuel Mopologetics and which, I think one could argue, has also contributed to some of their worst blunders.

In any case, Dr. Stak, this was wonderful and I look forward to reading more of your scholarship.

[Symmachus]

A post like this can only be received with the thanks it deserves. It is a model of what an in-depth review should be: instructive in its general description of the scholarly problem and incisive in its analysis of how the work under review addresses the problem. It's a pity that our injudicious friends at the Interpreter won't learn from Dr. Stakhanovite's labors, and all the more a pity that the review had to be done in the first place, because it was never very clear from Ostler, after all, just what Wrathall's book was about. All we knew was that it is a work of genius and originality, involving a Heidegger somewhere, and that it would be too difficult for us sub-Ostlers to grasp, not only because our limitations—some of us still haven't finished the Summa—but because of the fundamental fog in our "Weltanshauung."

I was being generous in my own mind—aren't we all!—in waiving off the Ostler review as something a first year graduate student would write ("Wrathall ingeniously shows that Alma resolves the tension by insisting on maintaining the tension"). Being little familiar with how first-year graduate students in philosophy write, I'm sorry to see from this post that it's much worse than that. Our Dr. Stakhanovite, true to his name in far exceeding his quotas for the greater good of Cassius, has really shown how far Ostler has failed even to meet his in doing a genuine comparative project. It was a nice touch bringing in Hazony and especially Van de Mieroop, the latter of whose work I esteem especially (I don't know the work of Rochberg): Dr. Stakhanovite has pointed us to examples of how it could be done.

Let us suppose, with that in mind, that the Book of Mormon is what it wants us to think it is and so on: in that case, our friends at the Interpreter have done even worse than we thought, because they have squandered every opportunity to magnify their calling as scholars in elucidating this text for us sub-Ostlers in need of salvation. From the point of the True Church, Van De Mieroop handles some worthless texts written by the would-be murderers of Abarahm in ways much more capable and illuminating than these guys who fumble with the Book of Mormon, a text compiled by the Lord's prophets.

What a pity indeed to witness this blasphemous incompetence. At least we have the literary and philosophical art of Dr. Stakhanovite for our solace.

[DrStakhanovite]

Drs. Scratch and Symmachus, your praises are unjust but gratefully accepted. I’m happy my ponderous writings can find any audience.

Yes: I think this is very true. There is a core within Mopologetics of resentment. A defensiveness over the idea that they're always being laughed at, and that "real" scholars will never take them seriously. It's one of the reasons why the Hamblin-Jenkins debate was simultaneously so entertaining, and such a painful defeat for them.

It is interesting you bring up Hamblin, I was just rereading his rather remarkable “thinkpiece” on ‘Enigmatic Mirror’ from September 2015 where he goes on quite the tirade against Brigham Young University.

Although many people might find it incredible, every single BYU administrator on every level of the administration has explicitly discouraged me from doing ancient Book of Mormon studies in my annual performance (“stewardship”) reviews. They have all explicitly told me to focus my research and publications on non-Book of Mormon topics, such as the crusades. In part this was good advice on their part; they were telling me if you want to be successful at BYU, don’t publish on the Book of Mormon or publish with FARMS or later Interpreter. More broadly, you must publish outside the “BYU Bubble”—that is, BYU or LDS sponsored publications.

As he goes on to describe how his Book of Mormon related research proposals were always rejected, you can really begin to feel the bitterness that absolutely soaks his words. He openly states:

So, my experience throughout my 25 years at BYU was that ancient Book of Mormon studies were not considered an authentic discipline.

That is a remarkable admission, but I’m beginning to grasp how its truth really motivates the Mopologist project. It makes Blake’s gripes about the lack of context in Mark Wrathall’s look more like Blake is carrying on his fallen comrade’s litany against the institution of BYU as opposed to making a sincere criticism.

Let us suppose, with that in mind, that the Book of Mormon is what it wants us to think it is and so on: in that case, our friends at the Interpreter have done even worse than we thought, because they have squandered every opportunity to magnify their calling as scholars in elucidating this text for us sub-Ostlers in need of salvation. From the point of the True Church, Van De Mieroop handles some worthless texts written by the would-be murderers of Abarahm in ways much more capable and illuminating than these guys who fumble with the Book of Mormon, a text compiled by the Lord's prophets.

I’m curious Professor Symmachus, do you happen to know offhand if Hugh Nibley made any statements similar to Hamblin? Something along the lines that he was discouraged or otherwise prohibited from undertaking “ancient Book of Mormon studies”?

Oops, pardon me sir. Didn’t mean to bump into you. Just sweepin’ up. I’ve been appointed to the position of groundskeeper at Cassius, and it’s my first day.

No pardons needed, Sledge! Here at Cassius, the good people in Facilities are placed on equal footing with the Faculty. You have as much cause to be here as anyone else.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

It's a pity that our injudicious friends at the Interpreter won't learn from Dr. Stakhanovite's labors ... What a pity indeed to witness this blasphemous incompetence.

Well. They don’t really read anything so much as google a topic and cherry-pick quotes to cram into a point, even if it’s ill-conceived. After all, one can only plagiarize wikipedia and Amazon reviews so many times before people get wise to the scheme.

Also, is there any value to a ‘teaching institution’ when it teaches midwits to become dimwits? The sheer damage the mopologists do to BYU is incalculable. I’m absolutely astonished at the brosefs that run the place - this kind of ‘scholarship’ is literally making people dumber.

- Doc

[Symmachus]

I’m curious Professor Symmachus, do you happen to know offhand if Hugh Nibley made any statements similar to Hamblin? Something along the lines that he was discouraged or otherwise prohibited from undertaking “ancient Book of Mormon studies”?

I am not aware of such statements directly, though a few incidents recounted in the Petersen biography might give us some indirect indication. There was one incident when Curtis Wright came into Nibley's office and witnessed him laughing as he read the Book of Mormon:

One day in the early 1950s, Hugh Nibley’s teaching assistant Curtis Wright found Hugh leaning over his desk, reading from the Book of Mormon, and laughing. Wright asked Hugh Nibley what was so funny, and he responded that he had discovered an error in the Book of Mormon.

“You did, huh?” Wright asked. “That’s interesting. Let me see it.”

Hugh handed the scriptures over to Wright and pointed to Alma 42:10, which says that humans are “carnal, sensual, and devilish, by nature.” Wright read the passage and demanded, “Well, what’s the matter with that?” Having taken classes from several BYU professors who had a very secular approach, Wright was beginning to think that Hugh might be ridiculing the Book of Mormon. “So I got a little defensive,” says Wright. Unable to conceal his contempt, Wright demanded, “How’s it a mistake?”

He responded, “Well, look at Alma, he says that all mankind is carnal, sensual, and devilish by nature. And he should’ve said they were carnal, sensual, devilish, and stupid.”

With that chortled shibboleth, Curtis was comforted in the knowledge that Nibley was not one of the secularists. Notice the time: the early 1950s. Now, I quote this story because that was just as Ernest Wilkinson was coming in to clean house. I have a hard time thinking that Wilkinson would have given anyone guff about "ancient Book of Mormon studies," but I'm not sure the same could be true of Nibley's colleagues who had been hired in the MacDonald years and earlier; among them was Brigham Madsen, who was certainly one of those with a "secular approach," one may lightly say. Madsen recounted with some admiration how Nibley had stood up to defend some of the "secularists" in a faculty meeting, but it wasn't at that time the arch-conservative school it later became, as you well know. As I remember from later in the book, Nibley came to BYU to teach languages and history. It was only after his sabbatical at Berkeley (where he first met Klaus Baer) in the late 1950s that he came to some kind of arrangement with the university that enabled him to teach only religion courses (no more history, no more languages). It was also around this time that he was wrapping up his work on patristics and moving into more overtly apologetic areas, and he published mostly in the Improvement Era. I don't recall the biography going into details, but surely it is not hard to imagine that working around someone like Brigham Madsen would have been less pleasant for someone engaged in "ancient Book of Mormon research" and the like than teaching in the college of religion exclusively, where Nibley had free rein.

So, to sum up: my guess is that he probably did face a reception from his earlier colleagues similar to that which met Hamblin. That might have meant even a department chair or two, though I doubt it went any higher than that. Unlike Hamblin, though, NIbley was able to break into the asylum.

[DrStakhanovite]

So, to sum up: my guess is that he probably did face a reception from his earlier colleagues similar to that which met Hamblin. That might have meant even a department chair or two, though I doubt it went any higher than that. Unlike Hamblin, though, NIbley was able to break into the asylum.

Well if there is one thing I've come to learn is that for any given thesis or argument, it is only as good as those proposing them. Nibley strikes me as the kind of guy who had the character and talents to make things happen, Hamblin? Not so much.