Hardy says Skousen Project "on par with the finest classical and biblical scholarship”

Grant Hardy has written the Introduction for Royal Skousen's forthcoming work, The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text¹, commending Skousen for bringing  "the textual analysis of the Book of Mormon to a professional level on par with the finest classical and biblical scholarship."² In an earlier blog post  I described Skousen's work on the Book of Mormon and gave some suggestions for further reading.³ In this post Hardy briefly discusses Skousen's project and clarifies why he believes it is "on par":

Not everyone appreciates the years of sustained, sometime tedious, labor that go into producing a scholarly volume, so it is a gratifying to discover that one’s work matters to others, especially when curiosity is high enough to elicit comments on a forthcoming book. In the case of Royal Skousen’s The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, he did all the work, and I had the pleasure of writing an introduction. I have followed the discussion on this website with interest, and perhaps I can offer a few points of clarification to help prevent misunderstandings or disappointments. The short response would be that that it is Skousen's "professional level" of textual scholarship that is "on par with the finest classical and biblical scholarship." I didn't mean to imply that the textual challenges posed by different texts were of the same scope or difficulty. The manuscript evidence for each book in the classical library or the Christian canon varies enormously. Now, a few points of clarification:

The first is that this Yale volume is not a true critical text, because it does not include an apparatus that indicates variants. For that information, along with Skousen’s explanations of his editorial decisions, readers will have to consult his six-volume Analysis of Textual Variants, which is very thorough indeed. The Earliest Text presents the results of Skousen’s analysis in a full, unencumbered format (although the book does include 45 pages of significant textual changes as an appendix).

The terms “lower criticism” and “higher criticism” date back to the nineteenth century when scholars tried to draw a distinction between studies that sought to establish the best text possible and those that attempted to uncover the origins of texts. Because the terms are imprecise and carry a great deal of theological baggage (mostly assumptions about the faith-positions of various scholars), they are no longer commonly used in biblical studies. Textual criticism is still something like what used to be called “lower criticism,” but everything else is classified according to more accurate methodological descriptions, such as the historical-critical method, source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, and literary criticism.

Skousen’s work is textual criticism, and as such, it is mostly belief-neutral. That is to say, he is working with the extant manuscripts and printed editions, and the results he derives are similar to what anyone, LDS or not, would get from applying the same scholarly tools to the same source materials. (Skousen’s objective is recovering the English text dictated in 1829; he has nothing to say about reformed Egyptian.) The strategies that he employs in establishing the text—including the analysis of handwriting, ink flow, insertions, deletions, corrections, spelling, scribal tendencies, parallel passages, linguistic evidence, dialectical analysis, and so forth—are exactly those developed over the last two centuries by textual critics across disciplines. It is with respect to his rigorous standards and methodological expertise that I claimed that he “has brought the textual analysis of the Book of Mormon to a professional level on par with the finest classical and biblical scholarship.” I stand by that claim. (Very few nineteenth-century works, even those that have been published in “critical editions,” have had this level of textual scrutiny. Shakespeare and Milton, however, are another story).

Of course, there are similarities and differences implicit in any comparison, and I took pains in my introduction to point out that the scope of Book of Mormon textual analysis does not match that of the Bible. After discussing the various types of errors that inevitably crept into the text, from misreadings, to mishearings, to copy mistakes, to typographical errors, to inaccurate corrections, I noted:

All of these textual relationships can be painstakingly worked out. The challenges will be familiar to New Testament textual scholars, but in the case of the Book of Mormon there are only two manuscripts and twenty significant printed editions (ranging from 1830 to 1981). By contrast, there are some 5,500 manuscripts of the New Testament, many of which are only fragments and no two of which are identical except, perhaps, for some of the smallest bits of papyrus or parchment.

I have nothing but awe and admiration for the generations of scholars who have painstakingly sorted through these documents to try to get as close as possible to the originals. And it is obviously more difficult to do textual criticism in a foreign language (though Skousen does pretty well when the lengthy biblical quotations in the Book of Mormon require him to work with Hebrew and Greek).

The New Testament is unique for the number of its extant manuscripts (which is a testimony to its significance in western culture), but the vast majority of these are relatively inconsequential for textual analysis. For a project comparable in scale, however, you might take a look at the Poona critical edition of the Mahabharata, which dealt with hundreds of manuscripts for a much, much longer work of literature. Another difference is that Skousen’s reconstruction is almost certainly more accurate than what we find in the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament (with a text identical to the Nestle-Aland twenty-seventh edition), precisely because he is dealing with just two manuscripts, including about 28% of the original autograph. Biblical scholars usually have to work with versions that are hundreds of years, and who knows how many copies, away from the autographs (though a handful of NT fragments are dated to the early second century).

In a project of textual criticism, the goal is to follows the evidence wherever it leads, without much concern for theological implications. Skousen has documented the non-standard grammar and awkward readings in the earliest text of the Book of Mormon (which necessitated several thousand changes, mostly stylistic, in the printed editions), but he doesn’t speculate on what that might tell us about nature of God or revelation. Similarly, a biblical textual critic, when acting in that capacity, analyzes thousands of textual variations without drawing conclusions about why God didn’t make that process of transmission smoother. Those are questions for the theologians. Whether one is inside the faith or not, a work of scholarship like Skousen’s is to be celebrated by anyone with an interest in scripture, literature, or textual criticism.


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Grant Hardy is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and chair of the history department at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He is editor of the excellent The Book of Mormon: A Reader's Edition.

FOOTNOTES

[1]

Yale University Press, 2009.

[2]

See Grant Hardy's comments under the "Editorial Review" section on Amazon.com.

[3]

See BHodges, "Royal Skousen's Critical Text Project and The Book of Mormon," LifeOnGoldPlates.com, August 20, 2009.