Why Margaret Barker is Right<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It is no secret that in the past I have not pulled many punches when it comes to the assessment of Margaret Barker and her attempts to reconstruct lost\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/faithpromotingrumor\/2009\/10\/why-margaret-barker-is-right\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why Margaret Barker is Right\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It is no secret that in the past I have not pulled many punches when it comes to the assessment of Margaret Barker and her attempts to reconstruct lost\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/faithpromotingrumor\/2009\/10\/why-margaret-barker-is-right\/\" 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{"id":2441,"date":"2009-10-28T01:27:52","date_gmt":"2009-10-28T05:27:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.faithpromotingrumor.com\/?p=2441"},"modified":"2009-10-28T01:27:52","modified_gmt":"2009-10-28T05:27:52","slug":"why-margaret-barker-is-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/faithpromotingrumor\/2009\/10\/why-margaret-barker-is-right\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Margaret Barker is Right"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

But all that changed for me when I realized that Margaret Barker is right.<\/p>\n

Why should history matter, (or methodology, while we\u2019re at it)? This is not entirely a tongue-in-cheek question. Really, what dog do we have in the historicity fight? Whether Josiah reformed a Temple cult that had been more in line with the Restoration matters about as much as whether or not Job (or the Good Samaritan for that matter) was a historical figure. What matters is the story we tell ourselves. And Margaret Barker facilitates that story in new and intriguing ways for Latter-day Saints. Historicity is grease for the narrative wheel, but such historicity need not conform to academic standards.<\/p>\n

What we see with the acceptance of Barker and her theories is the phenomenon of belief in a truth via a fiction, not unlike that outlined by Jon Levenson in his Sinai and Zion<\/em>. He asks if it\u2019s really an all-or-nothing question for Jews when it comes to Mosaic authorship of the Torah: \u201cCan it not be the case that the literary form of the Torah conveys a truth which is not historical in nature? Is not fiction a valid mode of knowledge, a mode of which God himself may have made use?\u201d (p. 8).<\/p>\n

You might counter, but what about truth claims<\/em>? The Book of Mormon cannot be a 19th century production and still be inspired because it claims<\/em> not to be. If it is such, it is lying and therefore not true. But do not fictions all make similar claims? (The Name of the Rose<\/em> comes particularly to mind.) And can God not work wonders through fiction? What is important is the sway it holds on us. Job is a fiction, one that asks us to go along in the face of outlandish claims to knowledge and events in order to make a sublime point<\/a>. Margaret Barker\u2019s fiction is no different (though far less sublime) for Latter-day Saints who seek to add to their constellation of evidences for an ancient Mormonism<\/a>. What is important is not whether there was <\/em>an ancient Mormonism, but that we see it there<\/em>. Margaret Barker helps us with that.<\/p>\n

By the way, Dan Brown was right too.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"