If you like reading history and biography, I think you should try a book called No Man Knows My History. It’s the first unauthorised biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. It’s beautifully written and very readable.
And it caused one heck of a stink when it was first published in 1945 and then updated in 1971, because the Mormon church absolutely hated it.
Fawn Brodie, the author, was raised as a Mormon herself but gradually became sceptical of their claims. So she turned to Smith as the founder and began to explore him historically. It took years of painstaking research and archival digging to retrieve the lost fragments of this mysterious man’s life.
Brodie was the first person to treat Smith as a man of his times, rather than a lofty figure set apart from the rest of humanity. The results were not flattering. But the book also set Mormonism into a bigger historical context of “enthusiastic”, non-conformist religion in the United States at the time.
Smith emerges from Brodie’s research as a charismatic, clever, and poorly-educated man who struggled to find his place in the world and among other people. He was part-psychic, part-conman, part-grifter, and part-true believer.
Looking at Smith’s life also meant looking more closely at Mormonism’s creation story of revealed golden tablets from heaven. It turns out that this story didn’t hold up at all. Up till then, no one then had given the story the close examination it needed. So the shock and unhappiness of many good people was understandable.
Today, some faithful Mormon scholars have come to recognise that Brodie did everyone a favour. But it took a while. This is a good time of the liturgical year to reflect on the evidence we have for the life and times of Jesus Christ and the foundation of the church.
Can the scriptural accounts of Jesus’ ministry and the early church really be trusted? I think they can.
The archaeological evidence is good. So is the constant unearthing of early fragments of the four Gospels, which are consistent with the versions we’re still using. So is the external evidence from pagan and Christian written sources outside the apostolic era, which are consistent with everything inside it.
The internal evidence is also very strong, including the variations in the passion and resurrection narratives in each Gospel. If this were all made up, why would you leave four different versions of the most important event in history unedited?
A made-up religion would have taken care of the gospels long ago and edited them into one seamless narrative with all the awkward bits smoothed over.
Brodie was able to show how Mormonism edited and improved on its own creation story over time, editing out the unflattering bits and making sure everyone believed the same homogenised version. But there’s no evidence that Christianity did this – although the temptation to edit scripture was already present in the time of the Book of Revelation, at the end of the first century (Rev 22:18-19).
At one stage there was a trend in Biblical scholarship claiming that the Gospels were written long after the events they described, and not by the evangelists who we believe wrote them. Instead, some writers speculated that they were all composed by a rather wispy sounding “Jesus community” who were trying to make sense of their own lives.
I still find this theory self-referential and Boomerish. The wispy Jesus community always sounded like it had felt banners in its churches. In reality, the first few centuries of the church’s existence were marred by persecution, heresies, and disruptions of all kinds.
No one had time to compose gospels – and especially not gospels that didn’t add up in their details. And I’m certain that if the wispy Jesus community had bothered to compose gospels in the first place, they’d have managed to write the same story once, rather than four different ones.
So I am quite happy with the authorship of the Gospels as we know them today. I’m also quite happy to believe that they were all composed before the end of the first century.
I think they are believable and robust. This is why I think you should also read St Luke’s racy sequel The Acts of the Apostles between now and Pentecost. It’s lively, real, and refreshing, telling a firsthand story that’s eminently believable.
Read it like a story, and you will be so thrilled – and you won’t regret it. It’s there that you will meet the real Jesus community, with not a felt banner in sight.
