The Task of the Book of Mormon

Joseph Smith saw himself as a seer called to rescue the Bible from Protestantism. Smith’s first scripture, his Book of Mormon, repaired, expanded, and revised the Protestant Bible in order to tell America’s primeval history. This Mormon scripture pointed out and exploited the Bible’s weaknesses even as it relied on the infrastructure of that very Bible. The Book of Mormon demonstrated strength where the Bible showed weakness—access to original manuscripts, plain language, canonization, transmission, ecclesiastical direction, and translation itself. The Book of Mormon wasn’t ever intended to be an independent scripture, but instead to be integrated with the Bible it had transformed. Through the Book of Mormon, Smith translated the Bible from one world and vision of scripture to another, in a way that obliterated the temporal separation of the generations of human history. He became thereby a time traveler, with scripture as his time machine.

Killing Time Again

I have argued that even if time travel is metaphysically possible, there are some things a time traveler would not be able to do. I reply here to critics who have argued that my account entails fatalism about the past or entails that the time traveler is unfree or that she is bound by “strange shackles.” My argument does not entail any sort of fatalism. The time traveler is able to do many of the things that everyone else can do and is as free as any non-time-traveler. The time traveler is constrained only as we all are by the laws of nature. My argument shows only how strangely those constraints must operate if those laws permit time travel.