Item Detail
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27446
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1
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2
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English
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Mixing the Old with the New : The Implications of Reading the Book of Mormon from a Literary Perspective
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Journal of Book of Mormon Studies
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25
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1
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Provo, UT
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Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship
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85-92
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Grant Hardy has produced some of the most significant scholarship on the Book of Mormon in the past decade. Hardy represents, for twenty-first-century literary and text criticism on the Book of Mormon, what the late, great Dr. Hugh Nibley represented for philological and archaeological studies of the Book of Mormon in the mid- and late-twentieth century. Understanding the Book of Mormon serves as the follow-up to Hardy's groundbreaking edition of the sacred text, The Book of Mormon: A Reader's Edition, published seven years prior.
Since Understanding the Book of Mormon is itself over half a decade old, this review will only briefly address the content of the work, itself summarized and critiqued by various readers, and instead focus on the implications of Hardy's work for current theological issues within the larger Latter-day Saint tradition. Particular emphasis will be given to the ramifications of Hardy's exegetical approach for recent debates about the status and role of the Book of Mormon within the reviewer's own tradition, the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints).