The Art of Scripture

Recent scholarly debates are reshaping people's understanding of scripture. The questions surrounding scripture are manifold and complex. It is important to understand, first and foremost, that the concept of scripture is a Western Christian invention. In the past, scholars of religion in the West have constructed their own idea of what a sacred text is, i.e., scripture, and they have imposed those ideas on the texts of other cultural traditions. At the same time, Christians have been careful builders and protectors of their own category of scripture. Many are protective of the Bible as the only word of God, the contents of which have been set now for centuries.

Of course, people who operate outside of the strictures of those dominant Catholic and Protestant frameworks, or on the margins of them, have not limited themselves to the Bible. As new ancient texts came to light, people started to incorporate them into their personal canons, and sometimes whole groups sprang up in response to those discoveries. Others have authored sacred texts under inspiration and as new contributions to existing traditions. Magicians composed the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. Other texts purported to be "letters from heaven." Outside of the limited framework of the Biblical canon, there is a vast number of texts that belong to the broader stream that flowed from the font of Ancient Near Eastern religion.

Gnostic literature has been one area of study that has raised new questions about the composition of sacred texts in this broader tradition. One reason is that the corpus of Gnostic literature included Platonic and Hermetic material, leaving experts to puzzle about exactly what the boundaries of Gnostic identity were, if there even were such a thing to begin with. Elaine Pagels suggested that penning new scripture was simply part of what it meant to be a Gnostic, and Nicola Denzey Lewis argued that Gnostic literature was the product of an esotericist elite's hobby. What clearly emerges from all of these conversations, in my view, is that human beings in their wrestling with the divine produce sacred texts. The process of doing so may be thought of as a kind of sacred art form.

Which brings me to the Restoration. Currently Restorationists are struggling over the questions about Restoration scripture. Many are losing their faith when they discover that the scripture they have read and treasured for years is not living up to their assumptions about it. People ask: Is the Book of Mormon ancient? Is the Book of Abraham ancient? Where did these texts come from? Were there Nephites and Lamanites? Not a few who struggle with these questions come to the conclusion that their convictions turned out to wrong, and they leave the Restoration altogether. Some become missionaries for converting others away from the Restoration on the new conviction that the Restoration and its scriptures are not "true" after all.

All of this was absolutely predictable. Or at least it should have been. It results from a fundamental misunderstanding of scripture that is shared by millions, and it is a literary error that goes back all the way to antiquity and was only aggravated by the conferral of special status on certain sacred books at the exclusion of others. That idea is that inspired authors did not make mistakes. Some ancient Greeks thought this was true of Homer, the alleged author of the Iliad and Odyssey, and they would look for ways to prove Homer's apparent errors were correct after all. He was, after all, the Great Homer. He could make no mistakes! Now move that practice over to the formation of the Christian scriptural canon. St. Augustine felt it was absolutely necessary to adopt from Greek literary studies the practice of allegorical reading when the Holy Scriptures appeared to be wrong about something. They could not be wrong, certainly. There is another, related problem, and that is the problem of authorship. It was standard operating procedure in antiquity to imitate the best authors and even erroneously assign famous authorship to texts written in the style of that famous author. I could go on, but the point is simple: Authorship did not carry the same significance in antiquity as it does today. In today's world where your patent protects your intellectual property and your ability to profit from it, credit for your work means everything. In a world where none of that exists, the work itself is more important than the identity of the person who created it, and people were more willing to imitate others and use famous names to obtain attention for their derivative work.

The work we call scripture was no different, and the activity of composing new scripture under famous names never stopped. Nor did the gate-keeping activity of Catholic and Protestant authorities and experts cease. The question of what counts as scripture is important, and, although the rules for deciding what scripture is evolved along the way, these rules came to be THE standard. All texts that do not meet that standard need not apply for entrance into the canon. Christians in those traditions play the role of gatekeeper by examining new texts claiming to be scripture and then they happily exclude them on the basis of criteria earlier Christian authorities and experts made. What are the odds that their standards would welcome the inclusion of the Book of Mormon or the Book of Abraham?

Joseph Smith, the founder of the Restoration, was not inspired to operate within those Catholic and Protestant frameworks. He was inspired to RESTORE the tradition of composing new scripture. It was a tradition that did not belong to the mainstream for centuries, but it is one that continues the original tradition of Christianity that started with the Bible itself. What do I mean? A large portion of the Bible was not written in the period the individual book is set was not authored by the person who is credited with authorship. Fundamentalist gatekeepers, of course, will tell you that they are. Unfortunately for them, the overwhelming evidence shows they were not. What happened? Much of our Bible was written in the same mode that Joseph Smith wrote the scriptures of the Restoration, a very similar mode to that in which new books of Pythagoras and Homer were written. Restoration scripture is ancient in that it continues in the ancient mode of scriptural composition which gave Christianity letters of Paul that were not written by Paul and the Book of Daniel.

Those who have a spiritual conviction of the scriptural status of Joseph Smith's scriptures have no need to satisfy Catholic and Protestant rules of what constitutes scripture. It is not the point of listening to charismatic, inspired prophets to follow the rules other men created in the past for much different purposes. Conversations about the historicity of the contents of the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham have no real bearing on the scriptural status of those works. Where they do fit is in the conversation of the academic history of them, and the academic history of their contents. Unfortunately, a pervasive misunderstanding of what scripture is, which dominates the minds of many Restoration insiders and outsiders, is tripping people up and throwing their spiritual lives into chaos. Those who cherish the Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham can continue to do so, so long as they do not make the mistake of equating historical accuracy with spiritual truth, and of confusing the inspired activity of writing scripture in the ancient mode with the claim that something occurred in antiquity.