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Joseph Smith, Thomas Paine, and Matthew 27:51b–53

2021; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 54; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/15549399.54.4.001

1554-9631

Grant Adamson,

Mormonism, Religion, and History

Despite its alleged antiquity, jutting back centuries before the Common Era, and its predominant setting in the Americas, the Book of Mormon contains several Matthean and Lukan additions to Mark made in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean. Scholarly consensus in biblical studies today is that the Gospel of Mark was written circa 65 CE, then Matthew and Luke were written in the 70s–90s approximately, and their anonymous authors both expanded and contracted Mark here or there as they reshaped it.1 One of these add-ons, Matthew 27:51b–53 KJV, describes the earthquake, rent rocks, opened graves, and resurrection of “many bodies of the saints” who “appeared unto many” in the aftermath of the crucifixion and Jesus’ own empty tomb. The retelling of this same story in the Book of Mormon is no accidental anachronism (Helaman 14:21–25; 3 Nephi 8:6–19, 10:9–10, 23:6–14). It reflects the way that the Book of Mormon intervened in early US debates about the reliability of the Bible.The chronological priority of the Gospel of Matthew over Mark was still assumed throughout most of the 1800s. But Matthew's added details about the resurrection faced a problem, nevertheless. Commentators had noted that the verses seemed to be missing from Mark and Luke as well as John. What was worse, this and other exegetical observations had been hijacked, and the passage derisively challenged, in Thomas Paine's Age of Reason; Paine wrote the three installments of the Age of Reason in France, but he published the third in New York City, and compendium editions were reprinted there too into the 1820s.2 Matthew 27:51b–53 was among the numerous passages in the Bible that Paine attacked. Many Christians felt that all of holy writ was under siege. Joseph Smith, a scrying treasure-hunter from Palmyra, New York, on the Erie Canal, came to the rescue, as did those more qualified. The unlikely apologist did not try to meet reason with more reason in the form of another learned commentary or refutation of the deist “Mr. Paine.” Instead Smith shored up revealed religion with more revelation in the form of another bible, one that was recorded by Israelite-American prophets and apostles, then buried in the ground for hundreds of years, and finally translated “by the gift and power of God” (Book of Mormon title page; Testimony of Three Witnesses; see also D&C 1:29, 20:8), hence safe from any manuscript corruption or translation error.3 Smith's solution to the problem of Matthew 27:51b-53 is a prime example of how he endeavored to save the Christian scriptures from skeptics.On the whole, the biblical apologetic thrust of the Book of Mormon should be obvious (1 Nephi 13:39–40; 2 Nephi 3:11–13; D&C 20:11), and the general thesis, that one of the functions of Smith's text was to defend the Old and New Testaments against threats such as deism, is quite widely accepted.4 There is also a longstanding tendency, however, for Smith's corroboration of the Bible to be minimized by his text's role as new scripture and its status as blasphemy against the Christian canon (see already 2 Nephi 29).5 My contribution builds on the general thesis and highlights the intricate if gaudy armor Smith hammered out to protect Protestant Christianity against Paine's battering of Matthew 27:51b-53, a passage they and their contemporaries thought was absent from the other gospels—not added to Mark by Matthew—on the venerably wrong assumption that Matthew was the first evangelist and an apostolic eyewitness.6To be explicit about what I myself am postulating, in this article I connect three literary occurrences that stretch from the late 1600s to the early 1800s, namely, (1) the writing and publication of a few influential British commentaries, (2) Paine's theological works, and (3) responses to the “arch-infidel” in England and America including the Book of Mormon.7 I understand these occurrences to have a loosely reactionary link, not just a heuristic connection. Whether directly or indirectly, the exegetes influenced Paine, who in turn provoked replies. As for Smith, the business of his sources is doubly fraught since he dictated his “translation” of the golden plates in what could be termed an altered state of consciousness while gazing into a folk-magic peep stone. Smith may have regularly relied on memory for his use of the Bible, although hefty quotations from the KJV strongly suggest that he had a copy in front of him now and then.8 At any rate, he was not interacting with the KJV in a vacuum; he was also interacting with the Christian and deist thought of his day. How, exactly, Smith was exposed to that thought, as a semi-educated farm laborer and “money digger,” will remain unknown. Much of the exposure may have been face-to-face in verbal exchanges with relatives and acquaintances during the years leading up to his dictation of the Book of Mormon. Even if he was not familiar with the very exegetical and apologetic literature that I cite, it is representative, and his text can be compared and contrasted with it to great value. I push more for Smith's familiarity with Paine which I think is unavoidable—whether or not he was always aware of responding to him, given the nature of religious experience.9Paine's challenge to Matthew 27:51b-53 did not come out of nowhere. English exegetes were both interrogating the pericope and defending it against infidels before him. Paine popularized and also radicalized an ongoing discussion and debate. In the British-American theological culture that Paine (1737–1809) and then Smith (1805–1844) shared, some of the most influential biblical commentaries were those by the Presbyterian nonconformist Matthew Poole (1624–1679), the Arminian Daniel Whitby (1638–1726), the Presbyterian nonconformist Matthew Henry (1662–1714), and the Congregationalist nonconformist Philip Doddrige (1702–1751).10 They were a mixed bag of potential vulnerability and antagonism to freethought.It was openly acknowledged in these commentaries that Mark, Luke, and John did not contain any accounts of the Matthean earthquake, rent rocks, opened graves, and resurrected saints at or around Jesus’ death. Moreover, a spate of perplexing interpretive issues was discussed but without clear resolution, chiefly who the nameless saints were, who saw them, whether they were raised from the dead prior to or following the resurrection of Jesus, and whether they had ascended to heaven or re-entered the ground to await the eschaton.11The exegetes also had to fight off incredulity about Matthew's unique account. As Henry described the problematic passage: “This matter is not related so fully as our curiosity would wish; for the scripture was not intended to gratify that; . . . . We may raise many inquiries concerning it, which we cannot resolve . . . . ” In sum: “We must not covet to be wise above what is written. The relating of this matter so briefly, is a plain intimation to us, that we must not look that way for a confirmation of our faith.”12 Henry's disapproval of curiosity and covetous wisdom was a tacit reply to probing rationalist critiques at the dawn of the Enlightenment, and his disclosure that Christian belief might need to be confirmed was an involuntary admission of their vigor.13 Doddridge, in his commentary, did not resort to laments. He struck back and was pleased to say that “a deist lately travelling through Palestine was converted, by viewing one of these rocks,” that is, the rent rocks of Matthew 27:51b, “which still remains torn asunder, not in the weakest place, but cross the veins; a plain proof that it was done in a supernatural manner.”14This was the stage onto which British expatriate Thomas Paine stepped as the first two parts of his Age of Reason were published in 1794 and 1795. He challenged Matthew 27:51b-53 in the second part, turning the observations of the biblical commentators against them at length.15 Paine devoted more space to those few verses than almost any others from the Old or New Testament. He began with the silence of the rest of the evangelists. Confusing Mark and Luke as apostles, he thought they and John could not have ignored the earthquake and the rending of the rocks; they had to be there with Matthew. More momentous was what happened after the tremor: An earthquake is always possible, and natural, and proves nothing; but this opening of the graves is supernatural, and in point to their doctrine, their cause, and their apostleship. Had it been true, it would have filled up whole chapters of those books, and been the chosen theme, and general chorus of all the writers; but instead of this, little and trivial things, and mere prattling conversations of, he said this, and she said that, are often tediously detailed, while this most important of all, had it been true, is passed off in a slovenly manner, by a single dash of the pen, and that by one writer only, and not so much as hinted at by the rest.16Paine then satirized the interpretive issues surrounding the appearance of the awakened dead in Matthew 27:52–53. He accused the first evangelist of being a liar and a poor one at that: The writer of the book of Matthew should have told us who the saints were that came to life again, and went into the city, and what became of them afterwards, and who it was that saw them; for he is not hardy enough to say that he saw them himself;—whether they came out naked, and all in natural buff, he-saints and she-saints; . . . whether they remained on earth, and followed their former occupations of preaching or working; or whether they died again, or went back to their graves alive, and buried themselves.Strange indeed, that an army of saints should return to life, and nobody know who they were, nor who it was that saw them, and that not a word more should be said upon the subject, nor these saints have any thing to tell us! Had it been the prophets who (as we are told) had formerly prophesied of these things, they must have had a great deal to say. They could have told us everything, and we should have had posthumous prophecies, with notes and commentaries upon the first, a little better at least than we have now. Had it been Moses, and Aaron, and Joshua, and Samuel, and David, not an unconverted Jew had remained in all Jerusalem. Had it been John the Baptist, and the saints of the times then present, every body would have known them, and they would have out-preached and out-famed all the other apostles. But instead of this, these saints are made to pop up like Jonah's gourd in the night, for no purpose at all, but to wither in the morning. Thus much for this part of the story.17Paine's challenge merged a large dose of mockery and a swift indictment for lying. But the two main features of his critique were already in the commentaries. First was the trouble of the missing earthquake, rent rocks, opened graves, and resurrected saints, all absent from Mark, Luke, and John. Second was the trouble of the limited information in Matthew, yielding the inquiries of who the awakened dead were, whom they appeared to, and where they went after their appearance.The skeptic did not just exacerbate a well-known exegetical problem, however. He also maintained, with a jeer, that if the risen saints were to be identified among the prophets and other heroes of the Old Testament, one of the options in the commentaries, there should be “posthumous prophecies” on record from these pre-Christians. Paine developed this more earnestly when he augmented the first two parts of his Age of Reason with a third, under the title Examination of the Passages in the New Testament, Quoted from the Old, and Called Prophecies Concerning Jesus Christ. It was published in New York City in 1807. As he rejected centuries of christological veiling over Jewish scripture, all the way back to the Gospel of Matthew's fulfillment citations, Paine inadvertently called for a retro-prophecy of the events in Matthew 27:51b-53 and of the darkness in Mark as well: Matthew concludes his book by saying, that when Christ expired on the cross, the rocks rent, the graves opened, and the bodies of many of the saints arose; and Mark says there was darkness over the land from the fifth hour until the ninth. They produce no prophesy [sic] for this. But had these things been facts, they would have been a proper subject for prophesy, because none but an almighty power could have inspired a fore knowledge of them, and afterwards fulfilled them. Since, then, there is no such prophesy . . . , the proper deduction is, there were no such things, and that the book of Matthew is fable and falsehood.18Paine's full critique of Matthew, then, hinged not only on the lack of multiple attestation for the evangelist's individual claims, nor solely on the questions of the identity of the resurrected saints and so forth, but also on the fact that, unlike Matthew's fulfilment citations, these events were not supported by Old Testament prophecy. To be sure, Paine did not believe any Jewish scripture had been fulfilled in the life of Jesus. He did not expect anyone to compose the wanting prognostication for Matthew 27:51b-53 either. That is what happened, though, some twenty years later, when another resident of New York, Joseph Smith, dictated the Book of Mormon as a translation of prophetic records from the ancient Americas, imagined to be Israelite-Christian. Smith's text would present a partial solution to the tripartite problem.19The Age of Reason was widely discussed. Between the publication of its three installments and the publication of the Book of Mormon, scores of biblical commentators and other defenders of holy writ were replying to Paine. The vast majority of them were responding to the first two installments, not the third, and only a portion sought to answer his challenge to the passage in Matthew 27: the Anglican Richard Watson (1737–1816), Bishop of Llandaff, Wales; the outwardly Anglican but inwardly evangelical Thomas Scott (1747–1821); and the Presbyterian Elias Boudinot (1740–1821), a US politician and future head of the American Bible Society.20 Their responses are valuable for the contrast they provide to Smith as much as for the comparanda.About Paine's contention that there should be more accounts of the opened graves and resurrected saints besides Matthew's, Bishop Watson assumed Matthean priority and said that the “omission” of events by the second and third evangelists “does not prove, that they were either ignorant of them, or disbelieved them.” The other synoptic writers’ selective retelling of Matthew 27 may be explained from their different audiences and purposes. If the people to whom the saints had appeared were themselves alive when Matthew wrote, subsequently they may have been deceased when Mark and Luke came to write—no need to reiterate the appearance, then. As for the fourth gospel, it was intentionally “supplemental.” Furthermore, the bishop averred, Matthew could not have been mendacious because the Jews he was writing to witnessed what did and did not transpire in Jerusalem; he could not have risked being constantly confronted, so the earthquake, rent rocks, opened graves, and resurrected saints had to be the truth.21 Scott applied similar logic to Mark, Luke, and John: “Matthew is generally allowed to have written before the other evangelists; had they not therefore credited his account of the miracles attending Christ's death, they would have contradicted it: for the circumstances he related were of so extraordinary and public a nature, that they could not have escaped detection, had they been false.”22 Boudinot likewise stated the events were “capable of immediate contradiction and refutation, had they not been known to be true.”23About Paine's contention that the Matthean account of the awakened dead itself should be longer, Watson affirmed: You amuse yourself . . . and are angry with Matthew for not having told you a great many things . . . ; but if he had gratified your curiosity in every particular, I am of opinion that you would not have believed a word of what he had told you. I have no curiosity on the subject: . . . . If I durst indulge myself in being wise above what is written, I must be able to answer many of your inquiries relative to these saints; but I dare not touch the ark of the Lord, I dare not support the authority of the scripture by the boldness of conjecture.24The bishop was shifting ownership of the inquiries from the exegetes to Paine and taking a page out of Henry's commentary with its disapproval of overly curious freethinkers. Speculation on the identity of the saints and so forth in the commentaries had become a liability that Paine exploited. Accordingly, Watson retreated to the position that asking to know too much was sinful. He cast Paine as petulantly brazen, whereas he himself was satisfied with the amount of information the apostle Matthew, or rather God, had given. Scott followed suit: Paine's questions were “degrading” of scripture, as if the arch-infidel did not get cues from previous biblical commentators.25 Boudinot said nothing of the interpretive issues per se, but he amplified Watson's point. Not only would Paine have no faith in Matthew regardless of the evangelist's specificity on the resurrected saints, he would be suspicious of the risen Lord too. Boudinot chastened and summoned him to repent for disbelieving the scriptural warrants that Jesus was the messiah—for instance, “the rending of the rocks (to be seen at this day),” a parenthetical allusion to the anecdote of the deist converted in the holy land. Then Boudinot stressed Paine's pride and skepticism hyperbolically: “For although Christ had appeared after his resurrection to every man in Jerusalem, nay even to all the then world, on the principle advanced in the Age of Reason, our author would not have been obliged to believe, because he himself had not seen him. But if the divine Saviour should even now appear to him,” Boudinot quipped, “as he did to another unbelieving Thomas, and show him his hands and his sides, I have as great doubts of his assent to the truths of the Gospel, as the disciples had of the Jews, who refused equal evidence.”26Together, these educated elites resorted to summersaults of intelligence in order to explain the missing material, and they contended that neither an increase in information from Matthew nor in revelation from Jesus would be effective because of Paine's bottomless skepticism. The unlearned Joseph Smith was more commonsensical than Watson, Scott, or Boudinot on this tally. In a concession to the skeptic, he would simply blame Jesus’ other disciples for forgetting to record the appearance and ministry of the saints. And the translator of the gold bible would exhibit scarcely any satisfaction with the limited information in canonical verse. In the Book of Mormon, the resurrected Jesus would appear to the Amerindians, not for the sake of rhetorical device, but in an alternate reality of salvation history, while deists would be vanquished at last, or so Smith grew to fantasize.27Paine's biting critique of revelation and revealed religion affected the Smith family, like other Americans. Per Lucy Mack Smith, the mother of Joseph Smith Jr., her Universalist father-in-law Asael so severely recommended the Age of Reason that in a disagreement over Methodism, Asael hurled a copy of it at her husband, Joseph Sr., and “angrily bade him read it until he believed it.”28 That was when the Smiths were living in Vermont. There is some indication, although from a hostile source, that Joseph Sr. may have acted on the endorsement and gone past what Asael hoped. The Green Mountain Boys, who supposedly knew Joseph Sr., later described him as having frequently said “that the whole bible [sic] was the work of priestcraft . . ., that Voltairs writings was [sic] the best bible then extant, and Thomas Paines age of reason [sic], the best commentary.”29Whatever the state of affairs with Joseph Sr. in Vermont before the family relocated to New York, and whatever lasting talks about Universalism and freethought the Smiths might have had as Joseph Jr. passed his adolescence in Palmyra, the Age of Reason was a documented topic of conversation in the village. For example, a newspaper column on “The Effects of Infidelity” was printed in the Palmyra Register in 1820, when Joseph Jr. was a religiously anxious minor: The following anecdote was related about eight[een] years ago in a sermon preached by the Rev. Alphonsus Gunn [1760–1806], at Lothbury Church [in London]. “I was lately (observed Mr. Gunn) called on to attend the death-bed of a young man at Hoxton [in East London]. On my entering the room, I found him in the greatest agony of mind. Thinking, perhaps, that it arose from that deep remorse sometimes attendant on the death bed of a sinner, I began to point him to Jesus, the Sinner's only friend, and to the glorious promises of the Gospel. When, with an agonizing look of despair, he replied, ‘Ah! Sir, but I have rejected the Gospel. Some years since, I unhappily read Paine's Age of Reason; it suited my corrupt understanding; I imbibed its principles; after this, wherever I went, I did all that lay in my power to hold up the Scriptures to contempt; by this means I led others into the fatal snare, and made proselytes to infidelity. Thus I rejected God, and now he rejects me, and will have no mercy upon me.’ I offered to pray by him, but he replied, ‘O, no, it is in vain to pray for me!’ then with a dismal groan cried out, ‘Paine's Age of Reason has ruined my soul,’ and instantly expired.”30Long after his own demise in New York City in 1809, the skeptic was still haunting both sides of the Atlantic. Britain and the US were not so distant from one another, the reported concerns of metropolitan churchmen in England from farming life in up-state New York. This column originated in a London-based periodical; within a year, it was in the Palmyra news.31The tale of the despairing deist was not the last of Paine's press coverage there. In 1826, another Palmyra newspaper, the Wayne Sentinel, printed a “Letter from Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin to Thomas Payne” about a draft of his that Franklin had read and counselled him to destroy for the sake of the youth, whose commitment to morality would not endure if he were to publicize his views on religion: “I would advise you,” Franklin had penned to an unspecified recipient, “not to attempt unchaining the tiger, but to burn this piece before it is seen by any other person.”32 Further newspapers in the state and elsewhere did more than imply that the letter was about Paine's infamous title; they prefixed stories to it asserting that the draft Franklin read was in fact the Age of Reason.33 New York divine William Wisner (1782–1871) enlarged the stories into a pamphlet, “Don't Unchain the Tiger,” amid the many anti-deist ephemera of the 1820s and ’30s.34Reverend Wisner himself spent the first half of the 1800s preaching across the western portion of the state and may well have visited Palmyra. In his memoirs, he related exchange after exchange with Universalists, infidels, male and female alike, even the rare atheist, and he told of denouncing the evils of freethought to his congregations. In one city, he organized an “infidel Bible class” by inviting the local deists and skeptics to supply him with written cases against scripture and in favor of skepticism. He then would read them aloud and dismantle them in front of his parishioners. The infidels also attended, and he kept the weekly class going a full season.35 In another town, he sermonized on “the influence of infidelity upon the moral character and happiness of men in this world,” and to demonstrate he outlined Paine's rise and fall. Afterward, he ascertained that “one of the young men who heard it . . . had been an admirer of the ‘Age of Reason’ and had adopted the sentiments of its author, but had gone home from hearing the sermon and burnt the book, and had taken up his neglected Bible to learn what he must do to be saved.”36 These vignettes, though packaged for consumption as literature, were nonetheless indicative of the revivalist atmosphere in western New York, as it was recalled by one Presbyterian reverend, for whom all Universalists were on the brink of spiritual ruin. In sum, the revivals were not only competitions between this or that style of Christianity; they were also battles against rural deism and skepticism.37Western New Yorkers who read the Franklin correspondence in the papers or in the many thousands of copies of Wisner's pamphlet could not have known that the letter itself was left unaddressed, and that it was not about the Age of Reason, which Paine wrote several years after Franklin died in 1790.38 Paine's promoters caught the miscalculation and decried the pamphlet, even the letter, as “fraud” and “forgery.”39 But this was likely inconsequential to most. It was too alluring to have Franklin, the very person who sponsored Paine's emigration to America, also repudiate his writing and call for the burning of the Age of Reason. Joseph Smith Jr. did one much better by having an ancient prophet and the resurrected Jesus respond to him nearly two millennia ago.40In 1827, the year after Franklin's letter “to Thomas Payne” was printed in the Wayne Sentinel, Smith acquired or fabricated the golden plates, if they ever existed other than as visionary objects, and he began to translate them.41 One of the ancient Amerindian prophets and apostles within their cast of characters is Samuel the Lamanite. In Smith's text, the Lamanites, named for Laman, the disobedient son of Lehi and brother of Nephi, are said to be the iniquitous branch of the Native Americans “cursed” by God with “black” or “dark” skin, whereas the other branch, the righteous Nephites, the scriptural record keepers, are “white,” “fair,” and “delightsome,” except for interludes when the racist trope is inverted to an extent (see 1 Nephi 12:23, 13:15; 2 Nephi 5:21, 30:6–7; Jacob 3:5–9; Enos 1:20; Words of Mormon 1:8; Alma 3:5–12; 3 Nephi 2:15–16; 4 Nephi 1:10; Mormon 5:15–24; Moroni 9:12). At the close of the first century BCE, Samuel preaches to the backsliding Nephites. His Lamanite standing and that of other dark-skinned proselytes serves to underscore the hardheartedness and disbelief of the paler visages.42Samuel prophesies of their doom if they do not repent, and he predicts several signs that will punctuate the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus—whose ministry the dwindling ranks of faithful Amerindians have been awaiting with conspicuous detail since their Nephite and Lamanite ancestors vacated Jerusalem and sailed to the Americas. Samuel declares that at the incarnation there will be a day with no night: “And behold, there shall be a new star arise, such an one as ye never have beheld” (Helaman 14:5; cf. Matthew 2:1–12).43 Then he pronounces that at the crucifixion there will be the opposite, the darkness that Paine doubted.44 The Lamanite prophet ups the ante from three hours in the synoptic gospels (e.g., Matthew 27:45) to three days, saying that the light will vanish when Jesus expires on the cross and will only be seen again at his resurrection (Helaman 14:20).45 Samuel also predicts the Matthean earthquake, rent rocks, opened graves, and resurrected saints, the final components of the retro-prophecy that Paine had unwittingly called for: And the earth shall shake and tremble. And the rocks which is [sic] upon the face of the earth, which is both above the earth and beneath, which ye know at this time is solid—or the more part of it is one solid mass—shall be broken up. Yea, they shall be rent in twain and shall ever after be found in seams and in cracks and in broken fragments upon the face of the whole earth, yea, both above the earth and beneath. And behold, there shall be great tempests. And there shall be many mountains laid low like unto a valley. And there shall be many places which are now called valleys which shall become mountains whose height thereof is great. And many highways shall be broken up; and many cities shall become desolate. And many graves shall be opened and shall yield up many of their dead; and many saints shall appear unto many. (Helaman 14:21–25)To bolster his prognostication, Samuel informs the Nephites that he has received it from one of God's heavenly messengers: “And the angel said unto me that many shall see greater signs than these, to the intent that they might believe—that these signs and these wonders should come to pass upon all the face of this land, to the intent that there shall be no cause for unbelief among the children of men—and this,” Samuel cautions, “to the intent that whosoever will believe might be saved and that whosoever will not believe, a righteous judgement might come upon them; and also if they are condemned, they bring upon themselves their own condemnation” (Helaman 14:26–29). When Samuel concludes his sermon, the Lamanite prophet is rejected by most of the Nephites, who are violently apostate, so he runs away to “his own country” where he teaches “his own people” (Helaman 16:1–7).At the turn of the era, as the messianic passages in Nephite scripture are finally being fulfilled, and as Samuel's prophecy of the sign of the incarnation is about to be accomplished, some believe; others do not. The skeptical Nephites plan to murder the faithful if the day with no night does not happen. It does, and the Matthean birth star sines forth, but that is not enough to convince everyone (3 Nephi 1:4–23). Thirty years later, once more there are “great doubtings and disputations” about the prophesied signs of the crucifixion and resurrection (3 Nephi 8:4). In a reversal of the past episode, God/Jesus sends catastrophes to slay the wicked for their unbelief. The lethal quaking of the earth and rending of the rocks lasts three hours, the darkness three days, a