“O Marduk, you are the most important among the great gods!” In my recent paper on the cosmology of the Book of Abraham I draw attention to the similarities between the Book of Abraham and the Mesopotamian myth Enuma Elish. Also significant for Latter-day Saints is the Enuma Elish’s depiction of the primeval theomachy in the … Read more
The First Vision by Joni Susanto. I must confess that I’ve never really been bothered by the fact that Joseph Smith left different accounts of his First Vision. Even as a teenager, when I first heard about the different accounts, I realized pretty quickly that most of the “contradictions” between the accounts were largely inconsequential, and … Read more
The Bar’an temple in Yemen. Warren Aston has a piece in Meridian Magazine on the NHM altar inscriptions that’s worth reading. Aston, having presented his findings on the Nihm tribe of Yemen at such places as Cambridge University, is one of the leading experts in the study of this topic. Besides discussing the history of … Read more
Column 1 of P. Joseph Smith XI, containing the hieratic text of the Book of Breathings of Hor. You never know what neat little connections you’ll find between different texts from the ancient world. Just this evening, as I was doing research for a paper on the Book of the Dead, I was reading Michael … Read more
Facsimile 2 from the Book of Abraham. I am pleased to announce that my article “Council, Chaos, and Creation in the Book of Abraham,” published in the Journal of the Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture, is now available online at the website of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. I presented … Read more
There’s a dark secret about this book that the Mormon Church doesn’t want you to know! This evening I bought a new set of scriptures. I have normally just been using the Gospel Library app on my phone, but I felt prompted during General Conference to start using a printed set of scriptures. I was … Read more
As reported by Allen Wyatt, the ex-Mormon “mass resignation” event this morning seems to have been a flop. It appears that a whopping . . . 34 people resigned their membership. By contrast, 2013 saw 282,945 convert baptisms. (Link) This is not to make light of these individuals’ unfortunate decision to leave the Church. I hope … Read more
Abimelech Rebuking Abraham by Wenceslaus Hollar. Dan Peterson, over at his blog, has a post on the falsehood that Mormons are encouraged to engage in what critics derisively call “lying for the Lord.” Dan’s post reminded me of an article published by Yael Shemesh of Bar-Ilan University titled “Lies by Prophets and Other Lies in the … Read more
At least according to this press release they will. I generally don’t like promoting stuff from brazen atheist activists like David Silverman, but I really just wanted an excuse to post the image above. (For those who don’t know the reference, it’s from Futurama, one of my favorite animated shows.) I also wanted to draw … Read more
Anselmus und die Schlange (1913) by Edmund Schaefer. [This post is partly a response to this post at Rational Faiths.] Grant Palmer is an ex-Mormon author who is best known for his 2002 book An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins. It’s a popular book amongst the ex- and anti-Mormon crowd, and you’ll see it frequently quoted by … Read more
Goethe in the Roman Campagna (1787) by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein. [This paper was written for the seminar on Goethe that I’m taking this semester.] Introduction and Summary Few of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poems have received such sparse and often perfunctory commentary as his 1813 ballad “Der Totentanz.” Most scholars offering critical notations in collections … Read more
Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) [This paper was written for one of my classes on Fin de siècle Viennese literature.] Introduction Readers of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1901 novella Lieutenant Gustl may, upon first encountering the text, feel somewhat overwhelmed by a seemingly chaotic literary structure filled with run-on and disjointed sentences, frequent breaks, and short focus. Notwithstanding this seemingly … Read more
The Church’s devious attempts to suppress the naked truth of Joseph Smith’s fraud and deception continues unabated. For example, next month’s New Era includes an article by David A. Edwards titled “True or False.” “If you’ve ever taken a test with true-or-false questions, you know it’s sometimes hard to spot a falsehood,” begins Edwards. “Likewise, … Read more