Mormons and the Bible in the 21st Century

By Philip Barlow

Reading the future is a precarious enterprise, one that prompts modesty -- or playfulness -- in all but the foolhardy. That awareness informs these several thoughts on Mormonism's relation with the Bible in the coming decades.

The safest prediction is that new developments in this arena will add interesting and subtle layers, but will not revolutionize foundational patterns. These established patterns include 1) a basic Mormon faith in the Bible as containing the word of God insofar as it has descended with integrity from its original sources; 2) a largely complementary (but sometimes tensive) allegiance to ongoing counsel and pronouncements proffered by modern prophets and apostles, as well as to additional revelations in The Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price -- the Mormon canon; 3) a pervasive biblical influence on the conceptions, content, and forms of these additional scriptures and the consequent consciousness of Latter-day Saint believers; and 4) additional dimensions, namely the Mormon experience with private and oral scripture, for example, or the considerable range of individual Mormons' interpretations both of specific passages and of the nature of scripture.

What future overlay awaits this foundation? Among other possibilities, four elements in a forecast follow here.

Although the Book of Mormon and the notion of open-ended (thus future) revelation set early Mormons apart from others, the Latter-day Saints during their first century-and-a-half tended, though not uniformly, to yield primacy to the Bible as first and foremost in its canon. The past two decades, however, have seen a shift.

Read More from: The Future of Mormonism Deriving from the church presidency of Ezra Taft Benson (1985-1994), a renewed and heightened emphasis on the Book of Mormon has meant that it has taken a certain priority over the Bible in Mormon culture and consciousness -- at least in the form of Mormonism embodied in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose headquarters are in Salt Lake City. This thrust contrasts sharply with the direction of the much smaller Reorganized LDS Church (since 2001 the "Community of Christ," with headquarters in Independence, Missouri), which increasingly since the 1970s has muted the Book of Mormon and elevated the Bible while veering toward a liberal Protestantism.

The new emphasis on the Book of Mormon in the dominant LDS Church could be overstated, for the Bible remains an essential component of official and popular perspectives and study. Nonetheless, when one visits a typical Mormon worship service today, one will hear church members cite and bear witness to the inspired nature of the Book of Mormon more frequently than they cite or testify of the Bible. It remains to be seen whether this will invite an eventual corrective, but the trend has considerable momentum with no hint of an end in sight.

Three other aspects of our prediction derive from Mormonism's growth and its encounter with the world. The movement is both enlarging and maturing, giving it a certain confidence. A scholarly expression of this confidence is already apparent in the academic study of Mormonism by both Mormon and other scholars. Studies less defensive or antagonistic than previously, which ask less constricted and more probing questions of interest to a wider audience, are forthcoming by the dozens from academic presses at Columbia, Harvard, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oxford, Princeton, Utah, Utah State, Yale, and others.

Professorships and programs in Mormon Studies have arisen for the first time in the secular academy. We can anticipate a biblical expression of this broader thrust on the part of Mormon scholars in the coming years. A biblical scholarship that is at once less apologetic, more competent and informed, but also more able to find its own voice in exploring distinctive contributions to biblical understandings will arise. Examples are already on the horizon, as with a multi-volume new translation and commentary on the New Testament already underway by scholars at Brigham Young University who are more equipped than heretofore for such an undertaking. If successful, such ventures will spawn others.

Institutional growth engenders other biblical implications. In 1996, for the first time, more Mormons resided outside than inside the United States. While considerable expansion occurs in Africa and elsewhere, the overwhelming increase for the next generation will continue to be in Mexico and Central and South America. Before long, there will be more Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking church members than Saints whose primary tongue is English.

Given this future, it is notable that the LDS church in 2009 published Santa Biblia, the church's own edition of the Spanish Bible, complete with scaled down annotations generally paralleling those in the official English LDS edition of the Bible (1979), which in turn entwine the biblical text with other Mormon scriptures. The Spanish chapter headings are closely translated from those in the LDS English Bible, which view the text through a literalist lens colored by a conservative version of Mormon Christianity. Like the headings in the English LDS Bible, for example, the Spanish heading to Genesis 49, wherein Jacob blesses his sons, interprets Shiloh and Stone of Israel as "Christ," and Joseph's branches as the Book of Mormon's "Nephites" and "Lamanites."

The choice to eschew the 1960 revision as the new LDS Spanish Bible's basis and to adopt instead the 1909 Reina-Valera translation (traditionally used by Protestants) may have been influenced by copyright restrictions on the former. In any case, the church's announcement of the new Bible also expresses its sentiment that the Spanish of the 1909 Reina-Valera "is comparable in the dignity of its language to the King James Version . . . in English." It is not the case that the LDS church uses antique biblical translations in all languages for its modern adherents, but the fact that they did so for its own edition of the Bible, in the language soon numerically to dominate Mormonism, is significant. It means that as the church grows in areas that speak additional languages, it will likely remain consistent with precedent set in Spanish and English by issuing its own editions of the Bible in these respective languages. This will entail the translation of the "Mormonized" chapter headings and cross references, as well as the need to address the problem of whether to choose a contemporary version of, say, Russian, which the populace more readily understands, or an older version which is understood to retain "a dignity comparable to the King James English Bible."

This leads us to a final consideration here -- the future role of the King James Bible in the Mormon canon. During its first century, the KJV was the movement's common, inherited, but not sole Bible. Joseph Smith patterned the language of the Book of Mormon after it as the sacred language familiar to him. But he spoke often of its limitations and drew on other translations frequently. The KJV morphed from the common Bible of Mormonism to its de facto official version only by 1979, after a series of traceable changes in perspective beginning after the Civil War. In that year, as noted earlier, the church published its own edition of the KJV, with an elaborate accompanying interpretive apparatus (chapter headings, Bible dictionary, topical guide, references, and footnotes) that conditions how the Saints understand the text, much as the famous Scofield and Ryrie Study Bibles shape and reinforce the dispensationalist views of fundamentalist Protestants.

In 1992, the Church's First Presidency made the implicit explicit by publishing a letter pronouncing the KJV to be the Church's official English Bible. Because of this, and because abandoning the KJV would raise questions about transposing to modern form the language of the Book of Mormon, and because the beautiful and antique Jacobean phrasing of the KJV seems to contemporary ears a sacred language that buffers the devoted from the mundane and the profane, this policy of championing the King James Bible is not apt to change in the next half-century.

In the subsequent fifty years, however, the Church may have to consider an alternate strategy. Although the KJV remains a popular translation, especially among older Christians, it has already been a quarter-century since it was dethroned as America's best-selling Bible. Its star is descending. Virtually no other major denomination in the United States uses it as an official translation, and its Mormon use in the year 2050 will seem to contemporaries akin to the Amish rejection of automobiles. Retention of young Mormons coming of age and of new converts has grown to a critical concern for the LDS church, as it is among most contemporary religions. English-speaking peoples two generations from now will increasingly find early 17th-century prose to be an alien tongue; this will not generally aid retention. Moreover, any respect that leaders and followers come to pay to modern biblical scholarship will need eventually to come to terms with the fact that the King James Bible was translated from Hebrew and Greek texts inferior to and more recent than those now available to us.

So, any change from the KJV is problematic, and yet the failure to change is only going to grow more problematic as the decades pass. Our crystal ball says that before the century expires the church will address the dilemma by retaining the King James Bible, but also reclaiming the tradition of original, 19th-century Mormonism in which use of additional translations was encouraged. This further implies the official or unofficial embrace by church authorities of paraphrasings of the Book of Mormon, cast in contemporary prose, to supplement the official text.

These, then, are components of the future Mormon connection with Christian scripture: an unshakable foundation of biblical loyalty in tandem with faith in additional revelation; a heightened emphasis on the Book of Mormon; a nascent strand of competent, mature biblical scholarship informed by but distinct from the work of Protestant and Catholic scholars; the character of specifically LDS editions of the Bible in languages beyond English and Spanish; and the deepened but problematic commitment to the King James Bible for English-speaking Mormons that will require eventual moderation. These ingredients -- part of a rich recipe that includes others -- will help to shape the 21st-century Mormon mind.

Philip Barlow is the Leonard Arrington Professor of Mormon History & Culture at Utah State University and the author of Mormons and the Bible , the new edition of which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.