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(See Part 1 here. )
We cannot separate our understanding of scripture, history, or doctrine from human scholarship. The image here is the gateway into the BYU Jerusalem center, where I really had my eyes opened to this idea; I first read a Study Bible through from beginning to end while learning about history and religion, touring archaeological sites. Scripture was much more than words on paper.

Again, we cannot separate our understanding of scripture, history, or doctrine from human scholarship. This is demonstrated in Church history as well as anything else; note the recent changes, including “factual corrections,” to our chapter headings in D&C based on better data and  understandings from the Joseph Smith Papers.

To stave off the critics, this does NOT mean Church classes ought to be focused on trivial or tertiary matters, Greek grammar, or Assyrian pottery typology; discipleship certainly does not require a MA in Semitics or even basic literacy, for that matter. While doctrine and history matter, discipleship “that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

But those who are—as I suspect my audience to be— literate and college-educated ought to be studying scripture along with “the best books,” to use the phrase from D&C. In my mind, those “best books” help us see scripture’s implicit contexts,  their meanings which were evident to their original audiences of two-hundred or two-thousand years ago, but are opaque to us. They get us beyond the words alone, because the words alone, however good a translation, are insufficient to communicate scripture’s meaning.

Let me relate three personal stories of how and why scholarship matters.

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Like many others, I felt an ominous shadow in the announcement that Elder Holland had gone back into the hospital and heartbroken at his death. It feels selfish to want him to remain alive but in pain and without his wife, and yet. Elder Holland made an impact on my life in ways others have not.

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I’ve plugged Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR) before, a great magazine (with pictures!) aimed at laypeople interested in the history, text, interpretation, and archaeology of the Bible. (Notably, there are some LDS in there from time to time!) It’s scholarly but accessible, includes multiple perspectives, and the letters to the editor are illustrative and amusing. Worth subscribing to. Continue reading

This is one of a series of seasonal posts I put up every year. 

When the mission president announced to our small group of greenies that I was going to Strasbourg, on France’s eastern border, I shrugged the resigned shrug of a missionary who knew nothing about anywhere but was willing to go wherever. One of the sisters expressed jealousy; Strasbourg, she said, was one of the best cities in the mission.

She was right, and it would not be a good thing. Continue reading

Lots of big announcements, lots of good things happening, some things… coming to an end.

I first started graduate school in September of 2001 at the University of Chicago, with courses in Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Akkadian. Life gave me some real detours, and now 23 years later, in a completely different discipline, but drawing on my six years of training in the languages and literature of the ancient Near East, my doctoral dissertation is nearly complete.  I’m sending off final revisions to my advisor, to get approval to send it out to my doctoral committee, with a defense in late June or July.

I will graduate and become Doctor Spackman.

The dissertation title is “The Scientist is Wrong”: Joseph Fielding Smith, George McCready Price, and the Ascendency of Creationist Thought among Latter-day Saints in the Twentieth Century.

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