Mark D. Thomas

MARK D. THOMAS {[email protected]} is a former Scriptural Studies Editor of Dialogue and a contributor to a forthcom￾ing book, entitled The Mormon Annotated Isaiah.

Review: The Empty Space between the Walls Joseph M. Spencer. The Vision of All: Twenty-five Lectures on Isaiah in Nephi’s Record

Articles/Essays – Volume 51, No. 2

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Review: The New Descartes and the Book of Mormon Earl M. Wunderli. An Imperfect Book: What the Book of Mormon Tells Us about Itself

Articles/Essays – Volume 49, No. 3

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The Continuing Quest for the Historical Jesus

Articles/Essays – Volume 27, No. 4

In 1975 I enrolled in the divinity school at the University of Chicago, where I hoped to earn a Ph.D. under Norman Perrin, a distinguished British New Testament scholar. But a call I made at the same time to the head of the LDS Church Education System in Salt Lake City stopped me cold in my tracks. He told me that if I wanted to teach New Testament for the church I could do so with a Ph.D. in physics or family counseling— anything but a degree in New Testament studies. That attitude has created a vacuum in serious New Testament studies among Latter-day Saints. One way to fill this void is to become a member of the Westar Institute of Sonoma, California, whose goal, among others, is to expose the public to serious biblical scholarship. 

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Scripture, History, and Faith: A Round Table Discussion

Articles/Essays – Volume 29, No. 4

Participants

Todd Compton: Ph.D., classics, University of California, Los Angeles. Dean, Graduate Studies, Park College, Independence, Missouri; Director, Temple School Center, Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Independence, Missouri. 

Steven Epperson: Assistant Professor of History, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, specializing in American religious history and history of Christian doctrine. 

Mark D. Thomas: Scriptural Studies Editor, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. 

Margaret Toscano: Ph.D. candidate, comparative literature, University of Utah, Salt Lake City. 

David P. Wright: Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts.

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A Mosaic for a Religious Counterculture: The Bible in the Book of Mormon

Articles/Essays – Volume 29, No. 4

Dialogue 29.4 (Winter 1998):59–83
THE BOOK OF MORMON HAS OCCASIONALLY been portrayed as a deficient
first novel. Its characters appear flat and stereotypical; the plots and char￾acters seem to lack moral subtlety; and so on. Should we wonder that to￾day’s high literary circles ignore it?

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Form Criticism of Joseph Smith’s 1823 Vision of the Angel Moroni

Articles/Essays – Volume 35, No. 3

This paper will examine the vision or purported vision of the angel Moroni to Joseph Smith on the night of 21-22 September 1823, announcing the location of the gold plates containing the Book of Mormon. The 1839 history of Joseph Smith contains by far the most detailed description of the vision, but there are details in this account which could not have occurred prior to 1834. The process used here (as in New Testament “form criticism”) will be to distinguish the original historic core of the visionary narrative and experience from later anachronistic redactions. Finally, if Joseph Smith did see what he claimed to see on that night, what does that represent—a dream, a representation of a being actually in his room, an altered state of sight, etc.? 

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On Balancing Faith in Mormonism with Traditional Biblical Stories: The Noachian Flood Story

Articles/Essays – Volume 40, No. 3

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