DiaBLOGue

Response to Boyd and Farrell Edwards’s Response to My “Critique of Alma 36 as an Extended Chiasm”

March 21, 2018

Extended chiasms were apparently an ancient Hebrew literary form. Since they were little known during Joseph Smith’s day, any extended chiasms in the Book of Mormon would be evidence of the book’s ancient Hebrew origins. John W. Welch has identified a number of extended chiasms in the Book of Mormon, one of his favorites being Alma 36. Among his many defenders are the father-and-son team of Farrell and Boyd Edwards, both physics professors.

Response to Earl M. Wunderli’s “Critique of Alma 36 as an Extended Chiasm”

March 21, 2018

Dialogue 39.3 (Fall 2007):188–206
Others, including Wunderli, hold that the proposed chiasms in the
Book of Mormon are not deliberate applications of the chiastic form and
ascribe their chiastic structure to the ingenuity of the analyst, rather than
to the intent of the author.

By Any Standard, A Remarkable Book | Richard Lyman Bushman, with the assistance of Jed Woodworth, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling

March 21, 2018

By any standard this is a remarkable book. Sixty years ago Knopf published Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History, a biography of the Mormon prophet by a disaffected Mormon who, according to her own biographer, had already decided before she began her writing that Joseph Smith was “not a true prophet.” This study by Bushman is, in contrast, a biography by a believer who said he would write faithful history but still examine “all sides of Joseph Smith, facing up to his mistakes and flaws” (Preface, xix). It is fair, then, to ask: How faith-promoting is this biography and to what degree does Bushman examine all sides of Joseph Smith? That Knopf has permitted Bushman to write such a biography illustrates how much the climate of opinion among historians regarding religion and the Mormons has changed since 1945.