By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion

Rating:
Summary: Good book-- the side of the story that needs to be told
Review: For a long time, people who desire careful analysis of the Book of Mormon have had nowhere to turn. They were required to choose between three types of sources: 1) abrasively anti-mormon polemics; 2) "objective" accounts; and 3) official church accounts.

There is no shortage of studies that fall into categorey 1. You can buy many or most of them here on Amazon. They are worse than useless, though, because they are designed to use as much evidence as possible to put Mormonism in a bad light. They are not very choosy about their sources, they ignore positive evidence and stories, and they follow what might be called Ed Decker's razor-- of competing interpretations of disputed historical fact, the one that make Mormons and Mormonism seem most outlandish must be true.

Category 2 studies are more helpful. These studies are more (sometimes) selective in their choice of sources. The problem with them is their "interpretative" element. They apply a version of Occam's razor to interpreting facts. However, while this sounds good and scientific, it leads inevitably to one conclusion-- Joseph Smith was not a prophet, the Book of Mormon is not true, etc. To see why this is so, consider that Occam's razor provides no real guidance as to how one goes about deciding which of the competing explanations of a phenomenon is "simpler." These books use a "secular" version of Occam's razor, where non-religious explanations are always more likely to be true, because they are "simpler" in some sense. This is fine as far as it goes, but it perpetuates a lie, in some sense-- the lie is that the secular interpretation is the only plausible one, or worse yet, that the facts as seen through this secular mindset are simply "the facts," with no real interpretation being done at all.

Category 3 books are not all that useful for analysis because analysis is not their point-- they are designed to present the SPIRITUALLY RELEVANT portions of a story that is already assumed to be true. That is, they are answering different questions-- not questions about WHAT happened, or WHETHER something happened, but questions about what we should DO in light of what happened.

Givens gives us a category 4-- this book is like the books in category two, but its Occam's razor does not discount the possibility of religious explanations in advance. Instead, it priviledges the possibility of religious explanations-- where a plausible one is available, it is assumed to be true. This is no better or worse than category 2. It is only the "other side" of the category 2 story. And it needs to be told, because otherwise the assumption among many in the world will be that believers simply don't know their own history, rather than the truth, which is that they don't see the evidence in the same light as their critics.

It is well-told here. Most of the complaints against the book are that it doesn't fit into one of the other three categories mentioned. But it doesn't pretend to. And that shouldn't bother you unless you happen to have already made up your mind that one of the other three categories is the best one. That will be the case if (numbers correspond to the categories): 1) You believe that Mormonism is an evil that must be fought at all costs (usually because it is not in agreement with your own faith); 2) You believe that secular explanations of phenomena are usually or always more reliable than religious/revelatory explanations of those same phenomena; 3) You believe that Mormonism is true and the only remaining question is what to do now. If you are interested in how a believer makes sense of the historical/textual, and other evidence regarding the Book of Mormon, this book is for you. If you really want to get crazy, actually get a copy of the BofM and read it for yourself, trying to evaluate whether this thing is or is not for real, based not just on the history, but on the actual text. Forming an intelligent opinion without reading it all the way through carefully is hard to do, because all of the stuff out there "about" it, has either agenda 1,2, or 3 in mind.

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating scholarly study of the Book of Mormon.
Review: The author wrote: "My focus in any case has not been on whether
the Book of Mormon or the account of it given by Joseph Smith is
true. Rather, I have tried to examine why the Book of Mormon has
been taken seriously--for very different reasons--by generations
of devoted believers and confirmed skeptics. ...it has assumed a
number of disputed identities: authentically ancient text,
imaginative masterwork, nineteenth-century cultural product, and
engine behind the growth of the next world religion. It would
seem appropriate at this juncture in its tempestuous career to
attempt an overview of what this "golden bible" has meant, and
might conceivably yet come to mean, to its various readerships."
(Author's Note)

In my estimation, Givens succeeds masterfully in presenting such
an overview. Both views, skeptic and devoted believer, are
fairly presented without evangelizing either view.

The facts are presented. Conclusions are left up to the reader.

Very highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: The Book of Mormon is a curious work. Jos. Smith, Jr., founder of the Mormon movement (whose largest branch is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Utah), claimed to receive it by divine revelation. It professes to be the history of ancient inhabitants of the Americas, who came to the New World centuries before Christ.

Upon first blush, the Book of Mormon seems to be little more than a pale imitation of the Bible written in exaggerated King James English (by the time your done with it, you won't want to hear the phrase "and it came to pass" again). Nonetheless, the book is quite complicated and appears unlikely to be the work of the generally unlettered Jos. Smith. What is most interesting about the Book is its complex nature. Opponents of the Book have had a hard time finding internal inconsistencies in it, although it has a fair number of anachronisms.

Although the LDS Church has produced competent apologists (such as the brilliant B.H. Roberts), the age of modern Mormons apologetics began with Hugh Nibley and has continued to the present with scholars associated with FARMS, now part of BYU. For example, while Jos. Smith believed that the events narrated in the Book of Mormon concerned the territory covered by North and South America, contemporary Mormon scholarship asserts that its events took place in a relatively small area of Central America. There is no archaeological evidence to support the authenticity of the Book, but it does appear to have numerous parallels to ancient Middle Eastern works.

Prof. Givens, who is professor of English at the University of Richmond, has written a comprehensive book about the Book of Mormon. It isn't a commentary on the Book of Mormon, but a background work on the role of the Book of Mormon in the Latter-day Saints Church, its authorship, and the controversy about it "revelatory significance" (i.e., whether or not it's inspired). It's fairly dense, but it I'm not aware of a work that provides such useful background information to anyone who wants to study the Book of Mormon or who has some familiarity with it.