Abstract: Alma’s conversion experience was both unusual and unusually powerful, and yet he fervently wished that he could provide others with the same experience. So much so, in fact, that he actually feared that he might be sinning in his wish by seeming to oppose the will of God. Increasingly, though, I find myself sharing that wish. My involvement with the Interpreter Foundation can correctly be regarded as one manifestation of that fact. I invite others to join us.

Readers of the Book of Mormon will remember the dramatic conversion of Alma the Younger, an apostate son of the Nephite high priest in Zarahemla, and of his four fellow apostates, the sons of king Mosiah. The Greek word αποστασία (apostasia), the obvious source of our English word apostasy, carries the essential meaning of “rebellion” or “revolt,” and that is precisely what they were doing.

But “as they were going about rebelling against God,” or, as Alma himself expresses it, as they were “seeking to destroy the church of God,” an angel appeared to them. “And he descended as it were in a cloud” and “spake as it were with a voice of thunder, which caused the earth to shake,” and summoned them to repentance. “Doth not my voice shake the earth?” the angel asked, rhetorically, reminding them of something that they already knew quite terrifyingly well. “He spake unto us, as it were the voice of thunder, and the whole earth did tremble beneath our feet.” “And so great was their astonishment, that they fell to the earth, and understood not the words which he spake unto them.”1

[Page vii]The experience was so powerful that it fundamentally transformed the lives of all five. They became famously devoted and extremely successful missionaries, preaching the Gospel with great effect. They are, thus, powerful examples of the scriptural concept of repentance, which is the term that the King James Bible and derivative English works most commonly use to render the Hebrew word תשובה (teshuvah), which literally means “return,” and the Greek term μετάνοια (metanoia). Metanoia, from the preposition meta, meaning “after” or “beyond,” and a derivative of nous, meaning “mind,” suggests, very strongly, a change of thinking, a transforming change of heart (as we would say it), a repudiation of past thinking, a conversion or reformation. In some modern German Bible translations (e.g., the Einheitsübersetzung, which has been adopted by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for its German-speaking congregations), the verb umkehren (“to turn back,” “to turn around”) captures the sense of the Greek and the Hebrew quite well. It also represents the reactions of Alma and the four sons of Mosiah quite well — they returned to the teachings of their devout fathers, the Nephite king and the Nephite high priest.

It was so powerful, too, that Alma evidently seems to have continued to use his conversion experience in his sermons for years afterward. So, probably, did the sons of Mosiah. We have record of one such retelling of Alma’s conversion in Alma 36, where, perhaps more than a quarter of a century after their encounter with the angel, Alma employed it to testify of his faith to his eldest son, Helaman.

But we also have clear echoes of it elsewhere.

First, though: Intertextuality is a word contemporary scholars use to describe ways in which various texts refer to each other, or play off of each other, often without explicitly indicating such interplay. For example, the title of the 2012 book Seven Habits of Highly Fulfilled People