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Abstract: The Restoration began with the stunning divine declaration to the Prophet Joseph Smith that the Christian sects of his day were “all wrong,” that “all their creeds were an abomination in [God’s] sight.” It’s a powerful condemnation, but what, exactly, does it mean? Later in his life, Joseph reflected that he felt that creeds set limits “and say ‘hitherto shalt thou come & no further’ — which I cannot subscribe to.” Certainly, as I realized during a wonderful musical experience many years ago, there is little if anything in one of the great ecumenical creeds with which a believing Latter-day Saint must, or even should, disagree.

Many years ago, while I was studying at the American University in Cairo, my wife and I joined the Ma‘adi Community Choir. It took its name from the Ma‘adi Community Church, a largely expatriate Protestant church that was located in a southern suburb of the Egyptian capital and that was pastored at the time by our American downstairs neighbor, the late Rev. David Johnson.1

During our time with the choir, which rehearsed in the church itself, we prepared and performed two especially ambitious pieces, Antonio Vivaldi’s “Gloria in D Major” (RV 589) and Franz Schubert’s Mass in G — strictly, his Mass No. 2 in G Major, D. 167. Both are wonderfully beautiful and very powerful, and those long-ago performances with that choir remain among our most memorable musical experiences. In this little essay, though, I would especially like to focus on the Schubert Mass, and particularly on the section of it that is called the “Credo.”2

[Page viii]Incredibly to me, Schubert composed his Mass in G in less than a week, during the first part of March 1815. The portion of the work called the Credo — Latin for I believe — is a musical setting of an ancient Latin translation of the so-called Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. (The Creed was first composed in Greek.)3 The name of the Creed comes from the fact that it is a modified version of the original ad 325 Nicene Creed that was adopted by the Second Ecumenical Council, which was held in Constantinople in ad 381. Interestingly, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed is the only formal statement of Christian faith that is accepted as both ecumenical and authoritative by the Orthodox churches, the Church of the East, many Protestant communions (including the Anglicans), and the Catholic Church (with one modification that I’ll describe shortly).

What I want to argue here is that Latter-day Saints, too, would be able — perhaps with some clarifications, and almost certainly with some surprise — to affirm the “Credo.” And that fact says something vitally important about the question, which still worries some of our friends and exercises some of our critics, about whether Latter-day Saints are really Christians. To lay out my position, I will individually cite and comment on every passage of the text:4

Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem cæli et terræ, visibilium omnium et invisibilium.

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.

Obviously, no Latter-day Saint would have any difficulty at all in affirming this opening sentence. The first phrase of our first Article of Faith, after all, is “We believe in God, the Eternal Father.” And that first [Page ix]Article of Faith goes on, of course, to declare our belief “in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost,” as does the Credo:

Credo in unum Dominum Jesum Christum, Filium Dei unigenitum, [et] ex Patre natum ante omnia sæcula. Deum de Deo, Lumen de Lumine: Deum verum de Deo vero; [Genitum, non factum;] consubstantialem Patri, per quem omnia facta sunt.

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,

Abstract: A traditional reading of Nephi’s chronicle of the trek through Arabia relies heavily on two verses in 1 Nephi 17. In verse 4, Nephi states that they “did sojourn for the space of many years, yea, even eight years in the wilderness.” In verse 5, he reports that “we did come to the land which we called Bountiful.” The almost universal interpretation of these verses is that of sequential events: eight years traversing the arid desert of Western Arabia following which the Lehites entered the lush Bountiful for an unspecified time to build the ship. A question with the traditional reading is why a trip that could have taken eight months ostensibly took eight years. It may be that Nephi gave us that information. His “eight years” could be read as a general statement about one large context: the “wilderness” of all of Arabia. In other words, the “eight years in the wilderness” may have included both the time in the desert and the time in Bountiful. In this paper I examine the basis for such an alternative reading.

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Recent discoveries have provided remarkable plausibility for many of the Book of Mormon’s locations and events.1 As more discoveries are made, it becomes increasingly apparent that Nephi wrote his account of the family’s trek through Arabia with a high level of accuracy and detail. However, in spite of Nephi’s carefully composed text, a variety [Page 282]of questions remain. With an aim to seeking helpful clarifications, this article will explore three questions about the journey through Arabia:

* What did Nephi mean by the word wilderness?

* Why did the trek ostensibly take eight years, and why do all current speculations designed to account for those “missing” years fall short?

* How much time did the Lehites spend in Bountiful, and how much of that total time was spent constructing Nephi’s ship?

Nephi tells us that he wrote the Small Plate account of the trek through Arabia in First Nephi some 30 years after his departure from Jerusalem (2 Nephi 5:27–31). Twenty years earlier, in what are usually referred to as the Large Plates,2 Nephi had been similarly commanded to “make plates of ore that [he] might engraven upon them the record of [his] people” (1 Nephi 19:1). Note that Nephi’s father, Lehi, had been recording events of their exodus even earlier than that (v. 1). All of that latter material was dictated by Joseph Smith a...

Abstract: Commentaries on Nephi’s first book tend to interpret the fraternal struggles it reports as historical facts that are meant primarily to invite readers’ evaluative responses. While recognizing the historical character of the facts marshalled by Nephi, this paper will argue that the author transposes that history into an allegory meant to inspire his readers in all times and places to abandon prevailing metaphors of life that are focused on the attainment of worldly goods and pleasures. In their place, Nephi offers the revealed metaphor of life as a day of probation taught to him and his father in their great visions. God’s plan of salvation revealed to them made it clear that the welfare of each human being for eternity would be determined by a divine judgment on how effectively their lives had been transformed by their adherence to the gospel of Jesus Christ in mortality. The message of 1 Nephi is that all men and women are invited to let the Spirit of the Lord soften their hearts and lead them into his covenant path wherein he can prepare them to enter into his presence at the end.

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From the time Lehi and his family fled from Jerusalem, Nephi kept their record on what we now call the Large Plates of Nephi, an enormous record that was maintained by Nephi’s successors for a thousand years — with the final pages being written by Mormon and Moroni at the end of Nephite times.1 But after thirty years, the mature prophet-leader Nephi tells us that “the Lord God said unto me: Make [Page 232]other plates” which would focus on the divine revelations and spiritual teachings of the Nephites (2 Nephi 5:30). It took at least a decade for Nephi to compose and inscribe this second record on what we call the Small Plates of Nephi (cf. 2 Nephi 5:34). Nephi’s purposes and guidelines for writing in these Small Plates are mentioned several times but are most fully articulated in a transitional explanation penned by Nephi’s younger brother Jacob, who inherited the responsibility of maintaining and extending them after Nephi’s death.2

The ten years or more that Nephi devoted to writing the Small Plates gave him ample time to think carefully through both the content and the rhetorical structure of this 154-page composition. While scholars have commented on Nephi’s writing from a variety of perspectives, we do not yet have a serious investigation of the following question: Why does Nephi begin this second record by recounting six stories of the earliest years of the family’s flig...

Review of John Gee, Saving Faith: How Families Protect, Sustain, And Encourage Faith (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2020). 313 pages.

Abstract: Saving Faith is a truly excellent book, designed especially for families concerned about their children. It is also a book appropriate for those getting ready to serve as missionaries, or for newly married couples, young couples about to be married, or even for those about to bring children into this world to undergo their mortal probation.

I must admit that I have had a really difficult time fashioning a review of John Gee’s Saving Faith.1 I have tossed out several earlier attempts to address the contents of each of its excellent chapters. When I first began to draft a review, I discovered that I simply could not address all of the excellent content in each of its ten chapters. Even reproducing the book’s table of contents would not help. Hence, in this essay I will not try to address the contents of each of the chapters, but I will only give some close attention to one portion of one chapter.

What Is (and Is Not) in This Book

John Gee is the William (Bill) Gay Research Professor in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University. Hence, this book is the work of a very able research professor. His employment requires him to do research and publish essays and books, which he has done in Egyptology (the field in which he has his PhD) and in other academic areas he finds challenging and important for preserving and advancing the faith of Latter-day Saints. Saving Faith is, [Page 226]I believe, his fourth book, and he has published over a hundred essays and reviews.

In this work, Professor Gee has been able to locate, understand, and master the secular literature on the crucial issues that each of the book’s chapters addresses. If I have counted correctly, Saving Faith has 1,052 footnotes, and at least half of these draw upon contemporary social science scholarship central to the issues addressed in the book. The reader can be assured that Gee has not manufactured evidence to support a revisionist ideology, which some others seem to have done.2

Saving Faith is not a devotional book composed of stories or sermons. Instead, it is, I must stress, an academic book. Don’t confuse it, however, with the stereotype of an academic book — a boring and sometimes pedantic tome that one academic writes for other academics who are often indifferent to what is published. Instead, Saving Faith is fully accessible to ordinary Latter-day Saints on each of the topics addressed in its ten chapters. The book’s subtitle — How Families Protect, Sustain, and Encourage Faith — is a fully accurate indication of what is addressed.

Now for Some of the Actual Contents

There is more information in Saving Faith than one can reasonably address in a short review such as this. Nevertheless, Professor Gee brings up some points that should be brought up here.

Saving Faith begins by addressing rumors (rife in some circles) that Latter-day Saint young people are leaving their faith in “droves.” He demonstrates that while, in America, we do “lose some of our youth, certainly more than we would like,” the fact is that, when compared with Roman Catholics and Protestants, “we hold on to more of our youth than anyone else” (p. 22). “There are,” he demonstrates,

Review of Spencer W. McBride, Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). 269 pages, $29.95 (hardcover).

Abstract: Spencer McBride’s book is the deepest look yet into Joseph Smith’s 1844 campaign for president of the United States. In smooth-paced and readable detail, McBride’s work expertly demonstrates the unique Latter-day Saint genesis for the campaign and how it fit into the wider American social-political environment. Its message regarding religious liberty is as applicable today as it was nearly two centuries ago.

[Editor’s Note: This review first appeared in The Civil War Book Review 24, no. 1 (2022). It is reprinted here with permission. Slight editorial changes have been made.]

On July 4, 1844, Americans celebrated sixty-eight years of independence with feasts, parades, and fireworks. Over three million enslaved Black people, however, were not celebrating. As Frederick Douglass would declare eight years later, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” Amongst other mechanisms, the southern Slave Power continued to enthrone states’ rights as a “political strategy … to maintain a carefully constructed — and deeply unjust — economic and social hierarchy” (209).

In the North, Independence Day passed with an uneasy calm in Philadelphia. Tragically, however, the next three days saw nativist mobs reignite anti-Catholic violence begun two months earlier. One thousand miles west in Nauvoo, Illinois, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were mourning. A week earlier their prophet and presidential candidate Joseph Smith had been assassinated while in Illinois State custody. Hundreds of electioneer missionaries canvassing [Page 220]the nation for Smith were just learning of his murder and would dejectedly begin returning to Nauvoo. Sustained anti-Mormon violence would expel them from the nation only eighteen months later.

This treatment of Catholics and Latter-day Saints demonstrated that in antebellum America, religious freedom was not universal. But why? Spencer W. McBride, an associate managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers, argues in his book Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom1 “that the states’ rights strategy was as effective at impeding efforts to establish full citizenship rights of religious minorities as it was at blocking efforts to establish the personhood of men and women of African descent enslaved in the American South” (209). In this important work, McBride employs the causes and outcomes of Smith’s sincere but quixotic campaign as a lens to effectively evaluate antebellum religious inequality and the systems that perpetuated it.

Joseph Smith’s new religion, with its community building and its anti-slavery and pro-American-Indian beliefs, engendered staunch opposition from Missourians who feared Latter-day Saints’ growing economic and political power. When tension turned to conflict, the governor of Missouri ordered the infamous “Extermination Order.” While Smith languished in jail, militia-mobs forced his people into Illinois — victims of theft, violence, and even rape.

After gaining his freedom, Smith traveled to Washington, DC, seeking federal assistance for protection and redress. Here McBride excels, meticulously immersing Smith and the reader in the larger context of American political life and realities. When the president and Congress offer no assistance behind the guise of states’ rights and electoral politics, Smith lost confidence in the American political system and even democracy itself.

No longer politically naive,

Abstract: This work explores an alternative interpretation of the Exodus narrative as a metaphor for childbirth. Gleaning from Old Testament and Judaic sources, we find rich female birth and salvific imagery in the saga of the migration of the children of Israel and the Passover itself. This perspective of sacred childbirth, when coupled with traditional Christian interpretations of the first Passover, ultimately paints an enhanced picture of the Atonement of Jesus Christ.

The Exodus account of the birth of the Israelite nation is an allegorical masterpiece, inspiring scripture and sacred worship the world over. The narrative acquaints us with the personal journey of Moses, from his ignominious beginning in a slave dwelling to his triumphant delivery of thousands from bondage — a tale venerated by Judaism, Islam, and Christianity alike. Though many iterations of the Exodus story focus on Moses as the heroic protagonist in the miraculous military victory over Egypt, the story can also be explored from a different vantage point: Moses as figurative midwife, delivering the children of Israel from the confines of the womb.

Childbearing in the time of the Exodus, as in any pre-modern period, was a perilous endeavor. According to conservative estimates, around one in three infants and one in forty mothers did not survive the birth process anciently.1 Experienced midwives who could mitigate [Page 210]the dangers of childbirth held a prestigious place in early societies, as entire nations thrived or declined depending on their birth rates. The role of midwife is honored in several Old Testament texts where God is described as performing the duties of a midwife. God delivers a newborn (Job 10:18–19, 38:8; Isaiah 66:8–9), clothes it (Job 10:10–12, 38:8–9), and places it in its mother’s arms (Psalm 22:9–10).2

The concept of the Exodus as a birth metaphor has been cited by many contemporary Jewish scholars as well as medieval3 and renaissance-era4 Biblical commentators. Viewing the Exodus story from a childbirth perspective has the potential to illuminate many aspects of birth and motherhood that are perhaps underrepresented in traditional western religious thought. These sacred principles regarding birth nevertheless play an essential part in ultimate exaltation. The Exodus story resolutely champions the divine commission of women through the actions of its female cast. The story also entwines sacred motherhood with the redemptive mission of Jesus Christ through the symbolism of the migration of the children of Israel and the...

Abstract: One example of verbal punctuation that has a very clear pattern of usage in the Book of Mormon is the term nevertheless. It is used to draw a marked contrast between what the previous text would lead one to expect and what follows it. It is not clear what the ancient antecedent to the term might be and the English term and usage might be an artefact of the translation process. The frequency and usage of nevertheless in the Book of Mormon contrasts with the way that Joseph Smith’s writings use it.

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Modern books use marks as punctuation to help structure the narrative. The Book of Mormon, being an ancient book, uses words as punctuation, rather than marks. Having established the existence of verbal punctuation in the Book of Mormon,1 other individual items of verbal punctuation remain to be explored. I will examine one whose function in the Book of Mormon is clear, but whose other features are more complicated.

A Note on Methodology

In looking at verbal punctuation in the Book of Mormon, the following general method is employed.

* The most important consideration is how a particular feature is used in the Book of Mormon text. All other considerations are secondary. Examples of usage are, whenever possible, drawn from every book in the Book of Mormon. This [Page 196]provides the reader with multiple illustrations that cover the whole gamut of the text as well as a check on whether there are chronological developments within the Book of Mormon. To avoid too lengthy of a list, generally only one or two examples from each book are cited.

* The Book of Mormon claims to be based on a language consisting of “the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians” (1 Nephi 1:2). Therefore both Hebrew and Egyptian are considered in providing antecedents to the expressions in the Book of Mormon. Where possible, if the expressions occur in the Isaiah portions of the Book of Mormon, the corresponding Hebrew text serves as a guide to finding Hebrew equivalents. These can then be examined in the parts of the Hebrew Bible that claim to be pre-exilic to see if the Book of Mormon has Hebrew parallels. Proposed Egyptian parallels are less secure.

* Because many claim that the Book of Mormon is not ancient; and that it came through the dictation of Joseph Smith, Joseph Smith’s usage from around the time of the Book of Mormon is also compared. Finding examples of Joseph Smith’s early usage, however, is a complicated matter. For the purposes of these studies, Stanford Carmack’s collection of early Joseph Smith documents (available through WordC...