Articles by

Steve Fleming

Study and Faith, 2: Mythos, Logos, and Historical Methodology

By March 18, 2024


As I mentioned over at Times and Season, I put together what we call our “safe-space group” to discuss all kinds of topics, and not surprisingly history stuff was one of the genre of topics the group wanted to go over.

As all of my fellow JI bloggers know, that can be a bit of a difficult topic to try to do a crash course in because though our concepts of what happened in the past are very important to the larger culture and our church, we all know the study of history can be a tricky thing that often isn’t understood very well. And if such a discussion can get tricky in our larger societies’ culture war, it is even more so in debates within Mormonism when we often feel that larger religious truths are on the line.

So I thought a lot about best approaches when I was brainstorming how to introduce the topic and all the points that trained historians often want to convey. Things like “the past is a foreign country,” we have to rely on historical documents and good-faith interpretations vary, but that doesn’t mean we just make up whatever narrative we want, good historical interpretations will be supported by historical evidence (etc etc).

Since the historical topics we were going to cover were in the context of our religious beliefs, I thought I would be useful to start with the concept of the Greek ways of knowing: mythos and logos (And yes I’m using the division for my own purposes, feel free to correct!) Mythos is the accepted cultural truth about the Gods (common in all pre-modern societies) while Logos is truth that comes truth discussion (Logos=word), debates, logic, and inquiry; what the philosophers were trying to get at.

Such ways of knowing often clash: the example of Socrates being executed for challenging the contemporary religious system is a good example. Even more so would be the containing angst biblical scholarship can cause. Yet, the example of many such scholars maintaining a religious faith after making adjustments is also an example of something of a reconciliation between mythos and logos. (I know this is an extremely complicated topic with a very long history, just trying to offer some summaries).

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Thoughts on Study and Faith, Part 1: Introduction

By February 27, 2024


I’ve been working my “intellectual biography of Joseph Smith” for a long time now (hope to finish before too long), or an attempt to traced where Smith got his ideas. By “intellectual biography” I mean the focus on his ideas. Framing the project in this way is Inherently controversial from within the faith as his revelatory claims believed by followers are that the ideas came from God or from lost scriptures also with God as the ultimate source.

I’ve been at this a while, but one part of my claim is that JS, it looks to me, would have had access to all the ideas he taught, to Mormonism, including the Book of Mormon, from particular sources. Yes, Mormonism was/is quite different than the prevailing Protestantism, so he wasn’t drawing on orthodox Protestantism for the distinctly Mormon stuff, but those idea were still out there.


No doubt such claims can prompt a lot of debate and can be taken as an attack on the faith. I’ve been at this a while, am still a practicing Mormon, and I recently finished serving as bishop of my ward having been released this last May.

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Are Visionaries Dangerous to Society?

By May 5, 2022


My thanks to series editors J Stuart and Cristina for their edits and comments on this post.

I haven’t read Under the Banner of Heaven; this post is about responses to the book that I have heard. After reading the book, my sister shared with the family her take on the book’s claim of the dangers of believing in personal revelation (Jana Riess makes the same observation about Krakauer’s claim in her review), and it was at that point that I began formulating what I’d observed from studying the history of Christianity: there’s been a long history of people being very worried about other people claiming revelations. No doubt such claims got Jesus in trouble as they did Socrates. After studying this topic in considerable depth, I’d say the worry of the potential threat of visionaries vastly outstrips the actual damage of such people, and thus it looks to me like Under the Banner of Heaven is a popular manifestation of an ancient claim.

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Arrington Lecture: Laurie Maffly-Kipp: Reading Mormonism in West Africa

By September 9, 2021



Some Mormon Theology in Shusaku Endo’s Silence

By July 9, 2021


Reading Endo’s Silence, recently made into a movie by Martin Scorsese, I was stuck by a mention of a Mormon theological concept. The story takes place in early seventeenth-century Japan, so it doesn’t mention Mormons specifically, but does mention a Mormon idea when discussing the theology of the Japanese Christians.

Silence focusses on Jesuit priests Rodrigues and Garrpe sailing to Japan after having heard that their mentor and hero, father Ferreira, had apostatized under torture. Silence is based on the history the harsh measures the Japanese government took toward crushing Japanese Christianity after the Shimabara Rebellion of 1638, driving Christianity there underground. Endo based the characters of Rodrigues and Ferreira on the actual Jesuit priests, Chiara and Ferreira, who did apostatize during the persecution. Endo himself came out of the Japanese Catholic community who saw the Japanese “Hidden Christians” as heroes and the apostate priests and not truly committed. Endo thus novelizes these Jesuits’ stories.

The Mormon theology comes in the buildup to the climax of the story after the Japanese capture Rodrigues and bring him to Ferreira so that Ferreira can convince Rodrigues to apostatize. Ferreira first begins by explaining the tortures he’s undergone before moving to his central arguments: “The one thing I know is that our religion does not take root in this country” (157). Rodrigues protests that the plant has been torn up and that Christianity flourished in Japan before the crackdown.

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D. Michael Quinn, 1944-2021

By April 23, 2021


Those of us at the Juvenile Instructor, like so many other in the Mormon academic community, are very sad to hear of the passing of D. Michael Quinn, and want to take a moment to honor his legacy as one of the most important historians of Mormonism. Our own Ben Park put together an excellent summation of Quinn life on this Twitter chain, but we’d also like to take a moment here to celebrate Quinn’s tremendous contribution to Mormon history.

For me, what stands out most about Quinn’s scholarship are controversy and indefatigable research. Controversy in Mormon history had been with the movement since the beginning with scholarship on Mormonism often dividing between believers and non-believers. Quinn was somewhat pioneering in tackling controversial topics as both a believer and an “insider” in his work at the church archives and at BYU. Scholars like Marvin Hill had been edgy, but Quinn fully embraced the most controversial topics and even held a kind of press conference to refute Boyd K. Packer’s 1981 “The Mantle is Far, Far Greater than the Intellect.”

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Recent Books on Joseph Smith’s Translation, Part Two: The Believer/Secular Divide

By March 5, 2021


For the second part of this review, (see first part here) I want to talk about the ways that Davis and Brown attempt a kind of middle ground between the larger secular scholarly field and those who believe in Joseph Smith operating under divine guidance while he translated. Both make attempts at explaining what Smith did in terms of translation, and this brings up the old religious-studies question, “Does explaining supernatural experiences mean explaining them away?”

Indeed, Davis’s theses certainly makes an attempt to explain the process of the Book of Mormon translation in terms of Smith’s abilities to draw on mnemonic speaking devices in order to dictate the Book of Mormon. Davis goes so far as to propose that Smith could have had a short, written outline of the book that he could have occasionally referred to throughout the process.  

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Review of Recent Books on Joseph Smith’s Translation, Part One

By February 24, 2021


Brown, Samuel Morris. Joseph Smith’s Translation: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Davis, William. Visions in a Seer Stone: Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

This past year saw a number of important publication on Joseph Smith’s translation; in addition to the ones above, also Michael Hubbard MacKay, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid, eds. Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity (Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 2020) in which Brown has an essay.

But first I want to compare Brown and Davis. In this post, I give a summary of their works and then discuss the implications more in a follow up.  

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Socrates and the Afterlife: A Critique of Bart Ehrman’s Time Magazine Blurb

By May 9, 2020


This morning while scrolling through Yahoo’s newsfeed I came across the article “What Jesus Really Said About Heaven and Hell,” a blurb from Bart Ehrman’s new book Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife. In the burb, Ehrman argues that the the popular notion notion among Christians of heaven and hell is wrong because Jesus and the Jews didn’t teach it. Instead, Ehrman argues, Jesus taught that the wicked would be totally destroyed while the righteous would be resurrected and live on earth. But Jesus and the Jews did not believe in a soul that that could live apart from the body. That was a Greek idea.

I leave aside the legitimacy of Ehrman’s argument–not surprisingly, a whole lot of people took exception in the comments–and I’ll only note that Ehrman’s idea was argued by a number of Anabaptist and other radicals in the early modern period (called psychopannychism, mortalism, or soul sleep, see N. T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyldale to Milton [1972]). It’s currently taught by Jehovah’s Witnesses.

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Joseph Smith’s 1832 First Vision Account and Plato’s Cave

By July 12, 2019


So Universal Theosophy having recently put Thomas Taylor’s 1804 translation of Plato’s works online has made it a whole lot easier to go through the edition of Plato’s works that would have been available in Joseph Smith’s day. I’ve argued that Smith seemed to have used Taylor’s translation, but I was still surprised to have just discovered the striking similarities between certain passages in Smith’s 1832 account of his First Vision and Taylor’s translation of Plato’s cave allegory from the Republic, especially lines 515 to 517. As I argued last year that Smith seemed to have drawn on the passage just after this for the description of Christ in the Olive Leaf revelation (which he dictated the same year), I do see these similarities as evidence that Smith read, knew, and used Plato. And that fact that Plato showed up so prominently in this earliest account of this founding event, I would argue, is a very big deal.

Here’s a write up that I just put together.

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