REVIEW
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Title: The Three Nephites: Saints, Service, and Supernatural Legend
Authors: Julie Swallow, Christopher James Blythe, Eric A. Eliason, and Jill Terry Rudy
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Genre: Academic, Religious non-fiction
Year Published: 2025
Number of Pages: 263
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-252-08892-6
Price: $27.95
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association of Mormon Letters
The Three Nephites: Saints, Service, and Supernatural Legend is exactly what you’d hope an academic book about the Three Nephites would be–a blend of insightful, contextualizing essays that introduce helpful terms and frameworks and situate some of the stories within broader folklore and transcriptions of Three Nephites stories themselves. Julie Swallow, Christopher James Blythe, Éric A. Eliason, and Jill Terry Rudy are perfect contributors to the project and approach their respective subjects with care and attention.
The book has five main chapters as well as an introduction and epilogue. Each chapter provides a different focus on a subset of Three Nephites stories–the vanishing hitchhiker, apocalypse, proclaiming the gospel, funny stories, and priorities of believers/storytellers. These chapters open with an essay by one of the book’s contributors and then include a collection of Three Nephites stories that embody and represent the focus that the author chose.
The Three Nephites is a treasure trove of folklore and insights, chock full of interesting and enlightening nuggets. I was particularly surprised by the sheer variety of stories, even with the shared themes, and somewhat paradoxically by the ways that even with that variety there is some sense of a core to what makes something a classic, standard Three Nephites story (though I’d LOVE to see more folks pickup where Swallow and company leave off here and really dig into and explore if/how these stories function today and globally). I grew up hearing such stories here and there, along with the scriptural basis, and so found great delight in seeing the stories taken seriously by the book’s authors.
One of the most striking moments in the book comes close to the end, where Swallow offers a pointed injunction to scholars and others engaging with these stories. She calls on people to take them seriously and to see them as more than a reflection of believers’ naivety, but as a source of moral and ethical guidance, as a reflection of values and priorities. I hope to remember this call as I hear and come across stories from friends, family, co-religionists, and others that may stretch my own credulity.
Whether you have an academic interest in lived religion and religious folklore or a cultural curiosity about the Three Nephites or even a devotional spirit about stories, there is something in Swallow, Blythe, Eliason, and Rudy’s The Three Nephites for you. I’ll be revisiting the collections of stories as I think about my own lived religious experiences, and if you have a Three Nephites story, I’d love to hear it.