Mormon History - The Other Side of the Story

Research by Kerry A. Shirts

We have now seen the claims of those who accept the "new view" of Mormon that those who are writing it, Fawn Brodie, Dale Morgan, Anthony Hutchinson, Brent Lee Metcalfe, Dan Vogel, Ed Ashment, and D. Michael Quinn, among others, are also hailed as the new saviors of Mormon history, objective, the epitome of impeccible scholarship, et.c., etc. So how about the Mormon side of this situation? There is more to this than meets the eye to be sure. I am not arguing that the above historians are all enemies and therefore their works are lousy. I want to analyze the behind the scenes ideas of them so to speak, to see what other Mormon scholars are saying about the secret agendas, so to speak, of the new Mormon History historians and scholars. Since the New Mormon Historians come to sometimes radically different conclusions than the Mormon scholars, the new scholars are classified as accurate, objective, and impeccible, while the other Mormon scholars are called apologists, idealistically motivated, subjective, and full of blather and faith promoting sanitized history. But is this dictomy really appropriate? Does it do justice to both sides? Either side? I will argue that it does not, but that such name calling - for that is exactly what it is - is in itself subjective. In fact Daniel C. Peterson, the editor of the "Review of Books" notes something very interesting with this type of thinking that the New Mormon Historians miss:

"Some writers on the fringes of the Church, however, perhaps a bit behind the times, still seem to entertain the notion that preconceived ideas and ideology, though they drive the work of pseudoscholarly apologists, have no impact on Critical Scholarship. Such scholarship, they seem to feel, is almost as scientific and objective as chemical analysis. (A leading employee at Signature Books in Salt Lake City called in May of 1991 to inform me, among other things, that, while FARMS has a point of view that is lethal to its scholarly pretensions, Signature has no point of view at all. At Signature Books, he told me, people simply allow the facts to speak for themselves.) Of course, it is now commonly realized in more advanced circles that even the sciences and such seemingly bloodless disciplines as mathematical logic presuppose nonempirical, nonprovable, even ideological assumptions, so that it becomes difficult to see why some folks grow apoplectic at observations of the same thing in more sensitive and emotional areas like biblical or religious studies. (Will and Ariel Durant are supposed to have said that history is mostly guessing, and the rest is prejudice.) Nonetheless, it is often implied that radical skepticism in biblical scholarship represents nothing but the inexorable advance of value-neutral Truth. And if disconcerting conclusions have been reached, why, they have simply been forced upon Objective Critical Thinkers by the Facts, so that only a bunch of Neanderthals could possibly complain. "Scholars did not set out," declares one Latter-day Saint dissident, "to 'tear asunder' the biblical text, or to impose a particular critical viewpoint on the text. Instead, it was noted that the Bible is frequently in tension [p.xxvii] with itself, and the critical scholar attempts to determine how this tension arose." He shows no awareness that the problems that are recognized, and the solutions that are proposed for these real or imagined problems, are not, and cannot in the nature of things be, free of "viewpoints" and the influence of general world views. He seems oblivious to "the power of assumptions, motives, and imagination to shape the way we make sense of the 'facts' that come to us from the past." In fact, it is on the basis of such presumably objective, critical New Testament scholarship that he rejects the claimed antiquity of the Book of Mormon: "The single greatest anachronism in my opinion is that the Jesus of the Book of Mormon is not the historical Jesus who lived and taught in Palestine [and who is revealed, not in the gospel accounts, but in the writings of certain late twentieth-century liberal biblical scholars], but the exalted, divinized Jesus as described by John the evangelist."

(FARMS, Review of Books, Vol.8, Number 1, p.xxvii)

There are, however, prominent authorities—not Latter-day Saints, and certainly not Mormon apologists—who point out that it is the purest fantasy to imagine that the world of contemporary biblical studies is divided, simpliciter, between purely objective, scientific biblical scholarship (embodied in the persons of the radical skeptics), on the one hand, and the opposing forces of subjectivist theological reaction and irrationality on the other. Thus, reviewing some of the more spectacular claims of recent Jesus scholarship, Professor Johnson concludes that "this, I need [p.xxviii] scarcely point out, is not critical history. It is the uncritical canonization of an ideological assumption." ( p.xxxviii)

Still, if Professor Johnson had desired an illustration of the methodological naturalist's approach to a nonscientific subject, and specifically to religious history, he could not possibly have improved upon the late Dale L. Morgan's written remarks to Juanita Brooks. Morgan, a minor historian much revered among radical revisionist writers on Mormonism, set forth his conception of "objectivity" by defining it as an objectivity on one side only of a philosophical Great Divide. With my [atheistic] point of view on God, I am incapable of accepting the claims of Joseph Smith and the Mormons, be they however so convincing. If God does not exist, how can Joseph Smith's story have any possible validity? I will look everywhere for explanations except to the ONE explanation that is the position of the Church.

Bernard DeVoto, reviewing Fawn Brodie's then-new biography of Joseph Smith in the New York Herald Tribune, recognized and praised the same essentially atheistic approach in her work: "She has written," he said, "as a detached, modern intelligence, grounded in naturalism, rejecting the supernatural." One recalls Sherlock Holmes's somewhat impatient remark to Dr. Watson: "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" For some writers on Mormonism and other religious topics, the existence of God is simply, from the outset, "impossible." Is it any surprise, therefore, since the action of God is ruled out in advance, that methodologies like those employed by Morgan and Brodie conclude that God did not act in Latter-day Saint history? Clearly, secularism is not religiously neutral. Secularists do not, somehow, by the sheer fact of their lack of religious commitment, emerge into a mythical world of pure, objective scholarship, beyond apologetics and polemics. Quite the contrary. (p. xxxix)

More to the point on Dale Morgan, Gary Novak in his review of the book "Dale Morgan on Early Mormonism: Correspondence and a New History" in FARMS - "Review of Books", vol. 8, p. 149 notes that:

Dale Morgan was very much a child of his times when it came to the question of whether objective history is a possible or desirable thing. He talked about objectivity with innocence and never, as far as the texts he left behind indicate, questioned in any fundamental way the possibility of objectivity.

After explaining to Juanita Brooks that he had not "always been quite ethical in drawing upon the [LDS Church] Historian's Office," he went on to justify that by explaining that he would "make only the most ethical use of the material" he had gathered to date (p. 30). He continued his rationalization, saying that he would only use that material "within the canons of the highest historical objectivity" and indicated that his conscience did not bother him (p. 30). Objectivity, in this sense, appears to mean that Morgan would not sensationalize what he had found.

Not long after he wrote these words, Morgan wrote to S. A. Burgess, an RLDS historian who had written him about an earlier publication, the Utah Guide. In this case he used objectivity as a slogan with which to soften or rebut criticisms from Burgess. He explained that he had attempted to "draw a picture of Mormon beliefs from an objective point of view" (p. 35). Presumably no one would be foolish enough to want to argue with an [p.150] "objective" interpretation. Morgan went on to say that he thought "that any reasoned consideration of these pages will confirm the honesty and objectivity of our observation…of the Utah scene" (p. 35). The insistence on honesty, reason, and objectivity was, of course, meant to silence criticism, not to imply any special rigor. Morgan larded the letter with talk of "any objective critic" (p. 36), insisted that Brigham Young biographer M. R. Werner "had no propagandic purpose to serve" (p. 37), talked about "the abstract truth of the matter" (p. 38), and then went on to insist on the "honest picture" of Joseph "as a man" and on "the integrity of our intention and the objectivity of our interpretation" (p. 40). How could anyone disagree with such a wonderfully reasonable explanation?

And yet Novak noted that Morgan's own Naturalistic view tainted his views:

"In moments of reflection Morgan could see that his own "naturalistic" point of view—that is, "disbelieving in the concept of God," which hence made him "'objective' and 'unbiased'"—would appear to the believer to be biased (p. 43). But even after granting that his "agnosticism" or "atheism" denied the fundamental grounds of faith, he still claimed that his "interpretation of Mormon history will not…do such violence to Mormon ideas of that history" (p. 43). He went on in the same letter to boast of his "intellectual detachment" and "scientific attitude" (p. 44), which presumably equipped him to deal objectively with Mormon history. He was naive enough to claim that, "if you gather enough facts, and organize them properly, they provide their own conclusions" (p. 45). He did not see that the theories which identified a "fact" for him and which he used to "organize them properly" were his own constructs and hence shared his own biases, hopes, and assumptions.

When defending No Man Knows My History, Morgan often talked about such things as "intellectual objectivity" (p. 86) or "objective facts" (p. 87). He explained to Juanita Brooks that his motivation in writing Mormon history was to "try to tread objectively between warring points of view, to get at facts, uncover them for facts, and see what the facts have to say to a reasonable intelligence" (p. 121). Throughout his life Morgan used adjectives like "scholarly," "absolute," and "scientific" to describe objectivity. He most often used the word objectivity when engaged in a polemic, and then usually to silence criticism. Morgan was, as he [p.151] would say of Joseph Smith, "perfectly the expression of the zeitgeist" (p. 68). (Novak - p. 150).

I thought this opening with Fawn Brodie was quite appropriate as she is still being hailed these days as being the epitome of Mormon History. Her work "No Man Knows My History" is simply one of the worse books in print on the subject. Hugh Nibley long ago noted so in his rather flippant, yet devastating review "No Ma'am, That's Not History". Nibley was accused of being less than serious about Brodie's scholarship, and hence was essentially dismissed, yet he noted in a later little article "A Note on F.M. Brodie", that the reviewers of Brodie's work on Thomas Jefferson were no less flippant of her utterly inane and silly book than he had been of her book on Joseph Smith. In fact, when Brodie took to writing about American heroes, rather than Mormon heroes, her work was finally noticed, and simply destroyed! They had no mercy for her terrible misreadings of Thomas Jefferson. And her methodology in both books, the one about Joseph Smith and Thomas Jefferson, was exactly the same. (Nibley - "Tinkling Cymbals and Sounding Brass", pp. 49-52). Most interesting, D. Michael Quinn in his recent magnum opus "The Mormon Hierarchy" explained his reluctance to use the ever infamous Fawn Brodie:

"Some may wonder why I rarely cite Brodie, whose biography has remained in print for fifty years due to the respect and popularity it has among non-Mormon readers. Despite her erudition, skillful prose, and insights, Brodie's biography is flawed by its inattention to crucial archival materials and by her penchant for filtering evidence and analysis through the perspective that the Mormon prophet was either a 'parapath' who believed his own lies or a fraud." (p. 271, footnote # 18).

Or in the words of Hugh Nibley who has constantly dealt with the ideas of history, experts, scholarship, objectivity, and subjectivity:

Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Vol.4, Ch.6, p.235

"But more damaging to the past even than the wilful and mechanical application of lazy hand-me-down "science" to its reconstruction is the rule of vanity. In the end, as Housman demonstrates at length, a scholar's right to reconstruct history or restore a battered text rests on the possession of personal gifts which escape analysis. Here is high art indeed! The expert feels in his bones that what he says is what is right, unaware that his bones have been undergoing constant conditioning since the day of his birth. He is trained and intelligent; he means to be perfectly scientific and detached; he is constitutionally incapable of wanton error; how then can he be wrong?

Answer: simply by being human! Purity of motive is no guarantee of infallibility; the greatest of errors are by no means intentional, and are often made by the ablest of scholars. Yet because Dr. Faugh means to write an honest, impartial, and objective history we are expected by his publishers to have the decency, or at least the courtesy, to believe that his history is honest, impartial, and objective. No scholar alive possesses enough knowledge to speak the final word on anything, and as to integrity, let us rather call it vanity.

Which exactly describes Dale Morgan, not to mention Brent Lee Metcalfe, D. Michael Quinn and other New Mormon Historians. It is not that they are trying to write skewed histories or being evil. They are simply people locked into their times, working with their built in assumptions as all scholars are. The problem seems to be is that they don't know they are subjective!

Nibley has also noted an interesting phenomena related to historical/religious studies: (Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Vol.4, Ch.6, p.212f)

"Recently Professor Pfeiffer has vigorously deplored any side-taking at all in the study of religion; he thinks one can maintain perfect scientific detachment by "keeping facts and faith, history and revelation, historical research and theological speculation separate and distinct." But is not this appeal for a double bookkeeping that shall "distinguish sharply between true facts and true doctrines" simply a device for placing one's own particular beliefs beyond the reach of objective investigation? Is it fair of the doctors to denounce with moral indignation those who have not yet given up those partisan strivings in which they themselves engaged for generations, and only gave up with reluctance when years of determined seeking led to unforeseen and embarrassing conclusions? It is altogether too convenient when one's own methods of soapmaking have failed, to declare to the world that soap simply cannot be made and heap contempt on those who are still trying and abuse on those who have succeeded.

When the professor finds that his facts do not square with his doctrines, then, but not until then, he announces to the world as a general moral principle that no one should ever try to compare facts with doctrines. That lets him out. But the escape is altogether too convenient; the cause of cool and scientific detachment is defended with such surprising heat and censure; and the announcement of these so liberal and so obvious principles has come so suddenly and so late (for until now church scholars have all admitted to a degree of partisan interest) that one is forced to the conclusion that all this pleading to keep religion out of religious studies is possibly just an extreme form of partisan pleading, an attempt to save face by the related declaration that the rules do not hold any more--that religious and historical facts have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Since the rules no longer favor us, we will abolish them!

Alan Goff in his article "Historical Narrative, Literary Narrative—Expelling Poetics from the Republic of History" notes an interesting idea with Brent Lee Metcalfe:

"All history is ideological and that ideology is revealed as you analyze the historian’s metaphorics and rhetoric.

Part of Metcalfe’s rhetoric is the notion that "apologists" inject ideology from the beginning then find a method to support that position; ironically, this is Metcalfe’s approach in his (mis)use of literary theory." ("Journal of Book of Mormon Studies", Vol. 4, #2, p. 63)

"For positivism, the task of history is to uncover the facts which are, as it were, buried in documents, just like, as Leibniz would have said, the statue of Hercules was lying dormant in the veins of marble. Against the positivist conception of the historical fact, more recent epistemology emphasises the "imaginative reconstruction" which characterises the work of the historian." (FARMS, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Vol.4, Number 2, p.61).

"Metcalfe notes, correctly, that "recent literary theory focuses on the complex and attenuated relation between language and the ‘real’ world." Both recent literary theory and recent historical theory attenuate the relationship between language and the "real" world. Most egregious of his recommendations is that readers peruse Hayden White. Metcalfe holds to a view of "critical" history that only those who believe in religion bring ideologies to their interpretation; "critical" commentators bring presuppositions but no ideologies and then apply neutral methods. But Metcalfe’s sources claim the historian’s language has a problematical relationship to reality. Positivist historians often believe in the neutral application of methods, without preconceived ideas or ideological contamination. The distinction between "true or empirical" narratives and "fictional" ones can’t be upheld by [p.61] narrative theory. Historical narrative is fictive; fictional narrative is historical." (FARMS, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Vol.4, Number 2, p.60)

Metcalfe’s misprision of narrative theory undermines the notion that "critical" historians begin from neutral assumptions and apply neutral methods.

(FARMS, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Vol.4, Number 2, p.62).

But what history borrows from literature can by no means be limited to the level of composition, hence to the moment of configuration. What is borrowed also involves the representative function of the historical imagination. We learn to see a given series of events as tragic, as comic, and so on. What it is, precisely, that makes for the perenniality of certain great historical works, whose scientific reliability has been eroded by documentary progress, is the appropriateness of their poetic art and their rhetoric with respect to their way of "seeing" the past.

Narrative theory doesn’t deny historical reference; it does, however, problematize it. How we conceive narrative is partly a function of the ideological presuppositions we bring to stories. In a similar manner, literature can have an impact on the world; literature is doubly ideological and this is the dialectic in which we must see narrative: (FARMS, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Vol.4, Number 2, p.66).

"Metcalfe doesn’t tell his readers that if you accept his proposition, you would not only have to reject the historical claims of the Book of Mormon but also the Bible and virtually all other ancient writing. Metcalfe’s principle is ethnocentric, anachronistic, and presentist by insisting that all narrative, ancient and modern, be governed by his own philosophy of history." (FARMS, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Vol.4, Number 2, p.74).

Goff's conclusion is significant for those who adapt and utilize Brent Metcalfe's intellectual persuits and assumptions:

Modern thought has largely defined itself in opposition to religion, particularly Christian religion. Through the past three hundred years the Enlightenment, the major branch of modernity, dominated Western culture by gradually convincing religious adherents to see their own commitments less through biblical lenses and more through Enlightenment ones. The Enlightenment was a great cultural watershed, but its unreflective and dogmatic battle against religious belief has distorted its own better nature, especially under the dominant form of Enlightenment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—positivism. Many elements of the [p.101] Enlightenment (its emphasis on emancipation and partly its emphasis on the individual) need to be refocused and reasserted.

We now stand at another similarly important cultural watershed. It usually goes by the name of postmodernism, but I am uncomfortable with that designation because only part of the confrontation with the Enlightenment is properly postmodernist. Various movements (hermeneutics, poststructuralism, analytic philosophy after the linguistic turn, literary and narrative theory, communitarianism) have combined to confront and at times undermine the Enlightenment.

Mormon intellectuals have gone about their business largely ignorant of the ongoing dramatic change in their intellectual disciplines. This is particularly true of Mormon intellectuals defining themselves in opposition to Mormon teachings. Brent Metcalfe is the first of these writers to enlist the disciplines of narrative and literary theory. He doesn’t consider that this literature (powerfully post-and antipositivist) is in opposition to his position; he instead wrenches these stances out of historical context to provide implausible rhetorical support. In historiography, these disciplinary revolutions have explicitly attacked the foundations of that old-thought and have so far undermined them as to make the movement in Mormon studies a relic, an irrelevancy, a dogmatic sect, a superstitious hangover from less enlightened times. This first (mis)appropriation of narrative and literary theory augurs badly for the Mormon intellectual community; Metcalfe’s flotsam is better abandoned and new materials used in the construction of a sea-worthy vessel; while Mormon historians slept, every plank in the ship of historiography was switched from the decaying lumber of modernity to the new materials of postmodernity. This "postmodernism" has yet systematically to define itself in relation to older positions such as religious belief. My guess is that it inherits too much of the Enlightenment it so often fights against to surrender its secularist tendencies. The past is always inhabited by the present: but we ought not to permit ill-, un-, and misinformed versions of that present masquerading as neutral and objective history to succeed in their propagandistic aspirations, neither let them wear the regalia of scholarship just because they dress up in voices and footnotes. Historians and historical writers are ineluctably immersed in language and literary imagination. [p.101] They may say with Caliban, "The red-plague rid you for learning me your language"105 and your narrative theory, but still they must face this brave new world bravely. [p.103]

(FARMS, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Vol.4, Number 2, p.101)

In other words, Metcalfe would have us believe that apologists, that is pro-Mormon scholars and writers, inject, subjectively into their essays, an ideology and thus their studies, by implication are flawed. This is simply not true though. Every single writer from the Bible, to the classics, to Mormon History has a view to present and either defend or refute. Metcalfe's own sources he uses, Goff shows undermines his own supposed "neutral" theory of historians in writing history. Metcalfe himself has an agenda, all the while claiming to be neutral! This idea of historians having a subjective approach has been noted again and again by writers. For instance, in the New Testament arena:

"It is accepted practice to rewrite the Gospels at will, provided one employs the proper jargon. But in frankly admitting that he is out to reshape Christianity to something nearer to the heart's desire, Bultmann has gone too far. "I do not want my eschatology de-eschatologized," cries the eminent scholar Millar Burrows. "It is one thing," he says, "for a theologian to say that demonology is for him a mythological experience of the reality of suffering and evil in the world; it is something else for an exegete to say that Jesus himself did not believe in demons. You cannot have accurate, realistic exegesis if you are not prepared and willing to find ideas that you cannot accept." You cannot de-mythologize the history in the New Testament no matter how badly you want to, Oscar Cullmann protests, because after all it never was mythology or allegory and never was meant to be--it was real history. What Bultmann fondly thinks is a clear, detached, objective view of things, his vaunted Vorverstndnis is nothing but the scientific tradition he has inherited, says von Dobschütz, a thing that conditions the thinking of every scholar whether he admits it or not. And as to this business of picking out of the scripture as the substance of your faith whatever suits your fancy and rejecting what does not, what does that lead to? "Bultmann floats in Bible and theology from one concept to another," von Dobschütz writes, "but everything remains idea without substance. One forgets entirely that Primitive Christianity was actually a very concrete phenomenon." (Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Vol.4, Ch.6, p.310 - p.311).

Better yet Daniel B. McKinlay's analysis of Alan Goff's Master's Thesis - "A Hermeneutic of Sacred Texts: Historicism, Revisionism, Positivism, and the Bible and Book of Mormon" (1989), in "Review of Books", Vol. 2, 1990, pp. 87-9) notes that Goff has some seriously wonderful insights we can all benefit from.

"In reading Goff’s thesis, I am under the impression that he is at least somewhat surprised that the above-named scholars, as well as others he mentions, presume to give authoritative evaluations of Book of Mormon texts by utilizing methods that are now discredited (p. 1). On pp. 6-7 he cites an excerpt of a letter Ron Priddis wrote to The Daily Universe at Brigham Young University, 29 October 1987, in which Priddis criticizes some of Richard L. Anderson’s methods in dealing with the question of Joseph Smith and magic. Priddis concludes that "Anderson’s approach to history is to align sources in ways that best support preconceived concepts, using the most lenient standards to evaluate data he finds useful and the most narrow allowances for sources which contradict his views." D. Michael Quinn, on the other hand, when dealing with the same subject, "has scrupulously followed his sources wherever they have led, letting history speak for itself." As Goff sees Priddis’s position, the latter considers any handling of historical sources that disagrees with his own to be tendentious, whereas the historian who agrees with him is simply appealing to "brute facts," whose understanding is self-evident. The fallacy in this, according to Goff, is that there are no brute facts which in and of themselves present an infallible picture of reality. Any historical scheme we create is an interpretive venture. We take whatever data we can find and try to construct a plausible mechanism whose features cohere and make sense overall. But as Goff rightly says, "We always give the data meaning; evidence doesn’t speak for itself" (p. 183). It is ultimately meaningless, even impossible, therefore, to claim objectivity. Hence, "our explanations of the past do not refer to what actually happened or the way things ‘really’ happen in the world—all our explanations are interpretations based on prejudices and ideologies as we encounter the data left to us from the past. We judge the historical evidence as we see it, not as it actually is" (p. 25). Not only are our conclusions based on prejudices and ideologies, but on value judgments, which are grounded on "assumptions that cannot be defended, logically or empirically" (p. 29).

"Along this line, Goff rejects the absolutist premise of Anthony Hutchinson, who claims that prophecy in the sense of predicting the future is nonexistent in the world of reality. According to Goff, "such a position doesn’t reveal what happens in the ‘real world,’ it reveals a theological understanding that excludes certain possibilities a priori" (p. 15). The best Hutchinson (or anyone else) can do is acknowledge that predictive prophecy is not real to him. But that does not necessarily preclude its existence.

"A point that Goff makes with regard to our attempts to re-create the past is too little recognized in scholarship in general. It is that the historian is required to fill in many gaps in his project. H. J. Cadbury pointed out some time ago that we have a paucity of knowledge from which to devise an accurate assessment of earliest Christianity. Yet it is amazing how confidently some scholars propose explanations for sayings attributed to Jesus. Frequently form critics will take a given saying and conclude: Jesus could not have said this; it is, rather, a reflection of the situation in the early church, perhaps in Mark’s or Matthew’s community. Frankly, this kind of exercise amounts to second-guessing the texts. By what standard do we determine what Jesus said as opposed to what must have been invented by the early church and then attributed to Jesus? Does it help to say that the logia came from Christian prophets who understood them to originate from the resurrected Lord, only to be transferred to the mouth of the historical Jesus? Whatever the standard may be, one thing is inevitable: our conclusions depend on our own reasoning and the presuppositions we bring to the text. We fill in the gaps. But regardless of strong justification for our own view, other people seeing the same data may make sense of it in another way. To me Goff may overstate the situation a bit, but nevertheless makes an important point, when he says:

"The historian doesn’t just take up the objective record and present it to the audience; he or she adds to the record concepts (such as evolution and theological notions) that the actors never would have considered: he or she makes connections the actors never made; in [Martin] Marty’s terms, he or she "invents." The historian invents, tells a story, invents a story based on the historical record. (p. 33)

"Goff thinks that historians should let their audience know what assumptions underlie their position, although he admits that they may not always be conscious of some of them. And certainly, given the interpretive nature of history, "we ought to be tentative about our conclusions" (p. 33). This should be stressed. Our perceptions of life are often contingent upon models. Models are the basis by which we apprehend the various disciplines we study. They are convenient because they are attempts to make sense of the world as we see it. The more a model is able to answer questions within its sphere the better it is. I think Goff would agree that Old and New Testament criticism is based on models, and of course there are some givens that govern their use. An example is the documentary hypothesis of the Pentateuch or the Gospels. The division of the Pentateuch into four strains of tradition, designated as "J," "E," "P," and "D," provides us with a workable model; various pericopes that have points in common may fall into one of the four groups. One wonders, however, about the possibility of grouping slices of the scriptures, which also make sense within their own paradigm, into different categories, thus creating a different model. Historically, models have a way of being replaced by better ones. I suspect that eventually some bright person will come up with a model that will replace the one that is now dominant. But we should keep in mind that the working out of models requires filler or guess work; the plausibility of any model is dependent upon assuming that certain data can be understood in a certain way. But the possibility of those data being seen in other ways is ever present. A good example of this is found in Gospel criticism. Many scholars believe that Matthew and Luke used Mark, as well as another common document or oral tradition, "Q," as two of their sources. But William Farmer, following the lead of Johann J. Griesbach, has offered some rather cogent arguments which suggest that Mark was dependent upon Matthew. The debate has not ended. Both views can make sense, depending upon how one looks at the evidence. It is possible that neither hypothesis is correct and that the story of the composition of the Gospels and their possible influence on each other is still unknown. There are all kinds of possibilities.

"Personally, I believe that the approach of Brodie, Russell, Ham, Hutchinson, and others of like mind—to disregard the possible antiquity of the Book of Mormon on the grounds that some features of the history of Judah prior to the Exile as presently understood by many scholars seem to preclude the book’s authenticity—is precarious. It demonstrates restricted scope and does not consider the many possibilities available in understanding the text. Some of those possibilities may not even have occurred to anyone yet. Hugh Nibley in Since Cumorah gave some tentative suggestions on the Isaiah problem, and there is still room for further considerations.

"Some thinkers claim they have found parallels between the Book of Mormon and the America Joseph Smith knew. That may be so, but as Goff puts it: "I firmly believe that given sufficient determination and research, environmental parallels could be found to claim that the Book of Mormon would fit into any epoch and location" (pp. 44-45). Nibley has said essentially the same thing. In spite of some similarities between the Book of Mormon and Jacksonian America, I believe (and I sense that Goff does) that the Book of Mormon is so exotic that it portrays a civilization "from another age and another culture." But ultimately, as Nibley points out, the evidence proving or disproving the Book of Mormon does not exist. One’s response to it is a matter of faith.

"Drawing on studies by Terrence L. Szink, Leland Ryken, Brevard Childs, Nahum Waldman, and others, Goff analyzes the story of Nephi’s broken steel bow. He notes that "the bow was a symbol of strength and leadership" (p. 95). A broken bow symbolized submission in treaties of a subservient king to his superior. The issue in Nephi’s episode is submission to God, which Nephi illustrates liberally. The tensions of leadership (i.e., the complaint of Laman and Lemuel that their rightful role of leadership is being usurped) are attested throughout 1 Nephi and the first part of 2 Nephi. An examination of the leadership questions, the murmurings, and the miraculous deliverances suggests resemblances to the Joseph and Moses stories with the same themes. Goff considers this to be deliberate; he holds that Nephi wants to emphasize common patterns. In this regard Goff applies the intriguing thesis of Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return, that archaic man felt that life was real when it was archetypal; the repetition of the events occurring at the foundation of the nation are ‘real’ events and ordinary events merely mundane; real events must be enacted. Thus Goff concludes: "What would surprise us most, then, would be for Nephi not to cast his narrative in the Exodus language and tradition" (p. 101). I find the possibilities in this approach to be attractive.

"While Goff offers many stimulating possibilities to ponder, I consider his most valuable insight to be stated in these words: "The text has no single meaning. Like all complex texts, the Book of Mormon resists our attempts to claim that we know what God means, finally and completely" (p. 84). The author reminds us that "each explanation of a text is itself a construction" (p. 182). The fact that we can look at the Book of Mormon (and the gospel as a whole for that matter) from all kinds of perspectives only enhances the richness of our literature. Antagonists of the Book of Mormon have tended not to examine that book very closely. As Goff states it: "Because the revisionist critics I have questioned in this study assume that the Book of Mormon is a shallow novel, their interpretations end up demonstrating a superficial book. This shallowness is as much a result of the superficiality of their own approach as it is of anything in the book itself" (p. 184).

So, I believe that we can see both sides have some points to make. I think it is completely out of line to simply label the new Mormon Historians as the epitome of honesty and objectivity when dealing with Mormon history simply because they come to different conclusions than church historians and leaders.