Foundational Texts of Mormonism

Foundational Texts of Mormonism

Author: Mark Ashurst-McGee

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 0190274379

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Joseph Smith, founding prophet and martyr of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, personally wrote, dictated, or commissioned thousands of documents. Among these are several highly significant sources that scholars have used over and over again in their attempts to reconstruct the founding era of Mormonism, usually by focusing solely on content, without a deep appreciation for how and why a document was produced. This book offers case studies of the sources most often used by historians of the early Mormon experience. Each chapter takes a particular document as its primary subject, considering the production of a document as an historical event in itself, with its own background, purpose, circumstances, and consequences. The documents are examined not merely as sources of information but as artifacts that reflect aspects of the general culture and particular circumstances in which they were created. This book will help historians working in the founding era of Mormonism gain a more solid grounding in the period's documentary record by supplying important information on major primary sources.


Visions in a Seer Stone

Visions in a Seer Stone

Author: William L. Davis

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2020-04-08

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1469655675

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In this interdisciplinary work, William L. Davis examines Joseph Smith's 1829 creation of the Book of Mormon, the foundational text of the Latter Day Saint movement. Positioning the text in the history of early American oratorical techniques, sermon culture, educational practices, and the passion for self-improvement, Davis elucidates both the fascinating cultural context for the creation of the Book of Mormon and the central role of oral culture in early nineteenth-century America. Drawing on performance studies, religious studies, literary culture, and the history of early American education, Davis analyzes Smith's process of oral composition. How did he produce a history spanning a period of 1,000 years, filled with hundreds of distinct characters and episodes, all cohesively tied together in an overarching narrative? Eyewitnesses claimed that Smith never looked at notes, manuscripts, or books—he simply spoke the words of this American religious epic into existence. Judging the truth of this process is not Davis's interest. Rather, he reveals a kaleidoscope of practices and styles that converged around Smith's creation, with an emphasis on the evangelical preaching styles popularized by the renowned George Whitefield and John Wesley.


Foundational Texts of Mormonism

Foundational Texts of Mormonism

Author: Mark Ashurst-McGee

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-02-16

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 0190274387

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Joseph Smith, founding prophet and martyr of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, personally wrote, dictated, or commissioned thousands of documents. Among these are several highly significant sources that scholars have used over and over again in their attempts to reconstruct the founding era of Mormonism, usually by focusing solely on content, without a deep appreciation for how and why a document was produced. This book offers case studies of the sources most often used by historians of the early Mormon experience. Each chapter takes a particular document as its primary subject, considering the production of a document as an historical event in itself, with its own background, purpose, circumstances, and consequences. The documents are examined not merely as sources of information but as artifacts that reflect aspects of the general culture and particular circumstances in which they were created. This book will help historians working in the founding era of Mormonism gain a more solid grounding in the period's documentary record by supplying important information on major primary sources.


Joseph Smith's New Translation of the Bible

Joseph Smith's New Translation of the Bible

Author: Kent P. Jackson

Publisher: Shadow Mountain

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 888

ISBN-13:

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This volume--the work of a lifetime--brings together all the Joseph Smith Translation manuscript in a remarkable and useful way. Now, for the first time, readers can take a careful look at the complete text, along with photos of several actual manuscript pages. The book contains a typographic transcription of all the original manuscripts, unedited and preserved exactly as dictated by the Prophet Joseph and recorded by his scribes. In addition, this volume features essays on the background, doctrinal contributions, and editorial procedures involved in the Joseph Smith Translation, as well as the history of the manuscripts since Joseph Smith's day.


The Pearl of Greatest Price

The Pearl of Greatest Price

Author: Terryl Givens

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-09-04

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0190603887

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The Pearl of Greatest Price narrates the history of Mormonism's fourth volume of scripture, canonized in 1880. The authors track its predecessors, describe its several components, and assess their theological significance within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Four principal sections are discussed, along with attendant controversies associated with each. The Book of Moses purports to be a Mosaic narrative missing from the biblical version of Genesis. Too little treated in the scholarship on Mormonism, these chapters, produced only months after the Book of Mormon was published, actually contain the theological nucleus of Latter-day Saint doctrines as well as a virtual template for the Restoration Joseph Smith was to effect. In The Pearl of Greatest Price, the author covers three principal parts that are the focus of many of the controversies engulfing Mormonism today. These parts are The Book of Abraham, The Book of Moses, and The Joseph Smith History. Most controversial of all is the Book of Abraham, a production that arose out of a group of papyri Smith acquired, along with four mummies, in 1835. Most of the papyri disappeared in the great Chicago Fire, but surviving fragments have been identified as Egyptian funerary documents. This has created one of the most serious challenges to Smith's prophetic claims the LDS church has faced. LDS scholars, however, have developed several frameworks for vindicating the inspiration of the resulting narrative and Smith's calling as a prophet. The author attempts to make sense of Smith's several, at times divergent, accounts of his First Vision, one of which is canonized as scripture. He also assesses the creedal nature of Smith's "Articles of Faith," in the context of his professed anti-creedalism. In sum, this study chronicles the volume's historical legacy and theological indispensability to the Latter-day Saint tradition, as well as the reasons for its resilience and future prospects in the face of daunting challenges.


Mormon Feminism

Mormon Feminism

Author: Joanna Brooks

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0190248033

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This is the first-ever collection of classic writings and speeches from four decades of the modern Mormon feminist movement. A definitive and essential guide for anyone who wants to understand the unique and often controversial history of gender in Mormonism, Mormon Feminism makes available in one place, for the first time, the groundbreaking essays, speeches, and poems of the Mormon feminist movement.


A Documentary History of the Book of Mormon

A Documentary History of the Book of Mormon

Author:

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-01-09

Total Pages: 552

ISBN-13: 0190699116

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The story of the creation of the Book of Mormon has been told many times, and often ridiculed. A Documentary History of the Book of Mormon presents and examines the primary sources surrounding the origin of the foundational text of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the most successful new religion of modern times. The scores of documents transcribed and annotated in this book include family histories, journal entries, letters, affidavits, reminiscences, interviews, newspaper articles, and book extracts, as well as revelations dictated in the name of God. From these texts emerges the captivating story of what happened (and what was believed or rumored to have happened) between September 1823-when the seventeen-year-old farm boy Joseph Smith announced that an angel of God had directed him to an ancient book inscribed on gold plates-and March 1830, when the Book of Mormon was first published. By compiling for the first time a substantial collection of both first- and secondhand accounts relevant to the inception of the divine revelation-or clever fraud-that launched a new world religion, A Documentary History makes a significant contribution to the rapidly growing field of Mormon Studies.


The Gift and Power

The Gift and Power

Author: Brant Gardner

Publisher: Greg Kofford Books, Incorporated

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781589581319

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Book length treatment of the wide spectrum of questions about the Joseph Smith's translation of the Book of Mormon. Includes discussion about the role of folk magic, how the English text replicates the original plate text, and the use of seer stones.


Mormons and Mormonism

Mormons and Mormonism

Author: Eric Alden Eliason

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780252069123

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The ideal introduction to what many historians consider the most innovative and successful religion to emerge during the spiritual ferment of antebellum America.


Race and the Making of the Mormon People

Race and the Making of the Mormon People

Author: Max Perry Mueller

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2017-08-08

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 1469633760

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The nineteenth-century history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Max Perry Mueller argues, illuminates the role that religion played in forming the notion of three "original" American races—red, black, and white—for Mormons and others in the early American Republic. Recovering the voices of a handful of black and Native American Mormons who resolutely wrote themselves into the Mormon archive, Mueller threads together historical experience and Mormon scriptural interpretations. He finds that the Book of Mormon is key to understanding how early followers reflected but also departed from antebellum conceptions of race as biblically and biologically predetermined. Mormon theology and policy both challenged and reaffirmed the essentialist nature of the racialized American experience. The Book of Mormon presented its believers with a radical worldview, proclaiming that all schisms within the human family were anathematic to God's design. That said, church founders were not racial egalitarians. They promoted whiteness as an aspirational racial identity that nonwhites could achieve through conversion to Mormonism. Mueller also shows how, on a broader level, scripture and history may become mutually constituted. For the Mormons, that process shaped a religious movement in perpetual tension between its racialist and universalist impulses during an era before the concept of race was secularized.