The Annotated Book of Mormon
edited by grant hardy
oxford university, 912 pages, $40.99
The Book of Mormon simultaneously affirms the Bible and challenges its uniqueness, with the stated purpose to convince “the Jew and Gentile that JESUS is the CHRIST, the ETERNAL GOD, manifesting himself unto all nations.” This new Oxford version is the third and best of three study editions produced by Hardy, a professor of history and religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. In commentary and essays, the layers of the text are deftly outlined. We have five sets of metal plates, three migrations from the old world to the new, and multiple narrators.
Whatever the origins of the Book of Mormon, the most obvious and important textual dependence is on the King James Bible. Extensive footnotes track quotations and paraphrases from both Old and New Testaments (sometimes in the same verse), while highlighting significant textual variations. Anachronisms are also noted—such as quotations from the apostle Paul purportedly occurring over five hundred years before Christ, or Jesus himself quoting from Acts. Hardy describes the Book of Mormon’s reception among the Latter-day Saints, who hold the book as scripture. One omission is the perspectives of other Mormon groups that adhere to the Book of Mormon but are not part of the LDS church (a scope that would exceed the capacity of any single editor).
Whether one considers the Book of Mormon scripture, midrash, or Bible fan fiction, one can gain a much deeper understanding of it from this fine edition.
—Joseph Stanford
Bede and The Theory of Everything
by michelle p. brown
university of chicago, 312 pages, $25
While Einstein wanted to know how God created the world and Stephen Hawking desired to create a theory of everything, thinking with relief that the search would never end, the Venerable Bede (a.d. ca. 672–735) pursued a “unification of all Creation, underpinned by Logos—the eternal, creative Word,” as medievalist Michelle Brown explains.
Bede read the signs of God in both the literal and the allegorical. His love of singing and poetry and his call to contemplative life at Lindisfarne monastery allowed him to pursue more than history and translation. If Bede’s wife, as a monk and priest, was the Church, then his mistress was “lady learning,” writes Brown. Because of Bede’s access to manuscripts unavailable to the average medieval, he was able to integrate his work on the arts, sciences, and theology into his own “theory of everything.” Bede saw the workings of the human brain and heart, along with the inner life of the spirit, as comparably important to the nature of eternity.
The Venerable Bede was not well traveled, but his life of research led him to write a guide to the Holy Land and create a calendar dating years from the birth of Christ; it also inspired his love of division (in Roman numerals, no less) and aided in his translation of the Gospel of John.
A physically attractive book (glossy, textbook-like pages replete with full-color photos of manuscripts), Bede and the Theory of Everything reflects its subject matter well. Written with due reverence and respect for Bede, Brown’s writing is indicative of a master researcher’s endeavor to take comfort in “the bigger picture of eternity.”
—Stephanie Passero
The Church: A Guide to the People of God
by brad east
lexham, 200 pages, $18.99
The Bible tells the story of God and His people.” So East begins The Church, an incisive book that shows the Church is a pre-Pentecost reality founded in the family of Abraham. To make his point, East puts an Abrahamic spin on St. Cyprian’s famous maxim: “There is no salvation outside of Abraham’s family.” One is either born into this family or adopted into it. East explains that the gospel is the good news of adoption into this family.
Renewed attention in recent decades has been given to the Jewishness of Jesus. Perhaps the greatest strength of East’s book is the clarity with which he shows the Jewishness of the Church. His term “Israel–Church” may be slow to catch on, but it suggests a way beyond supercessionism, in which accounts of the Church may often obscure the significance of Abraham’s family or even see it as simply replaced. East’s portrayal of the Church follows Paul in Romans 11. The trunk of the Church tree is Jewish. Gentiles have been grafted into this Jewish tree—or, to change the metaphor, have been adopted into Abraham’s family and await the re-grafting of the natural Jewish branches into this Abrahamic, ecclesial tree.
The Church defies easy categorization. Ecclesial partisans will understandably ask: “Which church?” To which, I think, East, who in another place confesses to be “an ambivalent sort of Protestant,” will simply respond: “The one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” In the reality of a divided Church, we need accounts of the Church that inspire and reveal a unity we might already possess while gesturing toward a greater practical unity. In the course of a few paragraphs, to take but one example, East can approvingly quote the ecclesiological insights of Calvin and Lumen Gentium. East hopes his work feels “at once biblical and theological, Jewish and catholic, evangelical and ecumenical, ancient and contemporary.” East’s hopes are more than realized.
—Blake Johnson
The Diplomacy of the American Revolution
by samuel flagg bemis
encounter, 272 pages, $30.99
In the Treaty of Paris signed on September 3, 1783, Britain formally recognized America’s claim to sovereignty, asserted in the Declaration of Independence. A new edition of Samuel Flagg Bemis’s The Diplomacy of the American Revolution shows how foreign intervention, particularly France’s, helped secure that triumph, turning the colonial struggle into a global war. Originally published in 1935, Bemis’s elegantly written narrative traces the “cut-throat international rivalry” behind independence and Congress’s scramble to secure diplomats and lay the foundation for conducting America’s foreign affairs.
European rivalries had long spilled across the Atlantic, rendering North America a theater for struggles that culminated in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), in which Britain defeated France. But, as conflict grew between Britain and its colonies in the 1770s, French leaders saw a chance to avenge their recent defeat. The policies of Versailles toward America shaped the actions of other European states, each with their own interests—and grievances. Bemis identifies the Battle of Saratoga as the decisive moment that brought France into the war, even though aid and implicit recognition had preceded the battle.
As the British pulled resources from America to defend other vital interests, European assistance kept the United States from collapse. The tide turned at Yorktown in 1781, and Britain’s formal recognition of independence came after pressures in Europe forced the British to concede generous frontiers. While research in the succeeding decades has dated Bemis’s work on some points, his book stands as an engaging narrative that balances patriotic sensibility with an understanding of the outlook and motivations of European powers. Readers today can still profit from this fine new edition.
—William Anthony Hay
