A BOOK OF MORMON LECTURE
Some scholars have referred to Joseph Smith’s 1830 Book of Mormon as “America’s Bible,” as though it was intended to replace the Protestant Bible. What has not yet been much appreciated is the extent to which the Book of Mormon was intended to save the Bible. How so?
In this guest lecture, Latter-day Saint scholar Samuel M. Brown argues that the Book of Mormon hoped to save the Bible by shoring up the authority of the Bible and clarifying theological conundrums. But to save the Bible, the Book of Mormon had to “kill” the Bible in a sense: unmasking the nature of scripture—its tentative, regional character, its fundamental inadequacy as a written text, the need for something more than text.