From the floor of the 2016 FairMormon conference (Thursday morning)

The morning began with something of a tag team presentation by Royal Skousen and Stan Carmack, offering a nice summary of their work on the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project.  There were some striking new details, and I got a kick out of the fact that several of Royal’s “conjectural emendations” — his suggestions of editorial changes to the Book of Mormon text, which have sometimes excited controversy — were actually already made by the Book of Mormon’s 1852 French translation.

The military historian Morgan Deane then offered a take on the Gadianton robbers that I very, very much liked, contending (as I’ve believed and, I think, said for years) that the Book of Mormon offers us something of an ideologically-charged caricature of them rather than a fully objective and fair portrayal.  (In this regard, I read the Book of Mormon in precisely the way that I would read, and do read, any other historical text, ancient or medieval or modern.)  Where he goes beyond anything I’ve said, though I find his approach both plausible and intriguing, is in suggesting that Gadiantonism was, to at least some significant degree, a movement (possibly of ethnic outsiders) in quest of land reform; that the Gadianton robbers may have had quite legitimate grievances; and that the “robbers” may may have been a bit more like Robin Hood, and the Nephite leadership a bit more like the Sheriff of Nottingham, than we’re accustomed to think.

The presentation of the morning was a really interesting discussion, by Matt Grow, of the Church History Department in Salt Lake City, of the soon-to-be-published minutes of the 1844-1846 Council of Fifty.  He closed with two really great quotations from the minutes, one by Brigham Young on the nature of revelation and the other, from Joseph Smith, on religious liberty and tolerance.

So far, in my view, really strong presentations.  If you’re not here or listing to the presentations by live streaming, be sure to listen to them or to read them when they’re available on line.  That should be, ideally, within a few weeks.