I told him I’m intrigued by the petroglyph on the cover, which makes the design is similar to the cover of Patricia Karamesines’ The Pictograph Murders. They’re both mysteries of sorts, so I’ll be interested to compare approaches. I should have more after the event, and maybe some pictures.

I must admit I would find it difficult to talk badly about this story if it deserved it (it doesn’t) as Karen is a friend of mine and, arguably, a large part of the reason life has resulted in me doing story-by-story reviews of a two-decade-old Mormon-short-story collection.

After graduating from BYU I joined the AML-List and took a menial job. With my brain untaxed at work, I aimed my thinking at the AML-List. Which ignored me. Sometimes the email I rewrote three times couldn’t get past the moderators because the day’s volume had already been capped off with a pair of three-sentence witticisms from Richard Dutcher; but I kept trying to get attention, jumping and waving my arms from the back of the room.

Anyway, fastforward a couple years and Karen Rosenbaum, then fiction editor at Dialogue, picked up my short story “The Widower,” and edited it to a new level of excellence. This was an important learning experience for me; plus, it let me feel that maybe the world of Mormon letters had a place for me after all.

Karen was friends with Eugene England and he approached her to write fiction for Dialogue in its early days. The second piece of fiction Dialogue published was one of Karen’s stories and she’s been a staple on the scene ever since. This particular story was published by Dialogue in 1978 and received an honorable mention in short fiction at the AML Awards that year.

The voice is extremely conversational—to the point many details are utterly lost as the speaker clearly assumes you can see what she sees and that you know what she knows. I was worried about this at first, but in the end it proved a sensible choice. The story is very meta (the protagonist is grading creative-writing assignments throughout, to say nothing of the final paragraph or the early discussion of cliches reflected in the title), signaling which tropes could have filled in the gaps had such filling been necessary.

The story might also be somewhat autobiographical (Karen’s husband is named Ben, though I don’t know if they were married in 1978; Karen taught college-level creative writing, though I don’t know if was doing so in 1978), but this too just serves to suggest ways to fill in gaps that don’t need to be filled.

But I was not certain what was going on in those gaps until the story ended unexpectedly and all that was left was for me to smile and say aloud, in genuine surprise, that was just right.

It’s short. Check it out.

This Saturday at Claremont Graduate University, Sunstone West, a small tidier Sunstone Symposium, will feature panels about two Peculiar Pages book. (Note that times and participants are subject to clarification.)

The first, Monsters & Mormons, accomplished with the help of A Motley Vision and the most fun currently available in print. Participating authors Erik Peterson (”Bichos”) and Brian Gibson (”The Eye Opener”) will be talking about their works as well as reading their own and others’ stories. Responding to their presentation will be Patrick Q. Mason, the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies and Associate Professor of North American Religion at Claremont, and the author of The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Also featured are several poets from Fire in the Pasture. Featuring editor, poet, and AMV-contributor Tyler Chadwick discussing a Javen Tanner poem, and, in a separate session, readings from Tyler, Neil Aitkin, Karen Kelsay, Elisa Pulido, Laura Stott, Holly Welker, and, we hope, more.

Sunstone West is always great fun and you’ll want to catch other panels and presentations while you’re there.

Come to L.A.!

Register today!

1. Relatively spoiler-free backcopy.

“To Jordan Fairchild, the dark-haired girl renting his basement apartment seems somewhat quiet and reclusive. Just a business arrangement, he thinks, as he watches her sign the name ‘Nattie Hand’ on the contract. Though two thousand miles away, Celeste Betancourt, an attractive Georgetown graduate student he met through a mutual friend, has captured his attention. A budding friendship with Nattie soon begins to bloom. Little does Jordan know his girl-next-door renter is none other than the world-famous pop star, a.k.a. Natalia Antonali, who recently disappeared from the public eye; little does he know how much his friendship will come to mean to her, how, for the first time a love begins to grow, untainted by ‘Natalia,’ and how she hopes Jordan never discovers the truth.”

2. Why there aren’t really any spoilers up there

Across a Harvested Field is told from Jordan’s p-o-v—mostly. In fact, although the book never egregiously violated his point of view, the selection of details does not always match what he would focus on. Result? The fact that Natalia and Nattie are the same person is evident to the reader almost immediately—yet Jordan doesn’t figure it out for . . . well, a long time. At first, you might want to call him what romance fans label TSTL. But that thought is always followed by the simple fact that a real person with an incognito celebrity living in his basement is unlikely to assume that the face on the tabloid is the same one downstairs.

Ever met someone famous? Ever noticed how, IRL, they are surprisingly lifesized?

They don’t live in my basement.

They wouldn’t fit in my basement.

3. So does it obey any rules of romance?

Or, better question, is it a romance?

Yes. Clearly. (Slight but utterly unsurprising spoiler in next paragraph.)

It has a happy ending, as is necessary, but which happy ending it will provide is unclear for a long time and, for a while, whether it will provide a happy ending (in terms of a satisfying romantic relationship) at all is unclear.

And in the end, I’m not sure the “happy ending” is really what Across a Harvested Field is about anyway. I realized this when I read the Marilyn Brown Novel Award citation by Jen Wahlquist; she describes the book as being about ”the multi-layered process of grieving.”

And that’s exactly right.

4. So Jordan’s sad?

Heck yes he’s sad! His wife and two kids were killed in a car crash last year! He’s 28 and living alone in the house he planned to entertain grandkids in! How could he not be sad?

Writing about sadness is tough though. And it takes a while for Goble to find his feet. But again, like the TSTL issue, when I stopped to figure out what was “wrong” with his telling, nothing was. Life doesn’t stop when your family dies. What’s the right way to depict this liminal space between living and utter grief? I don’t know. And if I did, who’s to say Jordan’s grief observance should match mine?

That said, I think Goble didn’t quite pull off that transitional grief during the first half of the book. He gets better as the novel proceeds, however, and the “the multi-layered process of grieving” he displays is, in the final analysis, very well done.

5. Favorite moments

Although it can’t really count as enjoyable, I was impressed with how much Goble could make me hate—with a painful immediacy—the paparazzi.

But unquestionably my favorite part—the part that nearly brought me to tears with how lovely it is—is Jordan’s wrestling match with his brother. You doubt me? Read the book. You’ll see what I mean. That is a beautiful, cathartic scene. And one of the best two pages of brotherly love I can cite.

Also, one kiss in the book is so exactly what an honest kiss between two affection-starved humans should be. It certainly sped my heartrate up.

The high school stuff. Sure, in part that’s because I work at a high school, and, admittedly, some details were off (how Ashleigh and Diego arrived in the same Spanish class is beyond me), but that’s basically what working at a high school is like. It’s a lot of good, a lot of bad, a certain amount of politically keeping certain girls on one side of your desk.

6. Final notes

This book has an unnecessarily large number of developed characters. The most obvious example is the high school’s astonishingly well educated janitor. His character never really goes anywhere (is he a monomythic wise-old-man? some other useful symbol?) yet he is complicated and opaque. I appreciate notes like that in my fiction.

And, finally, it is a romance. Don’t let the plot’s coulds and couldn’ts get in the way of enjoying a great human story of love and creation.

Well worth a read.

.

read wm’s interview with goble

On page 146, a couple of the main characters are speaking about the frontier of Mystria (aka America) and about an encounter they have just had with a young man who was preaching democratic/republican ideas from a Thomas Paine-style book but adding in some of his own extra radical revolutionary fervor, and one of them says:

“Makes a man wonder why a man would be saying them sort of things.”

And the other replies:

“Oh, I don’t know, Magehawk, seems obvious. Men, they come out here, they cut a town from the wilderness, they have an edge to them. The ones that come after, though, ain’t leaders. They’re followers. Sheep. Every now and again comes a wolf looking for sheep. If it weren’t Qunice, it would be some minister or a messiah. Down Oakland I hear a man dug up his own Bible and has been preaching it. Says Mysteria is the promised land and that the Good Lord wants us to make a Celestial City in the hear of the Continent. He says every man should have a dozen wives and they should bear a dozen children and God will come again to bless them all.”

Nathaniel [Wm notes: Nathaniel = Magehawk] smiled. “You going?”

“Cain’t find me one wife, so I don’t reckon there’s a point to it.” (146)

I found the reference amusing. Reductive and not flattering, I suppose, but it works well enough for the scene, and I found it amusing because it was both obvious and very almost inevitable. This is the first in the series so I wonder if it will come up again in the story (although I don’t know if that curiosity is enough for me to read the next book), but even if not, it suggests, yet again, how irresistible the Joseph Smith story is to fiction writers (and even just Mormonism as a movement [cf. all the Mormon references in science fiction]).

Today’s quotation is no exception. Here, in a defense of the Pearl of Great Price, he covers two significant issues in literary criticism. First, he weighs in on how to judge literary work, coming up with an answer that is probably not acceptable to most literary theorists today. Second, he emphasizes the individuality of each author’s style (and, perhaps by extension, the necessity of that individuality).

Here’s what he said in defense of the Pearl of Great Price:

… The passage I have read is from the Book of Abraham, translated by the Prophet Joseph Smith from papyrus found upon mummies exhumed from the catacombs of Egypt. This book was made the object of a rather fierce polemic attack a few years since, its authenticity being questioned by a scholarly gentlemen who then resided among us. His strictures were replied to by quite a number of our brethren, and the replies were published in the daily press.

Subsequently I conversed with this gentleman, and he asked me why I had not replied to him. I told him that I had been replying to him all over the country where I had been traveling, but that my reply had not happened to get into the papers. “Oh, indeed,” said he, “and what have you been saying?” “I have been saying this, in substance: That it matters not where truth is found, whether in the catacombs of Egypt, or in the mounds of North America; whether it comes through the lips of an ancient sage or a modern seer; that it matters not who translates it, or how many imperfections the translation may show; that truth is truth; and that the best criterion of judgment when the authenticity of any literary work is passed upon, is the spirit and character of its teachings.” Said he: “I agree with you; that is the best standard by which to judge the authenticity of such a work.”‘ “Then,” I affirmed, “the Book of Abraham needs no defense. It speaks for itself. It manifests its own divinity; for no one but God could have delivered such splendid teachings in such a majestic and sublime spirit as this book contains.”

There is something in every great author that stamps itself upon his writings and renders them peculiar, or characteristic of himself. There is a Shakespearean ring to Shakespeare’s writings; there is a Byronic ring to Lord Byron’s poetry; and a Miltonic ring to the productions of Milton; and any literary expert can distinguish between them. Many poets have described the sunrise, but when one of them says:

“Night’s candles are burned out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops,”

we know that Shakespeare has spoken; and no other poet could have worded it in just that way. Another calls upon God for inspiration,

“That to the height of this great argument I may assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to men”

The lines are Milton’s, and the style is peculiar to that mighty son of song. It is the same with all great writers. The creation testifies of the creator. Is it surprising, then, that when God speaks there should be some distinguishing feature to characterize the utterance and make it different from any utterance of mortal man? There is a spirit, an indescribable quality, a divine power in the word of God that cannot be successfully counterfeited. Men have tried to counterfeit it, but have failed ignominiously.

Conference Report,
April 1917, pp. 41-42

I don’t know if I agree completely with Whitney. I do think that literary works can, and perhaps should, be judged in part on the “spirit and character of its teaching.” To me, a work can be beautify and novel in its use of the language, but if it doesn’t inform the reader of some substantial truth, how is it different from watercolors painted on the sidewalk in the rain? Such works are nice for the moment, for entertainment perhaps, but in the end they are hollow. They are too much like cotton candy.

But I’m not quite sure on his contention that there is some spark of the author in everything he writes, and that somehow that spark is unique for each author. Despite Whitney’s claims, many have been fooled with literary deceptions, and authors have been able to write in the style of others. If, indeed, the handiwork of God can be found where he has inspired an author, I’d argue that this happens more on a spiritual level than in any literary fashion. Doesn’t the existence of so many apocryphal books that have been supported by many proponents through the ages argue that it might indeed be possible to fake the “handiwork of God,” at least for those who are not spiritually in tune?

But more importantly, the idea that the spark of the divine is present in inspired works might, I think, raise the question of whether or not the author matters much. If the “spirit and character of [a work's] teachings” is most important, and divine inspiration appears in a work, then does it even matter who wrote it?

I don’t know.

Take the story of Meredith, for example. When her husband of fifteen years decides he is gay and leaves her, it is almost unbelievable that she could ever find that “eternal perspective.” But in reading the details of her story you find out that, well, it actually possible for a woman to move forward with faith. Jana Reiss (of Flunking Sainthood fame) is startling–both in her bifurcated path to baptism and her tendency to pray with people at the drop of the hat–but also delightfully familiar in her struggles for devotional perfection. And then there’s the story of Bindu that makes you stop and say, “Wait. There are Mormons in India? I never even though to ask that question.” What is most astounding is how many, many Mormon women are changing the world at large through creative humanitarian forays.

Reading the MWP interviews is a little bit like climbing on a merry-go-round. The stories spin quickly enough and pull you in enough different directions that you think you will be pulled right off the ride. But what you are really experiencing is like centripetal force–something that pulls you in enough directions that you end up being held exactly in the center.

LHC: Do you have any favorite stories that have been shared on MWP?

NM: I think every interview we publish is the best one yet, so it’s hard to pick just a few! What I love about working now with a group of volunteers – I have about half a dozen saintly interview producers who work with me regularly – is that everyone finds different stories interesting. I’m constantly surprised by which interviews on the site go through the roof and which have a more tepid response. A volunteer will suggest a story or pick someone from off our list of nominated women and I’ll think, “Well, I guess that’s okay,” and then when then interview’s published it’ll be hugely popular. Objectively though, the interviews that have been read most are our anonymous interview with the author of Seriously, So Blessed, and our interview with Elaine Bradley, the drummer for the Neon Trees. I am most proud of our forays into the “unspeakable” subjects: our sexual abuse forum, our interviews that discuss eating disorders, infertility, divorce, pornography, homosexuality, adoption, etc. I feel that in these interviews we uncover not the proactive choices a woman makes about her job or how she’s going to spend her time, but the reactive choices about how she’s going to respond to a situation and who she’s really going to be, which are usually even more defining than her hobbies or jobs.

LHC: Are there themes or ideas that come up again and again in the interviews?

NM: The theme that arises in almost every interview is the idea that Heavenly Father knows who this woman is and He is directing her path. Regardless of whether that path leads her to be a drummer in a rock band or the mother of twelve foster children, God knows each woman and acts as a cheerleader, a prompter, a supporter and even an instigator of dreams, ambition and righteous goal setting. The common thread of His presence in these interviews never reveals Him to be an oppressor or a killjoy.

LHC: MWP is coming up on its second year anniversary in January. How has it grown in its second year? What hopes do you have for its future? In what ways can others who are passionate about the stories of Mormon women help out?

NM: Although I launched the MWP in January of 2010 without a distinct publication calendar, we’ve managed to average one new interview per week since that launch. We just published our 114th interview, and we’ve featured women in fifteen countries. There is power in that sheer volume of contemporary Mormon women’s stories. We also introduced this year Snapshot Portraits, which offer our readers the opportunity to submit their own short essays in response to specific prompts.

Our major achievement as an organization this year was to receive our 501©3 status, designating us as a non-profit. The MWP follows in the grand Mormon tradition of being a volunteer endeavor, but we chose to pursue this designation for a few reasons. First of all, it was an issue of establishing our brand as something that is of valuable even outside of the Church community. One of the pieces of feedback we receive time and time again is that members really like to share our interviews with non-member friends because they feel like it looks like and has the quality of a professional endeavor. Of course it takes money for the MWP to look that way, and for us to maintain the website. Even though we don’t need very much money, establishing ourselves as a 501©3 allows us to raise money from official sponsors as well as from private donors. Above and beyond website upkeep, we want to continue doing live events, like our annual Salon, so that the MWP has a physical presence in our community and provides us with a forum to come together as like minded women in person. I also have a dream of being able to subsidize transcription services for our volunteers so they don’t have to spend 5-15 hours transcribing (and sometimes translating) the interviews from the recorded conversation.

I think it’s quite obvious that the MWP approaches the subject of Mormon womanhood from positive, almost culturally apologetic, positioning. Some have called this naïve, that you can think the Lord loves you to bits but it doesn’t make up for the fact that the currency of power is not distributed equally within the institution. I believe there are many valid and important conversations going on online about the role of women in the Church, but I think the MWP plays important role in those conversations by reminding women that our spiritual lives are played out in our relationships, our actions and our prayers, and not in our institutional roles. I’ve had MWP readers tell me they appreciate the safe haven the project offers, the ability to step back and say, “God’s plan for me is real and it is beautiful,” rather than focus on the deficiencies of the modern church. For women who are seeking for a way to be actively involved in forwarding this emboldening vision of Mormon womanhood, I invite them to join us at the MWP. We’re always looking for more interview producers. Reading the interviews, discussing them, sharing them and letting them resonate really is the best way women can support the project.

For more of Neylan McBaine’s writing check out this podcast at The Round Table, this post at By Common Consent, or her articles at Patheos.com and Busted Halo. She has also authored a book, How To Be a Twenty-First Century Pioneer Woman.

Now, besides the gross error that Mormon women aren’t allowed to speak in Church, it’s pretty distressing to me that what characterized this group of women as liberals was that they wanted change tables in the men’s room. Really? Getting the men to help care for the babies? Isn’t that a little quaint? The picture this anecdote paints is one done in broad strokes with inexact coloring where the women come out in an ill-educated, unsatisfied, barefoot-in-the-kitchen kind of way. There is little nuance or subtlety and it is ultimately dissatisfying to me in a very personal way.*

However, what makes this piece stand out from so many other misrepresentations is the fact that there was a group of Mormon women who saw a need and found a way to get it met. They were polite, they were strong, and they got the job done. That’s the kind of Mormon woman I identify with–and the kind of women Neylan McBaine is seeking out and presenting to the world with through her Mormon Women Project. The stories she chronicles are the kind so many, many Mormon women identify with as their own. Subjects covered include women of many nationalities, races, and backgrounds. There are stories about surviving sexual abuse and difficult marriages. There are women who come from long legacies of Mormon membership and new converts. The portraits drawn by MWP are detailed, with many tones and hues, and offer a great richness to the picture of Mormon women.

Neylan graciously agreed to answer some of my questions regarding the project and it’s significance in Mormon culture.

Laura Hilton Craner: You have a unique name. How is it pronounced? Does it have any significant history in your life?

Neylan McBaine: I’m so happy you asked about my name! It’s pronounced “NY – lin,” (The first, stressed syllable rhymes with “high”.) It was my great-grandfather’s surname – John Francis Neylan – and thus my grandmother’s maiden name and my father’s middle name. John Francis Neylan was a powerful and brilliant man who was William Randolf Hearst’s lawyer and best friend and was known for his red-headed Irish temper. In fact, the Joseph Cotten character in “Citizen Kane” is based on my great-grandfather, and he was on the cover of Time magazine in 1935. But even more interesting to me is that he is a genealogical mystery: We can’t find where he came from, who his parents are, where he was born…

How much programming in our genes comes from our ancestors has always been a fascinating subject for me because, quite honestly, I’m uncomfortable with the idea that the choices and personality traits I have made and cultivated in my life are not entirely my own but come from predetermined traits. However, either because of admiration or intrigue or some unknowable connection, I do feel a special kinship with John Francis and am honored to carry his name.

LHC:What inspired you to start the Mormon Women Project? How does it coincide with other work that you’ve done?

NM: Usually when I explain the motivation to start the MWP, I don’t have time or context to explain how my family and my upbringing played a critical role. But since I’ve already introduced you to my great-grandfather and my father’s side of the family, allow me to introduce you now to my mother: the middle of five children born to a humble school teacher of extensive Mormon pioneer heritage. How, you might now ask, did a Mormon girl who grew up in a trailer in Southern California end up marrying a lapsed Catholic of San Francisco high society? The answer was opera. What my parents didn’t share in socioeconomic or religious background was made up for in their love of opera, but the tension between the identities of my two extended families produced in me – the only child of this union – a paradox of interests and influences that has allowed me to have a foot in different worlds: it was my father who pushed me to attend the best schools possible, travel and enjoy the best and most beautiful the world has to offer, and it was my mother who kept me rooted to faith and family.

My mother was a professional opera singer the whole time I was growing up in New York City and, as you might have already guessed, a single mother for much of that time. As a single, working mother with only one child, you wouldn’t imagine her to be the poster child of the Mormon faith. But she was. During the ‘80s and ‘90s, my mother was asked by local church leaders and general authorities to present firesides, perform for church and political leaders, and to appear in official church videos and messages. Her skill as a singer and her willingness to share that talent for the glory of God catapulted her into a position of spokesperson for the Church. As a child witnessing the tremendous affection of church leaders for my mother and, in turn, my mother’s affection for the Church, it never occurred to me that there wasn’t a place in the Church for women whose lives don’t fit a mold.

My mother also did a beautiful job of teaching me that getting the best education I could, working as hard as I could, and enjoying the beauty of the world as much as I could – all those good qualities my dad had brought to the table – were actually a way of magnifying God’s presence in my life and honoring Him. Our doctrine encourages us to aim high, and she fiercely taught that performing at the “worldly” standard that my earthly dad expected was actually the way I could magnify my Heavenly Father’s expectations for me. “The world” was never a scary, evil place in my home; on the contrary, it was a glorious gift to be enjoyed and learned from. It was simply my job to bring God into it through my active participation.

But when I left my home in New York and started functioning in a broader community of LDS women, I realized that I was unusual in feeling that my doctrine was the very thing that gave me permission to explore my potential. Even at Yale, where I went to college, I encountered Mormon women who were pursuing education sheepishly, fighting a constant internal struggle between the seeming paradox of their innate gifts and the kinds of pursuits they believed were “right.” I saw these internal struggles continue among some of the women in my San Francisco ward after college, culminating in one very dear friend leaving the Church over these issues and several more since then, and I was forced finally to ask myself the question, “What does it mean to be a Mormon woman? Is it a limiting proposition, or an emboldening one?”

Both because I think it is a much happier way to live and also because I fiercely defend that it is true, I see being a Mormon woman as an emboldening way to live. In contemplating an effective and positive way to assert that belief so that it might take root in our broader culture, I turned to the age-old tradition of story-telling. My mom had been held up throughout my childhood as a woman for Mormons to look to; why couldn’t I take some of the other women I admired and share their stories in a similar way? In Mormon culture, we don’t have a systematic way to tell the stories of our women, the way many of our men do in formal speaking and writing assignments. My goal was to create an environment of “deliberate disorientation” for the reader: by sorting through hundreds of stories about women who prioritize the gospel and yet still make unique and intriguing choices about how to maximize their potential, it is impossible for a reader to pick any one story and say, “This is who my church wants me to be or that is what my church wants me to be.” The breadth of examples forces the reader to turn within herself and ask, “What does the Lord want me to be?”

LC: You are not only an accomplished writer, but you are also the mother of three young girls. How has being a woman in the Church and then having daughters to raise in the Church influenced MWP?

NM: Like many other Mormon mothers, the foremost goal I have for my daughters is that they have a testimony of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. (And that they love music comes in a close second.) But I recognize that, at some point, they will have to define for themselves what it means to be a Mormon woman and decide if they are emboldened or limited by that definition. For many Mormon women, that internal struggle surfaces in young adulthood or even older as they come to terms with the Church’s gendered institutional structure and so I don’t expect my little girls to self-define for quite some time yet. However, I believe the MWP can play a role in their lives now by establishing a paradigm for that self-definition in which doubt of God’s intentions regarding His daughters is not a factor in their construction of themselves. In other words, as they grow up with the MWP as a presence in their spiritual lives, they will launch their self-defining journey from a solid foundation of trust in the Lord’s support for them as women.

Growing up with Mormon women I admired allowed me to sidestep the question “What does God think of me as a girl?” and focus instead on developing a very personal relationship with Him as my Heavenly Father. I am trying the best I can to provide a cleared path of spiritual development for my own girls as well.

Tune in tomorrow for Part II: Emboldening Women (Through Story)

For more of Neylan McBaine’s writing check out this podcast at The Round Table, this post at By Common Consent, or her articles at Patheos.com and Busted Halo. She has also authored a book, How To Be a Twenty-First Century Pioneer Woman.

*Now, now, I know this interview was about Romney and the anecdote was meant to show how he was able to deal with politics within a charged religious setting. But still. Gross factual error and dirty diapers? Come on.

Title: The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version
Editors: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: Scripture
Year Published: 2011
Number of Pages: 637
Binding: Hardbound in signatures
ISBN13: 978-0-19-529770-6
Price: $35

In II Nephi 29 Nephi pauses in the midst of an apostrophe to future readers who will reject his words to remind them of their debt to the Jews.

4 But thus saith the Lord God: O fools, they shall have a Bible; and it shall proceed forth from the Jews, mine ancient covenant people. And what thank they the Jews for the Bible which they receive from them? Yea, what do the Gentiles mean? Do they remember the travails, and the labors, and the pains of the Jews, and their diligence unto me, in bringing forth salvation unto the Gentiles?
5 O ye Gentiles, have ye remembered the Jews, mine ancient covenant people? Nay; but ye have cursed them, and have hated them, and have not sought to recover them. But behold, I will return all these things upon your own heads; for I the Lord have not forgotten my people.
6 Thou fool, that shall say: A Bible, we have got a Bible, and we need no more Bible. Have ye obtained a Bible save it were by the Jews?

(2 Nephi 29:4 – 6)

Nephi’s connection between hating the Jews and closing the canon is deeply intriguing, especially since Nephi speaks harshly of the Jews, of their refusal to accept his father’s revelations, of their attempts to kill his father, so harshly that he refuses to teach his people “many things concerning the manner of the Jews; for their works were works of darkness, and their doings were doings of abominations” (II Nephi 25:2).

Perhaps Nephi wrote his words to the gentiles partly to remind himself–and maybe to remind Jacob, who had said the Savior would come to the Jews because he had to die and there was “none other nation on earth [so wicked] that [they] would crucify their God” (2 Nephi 10:3)–to tone down his rhetoric, to remind his people of the Lord’s covenant with the House of Israel, which is one thing Nephi means when he uses the term Jew: “I say Jew, because I mean them from whence I came” (2 Nephi 33:8).

(Taken together with I Nephi 5:14, where Lehi tells the family he has examined the brass plates and learned they are descendants of Joseph, this passage suggests Nephi came from a culture that didn’t distinguish between the tribes. Everyone is called Judah, the largest tribe that came back from Babylon. (Not every member of the 10 tribes was lost. See Philippians 3:5, Romans 11:1, and Acts 13:21). So when Nephi uses the term Jew he means the whole House of of Israel, everyone at Jerusalem.)

Browsing the remainder table at the BYU Bookstore one day I came across a book that helped fill in the picture of how developing and setting boundaries to the Christian canon was related to forgetting who preserved the word of God in the first place. The footnotes and commentary for Willis Barnstone’s translation The New Covenant, Vol I, The Gospels and Apocalypse, read like a guided tour of the rift that developed between Jews who accepted Yeshua as Mashiach and those who didn’t, a tour of how Christians forgot their Jewish roots as Yeshua ha maschiach became Iesous the Christos.

Barnstone is very careful to identify what he calls “the voice of Rome,” passages he believes came from a desire to de-emphasize Rome’s part in Yeshua’s execution. You can see clues of the threat the Romans felt from Yeshua in passages like Loukas 23:12, where Pilate and Herod find a common enemy in Yeshua, “Herod and Pilatus became friends on that same day, though earlier they had been enemies.” Maybe the clues are vestiges of things cut from the text, but Barnstone focuses more on things like the phrase “the Jews,” which along with the Greek _Iesous_ imply that Yeshua was not a Jew.

The Prushim and all the Jews will not eat unless they wash, hand against fist, so keeping the tradition of the elders, and eat nothing from the markets unless they wash. And they keep many other traditions about washing cups and pots and copper cauldrons.
(Markos 7:3)

His parents said these things because they were afraid of the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed that Yeshua was the mashiah would be barred from the synagogue.
(Yohanan 9:22)

Or at least the passages distance us from Yeshua’s Jewishness. In the first passage the Jews are _they_, and in the second people to be afraid of. One of Barnstone’s projects with the translation is to restore Yeshua’s Jewish/Aramaic voice by using the Hebrew character and place names rather than Greek transl(iter)ations. That’s a valuable service, maybe as valuable as recovering the poetry. He says at one point that Yeshua as recorded by Mattai is one of the great world poets.

I think he overstates his argument at times. Consider this comment on Yohanan 9:28, the Prushim’s words to the man born blind:

And they reviled him and said, “You are his student, but we are Mosheh’s students.

“A reference to the superiority of Yeshua’s teaching over that of Moses and, by extension, of the New Covenant over the Jewish Bible” (340).

Or his comment on Apocalypse 3:9:

I know the blasphemy
of those who say they are Jews and are not
but come out of a synagogue of Satan.

“The demonization of the Jews in the gospels persists in Apocalypse” (317).

To me the passage is about hypocrisy, just as if you said, “those who say they are Mormons and are not, but do their sealings in the temple of Satan.” But the three words synagogue of Satan are so powerful that perhaps they overshadow the rest of the verse, which may be why the editors of The Jewish Annotated New Testament address it in their preface, saying the notes propose that the phrase “is not against Jews at all, but is against Gentile followers of Jesus who promote Jewish practices” (xii).

Their note for John 9:28 reads:

This passage sets up a contrast between the disciples of Jesus and the disciples of Moses. There is no evidence, however, that Jews referred to themselves as disciples of Moses (178).

Generally, from what I’ve read so far, the commentary in The Jewish Annotated New Testament is milder than Barnstone’s, and perhaps a bit more cautious. I particularly like the editor’s comments about how the commentators contextualize some of the more volatile statements “by showing how they are part of the exaggerated language of debate during the first century” (xi). There are a lot of passages like Yohanan 9:28 where Barnstone attributes an intent to the text that I don’t see there. And that’s the value of Barnstone’s commentary, not in giving us insight into the original intent of the gospel writers, but as a guide to how the early Christians, the people who didn’t think of themselves as Jews, reinterpreted the incidents in Iesous-nee-Yeshua’s life to blame and villify the tradition the early Christians had sprang from, far from.

One of my projects during the next few years will be to trace the passages I think were reinterpreted, and it looks like The Jewish Annotated New Testament will be invaluable in giving a sense of what the text might have meant to those first messianic Jews before or maybe after they were first called Christians at Antioch (see Acts 11:26).

The two books are valuable correctives to each other. Barnstone works a lot with the idea that the texts of the New Covenant were altered to amplify “the voice of Rome.” He seeks to diminish that voice. His work with resonate with Latter-day Saints who want to think about what Joseph Smith might have meant with his comment about corrupt and designing priests altering the scriptures.

The Jewish Annotated New Testament approaches the matter somewhat differently. My oldest son said, “Oh, giving cultural context?” when I mentioned the book to him, but others have given a puzzled or apprehensive look that says, ‘Jews don’t believe in Jesus. Is this a book that challenges our belief in his divinity and miracles?’

One can imagine the editors getting the same kinds of quizzical looks. “Many Jews are unfamiliar with, or even afraid of reading, the New Testament” (xii).

When I introduced the book to my Gospel Doctrine class at the nursing home I told the story of Chaim Potok coming to BYU in the early 1980s. Someone asked him the ritual question, “Have you read the Book of Mormon?” (He had been discussing his concept of the core-to-core culture confrontation, and the Book of Mormon is the core of our culture.)

He said he had a copy but hadn’t read it, because Jews read with a commentary and there wasn’t a commentary to guide his reading. The editors of The Jewish Annotated New Testament confirm that practice. The next sentence after the one I quoted above says, “Its content and genres are foreign, and they need notes to guide their reading.”

So the book gives Jews the tools to understand the New Testament and Christians the tools to understand the care and scholarship Jews bring to their study of scripture, including maps, charts, sidebar essays, diagrams, tables, glossary, cross references to Talmudic and other sources, index and nearly 200 pages of essays, starting with “Bearing False Witness: Common Errors Made About Early Judaism,” and including “Paul and Judaism,” “Food and Fellowship,” and “Josephus.”

The editors assure us they are not trying to convert Christians to Judaism, or Jews to Christianity–”It is very possible for the non-Christian to respect a great deal of the (very Jewish) message of much of the New Testament, without worshipping the messenger.”

That word respect is important to the editors: “As professional scholars, the authors of the annotations and essays approach the text with the respect that all religious texts deserve” (xii).

I’ll close with just two insights here. We all realize that John quotes the opening of Genesis in his gospel, but listen to the comment about Matthew’s opening: “Genealogy, Gk ‘geneseos,’ perhaps an allusion to the book of Genesis” (3).

And Luke 2:7 (since I got the book just before Christmas): “_Manger_ feeding trough; the symbolism anticipates the Last Supper (22.19). _Inn_, Luke gives no indication residents rejected the family; there may have been no room for the privacy needed for the birth” (101).

If Barnstone’s translation is the work of a scholar/poet thinking to thank the Jews, to calculate the debt we gentiles owe in gratitude, Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler and their editors’ work is thinking to thank the Jews for.

Unfortunately, I was only able to look at the books published in 1912, not items in periodicals, because the periodicals aren’t available online, except for a few cases[fn2]. The periodicals also require significantly more work to pull out the literary items. I hope to get through many of the periodicals sometime this year — and if I do this again next year, I’ll try to include periodicals from the start.

1912 was a year when Mormons must have felt under attack. The apostate scion of the late George Q. Cannon, Frank Cannon, had published his exposé of the Church in book form in 1911 (it had appeared in periodicals the previous year), and a wave of anti-Mormon materials hit the country and the world. The first big anti-Mormon film, the Danish film Mormonens Offer (A Victim of the Mormons) had just been released in the end of 1911 and was being distributed worldwide. And, the explusion of missionaries from a German town had made headlines around the world, leading activists in England to form the “British anti-Mormon League” and  ask the home secretary, Winston Churchill, if the same thing couldn’t be done in Britain[fn3].

So, it isn’t surprising that there were so many anti-Mormon works published during the year. The biggest surprise was the number of literary works published for the RLDS (now Community of Christ) market. As I was at one point (perhaps a couple of decades ago), I was completely unaware that the RLDS community had even produced novels so early. But, in contrast, the Utah mormon community had 9 periodicals (not all carried literature), while the RLDS community had just a single periodical.

I should mention that, as I undersand it, the 1912 edition of Added Upon is Anderson’s final major revision to the text, and is probably the edition that most later editions came from (of course many of the recent POD editions are taking the text from the first edition — a bad idea, IMO). Riders of the Purple Sage is clearly the best known work on this list, and has some importance in literature because it largely defined the pattern for subsequent westerns. And, finally, the appearance of the work of humorist Charles Farrar Browne (who used the pseudonym Artemus Ward) in 1912 is interesting — a testament to his lasting influence. Mormons should perhaps be grateful that he passed away as early as he did (in 1867, at age 32).

Even without the periodical works, I think this is an interesting list. The books portion I think is quite complete — but I’m not as certain about the film portion. I do want to eventually put together the periodical portion, since I think it could give further insight.

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Books

Utah

• Anderson, Nephi (1912). Added upon: A story. Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret News, 1912 (1898).
• Anderson, Nephi (1912). Piney Ridge cottage: The love story of a “Mormon” country girl. Salt Lake City, Utah: The Deseret News, 1912.

RLDS

• Brown, Paula (Pauline Browning Dykes). (1912). The Mormon girl. Lamoni, Iowa: Herald Pub. House, 1912.
• Frances (Marietta Walker). (1912). Object-lessons on temperance, or, The Indian maiden and her white deer. Lamoni, Iowa: Herald Pub. House, 1912 (1907).
• Frances(Marietta Walker). (1912). With the Church in an early day. Lamoni, Iowa: Herald Pub. House, 1912 4th edn. (1891).
• Wight, Sarah Estella. (1912). His first venture and the sequel. Lamoni, Iowa: Board of Publication of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, 1912.

Anti-Mormon

• Browne, Charles Farrar, Howells, W. D., & Johnson, Clifton (1912). Artemus Ward’s Best Stories. Edited by Clifton Johnson. With an introduction by W. D. Howells. Illustrated by Frank A. Nankivell. [With portraits.]. Harper & Bros.: New York & London, 1912.
• Chapman, C. H. (1912). The Mormon elder, or The triumph of virtue: A farce. Portland: The Futurists, 1912.
• Grey, Zane. (1912). Riders of the Purple Sage. A novel. Harper & Bros.: New York & London, 1912.
• Kester, Vaughn (1912). The fortunes of the Landrays. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1912, ©1905.
• Lewis, Charles Bertrand. (1912). Bessie Baine: Or, The Mormon’s victim. Chicago: M.A. Donohue & co, 1912 (1876).
• Möllhausen, Heinrich Balduin. (1912). Illustrierte Romane: 3,5. Leipzig: List, 1912 (1883).
• Pidgin, C. F., & Cosmopolitan Press. (1912). The house of shame: A novel. New York: Cosmopolitan Press, 1912.

Films

• Parade in Liberty Park, July 24, 1912 (dir. Chet & Shirl Clawson) 1912
• The Romance of Mormonism (dir. W. H. Harbeck) 1912
• Salt Lake City, Utah, and its Surroundings, Nov. 1912
• [Salt Lake City Pictorial Film], Nov. 1912

Anti-Mormon

• The Danites, 1912
• An Episode of Early Mormon Days, 1912
• Marriage or Death, 1912
• The Mormon (dir. Allan Dwan), 1912
• The Mountain Meadows Massacre (1912) January, 1912

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Notes

[fn1] Andrew has begun republishing his older reviews, which originally appeared on the AML-List, on Dawning of a Brighter Day.

[fn2] Of the 9 English-language LDS periodicals in print during 1912 5 are available online: the Young Women’s Journal, Juvenile Instructor, Improvement Era (available only on Deseret Book’s pay-for service), Deseret News and Women’s Exponent. Not available are the Millennial Star, Children’s Friend, Liahona the Elder’s Journal, and the Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine. In addition, there were three non-English periodicals in print in Danish, German and Swedish.

[fn3] I may have this connection a little off, but I can’t really investigate in detail yet. I do have a newspaper article that has an English source asking if the same thing that was done in Germany could be done in England. I don’t know if Churchill was actually asked that, however.