Shameless

I’ve already offered summaries of most of the presentations at Saturday’s Interpreter Foundation conference here and here.  I’ll finish with such summarizing in this post.

The fourth speaker during the afternoon portion of the conference was Professor Stephen D. Ricks, a longtime friend and both a former department colleague of mine and a former missionary companion in German-speaking Switzerland, who is also the principal organizer of the Temple on Mount Zion conferences.  He addressed the topic of “Premortal Existence in Ancient Jewish Tradition,” sharing a number of references to biblical and extra-biblical sources on the subject.

He was followed by Brent Schmidt of BYU-Idaho, who posed the question “How Are Faithfulness and Grace Connected to the Right Hand of Fellowship?”

Right-hand clasps, Professor Schmidt showed, symbolized covenantal faithfulness in the Greco-Roman world in many temple-related settings. The right-hand symbolized faith (pistis in Greek; fides in Latin) expressed as loyalty through ancient texts, mosaics and coins. His presentation summarized the findings of his important recent work Relational Faith, in which he demonstrates that apostolic faith (pistis) was not an abstract feeling or emotion, as it is conventionally understood in later Christian history. Rather, ancient faith was a token of action in an ongoing, covenantal relationship with God the Father through his Son Jesus Christ.

A personal note:  I have just about finished re-reading the fourth-century BC Anabasis of Xenophon (once nicely titled, in translation, The March Upcountry) in Rex Warner’s 1949 Penguin version (The Persian Expedition),  and I was struck by several instances in which the act of clasping right hands appeared as part of a treaty or covenant ceremony, not only among the Greeks but among Achaemenid Persians and Thracians:

• “I fought him and made him decide to stop fighting against me; then I gave him and he gave me the right hand of friendship.”  (I.6, page 41)
• “This was agreed upon.  The oaths were sworn, and Tissaphernes and the King’s brother-in-law offered their right hands to the Greek generals and captains and took theirs in return.”  (II.3, page 76)
• “If the King wants to destroy us, I have no idea why he, with all these advantages on his side, should have to take an oath and exchange the right hand of friendship and perjure himself and make his guarantees worthless in the eyes both of Greeks and natives.”  (II.3, page 78
• “On this understanding he swore an oath to us in person, he in person gave us his right hand . . .”  (III.2, page 105)
• “When the Greeks had heard what he had to say, they shook hands with the Thracians as a sign of friendship and rode back.”  (VII.3, page 263)

The sixth speaker of Saturday afternoon, and the final speaker of the conference, was Spencer Kraus, who gave an interesting presentation under the title “God Hath Shown unto Me a Vision”: The Sacred Handclasp and the Resurrection of the Dead.”  Here is his own summary of what he said:

In Joseph Smith’s Nauvoo sermons, the Prophet would refer to a vision he had received of the resurrection, in which the saints took each other by the hand and lifted the dead up to life, glory, and joy. Furthermore, Joseph taught that the order of resurrection by which we could become gods was to be revealed in the most holy place in a temple prepared for that purpose. The sacred handclasp used to raise the saints to become gods is an ancient ritual gesture, and a similar handclasp has been utilized by early Christians to depict Jesus Christ raising others to life. This ritual gesture is found in both the New Testament and early Christian literature, and reflects a wider use of a sacred handclasp in ancient Near Eastern temple practices, allowing the petitioner to be raised to eternal life and enter the presence of God. This ritual action is therefore best understood as a restored practice of ancient temple worship, both in this life and the next.

Videos of the presentations at the 2024 Temple on Mount Zion conference will, I think, eventually go up online.  And the ultimate goal is to publish them as an anthology in the form of a book.

A review of Six Days in August has appeared online that was written by my anonymous Mini-Stalker, who has been posting criticisms of me for many years now — especially of things (this is his particular specialty) that he’s invented about me.  To my completely disoriented surprise, he didn’t like the movie.  Color me astonished.

That’s fine, of course.  There are even people who dislike the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.  Leo Tolstoy detested Shakespeare.  My Mini-Stalker hates me. De gustibus non disputandum est.

But I do appreciate accuracy.

Among other things, Mini-Stalker comments on a scene in which Joseph Smith explains the principle of eternal marriage to Hyrum Smith and Brigham Young and their wives.  By that time, both Hyrum and Brigham were widowers who had married again after the deaths of their first spouses.  Hyrum had married Jerusha Barden in 1826, and they had six children together.  But Jerusha had died in 1837.   Later that year, he married the English-born Mary Fielding.  Brigham had married Miriam Angeline Works, but she died of tuberculosis in 1832 at the age of twenty-six.  She left two children behind.  In 1834, Brigham married Mary Ann Angell.

In the scene to which Mini-Stalker alludes, Hyrum was in the room with Mary and Brigham was there with Mary Ann.

The subject was eternal marriage, not polygamy as such — although, plainly, postmortem plural marriage is entailed by the idea that spouses can be sealed together for eternity and that (as Joseph says in the film) such sealings can be performed vicariously, on the same principle as baptisms for the dead.  Hyrum, in particular, is shown as being moved by the idea that he hasn’t lost Jerusha forever.  (I won’t spoil things by describing Brigham and Mary Ann’s reaction.)

Mini-Stalker accuses me of dishonesty because I represent the two women, Mary and Mary Ann — and, by extension, early Latter-day Saint women more generally — as being “happy,” “ecstatic,” “excited,” and “utterly joyful” at the idea of polygamy.  Two or three of his followers then join in, denouncing me for my dishonesty in misrepresenting those women as being “enthusiastic” about it.  Perhaps, one suggests, I feared excommunication if I didn’t depict them as absolutely giddy with delight at the prospect of sharing their husbands with other women.

However, as I say, Mini-Stalker is grossly misrepresenting the scene, where the emphasis is on the continuation of marriage relationships beyond the grave, not on polygamy in this life — which isn’t so much as mentioned by either Joseph or Hyrum or Brigham or Mary or Mary Ann.

And he certainly knows that the film doesn’t actually suggest that Latter-day Saint women were enthusiastic, happy, excited, joyful, and ecstatic about plural marriage, because he himself cites a scene — in order, of course, to mock and criticize it — in which Emma tearfully expresses her pain and sorrow to Joseph about the agonizing test of her faith that plural marriage poses.

It’s always ironic to be accused of dishonesty by (of all people) my Mini-Stalker.  Perhaps, in this case, even more so than usual.

Incidentally, there’s a second (and last) “sneak peek” early screening of Six Days in August that’s coming up on Monday, 7 October:  Six Days in August – Early Access

The photograph immediately above was, I’m told by a person whom I have no reason to distrust, taken in Springfield, Ohio.  (The two photos directly above it were taken in Germany in the 1930s.)  As readers of this blog are aware, I no longer hold public political opinions.  But I hope that people who know me, or who have some sense of who I am, will quickly be able to intuit my view of what is shown in the photograph and of those who are fostering such attitudes and actions.

The person who shared the image — a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints whom, following my consistent policy, I will not identify so as not to expose him to targeting by my obsessive critics — wrote the following to accompany it:

I was told this is going on in Springfield Ohio. The Proud Boys have taken up residence and walk the streets intimidating and threatening any Haitians they see.
Our Church congregation in the city has asked members to escort them to the store and school. Otherwise, they are too afraid to leave their homes.