Another passage from a manuscript-in-progress:   There were other connections between Arabian paganism and the religion of the biblical peoples. The pre-Islamic Arabs thought of themselves as the descendants of Ishmael. Beyond that, they seem to have been familiar with a story according to which both Ishmael and his father Abraham had come to central Arabia and had constructed a shrine in the town of Mecca, known as the “Ka’ba.” The Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, refers... Read more

    Eliza Snow remarked of Joseph Smith that “in his devotion [i.e., in his prayers] he was as humble as a little child.”[1]  He was, concurred George Q. Cannon, “as meek and gentle as a little child.”[2]  This aspect of his personality was also noted by Daniel Tyler: At the time William Smith and others rebelled against the Prophet at Kirtland, I attended a meeting “on the flats,” where “Joseph” presided. Entering the school house a little before the... Read more

    My wife and I have just returned from hearing Jack Welch deliver the 2017 Laura F. Willes Book of Mormon Lecture at the Assembly Hall of the Gordon B. Hinckley Center at BYU.  The title of his remarks was “Hours Never to Be Forgotten: Timing the Book of Mormon Translation.”   He’s spent decades, off and on, considering the question of the translation timeline for the Book of Mormon; his most recent publication on the subject appears in... Read more

    My wife and I attended a performance, last night, of Forever Plaid on the Sorenson Legacy Jewel Box Stage at the new Hale Centre Theatre in the very nearly completed Mountain America Performing Arts Centre.   Forever Plaid is, I’ll admit, not my absolutely favorite play.  But it’s entertaining and fun, and the superb cast that we saw last night included a son of our very, very good and longtime friends Dil and Laura Beth Parkinson, who are currently serving... Read more

    When I was growing up in California, critics of the Book of Mormon quite commonly opposed it to the theory that the first Americans had arrived from Asia via a prehistoric land bridge, now submerged, located at the Bering Straits.   It was, supposedly, an either/or.  If the Book of Mormon is true, so the reasoning went, it must account for the origin of every Amerindian before Columbus.  On the other hand, went the corollary, if the Bering Straits... Read more

    More preliminary notes on the apparent sincerity of Joseph Smith:   Even many of Joseph’s critics wrestled with the possibility that he might actually have been honest and sincere.  Josiah Quincy sums up his account of his 1844 visit to Nauvoo with the comment that, “If the reader does not know just what to make of Joseph Smith, I cannot help him out of the difficulty.  I myself stand helpless before the puzzle.”[1]  In June 1851, a journalist... Read more

    Some additional notes:   Joseph’s honesty seems clearly evidenced as well by his own sacrifices for the cause he proclaimed—something that becomes rather more difficult to explain if he was insincere. So did his family and those who believed in his message.[1] He was arrested repeatedly, and, from the very earliest days, he and his followers were subjected to harassment and worse.[2] “The Prophet Joseph,” George A. Smith recalled of the march of Zion’s Camp, took full share... Read more

    From Carol Cornwall Madsen, Emmeline B. Wells: an Intimate History (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2017), 49-50.   Could the church survive the loss of its murdered prophet, many wondered, and if so, who should now govern it?  It was not long before several made claim to that position, while others left the church to develop their own forms of Mormonism.  Some, disillusioned and apprehensive, simply left Mormonism altogether.  But the majority stayed the course, and in August, when... Read more

    Notes on the situation in Judaism after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in AD 70:   The scholars now reigned supreme within Palestinian Judaism. Family, social standing, and wealth no longer mattered. All that mattered was learning. Study, the scholars said, was even more important than keeping the commandments.[1] They did not claim revelation themselves, and they did not recognize revelation to others. This is well illustrated by the excommunication of Rabbi Eliezer... Read more

    Some more notes on how we got to the rise of Islam from the close of the New Testament period:   Rabbi Johanan sought and received permission from the victo­rious Roman authorities to set up a Jewish religious center at Jab­neh, or Jamnia, to the west of Jerusalem. There, with the Jewish state gone and its traditional leadership destroyed, an assembly of rabbis met and, still under the title of “Sanhedrin,” set about to answer the questions that... Read more