The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction

Few biographers devote years to writing a life history of Shakespeare who don't love and appreciate the man and his work. My colleague just completed an outstanding volume on Milton; he gave it twenty years of his life because he thinks Milton's legacy is worth celebrating. Nobody calls him a Milton-apologist.

Of course, there are passionate debunkers of Thomas Jefferson and Joseph Smith as well. My point is that a personal interest in, or profound appreciation for, a religious contribution or cultural inheritance is quite obviously not ipso facto grounds for disqualifying anyone's scholarly contribution or participation in a debate. We need a more level playing field. If any of us are apologists, we are all apologists: Richard Dawkins, Fawn Brodie, Arthur Lovejoy -- we are all making the best case we can for our appraisal of a scientific or metaphysical perspective, a historical character, or an influential paradigm. That's what scholars do. The question is, do we do it honestly and rigorously?

What was the biggest challenge you faced in writing this book?

Literary scholars are familiar with the "heresy of paraphrase," the fallacy that any summary of a poem can be adequate to the experience of that poem. Such a fallacy is infinitely more applicable -- and lamentable -- in the case of a text that is one of the most hotly contested texts of modernity, with a claim to divine roots and scriptural status. No one, myself included, can hope to fully succeed at such a task.

Will this reach a broader audience because of the nature of the publisher/publication? In other words, does Oxford publishing an introduction to the Book of Mormon communicate the idea "the Book of Mormon deserves to be more widely read and taken more seriously"?

There is certainly growing sentiment in this regard. Pulitzer Prize winning historian Daniel Walker Howe said, "The Book of Mormon . . . has never been accorded the status it deserves; ... non-Mormons, dismissing the work as a fraud, have been more likely to ridicule than read it."  Recently Penguin has published a version of the Book of Mormon, and Yale University Press just released "The Earliest Text." Oxford has been at the forefront of redressing a historical neglect that has impaired our ability, as literary and cultural historians, to fully assess the influential role this book has played in Mormonism's religious past.

For readers interested in going further in understanding the Book of Mormon, what volume(s) would you recommend?

Almost no material is available from the secular press on the Book of Mormon. Nothing can substitute reading the primary source itself -- the Book of Mormon. But Hand of Mormon will give a good overview of the controversies surrounding the book and the role it has played in the LDS church, and Grant Hardy's forthcoming study of the Book of Mormon will be rewarding to anyone interested in more fully appreciating its literary complexity and richness.

[1] See Introvigne, Massimo. "The Book of Mormon Wars: A Non-Mormon Perspective." Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 5:2 (1996): 1-25.