A BYU Education

Ten years ago I was approaching my 17th birthday, was a junior at Provo High School, and as for my future figured that I would eventually be living in Southern California playing the drums in a band and working at a convenience store to pay rent on my tiny place near the beach. If anyone asked me about college I would laugh and say that I wasn't planning on college, I was just breezing through high school getting good grades but in really easy classes, not preparing at all for higher education.

And for years I figured that was the way it would be, until a General Conference in April 2001. Everything changed during the two days of ten hours of instruction from inspired leaders. It seemed that each of them spoke about the importance of education. And so, after returning home from Michigan in December 2001, I enrolled at UVSC for the Spring semester 2002. But this was not to last long, inasmuch as a certain young lady whom I found very, very, very cool went to a different school--that one across town. The one I made fun of for all of my adolescence: BYU! Suddenly, BYU seemed like a great place to study, and so I applied and (after making the deadline by minutes) was accepted on a trial basis for a summer term. I did well and then spent the next five years working on six different majors until I finally settled on Ancient Near Eastern Studies--thanks mostly to Dan Belnap for that. It was his Book of Mormon class in summer 2002 that inspired me to look into learning Hebrew.

Winter 2007 came along and found us (the SANE club) sitting in a class that would be life changing, at least for me. To quote Dr. Seuss, this class went along at a break-necking pace, and yet the professor would begin each class with the refrain, "We're behind!" We would then ride an academic roller coaster in which we would learn about all manner of things having to do with Biblical Studies and the approaches modern scholars take to a study of the texts of antiquity.

Perhaps most impressive to me was the day in which our professor told us he was trying to "scare the hell out of [us], literally." It was a day when we had been discussing Latter-day Saints and biblical academics. It seemed that what he was attempting to get through our hearts and heads was that in this field of study there is more potential for losing our testimonies than in any other academic discipline. This is primarily because in Biblical Studies a large portion of what goes on is the questioning of things considered absolutes and simple facts--a quest which when set upon can at first be shocking.

I'll illustrate with a simple example: The Documentary Hypothesis

If a Latter-day Saint were asked who wrote the first five books of the Bible, they would likely say, "Moses." And why not? The titles to each of the books say that they are the books of Moses, and that is what the Judeo-Christian tradition has taught for thousands of years. Yet in the last few centuries this assumption has been questioned by students of the Bible from many different backgrounds. The questions began when students noted things in the text that seemed inharmonious with Mosaic authorship, such as the account of Moses' "death" (Latter-day Saints would specify and say "translation") as recorded in Deuteronomy 34. How could Moses be the author of this? Or perhaps even more unlikely, could Moses really have been the author of this verse?
(Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.)

Numbers 12:3

These types of questions were followed by hundreds more, and many theories have been put forth attempting to answer them. The widely accepted view today among scholars is that the five books of Moses, as they are often called, or the Pentateuch, were written by four different people/groups of people over the course of a few centuries, and ultimately put together to form the Pentateuch. This theory is called The Documentary Hypothesis. These four "sources" as they are called have been determined by stylistic analysis and other features which seem to distinguish the uniqueness of each source. They each have a particular voice, a way of viewing deity, certain names they use for God, ways of portraying the individuals they are writing about, and emphases in general. All in all (and in general terms) the Documentary Hypothesis is rather convincing, and on the surface seems formidable for those who "believe the Bible to be the word of God" (Article of Faith 8). Could it be that Moses is not really the author of the Pentateuch? But that would mean questioning a central fact in our faith! Or would it?

The thing with traditions is that they are just that: traditions. Nowhere in the Pentateuch is there any indication that Moses is in fact the author of these books. We ought to be careful telling the Bible what it is and what it isn't when it does not make such claims itself. The closest thing is found in Numbers 33:2 in which it is noted that Moses did indeed keep a record of the journeyings of the Israelites, but it does not say that the book of Numbers is that record. If anything the sense is that the book of Numbers is a retelling of what Moses originally wrote. And so it could well be. Do I, personally, believe that Moses kept a record? Yes. And I think Latter-day Saints have a pretty pristine version of the first part of this record in the Pearl of Great Price. (Incidentally, the Lord told Moses something about what would happen to his writings over the course of time in Moses 1:40-41.) But the book of Moses, though similar to the opening chapters of Genesis, is so different that it does not harm my testimony at all to consider that what is in the Bible is not so much original Moses stuff, but his story retold by others later.

Perhaps what is most concerning to many are the conclusions many of the scholars who come up with these theories propose, such as: If Moses did not write the Pentateuch, there was no Moses, no actual Exodus, and the story of the Bible is fiction. I think that is going way too far. In fact, here is my point. For a Latter-day Saint, the idea that a book was formed by someone taking the writings of many different people from different time periods and putting them together to form a sacred work of scripture is as familiar as the words, "And now I Mormon . . . speak somewhat concerning that which I have written; for after I had made an abridgment from the plates of Nephi" (Words of Mormon 1, 3). The Book of Mormon is in very fact what scholars are claiming, much to the chagrin of millions of believing Jews and Christians, the Bible is: namely, a book taken from lots of records and formed by others centuries after the events took place. And to use the methodologies the scholars do to determine that there are multiple authors to books of the Bible, we can indeed conclude the same thing about the Book of Mormon--there are multiple authors. They each have their own personalities, styles, and ways of viewing the world and events. In other words, the Book of Mormon could not have been fabricated by one man, but is the product of many different individuals, a claim that the book makes throughout!

In a very superficial way, I have thought about this and other methodologies that scholars use to study the Bible, and have seen how a careful reading of the text of the Book of Mormon in the way the Bible is read, we can see that the Book of Mormon comes out as exactly what its authors claim it is, and the Bible turns out to be not necessarily what tradition claims it is, but something that we can still trust as the word of God. Indeed, as Nephi saw in vision, the coming forth of the Book of Mormon establishes the truth of the Bible in so many ways! (see 1 Nephi 13:38-40)

So I guess I am a long way from a tiny place near the beach in Southern California, and I couldn't be happier. I will forever be grateful for my BYU education.