Last week I had the opportunity to give a talk about the atonement. In the process, I came across a Wikipedia page that was clearly written by someone who purported to know Church doctrine but apparently hadn’t read the Book of Mormon.[ref]The article as it stood before my edit attributed key doctrines to Joseph Smith, citing sermons that occurred several years after publication of the Book of Mormon, which clearly contains the doctrine in question.[/ref] So I edited the Wikipedia article. In citing the Book of Mormon passages that contain the doctrine discussed by the Wikipedia article, I took the time to insert the publication date of the Book of Mormon, 26 March 1830.

Sitting in Stake Conference yesterday, I had occasion to return to the article I’d edited. And as I stared at the date of publication for the Book of Mormon, I wondered why it was published on that date.

As has been discussed elsewhere, the First Vision occurred on a Sunday right after the Smith family had spent over a day harvesting maple sap. Due to weather records collected nearby, we know the maple sap was running a little over a week before the Easter of 1820.

A quick search confirmed that Easter fell on April 2 in 1820. That places the Sunday before Easter on 26 March 1820.

So it appears Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon on the tenth anniversary of the First Vision.

It’s a small historical grace note that doesn’t affect whether the Church is true or not. But it made me happy. And I hope it makes you happy as well.

I first stumbled across Don Bradley in 2015, first reading a snippet about his thoughts regarding the lost pages from the Book of Mormon, then reading his excellent article on Fanny Alger. I adore his careful scholarship. And I love how he came back from “faith dismissal/crisis” to re-embrace his original faith precisely because his scholarship taught him that the Gospel and the Book of Mormon were true, despite his younger skepticism.

I’d been busy living life over the holidays, so it took an unacceptable amount of time to notice that Don’s long-awaited book about the lost manuscript had finally been published [thanks to Rameumpton’s fine review]. Now that I’ve read the book myself, I think anyone who is a student of the Church of Jesus Christ in its various forms must read Don’s book. It will save both doubter and believer from embarrassing ignorance about the faith they wish to either embrace, understand, or criticize.

As Ram mentioned in his review, the book is divided into two parts: Five chapters about the now-lost manuscript itself and ten additional chapters examining the stories most of us lost when the manuscript was taken by unknown persons.

A few years ago I reviewed Reid Litchfield’s book Enslaved to Saved. The key insight was how the initial translators of the Bible text into English obfuscated the prevalence of slavery in biblical times by using the term “servant” for the Greek term δοῦλος, widely known to scholars as referring to slaves.

This struck me recently when I read of Nephi’s interaction with Laban’s “servant,” Zoram. Given how we now know the Book of Mormon text was transmitted into English, it appears the Stuart-era Bible translators were somehow involved. So I wondered whether Zoram was not merely a servant, but instead the kind of enslaved steward that was common in the ancient Western world.

if Zoram was slave rather than servant, Nephi’s offer to Zoram is stunning.

I posited this reading to family, and one relative pointed out that when the converted Lamanites offer to become slaves to the Nephites in Alma 27:8, Ammon said it was against Nephite law to own slaves.

I hypothesize that in the schism following Lehi’s death that Nephite society rejected the practice of slavery while Lamanite society saw no reason to abandon this familiar and “useful” practice. This would explain the cultural differences that are exposed by the passage in Alma 27:8. It could also explain why Zoram and his descendants chose to align themselves with Nephi.

I now return you to your own efforts to study the Book of Mormon in this bicentennial year of Joseph’s initial vision.

As we read the New Testament in 2019, I came to love the voice of Paul and his disciples. There was a joy and confident grace in the many epistles that follow the gospels and Acts.

Then I hit Peter. Gone was the learned Greek grace of Paul. The difference was so great that I commented on my disappointment to my husband.

“Well, Joseph Smith said that the epistles of Peter were the most sublime in scripture,” he replied

Seriously? Obedient, I continued reading. And I took in 2 Peter 2.

“When did Joseph say Peter was subblime? Exactly!” I demanded. Because 2 Peter 2 sounds a lot like what I assert was going on in Nauvoo in the 1840s, speaking of:

“them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government. Presumptuous are they, selfwilled…. Having eyes full of adultery, and that cannot cease from sin; beguiling unstable souls….”

2 Peter 2:10, 14

Since my husband didn’t much care where he’d heard about Joseph’s comment (or when Joseph had uttered this praise for Peter), I did the googling. And I was right – this wasn’t a statement from a Joseph who was studying the Bible in the early 1830s. This statement came from Joseph in May 1843. In 1843 Joseph (in my view) had lived through just over a year of ministry aimed at eradicating gross sexual error from converts to the restored gospel.

Joseph preached to the people about 2 Peter 1, then tossed off his comment about the epistles of Peter being the most sublime in scripture. You know those who belong to the Church when it comes to prophets, they would have gone home and made a point of reading all the rest of the chapters attributed to Peter.

And there they would have seen Peter’s excoriation of those who teach and practice sexual sin, of those who despise the efforts of Church leaders to teach correct principles. The faithful, such as William Clayton, would have gotten the message, loud and clear, in a manner more powerful than any sermon Joseph could have delivered of himself.

In the entry reporting Joseph’s sermon on 2 Peter 1 was another note, of dozens of Saints in the east who had been excommunicated. I haven’t done the detailed research on that rash of ecclesiastical actions. But I suspect these individuals had been pulled into the errors taught by Bennett and his strikers. Certainly this would match what Connell O’Donovan explains about the goings-on in the East, gross errors that unfortunately involved at least one prominent Black member of the Church (See Volume II of the Persistence of Polygamy, pp.48-86).

Whatever the past was, it was just one thing (multifaceted though that might be). I look forward to the day when we know as we are known, when all the truths and secrets of that past are laid out before our eyes. In that day I expect we will be willing and able to forgive almost anything, so long as those who erred repented and returned to God.

This morning my husband came down and turned on the radio, disturbing my typical silence.

“NPR said there’s going to be a story about the Church and Tithing.“

The story came on, and the news report says a whistleblower with the Church’s investment arm has said some stuff to the IRS. But it’s not the whistleblower who has gone public. It’s the whistleblower’s brother.

At issue is that when funds that come into the Church that aren’t immediately needed for Church operations they are invested. And apparently there are times when the whistleblower feels that some of this investment fund is used in ways inconsistent with the charitable donation status of the source of the funds.

There are articles on this at the Salt Lake Tribune and The Washington Post. One comment I appreciated pointed out that most businesses keep a reserve of 30 years of operating costs to sustain an organization through periods of economic hardship (or one can think of unprofitable growth, spreading the gospel in places where tithing income doesn’t cover operations costs). According to this individual, the touted $100B actually amounts to only 17 years of operating costs, leading to the conclusion that the reserve should be $200B rather than the relatively paltry $100B reported.

As for me and my house, we pay tithes not because the Church has imminent expenses, but because it’s a commandment. And it doesn’t hurt that when I’ve failed to pay a timely tithe, God has gone ‘repo man’ on me. There was my decision circa 2000 to use my minor excess to fix a teetering car transmission instead of bring my tithing current. In the wee hours of Conference Sunday that car was stolen and used in a high speed chase, ramming a police vehicle, harming the officers in the car. The thief then ditched my totaled car in a ravine. So I was bereft of the thing I had paid to repair, my wallet further lightened by the fees associated with the car being impounded by the police, and I had the expense of purchasing a new-to-me car. That’s the kind of experience I have when I don’t pay a timely tithe.

Back to the whistleblower’s report, this is a matter for the IRS to investigate. If the reserve funds are in fact being used for inappropriate payments, then appropriate fines and sanctions will ensue. But the fact of a reserve and the size of the reserve and possible misuse of some small portion of that reserve do not rescind the commandment to tithe.

if people really feel the Church shouldn’t have such a big fund, the faithful response is to volunteer for a mission amongst those children of God who lack, de facto increasing the Church’s operating costs. A decision to simply break the commandment to tithe is not a response appropriate to one who believes in God and the restoration.