Two new articles went up today on the website of the Interpreter Foundation:
“Twenty Years After “Paradigms Regained,” Part 1: The Ongoing, Plain, and Precious Significance of Margaret Barker’s Scholarship for Latter-day Saint Studies,” written by Kevin Christensen
Abstract: Twenty years ago, the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies published “Paradigms Regained: A Survey of Margaret Barker’s Scholarship and Its Significance for Mormon Studies” as its second FARMS Occasional Paper. The first part of this essay provides an overview of Doctor Barker’s scholarship and its wider reception through early 2022, and then includes a broad survey of Latter-day Saint interaction with her work to the present. Part 2 of this essay (forthcoming) will address specific criticisms and appreciations of Barker’s work.
“Interpreting Interpreter: Two Decades of Margaret Barker,” written by Kyler Rasmussen
This post is a summary of the article “Twenty Years After “Paradigms Regained,” Part 1: The Ongoing, Plain, and Precious Significance of Margaret Barker’s Scholarship for Latter-day Saint Studies” by Kevin Christensen in Volume 54 of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. An introduction to the Interpreting Interpreter series is available at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreting-interpreter-on-abstracting-thought/.
The Takeaway: Christensen thoroughly describes the over 20-year connection between Margaret Barker and Latter-day Saint studies in a tribute that’s part annotated CV and part personal reminiscence, outlining the intertwining paths of Barker’s temple-based biblical scholarship and the claims of the Restoration.
I often hear — still, even today — that religious belief cannot endure contact with real information or with genuine education. The claim has never struck me as true, however, and I’ve seen more than one serious study that has provided strong evidence directly to the contrary. Here’s another: “Does education ‘cure’ people of faith? The data says no: Despite a long-standing biased assumption among many that the uneducated cling to religion, studies show people with higher degrees are most likely to be religious.”
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)
I’m really pleased to see this development: “Tabernacle Choir Redefines Its Mission: Pilot programs to extend its reach throughout the world”
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)
I would be remiss in my duties toward you if I didn’t share these two horrors that I’ve found in the fabled and apparently inexhaustible Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File©:
probably not long before his death by accidental drowning
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)
Several years ago, on one occasion when I was speaking at BYU Education Week in Provo, Stephen Wight kindly handed me several pages that he had photocopied from a book by William Shepard and H. Michael Marquardt, Lost Apostles: Forgotten Members of Mormonism’s Original Quorum of Twelve (2014). The copied passages referred to three accounts of Lyman Johnson’s claiming to have been visited by an angel testifying of the Book of Mormon. Two of these accounts explicitly said that he saw the plates from which the Book of Mormon was translated.
1.
Lyman Johnson and Orson Pratt embarked on a missionary journey in February 1832. On 8 February 1832, they stopped at the home of Benjamin Stokely, in Cool Spring Township, Mercer County, Pennsylvania.
“According to Stokely, Lyman testified that an angel had personally shown him the Book of Mormon plates, the same as the witnesses to the Book of Mormon.” (42)
In Stokely’s own words, “An angel brought the Mormonite Bible and laid it before him (the speaker); he therefore knows these things to be true.”
Of Pratt and Johnson, Stokely wrote, “They appeared to have very little learning, to be sincere in all they said. They had good manners — had been well raised — were decent and unassuming in every thing I saw, or heard them say.”
Stokely’s comments were originally published in the Western Press (Mercer County, Pennsylvania), though no copies of that paper seem to be extant. But his report was subsequently republished as “The Mormonites” on page two of The American Sentinel for 25 February 1832, and then as “The Orators of Mormon” in Catholic Telegraph (Cincinnati) on 14 April 1832, on pages 204-205. The emphasis is in the original.
2.
In the 1880s, Edward Tullidge interviewed Lorin Farr, who by that time had served as the mayor of Ogden, about his early life. Among other things, Farr recalled hearing the gospel preached by Orson Pratt and Lyman Johnson for the very first time, when he was eleven years old. It was in the spring of 1832:
“Lyman Johnson arose and delivered one of the most powerful testimonies pertaining to the mission of Joseph Smith and the great work of the last days, that Lorin ever heard. [Lyman] also said that he knew the Book of Mormon was true, for he had seen an angel and he had made this known unto him.”
See Edward W. Tullidge, “Biographies,” in Tullidge’s Histories: Containing the History of All the Northern, Eastern, and Western Counties of Utah, also the Counties of Southern Idaho (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor, 1889), 2:174-175.
3.
When Lyman Johnson preached in Dalton, Coos County, New Hampshire, in July 1835, the eighteen-year-old Ethan Barrows was in the audience and listening carefully. In the “Journal of Ethan Barrows,” Journal of History 15 (January 1922): 36, written around 1892, Barrows reported that
“He said that an holy angel had ministered with him and had shown him the plates from which the Book of Mormon was translated, and commanded him to testify to all the world that it was true.”
These are very significant additions to the official Witness testimonies and to the several other unofficial testimonies of the Book of Mormon plates.
Posted from Moab, Utah
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In