LDS Perspectives Podcast

An Introduction to Biblical Criticism with Philip L. Barlow

(Released December 6, 2017)

This is not a verbatim transcript. Some grammar and wording has been modified for clarity.

Russell Stevenson: This is Russell Stevenson, and I am here today with Dr. Philip Barlow to talk about navigating the sometimes conflicting and sometimes collaborating interpretations of traditional LDS teachings and modern biblical scholarship.

Dr. Philip L. Barlow is the Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University. He earned a PhD in 1988 with an emphasis on religion and American culture and the history of Christianity from Harvard University. At Utah State, he has taught courses in religious studies, Mormonism, and American religion.

His books include the Oxford Handbook to Mormonism, co-edited with Terryl Givens, and Mormons in the Bible: The Place of Latter-day Saints in American Religion. He is also the author of Adam and Eve in the 21st Century: Navigating Conflicting Commandments in the LDS Faith and biblical Scholarship, which appeared in the most recent issue of “Studies in the Bible and Antiquity,” which we will be reviewing today.

Welcome, Philip.

Philip Barlow: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Russell Stevenson: Within the LDS tradition, there is this sense of an open canon; this sense of a continuing revelation; and quite explicitly, there is this sense that the Bible is only true as far as it is translated correctly. What are the ramifications of that for how Latter-day Saints understand scripture and understand this notion of “the word of God”?

Philip Barlow: Yes. Well, they are many, and they are profound and foundational. I think we, as a people, need to keep exploring them more than we have so far. The Bible is the word of God. Does that mean that every word in the Bible is God talking into a Dictaphone where prophetic secretaries transcribed God’s word or does it mean the Bible contains the word of God? What do we do with changes over history where God seems to be saying one thing An Introduction to Biblical Criticism with Philip L. Barlow

early in the Bible then another thing later in the Bible? What do we do with statements in the Book of Mormon that seem to correct statements in the Bible? There’s a rather large bouquet of questions that we ought to ask ourselves as we try in devotion and with intellectual integrity to respect these texts that, at the least, our faith says have been touched with inspiration — or that the prophetic figures that wrote them have been subject to inspiration. That’s quite different than saying that everything in it is inspired.

Russell Stevenson: The understanding of the Bible over the course of western history has not always been governed by religious authorities — especially toward the end of the 19th century, where we begin to have a crop of scholars. They began to engage in what has been called “higher criticism” of the Bible. How about you unpack that notion for us, because a lot of us hear about it in popular discourse.

Philip Barlow: Criticism in the public mind sometimes can sound negative, like you’re being critical of this thing. But it, like movie criticism or theater criticism, just means careful, competent thinking about. Criticism means scholarship and careful thought. Textual criticism means that we’re doing careful thought with modern tools about the history of the text. Like the 8th Article of Faith says, the Bible as far as it’s translated correctly — that’s a problematic thing, and we want textual criticism or so-called “lower criticism.” That’s the scholarly attempt to establish what the original texts looked like. If we have a text of the epistle of James, the gospel of Matthew, or the book of Isaiah, there are going to be hundreds of copies (in most instances) of those texts — no two of which, in their entirety, read the same because there are copyist errors or additions, intentional or inadvertent.

The scholarship of textual criticism has ways that they’ve invented and principles that they’ve established to help us get to what the originals looked like. Whereas, so-called “higher criticism” — a little arrogant sounding, as if it’s higher than other poor suckers’ attempts to understand the text — really means modern literary and historical thinking about or tools brought to bear about the well-established text that the textual criticism has given us.

For instance, one dimension of higher criticism is called “source criticism,” which is to say that we are trying to figure out what we call the book of Genesis. What sources went into that author’s writing of Genesis or where did Matthew get his material — especially since it reads quite differently than the gospels of John or Mark? How are these things put together? Source criticism asks, “How are these things put together?” Redaction criticism is a technical sounding term for the process of editing. We know now, through higher criticism, that the book of Genesis for instance was put together by several sources, and an editor wove them

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together into a single narrative that strikes the casual or average reader as a coherent account.

Yet if you put it under a careful microscope, conceptually you can trace out different sections of the book that are clearly authored by different traditions, represented by different writers, or just oral traditions coming down. For instance, there will be one strand of Genesis that has a certain vocabulary for God’s name and a certain theology about how God is conceived — and that’s conceived differently in a different section of Genesis. Mostly famously, chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis — the two creation accounts — don’t work the same, don’t have quite the same type of God in mind, or the order of creation is inverted, etc.

Russell Stevenson: It seems to me that the implications of this kind of higher criticism is that ultimately it would point to a kind of instability of the text. Rather than being this fixed set of ideas, accounts, and experiences that existed at a specific place in time, we’re coming to see these accounts as being perhaps not as reliable as we once thought they were.

Philip Barlow: That word “reliable,” is an interesting and elastic word, a malleable word. If our assumptions about the text is that everything about it is accurate because it’s a sacred text and it contains the word of God, that’s understandable — but it is an assumption on our part.

An analogy could be made with something closer to history in our own tradition: Joseph Smith’s own account of his own First Vision. When I was in college, I had a professor trying to overthrow the faith of the Latter-day Saints. He brought up these several stories that Joseph Smith himself had told about his First Vision account. That’s fairly common knowledge now — he was expressing these accounts to different audiences at different stages of his own reflection on them, and he was doing it for different purposes.

Similarly, we can establish that that went on in the ancient world. Obviously reflecting about the experience of Jesus, we have four canonized gospels and a good number of others that aren’t canonized. High criticism and the instability or vulnerability of the text just doesn’t need to overthrow faith or be considered unreliable, inaccurate, false, or fraudulent. It is an invitation for us to think carefully, “We have these texts that are conveying a sacred story. How did they come to be?” If we get two versions of one episode, we just have to take notice of humans in order to apprehend secular history, let alone diving history. We have to receive it, think about it, and digest it as a congregation or a people.

So they are unstable in the sense that they had to come into being historically even with the touch of the divine, just like you and I did in our mothers’ wombs. We’re not the same way at every point in our coming

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into being, so we’re unstable in the sense of evolving. Then when we come to be, we’re always rethinking who we are and how we ought to be in the world. You might make an analog that way about the texts.

Russell Stevenson: To me, that highlights a particularly Latter-day Saint notion that focuses not the role of human agency and the role of human choice in interacting with the divine.

Philip Barlow: We are making choices whether or not we’re conscious of them, because our 15-year-old selves, 25-year-old selves, and 50-year old selves do it differently, even if we’re not thinking about that deliberately. So the divine has to be imagined even though our faith says that divine is stable and real. We have to encounter it somehow. Even prophets have to encounter it. We can document how Joseph Smith’s thinking evolved over time because he’s so close to us in history.

Russell Stevenson: We look, then, at the impact that higher criticism had on the world of biblical scholarship. We can also look at how it affected not only biblical scholarship, but how Latter-day Saints came to imagine or see this text with which they already have a complicated relationship. How about you walk us through what the impact was of higher criticism on Christian scholarship, Jewish scholarship, and Islamic scholarship of the Old Testament, as well as Latter-day Saint scholarship.

Philip Barlow: Yes. Those are quite different in those several traditions, so I’m glad you asked the question that way. In the scholarship of the Quran, for the most part, any part resembling historical literary criticism in western civilization has been frowned upon — even to the point of being dangerous for the well-being of these scholars. That is, it wasn’t allowed and isn’t allowed in much of the world.

The text is conceived in this way: the prophet Mohammed is prompted by the angel Gabriel to recite, and he speaks. That divine process is really reflecting a divine, perfect, inerrant work written in Heaven — so anything trying to get at the evolution of the text in a scholarly fashion (or historical issues that have to be sorted through) have severe limits on it. That goes on among scholars of Islam in the west, in the United States, but even that’s really quite recent — within the last decade or so.

Some of that is developing more than was allowed earlier, whereas when historical literary criticism, or higher criticism, was developing in Europe, then in the United States in the 19th century, many strands of Judaism responded negatively and called it “anti-Semitism.” This is an intellectual attack on Judaism’s very fabric, so it could be taken very personally.

That sort of thing happened within Christianity. Roman Catholicism was somewhat buffered from it because they didn’t have a tradition of sola

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scriptura. They had more flexibility in a scripture that evolved over time because it had to do so in the custody of the church, as we already were talking about.

But in the most influential aspects of religion in 19th and 20th century United States, which is predominantly a Protestant culture, higher criticism rocked and fractured Protestantism in the most profound way since the Protestant reformation fractured western Christianity into Protestant and Catholic groups.

Are they scriptures? What is their authority and how divine are they — how imperfect or perfect are they? The result, as between, say, the 1870s, 1880s, and the 1920s, 30s, 40s, was to fracture Protestantism into fundamentalist or modernist — that is, conservative or liberal — groupings.

Presbyterianism fractured along those lines; Methodism fractured along those lines; the Baptists fractured along those lines.

Russell Stevenson: These developments — to me, they seem to be intimately interwoven with the developments of industrialization. It’s kind of like Max Weber’s comments about this sense of disenchantment with the world, where people are no longer necessarily accepting that providence plays an immediate and every day role in one’s life, but that you can now begin to rely on human wisdom and human infrastructure in order to understand the world in which we live.

Philip Barlow: Yes, and that process goes on, and it’s perfectly true. There have had to be revolutions in Christian thought, to use that example. That includes LDS thought among those who were thinking hard about it.

We used to imagine God as the creator of the world, and the only one who could create the world with angelic help, but now we’re doing very odd things in laboratories like cloning sheep, having test-tube production babies, and cloning the human genome. Those used to be powers that we understood to be reserved for God. The atomic age happened in the 1940s, and we used to think that God alone would have the power to destroy the world. Now we’re aware that environmentally, chemically, or in a nuclear fashion, we’re capable of destroying creation. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a God, but it does mean that we have an adjustment in thinking.

I would state that the most fundamental thing that happened during the course of the 19th and early 20th century is the change in human consciousness among those who were educated. They initially conceived reality as static — just something that was there and had to be mapped out (and by the way that included the Bible that was all divine revelation)

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almost like the periodic table in chemistry. You could just chart it and make a topography of reality using the Bible as your text.

There was a shift from that static and monolithic view of reality — that truth is unchanging evermore — to a model where change was the order of the day. Darwin’s evolution; biological evolution; and the origin and change in species is the poster child for that sort of change. But even our modern sense of history has changed across time, as opposed to who ruled what country and won what war anciently — just a listing of things — but actually change or evolution in time, in political institutions, in human consciousness. Even our very sense of history was part of that change.

Geology, the physical nature of the universe, had to go from a biblical account that was taken literally of 6000 years or 6 days — however one construed it — to a process of change where we could demonstrate by scientific method that this was millions of years old. Those are several examples to get at the fact that we did a world shift; a paradigm or model shift about how reality went from static to change right in that 50- or 80- year period.

It was a profound revolution. Then these tools of historical and literary criticism began to be applied to scriptural texts. We learned that they too had a history. We should be a little more comfortable with that right now. The scriptural text had a history — duh! But back then, it was shocking.

Russell Stevenson: These changes, they strike me as a transition between the sense of a universalist, enlightened world run by laws; it’s predictable. You can understand what happened yesterday; you more or less understand what will happen tomorrow, at least from the bird’s eye view.

But over the course of the 19th century, as you were saying, as you see the changes of industrialization and these changes in the discipline of history, geology, the natural sciences, people are beginning to see the world as one that is no longer predictable and, to come back to this word of reliability, maybe to some extent, that it’s not entirely reliable.

So I’m interested to see — and we can talk about it in terms of how scholars imagine it — how ordinary people would have absorbed these changes. They would have done so in perhaps a less nuanced way where they would end up adapting. It was like, “Wow, maybe the world that I thought I knew is radically different.”

Philip Barlow: Yes — and they would be right, would they not? The world looks radically different to me than it did when I was twenty. They would be right. How we imagine and access the world would be really different, and that can create an early-life crisis, an adolescent crisis, or a midlife crisis.

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It can create a faith crisis. In my estimation, in living in this world — this world of thought — it need not, but it’s an understandable problem.

One short answer to your question is yes, absolutely. It would be shocking to people. Naturally with every development that comes in society through scholarship, science, or politics, it’s heard with different ears at different levels or regions of society.

The general public was much more aware of the issue of Darwinian evolution as a threat to their faith potentially than they were of higher criticism of the scriptural texts because it’s much more easily popularized. “What? My great-great-grandparents were chimpanzees?” Horrors. The public is going to engage that because it’s easy to caricature and get into their minds. It’s not necessarily easier for people to get into the principles and understand what biological science can now establish.

Everybody, by the turn of the 20th century — by the time we got to the year 1900 — was aware of Darwinism and was either starting to defend it, mock it, or persecute those who tried to teach it. We arrived in the 1920s, where everyone in the United States would have likely heard of the famous Scopes Trial, but that sort of dynamic would have been going on in other parts of the world. Higher criticism took a longer time and still is much weaker in the public mind than the idea of evolution, because you can’t popularize it in quite the same way. It doesn’t lend itself to quite that same static shock as the idea that your great-grandparents were chimpanzees.

That process is by no means complete even today, but in both cases, it had to start with either scientists of scholars, then some debates at that level, then it had to have a trickle-down effect to the wider culture.

Russell Stevenson: Now let’s talk for a moment about how some of these debates influenced Mormonism specifically. We know that in the late 19th century, individuals had learned about Sidney Sperry, who had received some level of theological training. He began to have more influence in the Church Educational System. At the same time, you also have individuals like Heber C. Snell, where he certainly identified much more with this higher criticism, with this so-called “liberal” interpretation of the scriptures.

How about you walk us through how these debates manifested themselves on the grounds within Latter-day Saint practice.

Philip Barlow: Yeah. Mormons, even more so than Catholics, were somewhat buffered from these conversations. In the Protestant world, almost every major tradition started to have a series of heresy trials and public news accounting for the scandal of this-or-this preacher questioning the historicity of some passage or another of the biblical text.

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I’ve already suggested that the Catholics had some distance from that because they weren’t reduced to a sola scriptura notion of an inerrant Bible and the Bible alone as their authority. The Latter-day Saints were even more buffered from those conversations for good or for ill, in my estimation. They were buffered from them because they had a sense of living prophets among them, and of course they had the Book of Mormon and other scriptures that were construed as correcting the Bible; they were not as subject to the precarious transmission and translation over the centuries, so the Latter-day Saints did not engage these issues as early as the Protestant world, nor as thoroughly as the Protestant world.

The good side of that was aided by the fact that the leaders of the church issued a “no-comment” sort of response. So we don’t have an official position on historical literary criticism, nor, for a long time, on biological evolution. Officially, there was a buffer there: don’t have a schism in the church over this. That was helpful.

The unfortunate side of this is that we Latter-day Saints haven’t come to terms with these things that are very new — we’re talking a century, two centuries old now — of some things that we should come to terms with that we haven’t very thoroughly.

It’s good that the church didn’t split over them; it’s good that we’re separating official church stances from scholarly conclusions — that there’s no official response to that. However, it’s unfortunate that we aren’t informed by them, because one, our God is a God of truth, as reason, scripture, and devotion tell us. If God were the most powerful being in the universe or the all-powerful being in the universe, but not a God of truth, then He might be worthy of my quivering in front of him, “Please don’t throw a lightning bolt at me.” But He/She/They wouldn’t be worthy of devotion and love. Truth is a necessary part of that. Without “God is a God of truth,” God would cease to be God, in that sense.

One difficulty of us as a people not encountering this higher criticism — these tools that are available to us for understanding the scriptures — is that it sets us up to be brittle. Just like how in the church, not paying attention to historical developments and our own history as a people has set up many of our people — especially many of our young people — for a crisis of faith when they discover some outrageous allegation, many of which are stupid and don’t have a historical basis. In fact, that’s all over the internet. But some of them do have a historical basis and cause people to break and throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The same sort of threat is there with not being competent with basic tools of approaching the biblical text; that is, when we find out when such-and- such is true or when we get really looking or when on the internet we read that Matthew and Luke look quite different in their account of this or that. www.ldsperspectives.com Page 8 of 15 An Introduction to Biblical Criticism with Philip L. Barlow

We’re setting ourselves up possibly to crack with a brittle, non-organic faith.

It’s a potential problem. It won’t ever be quite like these other historical issues, maybe because it takes a little bit of work to even understand what the problems are … But it is out there and it does happen to people, especially in our era where religion is generally under critique, let alone the religion of the Latter-day Saints. It’s a potential problem that ought to be addressed.

Russell Stevenson: You mentioned that the LDS Church should not take an official stance on some of these higher criticism debates, but that does not mean that there were not semi-official or even unofficial manifestations of these debates on the ground. You have various professors at Brigham Young University attempting to teach evolution, and they were dismissed for doing so. You have J. Rueben Clark, where he presents his chartered course in church education, which was meant to be a response — and a rather critical response — to some of these higher criticism debates, in the sense that he did not find them to be terribly legitimate and ultimately, he felt like Latter-day Saints should embrace the King James version of the Bible as being a kind of cornerstone of Christianity and their faith.

So there is some level of these debates on the ground with Mormonism. Would you comment on other areas where these debates manifest themselves?

Philip Barlow: One of the episodes where this was manifest that you would have been alluding to, I suspect, is in 1911 here at Brigham Young University. There were two brothers — the Chamberlains were their names — and two other brothers by the name of Peterson. They had had some education out in the outside world, both in the east and on the West Coast. They had begun to have some competence with the issues and principles of historical literary criticism of the biblical text as well as the arguments for biological evolution.

That caused tensions that were a threat to people’s perceptions of God or how God works, just as in Galileo’s or Copernicus’s day. A new model of how the universe works was threatening because the model of how the universe worked; how nature worked; how the world was arranged in relation to the cosmos. It gets all mixed up in our human minds with claims about the divine as such — but neither Mormons nor earlier Christians, Jews, Muslims, Atheists, none of these people are immune from developments in society, including changing paradigms of reality.

It happened at BYU in 1911. All four of those brothers that taught at the University were either dismissed from their position or so discouraged in their opportunities that they were effectively invited out of town, shall we

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say. It happened again in the 1930s when the church recognized that it needed to have thoughtful people teaching religion and teaching scripture. They even supported and commissioned a group to go back to the University of Chicago to get some education. That included Heber Snell and Sidney Sperry.

They, like what happens today when young Latter-day Saints go off to school and study religion or study formal biblical studies, respond to it differently. That’s true in the non-LDS world too, of course. Sidney Sperry and Heber C. Snell had different responses. Sidney Sperry’s was more reserved, traditional, conservative, and apologetic than Snell’s was, so he had a long and fruitful career at BYU. There’s still an annual conference called the Sidney Sperry Symposium in his honor that goes on here.

Heber C. Snell, by contrast, had a harder time and was dismissed from teaching in the Education System of the church — although David O. McKay, the President of the church and previously a senior apostle, wrote to Chamberlain’s brother, Ralph, that he thought it was a tragedy that Chamberlain had been dismissed from his position, that we needed his kind of thinking to inform us, and that he had found him to be a faithful brother. Indeed, he was invited later to teach again within the Church Education System.

From the first time that we as a people were aware of these issues, we had to encounter them like any other people did. We had to interpret them, and we wouldn’t all respond to them the same way. The official church and officials at Brigham Young University were very cautious — that may even be a generous word — or sharply disapproving of these scholars bringing what these leaders thought of as outside perspectives into the gospel kingdom, because it was the business of the church and church leaders to foster faith. They considered these new approaches to scripture to be a threat to faith.

We have more and more Latter-day Saints who are getting education in these things, or learning from people who have education in these things, that see that they need not be a threat to faith. Biological evolution is demonstrable. Particulars of the theories can be debated and are debated among scientists, and sometimes they evolve and get refined. Yet the idea that there’s a genetic component, that mutation happens, and that some mutation tends to reinforce survivability — that is not contestable by people who see the evidence.

Biological evolution has been taught here at Brigham Young University very comfortably for many years now, so generally the idea is that these are natural laws or that that’s how God operates. Similarly, with the scriptural texts, we might say, “Of course the people — including the www.ldsperspectives.com Page 10 of 15 An Introduction to Biblical Criticism with Philip L. Barlow

prophets — had to apprehend the divine.” They did it through a glass darkly, as Paul says; they’re trying to the best of their knowledge to convey the word of God, and God’s word can’t be confined to the human consciousness without some growth going on.

These tools can help us understand that process and need not be a threat to our faith, but they are a threat to our preconceptions at any given point. If we’re inviting ourselves to be more Christ-like, I should say that there was nothing more typical about Christ other than love. If we examine his life through the New Testament gospels, one of his chief characteristics was always puncturing everybody’s preconceptions, whether his enemies or his devotees, right? There’s nothing evil about that, because our preconditions need to be popped and reconstructed regularly.

That doesn’t let us off the hook for being better off if we’re competent with texts that we’re studying and putting before us as guides by which to live our lives. It’s not a sinful question to ask, “What is the nature of these texts and how did they come to us? How should we approach them? What did the original authors mean in their historical setting and time, and in their Jewish or Aramaic language that only comes down to us in Greek that is translated into semi-medieval language that we’re now appropriating in the 21st century?”

That would be a good thing, to get competent with that process, lest we live our lives according to some false principles by being ignorant. There’s nothing virtuous about ignorance; there is something virtuous about humility.

Russell Stevenson: In fact, I think you could make the argument that asking those kinds of questions of text and how it came down to you could be seen as a sign of humility in the sense that there is knowledge here that I do not have access to, and I’m willing to put in the effort to find that knowledge. I recognize that I, based on my own learning, wisdom, and background, am ultimately incompetent to gain this knowledge without doing outside research and asking people who have competence in those areas that I do not have.

Philip Barlow: Yeah, indeed. There is what I call “Job’s Friends’ Syndrome,” which is to say that in the book of Job as we have it, all Job’s so-called “friends” do throughout the book is defend God. “How dare you have questions about God? How dare you, you insolent little sinner, you, say that you’re innocent. Clearly you’re not innocent, because you’re suffering, and suffering comes at God’s hands as punishment for sins. So even if you don’t know it, you’re guilty.”

All they do is try to put Job in his place in defense of God; then at the end of the story, God is really upset with them and won’t talk to them except through Job because they haven’t done well “as my servant Job has,” as

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the text reads. We can sin and apparently displease God by defending God on grounds of ignorance and too much confidence in our ignorance.

Russell Stevenson: Latter-day Saints have been raised within a certain world view with certain assumptions about what sacred texts mean. However, in the 20th and 21st centuries, we have a number of Latter-day Saint scholars who have been engaging in learning that comes from the academy and from outside of the LDS tradition.

In your article, you maintain that your fundamental suggestion is that Mormons work from within the tradition: finding and thinking through resources in Mormonism that comport with modern historical literary tools and assign these tools a healthy sphere while remaining their masters rather than their slaves.

I would like you to comment on this tension that exists between useful tools that are built within the Mormon tradition juxtaposed against tools that come from the outside.

Philip Barlow: Well, the 13th Article of Faith and other statements by Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and other church leaders, teach us that “if there’s anything virtuous, lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy” — and by implication, true and helpful — that we are invited to embrace and seek after those things and make them part of our faith, so I have no objection to learning from anybody that I can learn from, including principles and insights from textual criticism, historical criticism, science, or the Baptists, Presbyterians, Muslims, or Buddhists. That’s a principle of Mormonism that’s well established.

However, if I’m teaching a Sunday School class, and I start quoting Julius Wellhousen, the famous 19th-century German higher critic, that may confuse and discombobulate part of my audience. There’s plenty of room to call on our own tradition in that kind of devotional context that could be constructive. For instance, in the story of how the Book of Mormon came forth, Mormon is depicted forthrightly as an editor dealing with bazillions of plates and records that span over a thousand years. He is selecting, abridging, editing, and maybe conflating, for all we know, the text in order to get a simple, straight-forward narrative.

That is what is called the documentary hypothesis. Without a forthright picture like that, scholars determined that is what was going on in Genesis and the five books of Moses, and now, we know, elsewhere in the Bible. If that raised questions about the reliability; if that horrified us, like Moses wasn’t actually the author of this book and several people were; that it came from different traditions — it’s actually just what Mormon is portrayed as doing by Joseph Smith, without knowing anything about higher criticism of the text.

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That’s an example of drawing right within our tradition to defang the issue. There’s nothing scary; there’s no reason why the divine can’t be involved in a process like that just because it doesn’t comport with our picture. Does that make sense? I’m perfectly happy learning from the outside world, but when it’s more helpful to draw right from our own tradition, there it is starting us in the face without being named by those words — “documentary hypothesis.” That’s what he’s doing; he’s editing documents.

Russell Stevenson: In your article, you list a number of approaches for Latter-day Saints as they engage higher criticism and as they engage questions about the origins of scripture. What would you suggest that we do to avoid losing our faith as we engage these questions?

Philip Barlow: One of them is maybe gain some familiarity at the hands of a person who is both informed and faithful — who has not thrown the baby out with the bathwater — about some of these approaches to scripture. Because as I said earlier, without knowledge of historical change, our faith can be brittle and uninformed, and when it gets a little knowledge, it can crack wide open.

In the history of the interpretation of Genesis 3, all through Judaism; all through Christianity; all through Islam; all through modern psycho- analysis, thinking of it as archetypes and dreams — there’s one aspect that seems to be unique (and I have taught a class on the history of the interpretation of Genesis 3 a few times), and that is that Adam and Eve were given contradictory commandments, right? Multiply and replenish the Earth and don’t partake of that tree. Joseph taught, and the Book of Mormon alludes, that those collide.

That’s a tension and sort of a contradiction. What do we do? Do we turn our back on God and say, “I’m not going to play that game; I’m leaving,” or do we choose A or B? They had to work it out. They had to navigate that tension. My point in telling that story is that we ought not be afraid of what strikes us as contradiction or tension. The whole universe is held together by tension. Our solar system is held together by a combination of centrifugal and centripetal forces; without it, it would fly apart as would our galaxy, as would our marriages, right? There are tensions or difference between men and women by their natures.

So when we gain a little knowledge and it grows in tension with an earlier model of truth or an earlier sense of fact or how God works or what scripture is, we’re going to be a little surprised and maybe a little uncomfortable. What we ought not do is panic in the face of that, because that’s how growth works; that’s how, as Joseph put it — he did not originate this saying, as he sometimes is implicitly given credit for in our

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tradition — he cited a saying of his day: “By proving contraries, truth is made manifest.”

One is, of course, don’t be silly. You’re going to learn some new things and it’s going to collide a little bit with your models. The advice I would give, then, is that I’m going to think about it and pray about it, but I’m not going to panic in the face of it. I’m just going to explore it. The reason that I’m going to explore it without fear is that God is a God of truth, and whatever the truth is of this matter, God is not going to hold up His hands to His eyes and say, “Oh my goodness, Betty Sue has found me out here!” That’s a silly notion of reality, right?

God is a God of truth. Embrace that fact. Seek truth, wisdom, knowledge, and goodness wherever it’s found, including in the world of scholarship. However, we need to be critical of higher criticism, which is not to say that we should reject or negate it, but we need to be thoughtful about it. Not all practitioners of higher criticism do it deftly. Some of it is experimental.

There’s a famous group of scholars operating since the late 20th century called “The Jesus Seminar.” They have published a color-coded series of gospels that are bright red — I can’t remember if this is negative or positive, but I’ll say positive — if they’re confident that Jesus spoke this word; pink if they’re less sure, but He probably said it; gray if He probably didn’t say it; or dark black if they’re very sure that this isn't a historical saying of Jesus. I may have the two colors reversed.

They got to those judgements by having a series of scholars think it through, decide, and then vote on it. That’s not silly, but it’s not a very secure foundation for determining the historicity of any one of these sayings. Sometimes they determine whether Jesus likely said this thing, historically or not, on the basis of a principle that they’ve set forth. An example is if a statement in the New Testament that’s put in Jesus’ mouth might be embarrassing, but it still survived in the gospel account, it’s more likely to be true.

For instance, women who did not have standing to be witnesses legally in 1st-century Judaism are the first witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection. That should be embarrassing. You might think that they would have covered that up and found men to do it, but they didn’t, so that’s probably a true historical thing, that women were the first. That’s an argument. Is that plausible and logical? Sure. Is it a sure foundation? No, it’s a deduction, a scholarly, rationalized deduction. So we need to weigh into that higher critical principle and say, “How much are we persuaded by that?”

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People who just think it’s only dopes who don’t practice historical criticism — well, that’s naive at a secondary level. We need to be critical about our tools of criticism.

Russell Stevenson: I’m reminded of Hugh B. Brown’s citation of kind of an ancient saying, where he said, “From the cowardice that backs away from truth; from the laziness that is satisfied with half-truth; O God of truth, deliver us.”

Philip Barlow: Yeah. A love of truth — but we can make an idol of truth. We can make an idol of the Bible. We can make an idol of ourselves. We can make an idol of our own images of God that need to be broken down. Higher criticism can become an idol. Our perceptions of rejecting higher criticism can be an idol. We have to welcome truth and be humble.

Russell Stevenson: Excellent. Thanks so much for joining us, Dr. Philip Barlow. We are definitely edified and enlighten by your comments.

Philip Barlow: I was happy to be here, and thanks for your good explorations.

Disclaimer: LDS Perspectives Podcast is not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The opinions expressed on this episode represent the views of the guys and the podcaster alone, and LDS Perspectives Podcast and its parent organization may or may not agree with them. While the ideas presented may vary from traditional understandings or teachings, they in no way reflect criticism of LDS Church leaders, policies, or practices.

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