Buried Treasures: Reading the Book of Mormon Again for the First Time

by Michael Austin

Over the course of a year, Michael Austin--an English professor and literary critic who was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints--read the Book of Mormon for the first time in more than 30 years and wrote weekly blog posts detailing his insights and challenges with the text. The 44 essays in Buried Treasures, adapted from those original posts, show a trained scholar and literary critic grappling with the foundational text of his own religious tradition and finding surprising things that he had never seen before.

The essays in this volume draw a picture of the Book of Mormon that is rarely seen in the devotional writings of those who consider it a scripture or the polemical writings of those who consider it a fraud. For Austin, the Book of Mormon, whatever its origin, is a complex literary and spiritual text full of sophisticated narratives, recurring patterns, and big ideas that can sustain a high level of critical analysis. Buried Treasures shows what happens when a well-trained reader approaches this text with fresh eyes and an open mind and unearths the treasures that have been hidden in plain sight for almost 200 years.

Michael Austin is the author of seven previous books, including Rereading Job , We Must Not Be Enemies , and the bestselling textbook, Reading the Ideas that Matter. He is currently the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at the University of Evansville in Evansville Indiana.

“I discovered in the Book of Mormon a profoundly human record of people struggling with their relationship to God and to each other. It has all the messiness one would expect of a record compiled over a thousand years, with multiple narrative perspectives, biases, agendas, and blind spots—as the authors and narrators groped towards an understanding of the Kingdom of God. It is a book that can bear multiple readings from multiple perspectives without exhausting its treasures. And it is a book that Latter-day Saints should never be ashamed to place alongside the great books of the world’s traditions, both religious and secular.”
--Michael Austin, from the Introduction

Genres: Religion, Mormonism

260 pages, Paperback

Published January 6, 2020

About the author

I am an English professor who became an administrator who dreams of being a political pundit. After eleven years teaching English and writing books like this, I accepted a position as the Provost and Academic Vice President at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas. All the while, though, I dreamed of being a talking head. Soon after moving into administration, I started to write the Founderstein Blog, which examines contemporary politics from a historical perspective. My most recent book is That's Not What They Meant Reclaiming the Founding Fathers from America's Right Wing, a 75,000 word op-ed piece that treats the misuse of history by conservative politicians and media personalities.

Reviews

[Bryan Sebesta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Buried Treasures: Reading the Book of Mormon Again for the First Time is Michael Austin’s chronicle of him reading, for the first time after 30 years, the Book of Mormon. Having spent the better portion of that intervening span analyzing and teaching great literature as an academic, he admits he was afraid the Book of Mormon wouldn’t measure up to the great works he had spent so long studying and teaching. His report? “I was wrong... it is a book that Latter-day Saints should never be ashamed to place alongside the great books of the world’s traditions—both religious and secular.”

This chronicle is composed of 44 short chapters, written originally as blog posts, so they’re short and accessible; they range across the whole Book of Mormon. Some chapters read like sermons, drawing principles to live by from the text and with quotes I’d happily draw from when preparing a Sacrament talk. Other chapters show you some literary or rhetorical aspect of the Book of Mormon that makes you appreciate how rich the Book of Mormon really is. My favorites were “Alma and the Dunbar Number,” “Why Alma’s Mission Failed while Ammon’s Succeeded,” and “Why the ‘Anti-Nephi-Lehis’ Matter Today.” (That last one, especially, touched me deeply.)

But calling those favorites belies how much I loved the entire book. He has some great insights onto warfare in the Book of Mormon, including how nearly ever war was, in fact, a civil war. He walks you through the “typological” connections in the Book of Mormons, the allusions the Book makes to itself and the Bible, that enhance it richly. (The connections between Lehi’s Tree of Life Vision and the Fall story in the Bible was especially enlightening.) He dwells on how the Book would have been received by the faithful saints in the 1830s. And he shows you, too, how to read “against the grain” at parts: questioning some of Mormon’s decisions, especially when it comes to how Mormon depicts religious freedom and warfare. Far from diminishing my faith in the Book of Mormon, it enhanced it: for it showed that the Book is precisely what it claims to be, an inspired tragedy commissioned by God, but written in the limited perspective of a faithful but flawed historian, doing the best for his people and for the people he knew would inherit his book a millennium-and-a-half down the line, testifying of Christ.

I heartily recommend this collection. There were some observations I disagreed with, and several small grammatical mistakes, but the substance and range of the insights have expanded my view of the Book of Mormon immensely. It’s accessible and handy and always thought-provoking, and as I read the Book of Mormon each year, I’m going to be looking back to this book to see what buried treasures I might have missed.

[UPDATE: Michael Austin added "an additional chapter" through a blogpost here, called "Enos and the Joy of the Saints." It's an excellent addition.]

[Chad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Austin’s book, Buried Treasures: Reading the Book of Mormon Again for the First Time is a quick, insightful and though-provoking read about the Book of Mormon. The book began its life as a series of blog posts at By Common Consent, documenting some of Austin’s thoughts as he read the Book of Mormon in-depth for the first time in decades (after spending a significant amount of time during those decades focused on literary criticism and Biblical studies). The book, published by the By Common Consent Press earlier this year, takes the form of a collection of short essays that, as put by the author, are “not scholarly articles, or even well-thought-out personal essays; rather, they are the record of a deeply personal experiment upon the word.”

A bit of background on the author: Michael Austin is a former English professor who currently serves as an academic administrator in Evansville, Indiana. He has published several books and articles, with the subjects of political discourse in the United States of America and literary criticism of the Bible and Mormon Literature being some of the notable topics. A few of his published books include Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poem (Greg Kofford Books, Inc., 2014), That’s Not What They Meant!: Reclaiming the Founding Fathers from America’s Right Wing (Prometheus, 2012), and Reading the World: Ideas that Matter (W. W. Norton & Company). He also has written for the By Common Consent blog and Sunstone magazine over the years and received the Association for Mormon Letters Award in Criticism. As he notes in Buried Treasures, his training focused on reading “closely, intensely, looking for symbols and types and patterns,” which he brings to bear on the Book of Mormon with both spirituality and wit.

The essays in the book—by the constraints placed upon them by their origin as blog posts—are short, varied, and readable. In general, Michael Austin avoids the issue of the historicity of the Book of Mormon, focusing on the text itself. The author’s background is in literary criticism, so most often, chapters focus on discussing literary techniques used in the Book of Mormon (with types and type-scenes being a favorite topic) or rethinking certain narratives, characters, or groups based on clues in the text itself. This focus means that it bears some resemblance to Grant Hardy’s Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide (Oxford University Press, 2010). (Indeed, despite Austin’s statement that he “didn’t read any” of the “work on the literature, history, and doctrine of the Book of Mormon” published by previous authors so he didn’t spend his time responding “to other people’s experience with the text,” he does draw on Hardy’s work in several of the essays.) Other chapters in Buried Treasure take a more spiritual or pastoral turn in their reflections on the meaning of sections in the Book of Mormon, such as his reflections on how God is good while discussing the Isaiah chapters in 2 Nephi or the meaning of the baptismal covenant recorded in Mosiah. Yet other chapters reflect on connections between the Book of Mormon and the Bible or Biblical research. All told, the 44 short essays collected in the book cover a variety of topics as Austin explores the Book of Mormon.

One of the biggest highlights for me was Austin’s discussion of type scenes that the Book of Mormon shares with the Bible. For example, one essay discusses type scenes through the lens of similarities and differences between Alma the Younger’s dramatic conversion in the Book of Mormon and Paul’s dramatic conversion in the New Testament. While the experiences are similar enough that Austin points them out as type scenes, he also makes a case that the two individuals in question are quite opposite in where they are coming from. Ultimately, the conclusion he draws is that: “Despite very different starting positions, however, Alma the Younger and Saul end up having almost exactly the same conversion experience with exactly the same results. The two narratives, in this case, encourage us to universalize the possibility of conversion—to remove the possibility of context-specific interpretations and understand that real, meaningful change is ALWAYS possible for us and for those we love.” Many of his discussions of type scenes are among the most thought-provoking and interesting chapters in Buried Treasures.

In fair warning, I suspect that Austin’s efforts to challenge traditional readings of the Book of Mormon will bother some Latter-day Saints. For example, at the end of an essay that discuss shifting views about race and Lamanites as ancestors of all Native American, he states that: “We might profitably use this recent shift in what was once an important part of LDS theology as an invitation to show more humility about other things that seem unequivocally true today, but which may not seem quite so true tomorrow.” Given how much a statement of that sort undermines trust in the Church as it currently stands, some may find such assertions disturbing, and that is not the only time he makes a statement along those lines. Traditional heroes also often come out as flawed figures, villains are made more relatable, and sometimes readers are encouraged to go against what seems to be the author of the Book of Mormon’s intentions. For example, in discussing the war chapters of Alma, he states his feeling that: “We should read the story of Captain Moroni as a cautionary tale—even though Mormon clearly intended it to be a moral example—as so much of what he does cannot be reconciled with contemporary values that I am not willing to part with,” even though “everything Captain Moroni did was consistent with the moral understanding of his culture.” His point was that if “we want to use Book of Mormon as the basis for anything in our own lives, we have to be willing to evaluate the morality of its characters by the standards of the world that we want to live in” rather than merely trying to understand their world. His occasional treatment of prophets and heroes in the Book of Mormon in this vein might be viewed by some with umbrage. Hence, it is likely that some Latter-day Saints would object to Michael Austin’s conclusions in at least a few of his essays that are collected in Buried Treasures.

With a variety of topics and approaches among the essays collected in Buried Treasures, there is a lot to think about. Even though I didn’t always agree with Michael Austin’s conclusions, I appreciated that his essays made me think more carefully about the Book of Mormon. I also appreciated that Austin was able to do this in a way that felt like light reading. While I suspect that not everyone will appreciate the more challenging aspects of Michael Austin’s wrestle with the Book of Mormon, I really enjoyed exploring what he had to say from his “deeply personal experiment upon the word.”

[tiffany greene · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting perspectives and fascinating history lessons (the ones that talk about the parallels between Old Testament and Book of Mormon were of most interest to me). These thoughtful essays (it was written over the course of a year, with these essays as separate installments of his thoughts) are an easy read with some intellectual and spiritual food for thought.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of op-eds, really. They made me think, I agreed with much, disagreed with others, but, overall, this book achieved its aim: to get you to think about the messages of the Book of Mormon in a new way. Not the same old Sunday School questions and lessons, but with more thoughtfulness and curiosity.

I gave it 3⭐️ simply because I would have liked a more academic look, not just opinion.

But it was a good read and an important beginning to a thought process.