Today we will be referring to “If Christ Had Not Come Into the World,” a chapter he wrote in Abinadi: He Came Among Them in Disguise, and an article published in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, titled “Evaluating the Interaction Between the New Testament and the Book of Mormon: A Proposed Methodology.” The latter is available online for free, so I’ll provide a link in this episode’s show notes. Hello, Nick.

And so we said, “Why don’t we ask for some money and put on a conference?” It may just be a one-off. It may never happen again. We may have nobody show up, but at least we’ll have opened up a venue. We got some really nice papers turned in. It was a really fun two-day conference, and we decided to make it an annual thing. We got some great sponsorship from Phil Barlow at Utah State. We’re going to hold it again during the second weekend of October. Whoever’s out there who wants to make it, come on over.

What do those connections say about a text? You have some obvious ones like, you read The Chronicles of Narnia and you can see the Bible all over it. You can see Jesus in Aslan, or you can see Adam and Eve, the fall story, in The Magician’s Nephew. The Book of Revelation, is in The Last Battle. Those are obvious connections that I think Lewis wants us to see.

But the question is what about the less obvious ones? What about ones that we read where we wonder does the author mean us to see a connection or a parallel with this other text? And if he does, how might that influence our reading?

Or one of the responses I would get from people would be, “Well, the New Testament is just the leftover Old Testament stuff. The New Testament actually just recycled the Old Testament, so if there is a New Testament for the Book of Mormon, it’s really just Old Testament, anyway.” It became this kind of thing that we had to build a barrier around because it was perceived as threatening historicity in some way.

I really couldn’t find anybody who dealt seriously with the New Testament in the Book of Mormon. And the places that I did were things like the Tanner’s book, Joseph Smith’s Plagiarism of the Bible and the Book of Mormon. They have a list of several hundred phrases, but a lot of them are just two or three word consecutive phrases like, “He withstood,” or “of a God,” or something like that that doesn’t really tell us anything. Those may be from the New Testament, but that could just be King James English.

Part of it was me wanting to say, “Okay, rather than just doing word searches for consecutive words, let’s actually come up with a methodology that allows us to define whether we have a legitimate connection between this phrase and the New Testament.”

I wonder if an easier way around this is …

Too often when I hear Latter-day Saints talk about the Book of Mormon, they talk about the Book of Mormon and the gold plates as if they’re the same text. I wonder if it would be useful for us to conceptualize them as two different texts. The Book of Mormon is an English document that was produced in the 19th century by Joseph Smith, however you want to see translation happening. And the gold plates are a record that was written 2,000 years ago by Moroni, by Mormon, and by Nephi. They’re not the same text. One is a translation of another one.

If we’re comfortable saying that the New Testament is an antecedent text for the Book of Mormon, for the King James English 19th century Book of Mormon, then that opens up some wonderful avenues of inquiry. We can look at how those passages were understood in the 19th century and say, “Okay, is the Book of Mormon pushing back against something? Is the Book of Mormon affirming one of these ideas? What was the impact of these passages on early converts? How might this have changed through trajectories of 19th century theology?” Whereas if we just say, “No, no, no. It couldn’t be. There’s no way the New Testament was on the gold plates,” that just ends the conversation. If we see these as two different texts that are related through translation, then I think that helps us bridge this at least question of the New Testament in the Book of Mormon a little bit easier.

Instead, what it will do is carefully weave these New Testament passages into the larger text so that you almost don’t notice they’re even there unless you’re carefully looking for them. You have places like 1 Corinthian 13, and Romans 7, or the Sermon on the Mount in 2 Nephi 12–14, but the majority of places where the New Testament appears are just at the phrasal level. It’s just four or five (rarely) consecutive words. They’ll just be four or five words that are worked into a larger sentence, that are worked into a larger paragraph. But the words will be clear enough and obvious enough that you can say, “That’s likely drawn from the New Testament.” The problem is you just have to work to find them.

Grant Hardy’s work has been great here. His chapter on allusion in Understanding the Book of Mormon, where he deals with Hebrews 6 and 11 and Ether 12, and he shows that it isn’t just Moroni just wholesale lifting Hebrews. What Moroni is doing is carefully deconstructing and then reconstructing parts of Hebrews to create an entirely new text. And that’s what the Book of Mormon does with the New Testament that’s just so remarkable and so much fun to look for.

What I tried to come up with instead is to determine how firm we can make this phrase here. We have a phrase from the New Testament. We have a phrase in the Book of Mormon that appears similar. It has some similar words. Can we qualify it as a precise interaction? This is definitely a New Testament phrase in the Book of Mormon indisputably. Can’t argue it.

Then you might say the next step down would be those that are probable. This is probably a New Testament interaction with the Book of Mormon. It’s a phrase. It’s probably from the New Testament, but there is some room for argument. It could just be the result of speaking in King James English.

Then you have just your possible ones. These are the ones that may be, but I can’t say one way or another for sure. My point in doing this was to say, “Let’s isolate the ones we know are from the New Testament, then we can start to talk about what the New Testament is doing in the Book of Mormon.”

The criterion of dissimilarity looks at how often a phrase is used in the New Testament. If it’s only there one or two times in the entire New Testament, the chances are more likely that if you find it in the Book of Mormon, then it’s drawn specifically from the New Testament because it’s not an overly common phrase.

How is the criterion of sequence different than the criterion of proximity?

But there’s a lack of dissimilarity. It’s a common phrase that appears a lot. It’s very basic English. “Hearing” is going to appear a lot. “Word of God” appears all over the place. Then it’s too broad of a context to really be able to tell us anything from that perspective. I list this as a possible one. I guess it could be consciously that Mosiah 25 was drawing upon Luke 5, but I didn’t want to rank it as one that would be useful in helping us understand the true, obvious places where the New Testament is in the Book of Mormon. I just kind of dismissed that one.

One of the things you have to do then is to get rid of all the places where it just sounds King James, and it could be from the New Testament, but you don’t really know. You have to get those out of the way, so you can determine where there are actual crystal-clear examples. Then we can really study these passages under a microscope and try to get a sense of what this is doing.

He reads 3 Nephi 12–14, compares it to Matthew 5–7, and finds out that while the majority of 3 Nephi 12–14 seems to be lifted straight from Matthew 5–7, there were some subtle nuanced changes.

For example, Jesus says things like, “Verily, verily,” in 3 Nephi 12–14, which isn’t there on the Sermon on the Mount, and, in fact, only comes from the Jesus of the Gospel of John. That’s a phrase that’s unique to him.

Stendahl brought out several more instances where it seems like you have Matthew’s text, but the speaker of that text is the Jesus of the Gospel of John. This makes sense of a lot of the surrounding chapters where you get lengthy interactions—things like John 10, “other sheep I have, which are not of this fold” that Jesus mentions. It’s the Jesus of John’s gospel speaking the language of Matthew’s gospel.

This applies to the D&C as well. When Jesus gives his revelations to Joseph Smith, when he identifies himself, it’s using the language of the Gospel of John. For whatever reason, when Jesus identifies himself to Joseph Smith, either through the Book of Mormon or in the D&C, it’s as the Jesus of the Gospel of John.

What were you looking for when you were studying John 11 and its counterpart in the Book of Mormon?

Then you have these four characters, two men and two women, who find themselves in similar circumstances, which is the apparent death of a major character.

The Jesus role now falls, of all people, to a Lamanite slave woman named Abish. It’s she who emerges as this giver of life who then comes forward and raises the queen by the hand in a similar action to what Jesus does to Lazarus. Then she disappears. Then the Lamanite queen is the one who raises the actual Lazarus figure, her husband, Lamoni. The Jesus role plays out through both Abish and Lamoni’s wife.

What this does is it serves to give you this twist when the story doesn’t go the way you think it’s going to go based upon your knowledge of John 11. You step back and realize the Book of Mormon has now opened up this space for discussion for analysis in reframing the Lazarus story. You’ll stop, and pause, and say, “What am I supposed to take away from this?” It isn’t just that we’re mimicking the New Testament, we’re playing with it. We’re revising it. We’re using this dissonance that’s been created through the reshaping of the narrative to ask questions.

What theology does the Book of Mormon accomplish in its recasting?

It seems the Book of Mormon is saying that female characters need not be only those who believe or do not believe, or those who are misunderstood, or those who are instructed. In fact, they can do the Jesus work themselves. They can extend the divine message. They can instill faith. They can be the active movers, not just those who are passively on the sidelines.

The Book of Mormon from its very opening pages has what you could call a realized messiology. The Nephites have a knowledge of Jesus. They know what his name is going to be. They know where he’s going to be born. They know what his mother’s name is going to be. It’s almost as if Jesus is there from the very beginning. He has this presence throughout the Book of Mormon.

And so you say, “Well, it’s the influence of John.” It’s Johannine realized eschatology that manifests itself Christologically.

Then you get to Alma 19, and you realize that there’s something a little bit different. Alma 19 doesn’t actually give you Jesus. It doesn’t actually give you the kingdom. What it gives you is two Lamanite women who serve the role of Jesus. They’re functioning as Jesus, and the Anti-Nephi-Lehis respond not with the knowledge that comes from experiencing Jesus but with the faith and the hope that what you’re going to have is this later messianic age, which isn’t realized until, as Stendahl points out, 3 Nephi 12–14. That’s the true moment of realization. That’s where the kingdom is actually introduced.

What the Book of Mormon does is it gives you on the surface, again, this idea of this Johannine realized eschatology that the kingdom is here, but with a story that’s taken from John. It’s not realized until 3 Nephi 12–14. Up until this point, we’re still dealing with kind of a future eschatology. It performs a critique of Johannine theology with a Johannine narrative.

What you have to come up with is a clear catalogue of phrases. These are the precise and probable interactions where the New Testament is present in the 19th century English Book of Mormon. And then you say, “We have this bank of interactions. Now let’s sit back and decide how they’re being used and what they mean,” or else you just get lost in the data. In my own list that’s coming out in a forthcoming publication, I’ve identified that we have about 650 phrases that I think you can demonstrate pretty clearly are from the New Testament in the Book of Mormon. And that’s a lot to have to deal with—650. But until you get to that point. Until you can start to say this phrase is here; this phrase is here; and this one isn’t, then any conclusions you come to, any analysis you do, is going to be a little bit flawed.

The New Testament was an authoritative text in the 19th century until the Book of Mormon was appropriating some of that authority through manipulating and appropriating some of the language from the New Testament. Those are interesting questions, but to me they’re not the important ones. Those are the why.

What I’m really interested in is how. What I really want to know is like with Alma 19 and John 11, how was the Book of Mormon taking a story, a phrase, an idea, some tension from the New Testament and reproducing it, reconstructing it, appropriating it?

That, I think, will take us to a point where we can really appreciate a deeper, fuller understanding of what the Book of Mormon wants to do with the Bible. It clearly loves the Bible. All throughout the Book of Mormon, it says this is written so that you’ll believe that. 2 Nephi 3 says that these things are supposed to grow together. The Book of Mormon says we want to be seen as part and parcel with the Bible. Now I think it’s our task to figure out where those similarities are, come to some initial thoughts on why, but then really try to dig into the how. How are they growing together?