FAIR

The death of “blood atonement?”

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My “blood atonement” article (“Dead Men Tell No Tales: The Blood Atonement Balance Sheet”) is up on the main web site:

/Misc/Dead_Men_Tell_No_Tales.html

It’s a long one (109 footnotes), but well worth the read, in my opinion. I think much of the material will be new for even those who are well-read in things Mormon. Much more so (in spades) for those who happily parade the standard “blood atonement” proof-texts from Journal of Discourses as devastating to Mormon claims that their prophets and apostles were divinely called and sanctioned.

This material is a very small part of some books I’m working on focusing on topics in Journal of Discourses. I have made my own detailed index on over a hundred topics (apologetic, Church-related, background, humor, etc.), which is much more detailed than the standard one published by BYU in 1959 (which listed only seven references for “blood atonement”).

Feedback is more than welcome . . .

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Comments

  2. McKay Jones says

    Thank you, Dave. I’ve updated it in the original post as well (although I couldn’t figure out how to make it a live link).

  4. Jared says

    Excellent article. There were plenty of quotes that I had not seen before, many that got me thinking about modern social issues that we face, such as illegal immigration.

    FYI – There were a number of individual characters that didn’t render correctly in my browser, you might look and replace them with the proper html codes for those characters, or make sure that the http headers specify the proper encoding for the file. Using html codes is probably the easiest.

  5. McKay Jones says

    Jared:

    I would be interested in your thoughts on modern social issues that reading this spurred. Would you mind elaborating?

    Thanks!

  6. Cassandra says

    Hi McKay,

    Fantastic article. I’d love it someone (maybe I will) would follow up with a more generalized survey of American Protestant rhetoric at the time, to tie the Mormon statements into the broader cultural acceptance of strident and vivid religious threats. Jonathan Edwards alone would be a goldmine. Do you know if an article like this has already been published?

  7. McKay Jones says

    I think that would be a valuable follow-up. Consider yourself commissioned!

    I have found that this is a helpful secondary approach with many other favorite topics as well.

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