Item Detail
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32785
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0
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3
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English
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I, Nephi
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Perspectives on Mormon Theology: Scriptural Theology
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Salt Lake City, UT
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Greg Kofford Books, Inc
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81-95
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"In my reading of this important first section [Nephi's writings] of the Book of Mormon, I consider, and accept, its purported history. Having done so, I consider the implications of how a man engaged in a harrowing and life-threatening enterprise might write his story differently over a period of thirty or forty years, how the passage of time might have modified the way he told his story. These people act in history, even as they record their own stories. People frequently retell their stories differently as time passes, selecting, revising, and justifying their accounts. Particularly when the years have passed and other witnesses have disappeared, written accounts tend to become bolder. Writers exaggerate. People make the stories they remember smoother and cleaner. They appropriate the experience of others. Historians privilege contemporary accounts over those written many years later, knowing that while even contemporary accounts are generally told to the benefit of the narrator, later accounts are less reliable. I am proposing that Nephi's intervention in American history to replace his earlier boyish account with a more mature, if disillusioned account of his youthful adventures, changes the Book of Mormon as we might have known it." [Author]