Two Interesting Parallels to the Gadianton Robbers of the Book of Mormon

There are a few interesting echoes of the Gadianton robbers in Ethan Smith’s 1825 book View of the Hebrews. In relating the events leading up to the collapse of Jewish civilization in 70 A.D., Smith reports that the people divided into warring factions that slayed and murdered each other with such fury that the bodies of the dead were heaped up in great piles (cp. Alma 16:11, 28:11, and Ether 14:21-22). And then, he reports,

To add to the horrid calamities of the times occasioned by bloody factions, Judea was infested by bands of robbers and murderers, plundering their towns and cutting in pieces such as made any resistance, whether men, women, or children.[1]

That Smith sees these as typical developments in the decline of a society under divine judgment is evident from his quotation of the Latin proverb, “Whom God will destroy, he gives up to madness.”[2]

Later in the same book, when citing prophecies about the last days, Smith makes numerous references to “Gog and his bands”: these he interprets as the assembled powers of antichrist that will assault Israel in the battle of Armageddon.[3] The use of the word “bands” implies that he sees the bands of Gog as recapitulating the destructive work of the robber bands of 70 AD. Smith is fond of typological interpretation, and explicitly says that the destruction of Jerusalem was a type of the battle of the last day.[4] Thus the bands of Gog represent both the forces arrayed against the old Jerusalem and the forces that will be arrayed against the New one.

If the author of the Book of Mormon read View of the Hebrews, these passages might have suggested to him the likelihood that a band of robbers, murderers, and plunderers would be active in America in the last days: a precursor to the judgment of Gentile society. There is, however, no reference in View of the Hebrews to these bands engaging in secret covenants. If View of the Hebrews was the inspiration for the Gadiantons, then their sinister ritual practices were an innovation original with the Book of Mormon’s author.

Ethan Smith’s robbers were found by him in Josephus’s Wars of the Jews. Is it possible that Wars of the Jews influenced the Book of Mormon directly, without any mediation from Ethan Smith? Josephus’s robbers are definitely suggestive. They joined together into a “band of wickedness” (4:3:3), and “joined in the conspiracy by parties” (4:7:2). These robbers “omitted no kind of barbarity; for they did not measure their courage by their rapines and plunderings only, but proceeded as far as murdering men.” In their murder they “began with the most eminent persons in the city; for the first man they meddled with was Antipas, one of the royal lineage” (4:3:4; cp. Helaman 1-2). The robbers eventually became such a problem that they engaged in mass slaughter, leaving cities, villages, and holy places utterly desolate. Even more suggestively, Josephus’s robbers did enter into an agreement to kill the innocent (5:1:5), and the leaders of the factions did cut the throat of anyone suspected of wanting to desert to the Romans (5:10:2). Certainly the chaos caused by the robbers according to Josephus is more commensurate with the Book of Mormon than anything suggested in the Bible.

However, although Joseph Smith owned a copy of Wars of the Jews at a later date, it was an edition published in 1830, and so could not have been used in the production of the Book of Mormon. An 1806 edition of Wars was available at the Manchester subscription library, and may have been available in the public library in Palmyra as well.[5] That Joseph read it prior to 1829 is therefore not impossible, but it seems unlikely.  Probably the explanation for the Book of Mormon's Gadiantons lay elsewhere, in some combination of anti-Masonry and biblical narrative.

NOTES:
[1] Ethan Smith, View of the Hebrews; or the Tribes of Israel in America (Poultney, Vt.: Smith & Shute, 1825), 29-30.
[2] Ibid., 31.
[3] Ibid., 45, 54-55, 65, 243.
[4] Ibid., 15, 45, 259.
[5] Robert Paul, "Joseph Smith and the Manchester (New York) Library," BYU Studies 22, no. 3 (1982): 14.

Word Frequencies and Mosiah Priority

To generate the graph below, basically what I did was chopped the Book of Mormon up into sequential ten-chapter "chunks" (excluding chapters borrowed from the KJV Bible) according to Mosiah and 1 Nephi Priority, then measured (using Delta word frequency scores) the relative similarity of each "chunk" to the front and back ends of the Book of Mormon. Relative similarity to the front half was defined as "positive", and relative similarity to the back half was defined as negative. Given sequential authorship of the Book of Mormon by a single individual, we'd expect to see a negative linear trend over the course of the Book. As you can see in the attached graphs, this is precisely what we observe according to a Mosiah Priority sequence. In the 1 Nephi Priority sequence, though, we actually see a reversal of the trend in the middle of the book, with the latter portion becoming gradually more similar to the early chapters. This makes a strong argument for Mosiah priority.

How the Declaration of Independence Became an American Scripture

The Declaration of Independence was not initially a revered document. In fact, for the first 15 years or so, it was virtually ignored. It was the act of declaring independence that people celebrated, not the document itself. It was a sheer historical accident that we ended up celebrating independence on July 4, when the written Declaration was formally adopted, rather than July 2, which is when Congress actually voted to declare independence. The Declaration only came to be revered a generation later, when people were looking back on the Revolution as an age of heroes.

It’s interesting that the vast majority of the Declaration’s text is a list of grievances and a justification of the states’ reasons for breaking away from Britain. Today we mostly ignore these, except for historical purposes. There are only a few lines that state general philosophical principles that people today treat as authoritative—most notably, the line that says it is “self-evident” that all men were created equal, with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Sometimes we also quote the line that declares the right to revolt against a tyrannical government. And that’s about it. Besides the parts that we mostly ignore, there are also some parts we’d probably completely reject, such as the part that paints the “merciless Indian savages” as indiscriminate destroyers of human life. Or, perhaps, the part that treats the 13 colonies as united, but “independent states” rather than as territories under the jurisdiction of a federal government.

Ironically, the parts that we do quote, we probably aren’t interpreting in their original sense. The first draft of the Declaration made no reference to God or a Creator, so we might say that Jefferson initially did not really intend it to be a religious document. The line that says all men have been created equal was not intended by Jefferson to apply to blacks or women. Neither was the concept of a right to revolution. Jefferson himself was a slaveholder, and although he wasn’t against emancipation per se, he was a gradualist on the question and believed that the calls for immediate emancipation were a ploy to expand federal power. It is also significant that the idea of the equality of mankind was not a dominant theme in the Declaration, nor was it a theme to which its first audience paid much attention.

So how did the Declaration come to be the embodiment of the American idea of equality? Well, it’s really because of the inadequacy of the Bill of Rights—and, I’d suggest, the Bible—on the subject. There was nothing quotable in the Bill of Rights about the equality of all humanity, and nothing that could be used to end slavery. And while there were definitely passages in the Bible that could be quoted to make an anti-slavery case, the slaveholders quoted the Bible just as much, and actually seemed to be winning that debate. The anti-slavery interpretation required an appeal to the spirit behind the text, whereas the pro-slavery folks could appeal to the letter of the text—the literal, surface meaning. It was easier to find pro-slavery than anti-slavery prooftexts.

In the Declaration, though, you arguably had the charter of the American Republic, and it very clearly said that all men were equal. Even though it wasn’t a legally binding document, the anti-slavery crowd could make a strong argument that it was hypocritical for Americans to revolt against Britain on the principle of human equality, and then turn around and enslave a sixth of the country’s population. And in this case it was the letter of the text that said it, and there were no contrary prooftexts that the pro-slavery crowd could appeal to. They were reduced to arguing that the Declaration was wrong, and that this was a “self-evident lie,” not a self-evident truth. This is exactly the kind of argument that had gotten the abolitionists in trouble. Some abolitionists were liberal Christians, and had argued that when the Bible spoke approvingly of slavery it was simply wrong. You can imagine that most people thought pretty poorly of abolitionists for that reason. So when the pro-slavery crowd started saying the same about the Declaration, this was a major victory for the anti-slavery side, because now it was the pro-slavery people who were trampling on a sacred document and the sacred heritage of the nation. By the time Lincoln was running for President, he was using the Declaration and its teaching of human equality as a major plank in his campaign platform. For Lincoln, the Declaration was the nation’s all-encompassing moral charter. The Union victory in the Civil War helped to universalize this view.

The Gnosticism of the 1832-33 Revelations

Joseph Smith’s “exaltation revelations” of 1832 and 1833 resonate strongly with certain ancient ideas that can be loosely described as “gnostic” (although of course this is a term for which there is no consensus definition).

If I may be permitted to engage in some very crude generalization, gnostics described the being of God as a pervasive and immutable realm of divine light which they called the pleroma, or fulness. Human souls were “divine sparks” emanated from the pleroma that had become trapped in the darkness of the material world. Christ (the Logos or Memra) was also emanated (“begotten”) from the pleroma, to serve as a mediator between God and the world. (In the gnostic view, God cannot interact directly with the world, because God is too transcendent.) Christ’s purpose was to serve as a redeemer, to guide human souls back to mystical union with the pleroma. In addition to light, gnostics described the divine being as pure Reason. Salvation was often framed in terms of mystical “knowing”, or gnosis—which is of course where we get the term gnostic. Many New Testament scholars have argued that the Johannine literature and the epistle to the Colossians exhibit gnosticizing or proto-gnosticizing tendencies.

Ideas like these come through very strongly in several of Joseph Smith’s revelations of 1832 and 1833. Perhaps most remarkable of all is the February 1833 revelation that says that Enoch “saw the time when Adam his fath[er] was made and he saw that he was in eternity before a grain of dust in the balance was weighed[;] he saw that he emenated and came down from God[.]”[1] The use of the word “emanated” here is remarkable because, while it is not at all biblical, it is a very crucial part of the Western gnostic and mystical traditions. Also significant is that Adam paradoxically had a beginning (was “made”), but also was present “in eternity” before anything else was created. This is strikingly parallel to the biblical conception of the pre-existence of Christ, who was paradoxically both begotten and “with God in the beginning” (John 1:1). It is also parallel to the gnosticizing idea of emanation, in which emanated entities in one sense have a beginning, but in another sense have existed in God eternally. A first-century gnostic would see the same idea reflected in D&C 76, where Jesus is said to have been “in the bosom of the Father, even from the beginning” (language borrowed from John 1:18), even though the same passage says he was begotten.[2] Similarly, humans are “the work of [Jesus’] hands” in D&C 76, but were “in the beginning with God” in D&C 93.[3] On a related note, the stated identity of Christ with light and human “intelligence” (placed in its sphere to act independently) strongly resembles the Neoplatonic/gnostic notion that human souls are free and independent sparks of the light of God’s own being.[4]

The soteriology of these revelations also bears some resemblance to gnostic notions. Generally gnostics framed salvation in terms of an ascent to the pleroma, or fulness, of God. The identification with the pleroma begins in this life, through the acquisition of mystical knowledge, or gnosis. The idea of an ascent is perhaps relatively muted in Smith’s revelations, but it is implied in the hierarchy of heavens.[5] Certainly the concept that believers can become indwelled by the fulness is present,[6] as is the connection between knowledge and exaltation.[7] In one respect these revelations do differ quite significantly from most early gnostic groups: they are insistent upon a physical resurrection and the importance of embodiment.[8] In that respect they accord with proto-gnostic works like the Gospel of John and the Odes of Solomon, but not with the more extreme Sethian or Docetic traditions.

In another respect, however, the exaltation revelations actually seem to go beyond John’s gospel. Whereas John says the world was made “through” Jesus (John 1:3), the “record of John” in D&C 93 says that the world was made “by him and through him and of him.”[9] This implies a panentheistic universe, in which Christ is not only the instrument of the universe’s creation but also the agent who initiates it and the substance from which it is constructed. It is difficult to say how carefully Smith thought about these words before he wrote them, but in any case, the implication is there.

Some of these ideas were present in Joseph Smith’s context. Neoplatonism influenced the entire Western tradition, and its views were reflected in Quakerism, Transcendentalism, Romanticism, and Universalism. Emerson, for example, taught the doctrine of emanations and held that there is “one light which beams out of a thousand stars,” and “one soul which animates all men.”[10] The Universalist preacher John Murray, too, taught the emanation of the soul from God.[11] Quaker founder George Fox, meanwhile, spoke at length about “the Light of Christ” that shines through all things. Fox argued that this Light would not only restore us to the original state of Adam, but also raise us to “the measure and stature of the fulness of Christ.” Although Fox was a mystic, he was affirming of the physical elements and believed in a physical, embodied resurrection.[12] Asael Smith had been a fan of Murray, and Martin Harris’s wife and relatives were Quakers, so these influences were at least indirectly available to Joseph Smith.[13] More immediately and more importantly, Smith had access to the Gospel and epistles of John. He was revising the Gospel during the period when the “exaltation revelations” were produced (cf. D&C 76:15).

NOTES:
[1] H. Michael Marquardt, The Joseph Smith Revelations: Text & Commentary (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1999), 232.
[2] Ibid., 186.
[3] Ibid., 188, 238.
[4] See also the comment that “man is the tabernacle of God,” just as the elements are. Ibid., 214, 238.
[5] Marquardt, Joseph Smith Revelations, 189.
[6] Ibid., 238.
[7] Ibid., 213, 238.
[8] Ibid., 223.
[9] Ibid., 237.
[10] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 5 (Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1880), 91, 163.
[11] John Murray, Judith Sargent Murray, and Linus S. Everett, The Life of Rev. John Murray (Boston: Marsh, Capen, and Lyon, 1832), 208.
[12] George Fox, George Fox; An Autobiography (Philadelphia: Ferris and Leach, 1904), 101, 195.
[13] Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 17; Dan Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, vol. 2 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1998), 31, 34.

Choice Seer, Spokesman, and Scribe

(This post was originally guest-posted at Mormon Matters a few days ago.)

The Book of Mormon records in 2 Nephi 3 a very interesting prophecy attributed to the biblical patriarch Joseph of Egypt, according to which a “choice seer” would be raised up from the fruit of Joseph’s loins in the latter days.  “And his name shall be called after me; and it shall be after the name of his father,” the patriarch announces.  Clearly Joseph Smith is in view.

An addendum to this prophecy adds an interesting additional promise. “I will raise up unto the fruit of thy loins; and I will make for him a spokesman. And I, behold, I will give unto him that he shall write the writing of the fruit of thy loins, unto the fruit of thy loins; and the spokesman of thy loins shall declare it.”  The traditional Mormon view is that the “spokesman” of the prophecy is Sidney Rigdon (see for example George Q. Cannon’s remarks in JD 25:126).  This view is based on D&C 100:9–11, which proclaims that “it is expedient in me that you, my servant Sidney, should be a spokesman unto this people… I will give unto thee power to be mighty in expounding all scriptures, that thou mayest be a spokesman unto him.”  I would like to suggest, however, that a better candidate for the spokesman of the “choice seer” prophecy is Oliver Cowdery.

Note that whereas the D&C emphasizes Sidney’s preaching role, the prophecy itself emphasizes writing.  In fact, the roles of Smith and his spokesman are precisely the reverse of Moses and Aaron.  The prophecy says of Moses, “I will give power unto him in a rod; and I will give judgment unto him in writing. Yet I will not loose his tongue, that he shall speak much, for I will not make him mighty in speaking. But I will write unto him my law, by the finger of mine own hand; and I will make a spokesman for him.”  Whereas Moses needed a spokesman for speaking but not for writing, Joseph Smith evidently needed a spokesman for writing but not for speaking.  The reference to a rod is also suggestive.  Unlike Moses, Joseph Smith did not have “power in a rod.”  But if the roles of seer and spokesman are reversed, then we might surmise that his spokesman did.  And in fact, that is precisely what the D&C says of Oliver Cowdery.

Oliver Cowdery served as Joseph Smith’s principal scribe for the Book of Mormon and some early sections of the D&C.  Of all Smith’s associates, Cowdery was the most prominent in the early period.  D&C 28 specifically likens him to Aaron, and tasks him not only to write but also to “speak”, “preach”, and “declare faithfully the commandments and revelations” (D&C 28:3–8). Cowdery apparently sometimes made use of a divining rod, which the 1835 D&C describes as a “rod of Aaron”.  He even received revelations of his own (EMD 2:409; 1835 Pat. Blessing Book), and did much of the early preaching and baptizing.  But here’s the unambiguous kicker.  In Cowdery’s patriarchal blessing—given in 1835 by Joseph Smith, Jr. himself—there is a reference to “the prophecy of Joseph, in ancient days,” which pronounced blessings upon “the Seer of the last days and the Scribe that should sit with him.” Clearly the choice seer’s “Scribe” is here supposed to be Cowdery.

So what are we to do with the D&C’s application of the spokesman label to Sidney Rigdon?  Like Oliver, Sidney served as a spokesman for the prophet in both written and oral capacities.  Sidney had started as the prophet’s scribe.  In fact, when Joseph met Sidney in 1831, Sidney was specifically instructed to preach only “inasmuch as ye do not write [for the prophet]” (35:20–23). But by 1833 he had taken on a much larger role in the movement, and his role as “spokesman” was primarily a preaching and teaching role.  Clearly Sidney did serve as a spokesman for Joseph Smith.  But was he the spokesman of prophecy?

One possible reading of these sources is that by 1835 Joseph Smith had bifurcated the “spokesman” role of Joseph of Egypt’s prophecy into oral and written components, such that Rigdon was the “spokesman”, and an additional role of “Scribe” was created to accommodate the displaced Oliver Cowdery.  But there is another possible reading as well.  Perhaps the spokesman was never intended to be a single, unchangeable individual, but rather referred to a role or office that might be filled by multiple individuals simultaneously or in succession.  A capital “S” is used in the prophet’s journal when calling Warren Parrish his “Scribe”, as well, suggesting perhaps that he saw Parrish as filling the same eschatological role that just a few months prior had been assigned to Oliver Cowdery.  Smith in fact enlisted many talented scribes over the course of his life, selecting for the role some of the Church’s most talented and educated men.  He never felt constrained to limit himself to a single individual.  He had a whole cadre of spokesmen, some of whom moved in and out of the role as their fortunes and the Church’s changed.

I’m interested to hear how the commenters here at MM read this evidence.  How are we to reconcile D&C 100 with Cowdery’s patriarchal blessing?  Was the spokesman a person, or an office?  If it was a person, then who?  Cowdery?  Rigdon?  Or someone else entirely?

Correcting an Error in My Dialogue Article

The latest issue of Dialogue has just mailed, with my paper "Joseph Smith in Hermeneutical Crisis" included. Unfortunately, after signing off on the proofs for this paper I discovered a problem with footnote #60. In the published version it reads in part,

[The Book of Mormon] also tends to exaggerate the use of certain forms--for example, the emphatic construction “I did go up unto,” as opposed to “I went up unto.” My own computer study reveals that most biblical books use the word “did” very little--only Habakkuk uses it more than three times per thousand words. The Book of Mormon, by contrast, exhibits extraordinarily high rates of occurrence per thousand words in four books: 4 Nephi (23.64), Ether (12.26), Mormon (11.87), and Helaman (11.86). Only 2 Nephi (1.29), Jacob (2.08), and Moroni (2.61) use “did” fewer than five times per thousand words.

In order to generate these word frequencies I used a computer program I wrote years ago for that purpose. Upon revisiting the code for this program, however, I discovered that years ago I was a pretty crummy programmer! I fixed my code and got slightly different numbers. Fortunately the basic conclusion remains the same. The corrected footnote should read,

[The Book of Mormon] also tends to exaggerate the use of certain forms--for example, the emphatic construction “I did go up unto,” as opposed to “I went up unto.” My own computer study reveals that most biblical books use the word “did” very little--only 1 and 2 Kings use it more than three times per thousand words. The Book of Mormon, by contrast, exhibits extraordinarily high rates of occurrence per thousand words in four books: 4 Nephi (25.99), Ether (13.93), Mormon (12.63), and Helaman (13.01). Only 2 Nephi (1.55), Jacob (1.75), and Moroni (2.62) use “did” fewer than five times per thousand words. (Book of Mormon chapters copied verbatim or nearly-verbatim from the KJV are excluded from these ratios.)

An Opportunity to Treat with China on Human Rights

Every year, China issues a report on human rights in the United States.  Most view the report as something of a joke.  It was originally created as China's response to the US's "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices," in which China is frequently and harshly criticized.  This is just China's way of turning the tables.

In their desire to strike back at the US for its arrogance, however, the Chinese have given us an opportunity.  China is not likely to ever make unilateral concessions on human rights or democracy.  As a rule, unilateral concessions of any kind are bad diplomatic practice.  That means that any improvement of human rights in China will have to be part of a bilateral agreement.  So, what if we chose to take the Chinese human rights report seriously?  What if Obama called for a large-scale human rights conference for the US and China to work on a plan to improve human rights in both countries?  Even if the Chinese originally meant their report as a joke, they would be forced to act as though it were serious in order to save face.

Besides, the Chinese human rights report makes some good points.  If they can help us reduce violent crime, corruption, drug abuse, prison overcrowding, disease, government wiretapping, poverty, and other such problems in our country, that would be good for everybody.