[Editor’s Note: We are pleased to present the eighth (and final) installment from a book entitled Labor Diligently to Write: The Ancient Making of a Modern Scripture. It is being presented in serialized form as an aid to help readers prepare for the 2020 Come Follow Me course of study. This final installment is the Preface for the book. This is a new approach for Interpreter, and we hope you find it helpful.]

 

 

Preface

Brant Gardner changed the way I read the Book of Mormon.

Back in the mid-2000’s I was preparing to teach two courses on the Book of Mormon at Brigham Young University as an adjunct professor. I had taught several New Testament courses in prior semesters, but this was my first time teaching Book of Mormon. As I began to prep for the course I began to get more and more frustrated. Due to my years as a Classics major, I had felt pretty confident in teaching the New Testament. I had spent years studying the ancient world, toiling with Greek and Latin texts, and poring through the books, commentaries, and articles crucial to New Testament studies.

When it came time to teach the Book of Mormon, I was adrift. Where were the monographs? The commentaries? Much of what had been published on the Book of Mormon was either doctrinally oriented or apologetically motivated. Both of these types of publications were useful, but I desperately wanted to have someone take me into the world of the text and open up the Book of Mormon in a similar fashion to what I had enjoyed in studying the New Testament.

As luck would have it, right before I was to begin teaching I was wandering through the old Pioneer Book store in Provo when I noticed [Page viii]a set of books with the title Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon. They were written by Brant Gardner, a scholar whom at that point I was unfamiliar with. I cautiously took the volume on First Nephi off the shelf, eager to see what an “Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon” looked like. I was instantly drawn in by the level of attention and depth paid to every verse. As the title suggested, these books were less concerned with matching up Book of Mormon verses to modern LDS doctrine than they were with trying to dig deeper into who Nephi was. What was his agenda? His theological background? His connection to Isaiah? Why did he structure his record the way he did? I was so excited to find these four books (at the time only the first four had been published — I was told by the employee I would have to wait a while to get the last two) that I immediately purchased all four, figuring that I could easily convince my wife and two small children that going a week or so without food was a small sacrifice to make when compared to Dad’s awesome new books. (I was unsuccessful in that endeavor, but that’s a story for another day.)

For the next few months I pored over Gardner’s commentaries, finding nuggets of gold on every page. I was impressed most of all by how careful of a reader he was — gleaning crucial insights from words or phrases but then also able to contextualize what was happening in an individual verse into the larger picture of the Book of Mormon. It’s safe to say that when I finally bought the last two books in the series and finished reading all six volumes that Gardner’s works had reshaped how I read the Book of Mormon. For the first time I felt I really understood the context of Jacob’s temple sermon, or the theological position of Noah’s priests, or Mormon’s possible typological use of Gadianton Robbers, or the many different social and economic reasons behind the collapse of the Nephites. My students were certainly better-off, as I was able to bring insights into the Book of Mormon that really ope...