Title: Envisioning Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Revelations in Their Early American Contexts
Editor: Colby Townsend
Publisher: Signature Books
Genre: Religious Essays
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 306
Binding: Paperback
ISBN13: 9781560854470
Price $18.95
Reviewed by Cheryl Bruno for the Association for Mormon Letters
Envisioning Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Revelations in Their Early American Contexts is a thoughtfully chosen collection of essays on the print culture of the “long eighteenth century” (1660-1830). The essays, all previously published, have been curated by editor Colby Townsend to elucidate the uniqueness of Mormon scripture. Even those essays written by non-members or without a Mormon focus still pierce deeply into the essence of LDS sacred writings.
I found that this collection was a launching pad for me to consider several issues surrounding Joseph Smith’s creation of religious texts. In the world of “liberal” Mormonism that I inhabit, it has been in vogue to study the influences that surrounded Joseph Smith and what effects they might have had on his work. This idea first punched me in the gut with Dan Vogel’s 2004 book Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet and Charles Harrell’s 2011 book This Is My Doctrine: The Development of Mormon Theology. Although I don’t agree in every aspect with either author, each makes a strong case that Joseph Smith’s scriptural contributions were highly influenced by his personal experiences and the culture around him. Townsend’s collection includes this as an overarching theme. To some extent, each author expounds upon or responds to topics of early American culture such as gender, education, history, literature, commercial print methods, Biblical canon, politics, religion, and race; and their impacts upon Mormon scripture.
It would be difficult to fully represent each author in this short review, but I’d like to highlight just one item from each of the ten essays that caught my attention and spurred me to further reflection.
Catherine A. Brekus, in her essay on women’s authority in early America, “Writing Religious Experience,” observes:
Excluded from formal avenues of power, women across the centuries had learned to emphasize the authority of their experience rather than their reason or their education…Because Enlightenment philosophers elevated first-hand experience as the only reliable source of knowledge, even more, reliable than the Bible, empirical language sounded particularly potent (17).
Brekus’s description of the growing ability of women with no religious authority to publish writings about their lived experiences seemed to illuminate why the young farm boy, Joseph Smith, was able to publish a book that would be taken seriously. I also reflected on the modern ease of self-publishing, which tends to make the writings of the common person even more available than in the past, regardless of their scholarship, social, or economic position.
Lest one take the farm boy picture of Joseph Smith too far, William Davis offers the well-researched essay, “Reassessing Joseph Smith Jr.’s Formal Education.” “The amount (and quality) of Smith’s formal education, or rather the various assumptions surrounding his presumed lack of it,” Davis cautions, “has been enlisted by followers and detractors alike in order to frame Smith’s life within the narratives of divinely-inspired prophet or deceptive fraud” (21). As I expected, Davis gives evidence that Joseph Smith was adequately educated for his day and time, far from illiterate, as some claimed. But Davis’s warning made me realize that my assumption about Smith’s education might reveal some underlying religious bias.
“Open Canons,” an essay by Elizabeth Fenton, addresses sacred history and American history in the Book of Mormon, which she treats as a literary text. Fenton shows how the Book of Mormon’s text represents the works of its ancient authors as inadequate and incomplete. This, as well as the statement it makes as supplemental scripture to the Christian Bible, demonstrates the need for an “open canon” of texts describing the Divine. Through Fenton’s depiction of the Book of Mormon, I saw it in a new light, as purposefully representing itself as flawed and inadequate. I could think of many other instances besides those she presented in which it does this, helping me see a message that I had missed in my many readings of this Mormon scripture.
Seth Perry’s “Scripture, Time, and Authority Among Early Disciples of Christ” compares five editions of the New Testament edited and published by Alexander Campbell and the personal bible of Disciples minister Thomas M. Allen, covered in handwritten notes. One observation Perry makes in his study is that Campbell believed the scriptural authors had human motivations. Through understanding these and how the authors hoped to transcend their human and historical situations, one could gain a more transparent understanding of scripture. For example, Paul’s goals in 1 Corinthians, according to Campbell, were “to support his own authority, dignity, and reputation; to vindicate himself from the aspersions and calumnies of the factious; and to diminish the credit and influence of those aspiring demagogues and leaders” (119). I could readily apply this idea to ancient authors of the Book of Mormon, giving me yet another way to read and understand their words.
Kathleen Flake’s contribution to this collection, titled “Translating Time,” delineates the nature and function of Joseph Smith’s narrative canon. To Flake, Smith’s scripture offers a story, a narrative, which draws the reader into a reality that subverts the Christian narrative. She tells us that there is “something besides the power of description at work in certain narratives, especially those that rise to the level of mythos and make a claim to religious authority” (154). In Joseph Smith, I see the same “myth-making genius” that she and Howard Bloom describe. As Flake points out, some of this genius comes from telling stories, shaping reality, “abjur[ing] theology for mythmaking” (155).
“The Golden Bible in the Bible’s Golden Age” is Paul Gutjahr’s essay on the Book of Mormon and antebellum print culture. Like previous authors in this book, Gutjahr writes of Alexander Campbell’s quest to bring a more authentic Bible text to his contemporaries. He remarks, “While discussions of textual purity and primitive integrity racked the American Protestant world in the 1820s and 1830s, Smith offered his countrymen a sacred book which was able to strike at the core of such discussions. In claiming that his book was published from gold plates recently discovered in upstate New York, Smith was able to offer American Protestants much more than a mere revision of a corrupted biblical text; he gave them a new sacred text translated directly from original source material. All other purity claims paled in comparison” (169). What’s more, the binding and packaging of this Mormon scripture resembled the Bible, and its contents corresponded with many aspects of historical writing with which Smith’s contemporaries were so enamored. No wonder it appealed to many of the religious seekers of the time.
Roberto A. Valdeón’s essay, “Joseph Smith’s Uses of Pseudo-, Intralingual, and Intersemiotic Translation in the Creation of the Mormon Canon” is an interesting treatment of the different types of translations that gave rise to the Bible (traditional translation), the Book of Mormon (pseudotranslation), Smith’s Inspired Version (intralingual translation), and the Egyptian papyri (intersemiotic translation). Smith’s skills as translator are fascinating as they include many different and nontraditional means of rendering a text into a language—all except the traditional method.
“Narrative Revolutions in Nat Turner and Joseph Smith” is Laura Thiemann Scales’s comparative essay on Smith and revolutionary activist slave Nat Turner. Scales sees commonalities in both men’s prophetic vocabulary, “revealing a historically specific mode of narration that crosses their local geographies and cultures, one that would become influential well beyond their peculiar religious and political spheres” (207). I was intrigued by Scales’s description of both men’s writing as preserving the character and personhood of the writer as well as acting as a medium for the voice of the Divine, often leaving the reader asking, “Who speaks?” (209).
Susan Juster’s “Demagogues or Mystagogues?” deals with gender and the language of prophecy in an age of millennial thinking. Of interest was her characterization of male prophets, who, she says, “had fully made the transition to the Enlightenment, with its elevation of reason as the supreme human virtue” (257). At the same time, women prophets such as Ann Lee, Jemima Wilkinson, and others, represented the somewhat archaic realm of mystical power. American prophetesses reached for spiritual power which transcended the written word, while their British counterparts “cleverly exploited the technologies of print to proclaim a new Word” rooted in mysticism (258-59).
Jared Hickman presents “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse” in the final essay of this collection. The book, he says, inspired “a Mormon version of Manifest Destiny” that threatened the current romantic view of “the vanishing Indian” (270). Hickman shows how early Mormons gathered “near the borders of the Lamanites…in the hopes of forming a Mormon-Lamanite alliance that would hasten the building of the New Jerusalem” (271). I have often thought of Mormonism as fostering Manifest Destiny, but not in this particular way.
I compliment Colby Townsend and this quality group of authors for their scholarly achievement. No doubt the reader of this dense collection will pull out many additional threads to chew on regarding our unique Mormon scripture and its placement in nineteenth-century American culture.