Redaction: This explanation provides an interesting and rare glimpse into the process by which Mormon created his text. He seldom mentions how he decides to include or exclude some information. In addition to divine direction, doubtless other decisions were personal. In this case, Yahweh gave him explicit instructions that curtailed the material in the text. It helps us understand why Mormon did not record every word the Savior spoke when certainly he prized them above everything else. After all, he had been impressed to include Nephi’s small plates as a physical unit in his own book, quoted lengthy passages from the brass plates, and replicated full letters verbatim. If it had been his decision, he surely would have transcribed the Savior’s complete sermons.
As a result, we must attempt to understand why Yahweh instructed Mormon not to write words that were important enough to be spoken and important enough to be recorded in Nephi3’s record. We know that some items were too sacred to be recorded (3 Ne. 17:17), and naturally Mormon could not have passed them on. However, what had been written was significantly more voluminous than what ended up in his account.
Yahweh’s purpose in imposing this limitation was to “try the faith of my people.” Even understanding “trying faith” as a purifying process, “trying” requires stress. Muscles are built when they work against resistance. How would the limited text try our faith? Certainly many have disbelieved the Book of Mormon because it contains such obvious quotations from the King James Version. Some have pointed out the possible problems of the Sermon on the Mount as a literary whole in 3 Nephi, when the scholarly community sees it as a Matthean construction from traditional materials.
Nevertheless, the Savior’s appearance in the New World has been a comfort and source of faith for those who accept the Book of Mormon. For them, it is a point of faith, not a test of faith. Perhaps that is, in itself, the test. What do we see in the Savior’s word? If we see spiritual value, we gain spiritual insights. If we see only the textual scholar’s concerns, we begin to see darkness, and soon risk losing the text’s value.
Of course, this does not mean that we should not understand the scholar’s view. It is a question of perspective. The text can and should be analyzed with scholarly tools. The “test,” if it is one, is in making the presumptive decision that there is no explanation for apparent contradictions. These are issues of translation that properly belong to a discussion of translation—if we understand the text as a translation. The issue of whether it qualifies as a translation necessarily precedes any discussion of what type of translation it is. That is a question for scholarly analysis. Deciding that the text is not a translation because one assumes a particular type of translation creates a conclusion prior to analysis of salient data.