History of Religions of Western Origin Commons^™

Mobile Societies, Mobile Religions: On The Ecological Roots Of Two Religions Deemed Monotheistic, Edward Surman

CGU Theses & Dissertations

How do environments affect the generation and development of religions? The investigation taken up in this dissertation is one attempt to address this question. This work focuses on one comparative case study: the potential causal relationship between agriculturally marginal landscapes and the two oldest religions deemed monotheistic. This dissertation argues that the respective origins (and early development) of communities of worship centered around Ahura Mazda and YHWH were affected by similar environmental contexts. The dearth of literature concerning the effects of environments on religions extends to established theoretical and methodological approaches on the topic. The framework for approaching this research …

The Battle To Authenticate 'The Gospel Of Thomas', Lisa Haygood

LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University

Many early Christian sects were aware of and accepted The Gospel of Thomas as authentic Christian scripture, despite its unorthodox, radical doctrine, igniting an ideological battle in and around the Thomasine communities of the ancient world. This ideological war is still raging and conflict renewed and amplified with the discoveries of the Greek and Coptic texts of The Gospel of Thomas in the first half of the 20^th Century.

Since it’s discovery, The Gospel of Thomas has presented scholars with ferocious debate, as serious probability exists that Thomas preserves an older tradition of the historical Jesus than that of …

Can't Be Tamed: A Feminist Analysis Of Apocrypha And Other Scripture, Catherine Alison Ballard

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper is my own unique feminist analysis of certain apocryphal texts. Though the texts I use have common themes, they are divided into what I consider the three most societally important aspects of an ancient woman’s identity: virgin, mother, and whore. The Acts of Thecla and The Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena deal with virginity. II Maccabees, The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, and select chapters of Augustine’s Confessions represent motherhood. Finally, the hagiographies Life of Pelagia and Life of Mary navigate through the mire of sexualities that deviate from norms.

The Foundations And Early Development Of Mormon Mission Theory, David Golding

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This study seeks to answer a fundamental question facing missiologists and historians of Mormonism: given their sustained preoccupation with converting others to Mormonism and their thriving tradition of missionary work, how do Mormons conceive of their mission? By focusing on the theoretical frame in which Mormon missionaries imagined the non-Mormon world, prepared for missionary engagement, and derived their expectations for their mission work, this study aims to illuminate the development of Mormon missionary activities and explain the processes by which Mormons fashioned for themselves a missional character. Beginning with Joseph Smith and the emergence of his missional thought and ending …

The Archive Of Restoration Culture, 1997-2002, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

When I first began work on Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling in 1996, I realized that reconstructing the cultural environment of the Prophet would be one of my largest tasks. I could scarcely conceive how to go about probing the huge quantities of sermons, newspapers, journals, pamphlets, books, artworks, and private diaries that possibly bore on the restoration of the gospel in the 1820s through the 1840s. Yet the culture of that period bore directly on the success of the young church under Joseph Smith’s leadership. People would never be able to grasp theological ideas that were entirely foreign to …

Joseph Smith’S Many Histories, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

I wish to explore, in broad general terms, the histories to which historians have attached Joseph Smith. As you can imagine, the context in which he is placed profoundly affects how people see the Prophet, since the history selected for a subject colors everything about it. Is he a money-digger like hundreds of other superstitious Yankees in his day, a religious fanatic like Muhammad was thought to be in Joseph’s time, a prophet like Moses, a religious revolutionary like Jesus? To a large extent, Joseph Smith assumes the character of the history selected for him. The broader the historical context, …

Joseph Smith And Abraham Lincoln, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

In a letter to his friend John Stuart, dated March 1, 1840, Abraham Lincoln wrote that Joseph Smith had recently passed through Springfield, Illinois. In a tantalizingly brief report, Lincoln told Stuart that "Speed [another close friend] says he wrote you what Jo. Smith said about you as he passed here. We will procure the names of some of his people here and send them to you before long." The nature of Joseph's comment on Stuart can only be surmised. Joseph had spent the winter in Washington D.C., vainly seeking compensation for the Saints' losses in Missouri in 1839. He …

The Character Of Joseph Smith, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

The title of this essay, "The Character of Joseph Smith," may promise more than can ever be fulfilled. Joseph warned the Saints of the difficulty in trying to understand him. In the King Follett discourse given two months before his death, he told them, "You don't know me--you never will." Another version of the same speech says, "You never knew my heart. No man knows my hist[ory]." He seems to say that what we want to know most--his heart and his history--are not to be found out. No matter how much we study him, we must be cautious about believing …

Cultural Orientations: Migrations West, Migrations North, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

The word "orientations" in the title of this essay refers to spatial orientations, as in points of the compass, and is meant to raise the question of cultural change along the South-North axis in North America. What happened to people as they moved northward in the eighteenth century, or more exactly, what was thought to happen to them? Much as been written about culture going from East to West and in the opposite direction from West to East. Contemporaries likewise spoke of the change in culture moving from North to South, but what about migrations from South to North, from …

The Colonization Of The Mormon Mind, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

The title of my talk doesn't shed much light on my topic. This past week, when I told people about the talk, the title mystified them. What can be meant by the colonization of the Mormon mind? The phrase is both inscrutable and ominous. Has the Mormon mind been colonized? Are we under the control of an imperial power without knowing about it?

Because of the obscurity of the title, I want to explain what the talk is about. It has two parts, an autobiographical section and a historical section, which are interrelated. I am going to talk about myself …

Was Joseph Smith A Gentleman? The Standard For Refinement In Utah, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

The question of refinement cut even more deeply in Utah in the early days when the governance of the territory was at issue. The Latter-day Saints worked with a double handicap in striving to win respect from eastern travelers: in addition to the usual doubts about civilization in the West, the visitors were skeptical about Mormon religious fanaticism. Travelers came expecting that the poor credulous fools who submitted to the rule of Brigham Young would lack education, manners, taste, and intelligence—in short,would be as degraded as the woodcutters Trollope sighted along the banks of the Mississippi. The Saints for their …

The Social Dimensions Of Rationality, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

I recently attended a conference on religious advocacy sponsored by a group of Christian scholars who feel that religious belief is unduly restricted in academic discourse. The starting point for the conference was the evident fact that political convictions are freely advocated in classrooms and scholarly writing. These political positions are ideological and value laden, so why not introduce religious views too? If history can be taught from a Marxist perspective, why not from a Christian viewpoint?

African Americans And The Bible, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Rationale for a History of "Readings": The history of the engagement of the Bible among African Americans is dramatic and complex and has important implications for biblical interpretation. It provides the student of the Bible not only a conceptual window onto a dramatic and complex history of self-definitions and worldviews among those in the modern world who now call themselves African Americans, but also the opportunity to rethink the basic hermeneutical assumptions about biblical interpretation, especially its focus upon the ancient text and/or ancient historical situation as the starting and end point of interpretation. The critical juxtaposition of the Bible …

Making Space For The Mormons, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

This work is a lecture that was presented at Utah State University.

The Secret History Of Mormonism, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

This is a book review.

The Bible And African-American Culture, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

The history of the influence, uses, and functions of the Bible among African Americans is dramatic and complex, and reflects the different, sometimes conflicting, sociopolitical and religious self-understandings, orientations, and aspirations of a dominant segment, if not the great majority, of African Americans.

The Ascetic Impulse In Ancient Christianity, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

"It is important to understand ... that the difference between the non-elites (the weak) and the elites in Corinth is not that between a world-rejecting ethic (the 'weak') on the one hand and a world-embracing ethic (the pneumatic elites) on the other. Clearly, both groups shared the imperative to renounce the world; the fact of membership in this new social group, the Jesus movement at Corinth, suggests as much,"

In spite of the long and impressive legacy of scholarship in New Testament and Christian origins and the exacting critical attention to the texts of the earliest Christians, it remains unclear …

Joseph Smith In The Current Age, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

What is the place of Joseph Smith's teachings in our time? What do his writings have to say in a world so much different from the one he himself lived in? If Joseph Smith were alive today, he would be 186 years old. Most of his writings have been in circulation for over 150 years. During that century and a half, vast changes in government, the economy, philosophical outlook, and popular values have transformed society. After all this, what do Joseph Smith's teachings have to say about the problems of the late twentieth-century society? We do not expect his writings …

Foreword To Old Ship Of Zion, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Walter F. Pitts died July 20, 1991. I did not know him personally; I came to know only a part of him through the manuscript-obviously an important part of his life-that has been transformed into the book now before the reader. If that which is created is in the image of its creator, I suspect that had I met Walter Pitts I probably would have liked him very much; I know I would have been impressed by him, and would have learned a great deal from him.

At first, when I was asked by Oxford University Press to review Pitts's …

African American Traditions And The Bible, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Introduction: Reading the Bible = Reading the Self and the World. African Americans' engagement of the Bible is complex and dynamic. It is a fascinating historical drama, beginning with the Africans' involuntary arrival in the New World. But as sign of the creativity and adaptability of the Africans and of the evocative power of the Bible, the drama continues to the present day, notwithstanding the complexity and controversies of intervening periods. Thus, there is in African Americans' engagement of the Bible potential not only for an interpretive history of their readings as a history of their collective self understandings, visions, …

Ascetic Behavior And Color-Ful Language: Stories About Ethiopian Moses, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

The characterization of the fouth-century Black (Ethiopian) monk named Moses in late ancient Christian hagiographie narratives opens wide a window not only onto particular understandings of, and propaganda about, ascetic piety and religious orientations to the world, but also ancient (non-black) Christian sensitivies to racial/color differences. Four ancient sources— Palladius' Lausiac History, Sozomen's Ecclesiastical History, the anonymous Apophthegmata Patrum, and Acta Sanctorum—are analyzed on the basis of a recent translation.

1820-1831, Background, Founding, New York Period, Richard Bushman, Larry C. Porter

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

This is an encyclopedia article.

Joseph Smith: The Prophet, Richard Bushman, Dean C. Jessee

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

This is an encyclopedia article.

Book Review: "Radical Christianity: A Reading Of Recovery" By Christopher Rowland, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Christopher Rowland, Lecturer in Divinity, Dean and Fellow of Jesus College, University of Cambridge, has written a fascinating and provocative book. Although drawing upon years of research on Christian origins, especially on apocalypticism in Judaism and early Christianity, this book goes far beyond antiquarian exegetical interests and questions. It is a most interesting attempt to determine the origins, then chart and account for major developments in the course of one type of Christian ethic and orientation-a type of "radical Christianity" rooted in apocalypticism.

The Lamanite View Of Book Of Mormon History, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

History is one of the spoils of war. In great conflicts, the victors almost always write the history; the losers' story is forgotten. We remember the patriots' version of the American Revolution, not the loyalists'; the Northern account of the Civil War, not the Southern story of the War between the States. Ordinarily the winners' account of event commands our memories as completely as their armies controlled the battlefield. The reverse is true of the Book of Mormon. The Lamanites vanquished the Nephites and survived; yet by virtue of a record that went into the earth with them, the Nephites' …

Joseph Smith's Family Background, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Because the Latter-day Saints love and honor Joseph Smith, we wish to create for him a family background in perfect harmony with his later life as a prophet. Not that his parents had to be wealthy or well-educated, for we know they certainly were not, but we believe they must have been devout people who taught their son faith in the Christian religion and surrounded him with their love.

Treasure-Seeking Then And Now, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Last August I attended the BYU conference on the Mark Hofmann documents where I had an opportunity to reflect on what the documents meant to me. After searching my thoughts and testing my feelings, I came to the conclusion that they meant very little. They did not mean much when they first came out, and their fall from historical authenticity had little effect on me later. That may sound like a strange confession from one who was writing on the early life of Joseph Smith at the very moment the "Salamander" and 1825 Joseph Smith letters came to light, with …

The Book Of Mormon In Early Mormon History, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Brief excerpt from content in lieu of an abstract:

Was Joseph Smith a magician? That question has always lingered over the early history of Mormonism, but in recent years interest in the issue of magic has been renewed. The flurry of excitement over the short-lived Hofmann letters, with their evidence of a magical outlook in the 1820s, turned the attention of Mormon historians as never before to the broader scholarship of folk magic. There we have found a growing literature on an underground world of magical practices among Christians throughout the western world.

The Character Of Joseph Smith: Insights From His Holographs, Richard Bushman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

What kind of a man was Joseph Smith? His high calling as a prophet intensifies our curiosity about him as a person, but at the same time obscures him from view. As with so many public figures, the official stands in the way of the personal. We can picture him revealing the Lord's will, preaching to the Saints, and sitting in counsel, but we are also interested in him as a father, a friend, a husband, and a man.