Volume 18, The Leonard J. Arrington Lecture Series The Special Collections and Archives of Utah State University's Merrill-Cazier Library houses the personal and historical collection of Leonard J. Arrington, renowned scholar of the American West. The Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture annually hosts the presentation of current research by a leading scholar. Among the lecturers have been such notable historians as Thomas G. Alexander, Richard L. Bushman, Sarah Barringer Gordon, Howard Lamar, Jan Shipps, Donald Worster, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

The sources of Joseph Smith's literary works remain the most enigmatic aspect of Mormon history. Smith's "translation projects," the Book of Mormon, Book of Moses, the Inspired Bible and Book of Abraham, include prophecies, visions and allusions to the ancient biblical prophet Enoch. Before Joseph Smith began writing his visions of Enoch, Oxford professor Richard Laurence revived interest in the prophet through his 1821 English translation of the ancient text, the Book of Enoch, known as 1 Enoch. For decades, some historians have denied that Joseph Smith ever had access to the Book of Enoch, but many reserve the possibility that it directly influenced Smith's works. The author of this book documents the many similarities between the Book of Enoch and Smith's Mormon texts. Using source analysis and historical context, the author identifies the uniquely Mormon words, storylines, imagery and concepts that appear in Richard Laurence's translation of the ancient religious text.

In Standing Apart, fifteen Latter-day Saint scholars explore how the idea of a universal Christian apostasy has functioned as a category to mark, define, and set apart "the other" in the development of Mormon historical consciousness and in the construction of Mormon narrative identity.

The Jewish culture of the Hellenistic and early Roman periods established a basis for all monotheistic religions, but its main sources have been preserved to a great degree through Christian transmission. This Guide is devoted to problems of preservation, reception, and transformation of Jewish texts and traditions of the Second Temple period in the many Christian milieus from the ancient world to the late medieval era. It approaches this corpus not as an artificial collection of reconstructed texts--a body of hypothetical originals--but rather from the perspective of the preserved materials, examined in their religious, social, and political contexts. It also considers the other, non-Christian, channels of the survival of early Jewish materials, including Rabbinic, Gnostic, Manichaean, and Islamic. This unique project brings together scholars from many different fields in order to map the trajectories of early Jewish texts and traditions among diverse later cultures. It also provides a comprehensive and comparative introduction to this new field of study while bridging the gap between scholars of early Judaism and of medieval Christianity.

In this first volume of his magisterial study of the foundations of Mormon thought and practice, Terryl L. Givens offers a sweeping account of Mormon belief from its founding to the present day. Situating the relatively new movement in the context of the Christian tradition, he reveals that Mormonism continues to change and grow. Givens shows that despite Mormonism's origins in a biblical culture strongly influenced by nineteenth-century Restorationist thought, which advocated a return to the Christianity of the early Church, the new movement diverges radically from the Christianity of the creeds. Mormonism proposes its own cosmology and metaphysics, in which human identity is rooted in a premortal world as eternal as God. Mormons view mortal life as an enlightening ascent rather than a catastrophic fall, and reject traditional Christian concepts of human depravity and destiny. Popular fascination with Mormonism's social innovations, such as polygamy and communalism, and its supernatural and esoteric elements-angels, gold plates, seer stones, a New World Garden of Eden, and sacred undergarments-have long overshadowed the fact that it is the most enduring and even thriving product of the nineteenth century's religious upheavals and innovations. Wrestling the Angel traces the essential contours of Mormon thought from the time of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young to the contemporary LDS church, illuminating both the seminal influence of the founding generation of Mormon thinkers and the significant developments in the church over almost 200 years. The most comprehensive account of the development of Mormon thought ever written, Wrestling the Angel will be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the Mormon faith.

The Pearl of Greatest Price narrates the history of Mormonism's fourth volume of scripture, canonized in 1880. The authors track its predecessors, describe its several components, and assess their theological significance within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Four principal sections are discussed, along with attendant controversies associated with each. The Book of Moses purports to be a Mosaic narrative missing from the biblical version of Genesis. Too little treated in the scholarship on Mormonism, these chapters, produced only months after the Book of Mormon was published, actually contain the theological nucleus of Latter-day Saint doctrines as well as a virtual template for the Restoration Joseph Smith was to effect. In The Pearl of Greatest Price, the author covers three principal parts that are the focus of many of the controversies engulfing Mormonism today. These parts are The Book of Abraham, The Book of Moses, and The Joseph Smith History. Most controversial of all is the Book of Abraham, a production that arose out of a group of papyri Smith acquired, along with four mummies, in 1835. Most of the papyri disappeared in the great Chicago Fire, but surviving fragments have been identified as Egyptian funerary documents. This has created one of the most serious challenges to Smith's prophetic claims the LDS church has faced. LDS scholars, however, have developed several frameworks for vindicating the inspiration of the resulting narrative and Smith's calling as a prophet. The author attempts to make sense of Smith's several, at times divergent, accounts of his First Vision, one of which is canonized as scripture. He also assesses the creedal nature of Smith's "Articles of Faith," in the context of his professed anti-creedalism. In sum, this study chronicles the volume's historical legacy and theological indispensability to the Latter-day Saint tradition, as well as the reasons for its resilience and future prospects in the face of daunting challenges.

Anyone desiring to understand more about Mormon Christianity could

In the late 1820s a fiery minister in western Ohio converted nearly 1,000 proselytes to the Reformed Baptist Movement. But as these schismatics organized themselves into the Disciples of Christ, the Reverend Sidney Rigdon aligned himself with the Latter. day Saints, quickly becoming a member of the First Presidency. He served Joseph Smith loyally, even through a spat over Smith's romantic interest in Rigdon's teenage daughter.Next to Smith, Rigdon was the most influential early Mormon. He co-wrote the famous Lectures on Faith, championed communalism, and delivered significant early sermons, including the famous Salt Sermon and the Ohio temple dedicatory address. Following Smith's death, Rigdon led some 500 Latter-day Saints to Pennsylvania, where today his followers still number about 10,000 strong.Rigdon is a biographer's dream, writes Van Wagoner. Intellectually gifted, manic-depressive, an eloquent orator and social innovator but a chronic indigent, Rigdon aspired to altruism but demanded advantage and deference. When he lost prominence, his early attainments were virtually written out of the historical record. Correcting this void, Van Wagoner weaves the psychology of religious incontinence into the larger fabric of social history.