Jettisoning Joseph but not Jesus?
When Grant Palmer’s book and the furor surrounding his heresy trial hit the press a few months back, I blogged at United Brethren about one of the things about it that really gets on my wick: at the same time that Joseph Smith supposedly withers under the heat of critical scholarship, many disillusioned Mormons still claim a warm and fuzzy love for Jesus. Brother Palmer claimed that he “still believes in the church because he has refocused his faith on Jesus Christ” (AP).
Let me first say that I am delighted that Brother Palmer still has faith in Jesus (who is, after all, the only name under heaven whereby we may be saved). But something needs to be said here loud and clear: if you were to pass the New Testament through the same lens of hyper-critical scholarship that some do the Joseph Smith story then Jesus would not come out well. Not well at all. This is my own experience from teaching a college New Testament class where I am required to take a scholarly and secular approach to the text. The result is that I see many of my Christian students fidget and squirm as they are bombarded with issues of Gospel historicity and the so-called “historical Jesus” who appears to bear little resemblance to the “faithful history” promoted by Paul and other early Christians.
It’s ironic for me to see my Christian students go through the same challenge that many disaffected Mormon intellectuals claim has been their cross to bear: they begin to suspect that the religion they know from Bible classes is not quite the same as the religion presented to them at college. Where in the Alpha Course do they tell you about the Messianic Secret?
The simple fact is that it is not hard to reduce the Christian “faithful history” into something far less glorious. Indeed, that is the current state of the New Testament in academia. So why is it so easy for Grant Palmer to be critical of Joseph but place Jesus in soft focus? Is it because:
1. Something that belongs to blurry antiquity is somehow more believable?
2.”Fish-sticker Jesus” gives everything and expects nothing?
For me, it is as hard to believe that Jesus rose from the dead (known only from accounts written years after the fact) as it is to believe that Joseph had a vision of God (which he only published years after the fact). For reasons of faith and Spirit I believe both, and I have come to expect, even embrace, the idea that religious history is almost always a case of peering through a dark glass. This is something I try to tell my students, that although the Gospels may reflect the problems of the time in which they were written as much as a factual, historical Jesus, their writers were not trying to deceive. They believed, without equivocation, that Jesus was the Christ.
Again, I wonder why these problems of human history do not seem to bother people like Grant Palmer when they are applied to Jesus but are embraced wholeheartedly in the diminution of Joseph Smith. Indeed, Christian anti-Mormons ought to beware: the same methods they apply to Joseph would also hurt Jesus. One favorite anti-Mormon tactic is the environmental theory of the Book of the Mormon, that it is, in fact, a veiled analogy of 1820s America: the Second Great Awakening, Anti-Masonry, and so forth. Funny, then, that some claim that the Gospels also veil a subtext: for example, that the Jesus story is really about Julius Caesar!
This post is adapted from the one at United Brethren. Here are some of the comments (with light editing) that accompanied the original:
Kim Siever:
My question is why didn’t Grant Palmer focus his faith on Jesus Christ to start with?
Not focusing your faith in Jesus Christ is simply asking for trouble.
Peggy Snow Cahill:
Probably the reason why many people are willing to soft-focus on Christ, but want to turn up the magnification on Joseph Smith is because Joseph is more recent in time, and therefore seems more real to us. As history becomes legend, and legend becomes myth, well, you know the rest… we don’t feel the same need to hold a “mythical” figure like Christ to the same level of scrutiny as a mere “historical” one like Joseph.
John C.:
As a teacher of mine once told me, all religions are equally implausible. There is no reason to pick on one more than others.
Nathan Smith:
I was thinking of Jan Shipps’s characterization of Mormonism as a case study for the formation of a world faith. If one is being truly “objective” and looking at science and history, and one concludes that Mormonism – the only world faith for which we have solid and comprehensive data on the founding – arose through fraud, changing stories, and suppression of inconsistent narratives, then would not the objective historian presume that all other faiths began similarly until he encounters contrary evidence?
I agree wholeheartedly with the other posts, as well. Where is Palmer’s rigor in approaching Jesus, or Paul’s vision, or the relationship between the New Testament and the Old Testament, or the Pentecost. Or God himself? For every C.S. Lewis there are 10 Bertrand Russels. Devotion to reified objectivity just can’t get Palmer to where he wants to plant himself.
Adam Greenwood:
“Fish sticker Jesus” is Phrase of the Month. Yeehah!
I am physical scientist working in industry for 20 years, not a scholar on Mormonism. So what I’m about to say might sound dumb to some but comes from the heart:
On this issue of JS and the origins of the church holding up to scholarship, I think the church shares a good bit of blame for the situation. One example — I can’t be the only church member who has been long troubled that the church bases our teachings on the nature of the G-d head on the first vision. As a young missionary teaching discussions, I’d often think, it’s an account of a vision; how can we make doctrinal declarations based on it? After all, Moses didn’t teach that the almighty was a burning bush…………
Visions to me are mythological type constructs given to the recipient to illustrate something that can’t be comprehended within our normal state of existence. This makes sense to me since the almighty creator must be independent from his space-time creation in which we live in. If someone is to gain understanding of something outside of space-time, mechanisms such visions are required. If so, an account of a vision conveyed in our realm can only describe an aspect of what was actually experienced. The teaching methods used in the temple have a relationship to what I’m trying to say, in that, one only begins to fathom what is actually meant to be conveyed when one looks past the superficial actions and words. I’d really like to see an endowment based on the Matrix trilogy, but that is a story for another day.
I think the church made a good move in the last generation to move away from doctrinal and organizational emphasis back to the essence of Christianity. In other words, emphasizing the message of the protestant reformers combined with restored priesthood authority (although I’m still waiting for Amazing Grace in our hymn books. Tragic it’s not in there considering some of the clunker hymns we have). Had earlier church leaders made that move much sooner, I don’t think we be facing the current controversy. Our modern scriptures and “historical†accounts of the founding of the church wouldn’t be treated as history, just as the bible isn’t.
Comment by Steve (FSF) — February 21, 2005 @ 1:27 pm
Our modern scriptures and “historical†accounts of the founding of the church wouldn’t be treated as history, just as the bible isn’t.
I am not sure what you meant by this therefore I may be missing the point here (nothing that unusual), but it was once pointed out to me that the idea of the covenant within the church demands historicity in the Bible. It doesn’t necessitate inerrancy, but it is awfully hard to have an Abrahamic covenant that is at least partially responsible for the restoration if you don’t have an Abraham (this argument is stolen wholesale from Paul Hoskisson, by the way).
Outside of that, there are quite a few people that argue that there is good history to be found in the Bible (OT and NT (although less the second than the first)). Why? Because we have some idea of some of the biases that might have motivated the original authors, editors, and copyists to include what they included and discard what they discarded. Remember that much like how LDS Church History has come felt the full force of a skeptical public, the Bible is in the state it is in because it too is the object of a skeptical critique. The parallels are there because Ronan finds the treatments similar, not different.
Outside of this, as C. Terryl Givens points out, the reality of the spiritual phenomena surrounding the founding of the church is a point that is particularly offensive to other denominations. You are right in pointing out that the historicity of these claims are at the heart of current controversies, but doing away with them might make for an emptier LDS faith. “Fish-sticker Joseph”?
Comment by John C. — February 21, 2005 @ 2:14 pm
We already have fish-sticker Joseph: Liz Lemon Swindle (your favourite artist JC).
Comment by Ronan — February 21, 2005 @ 2:18 pm
HA!
Comment by John C. — February 21, 2005 @ 2:30 pm
To clarify what I meant by “………..wouldn’t be treated as history, just as the bible isn’t.”, I didn’t mean there is absolutely no history in the Bible, but that plenty of it just can’t be (and isn’t) treated as history. Here are two examples:
To me the gospels read like missionary discussions of their day. The purpose being to teach the audience about Jesus, their Lord and Savior. I don’t read the gospels as history. So if one gospel says the Sermon on the Mount occurred in such and such place and that contradicts another gospel, I’m not bothered. Variations of the Sermon on the Mount were probably delivered hundreds of times almost everywhere Jesus went. It was “The Speech”. His traveling followers had the thing memorized and the essence of the speech was written down on various occasions later. There were probably many gospels (most of which are lost) used for missionary purposes, none of which were/are history.
An Old Testament example would be the genealogies back to Adam and Eve. I assume these were based on an oral history before being written down. The people mentioned in each generation are likely people of renown. The generations with “nobodies” (which would be most of the generations) are skipped. Hence Adam and Eve could have lived 60,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago, etc. Adam and Eve are most likely a mythological construct to represent a group of people from which we all descend anyway. In short, it’s not history, but has profound religious significance nevertheless.
Once again, I’m a scientist, not a Mormon scholar, so I’m not saying I have all the answers, but I hope that clarifies where I’m coming from.
Comment by Steve (FSF) — February 21, 2005 @ 4:22 pm
If what you are saying is that it is natural to have a type of mythology growing up around significant religious movers, I agree (I also think that this is what you are saying). But be careful in stating that this is not history. Certainly it may not be what you call history, but within a context of Roman Hellenism, the gospels are (at the very least) good examples of histories. The motivation behind them may have been propagandistic but surely there are similar histories written today. Many historians nowadays have given up on the idea of objective truth being found through history in any case.
Does that mean that we can know nothing about history? Of course not. It is simply an acknowledgement that all sources and all historians reflect some degree of bias in their use. Clearly, this was the case in the Gospels. But there is no compelling reason to assume that just because the Gospels are biased, they contain nothing that can be called (even in a modern sense) historical or that the historicity of a given event be necessarily thrown out.
Comment by John C. — February 22, 2005 @ 10:24 am
Ronan,
That is an excellent, excellent point. Because I grew up in Utah, I’d never really considered that the reality of God or Jesus were in play; the issue was simply whether or not Joseph Smithw as a Prophet and the Book of Mormon wass true. When I served my mission in Argentina I was flabbergasted by the fact that some people applied the same skepticisim of God and Jesus that I had only seen levied at the Prophet and the Book of Mormon. LDS deal with the historicity of the BOM and the divine calling of JS so much that we forget that the Bible and everything in it is subject to question. I feel bad for the evangelicals, JWs, and others, as they’re fighting a two-front war: on the one hand trying to disprove the claims of Mormons and others and on the other fending off the claims of the skeptical rationalists.
Comment by Davis Bell — February 23, 2005 @ 2:07 pm
Hey Davis, don’t feel too bad for them
Comment by Ronan — February 24, 2005 @ 11:52 am