The Pioneer Tradition and the True Church

The Pioneer Tradition and the True Church

The Israelites always looked back upon the days of the wandering in the wilderness as the true schooling of the Chosen People and the time when they were most nearly fulfilling the measure of their existence. The concept of man as a wanderer and an outcast in a dark and dreary world is as old as the records of the human race. The desert has always had two aspects, that of refuge and asylum on the one hand, and of trial and tribulation on the other; in both respects it is a place where God segregates and tests his people. Throughout the history of Israel zealous minorities among the people have gone out into the wilderness from time to time in an attempt to get back to the ways of the patriarchs and to live the old Law in its purity, fleeing from Idumea, or the wicked world. This tradition remained very much alive among the early Christians, and is still a part of the common Christian heritage, as can be seen from numerous attempts of Christian groups to return to the ways of Israel in the desert. Only the restored Church of Jesus Christ, however, has found itself in the actual position of the ancient saints, being literally driven out into the desert.

The Pioneer Background, a Book of Mormon Tradition

Time and again the Book of Mormon people were admonished by their leaders always to remember the trials and deliverances of Abraham in the wilderness, of the children of Israel in the Exodus, of Lehi in his wanderings, and of the tribulation and release of various wandering saints and ancestors in the New World.¹ This is another example of the significant timing of the Book of Mormon, for none knew at the time of its appearance that the saints of the new dispensation would soon be continuing that great tradition of tribulation and triumph in the wilderness. The Book of Mormon was the best preparation and training manual for what was to come.

Recently scholars have become aware as never before of the importance and significance of the wilderness and the wandering in the religious teachings both of ancient Israel and the primitive Christian church. A number of important studies have appeared on the subject, and these supply a welcome commentary and confirmation for the rich fund of information that the Book of Mormon gives us about the ways of the wilderness.

The Hebrews and the Wandering

It has often been pointed out that the Hebrews always idealized the desert life as the good life. For the prophets of Lehi’s time, the years of Israel in the wilderness were in spite of all hardships “Israel’s ideal time,” when the people were nearer to God than ever before or after. It was to recapture the spirit of that time that Jonadab ben Rekhab and his followers, fleeing from “paganizing influences in law and religion,” settled in the desert some hundred years before Lehi.² The idea was much older than that, however. “The narrative of the exodus,” writes Daube, “is dominated by the concept of God as go’el, ‘redeemer,’ of the nation, as the mighty relative or legitimate owner who enforces his right to recover a member of the family or property subjected to foreign domination.”³ That is, the Exodus was not only a real event, but also “a type and a shadow of things” (Mosiah 13:10) representing both escape from the wicked world and redemption from the bondage of sin.

Man the Outcast

Now the idea that this life is a pilgrimage through the desert did not originate with the Christians or even the Jews; it has been the religious memory of the human race from the earliest dispensations of the Gospel. The apocryphal writings are full of it, and the great antiquity of the tradition they report may be judged from Haldar’s study of the oldest known temple texts—those of the Sumerians. The religious activity of the Sumerians centered about a ritual drama that took place at the temples (built for that purpose) at the New Year, celebrating and dramatizing the creation of the world, the fall of man, the redemption and resurrection. The ritual drama began by depicting the original home of man as a Garden of Eden, “a beautiful place, adorned with greenery,” in which the hero, the father of the race, resided; next “the enemies enter the edin [for such the Sumerians called the place], destroying and carrying off the god to another place, also called edin.”⁴ Edin is thus the world before and also after its transformation, when it becomes a dark and dreary place: “We meet with a kind of ‘exodus’ into the desert as an equivalent to the descensus ad inferos,” in which man becomes a homeless wanderer in a land of desolation,⁵ a place not to be confused, however, with the underworld or place of the dead.⁶

As Halder summarizes it,

At the beginning we meet with the ‘steppe’ flourishing with verdure being the pasture of the herds. Then, the enemies from the desert enter the god’s field, destroy it, and make it a desert; at this moment the god descends to the Nether World. Then, the change occurs, and finally, the god’s triumph over his enemies and his return to life are celebrated, the field again becoming the flourishing dwelling-place of the cattle.⁷

What we should notice here is not the important resurrection theme, or the Garden of Eden motif, or the appearance in the earliest known human records not only of an “eschatology of woe” but also of a millennial hope and “eschatology of bliss,” but the specific reference to this world as a desert. Man has lost his paradise and though he shall regain it eventually through the sacrifice of the hero who overcomes death, he must live meanwhile as an outcast in a dark and dreary place. In the greatest Sumerian epic, man is represented by the wandering and homeless hero Gilgamesh (often identified by scholars with Adam), who travels through a dark desert in search of the water of life and the plant or tree of immortality (of which a serpent deprives him). Hundreds of parallels to this have been found in folklore and ritual literature everywhere; it is the great heritage of the whole human race.⁸

The Desert’s Two Faces

The desert has two faces: it is a place both of death and of refuge, of defeat and victory, a grim coming down from Eden and yet a sure escape from the wicked world, the asylum alike of the righteous and the rascal. The pilgrims’ way leads through sand and desolation, but it is the way back to paradise; in the desert we lose ourselves to find ourselves. These familiar paradoxes are literal as well as figurative: “It may be said, without any exaggeration,” wrote the celebrated Burckhardt from much personal experience, “that the poorest Bedouin of an independent tribe smiles at the pomp of a Turkish Pasha.” In the midst of poverty that we can hardly imagine, the man of the desert deems himself rich. “Among themselves,” says Burckhardt, “the Bedouins constitute a nation of brothers,” but only as they keep to the desert: “In proportion as they reside near to a town, an avaricious spirit becomes more general among them.”⁹ Our Mormon missionaries have often noted that the same thing holds true of the Indians among whom they have worked: the farther from the highway they live, the higher are their moral standards and the purer their traditions. “The Bedouins are sober,” a recent observer reports, “because they cannot be otherwise. Since they must carry everything with them, they must ration everything, always counting on the possibilities of being held up at every departure and every arrival. They accept their lot because they know no other.”¹⁰ There is no escape from the discipline of desert life, and no compromise with city ways: there is always trouble when the two come into contact.

The Desert as an Escape

Bitter experience has taught the desert people that the world envies and resents their hard-bought freedom. The mass and inertia of a city civilization is a terrible thing: since none can stand against it, the only hope of opposing it lies in escaping from its reach. The skill of the Arabs in “silently stealing away,” dissolving like a wraith into the trackless sands, is proverbial. So is their quick and deadly reaction to the presence of strangers in their midst. Robbed at every turn by the smooth manipulators of the city, the Arabs can hardly be blamed for thinking that robbery is the normal form of human economy and making themselves masters of the craft. Upon turning his talents to business, many a simple desert sheik has displayed a capacity that seemed nothing short of genius. Since their land is unproductive, these people must deal in goods that they neither produce nor consume; they become carriers and conveyors, skillful middlemen artfully turning every situation to their own advantage. The Arabs feel perfectly justified in raiding the caravans which do not buy their protection. There is nothing cynical about their ancient and established blackmail, which is simply the application in their own country of business methods learned in the city—they sell what they have to sell for all they can get.¹¹ If the outside world forces itself upon them, the outside world must pay the price, for they know that the only hope of preserving their integrity is to avoid contact with the outside world altogether, even at the risk of appearing morbidly anti-social.

Volumes have been written on the pure and noble character of the Bedouin in his native state. “I was inclined in the prime of my past life,” writes an ancient poet, “to make my residence among the people of the desert, in order to acquire their high-minded temperament, and their [pure dialect of the] Arab language.”¹² Both are very hard to find, and totally beyond the reach of the short-time visitor: “In order to form a really good estimation of Arab character, it would be necessary to live in these remote districts for many years, following the migrations of one of the great tribes.”¹³ One can no more get to know these people by casual contacts in and around the towns than one can get to know our Indians by talking to them in trading posts. Theirs is a secret and hidden life to which access is only possible for one who is willing to share that life all the way.

Thus it is no exaggeration to say that the dwellers in the wilderness are utterly removed from the ordinary affairs of men. When “the world” becomes too much for the Arabs, “they withdraw into the depths of the wilderness, where none can follow them with hopes of success.”¹⁴ This suggested to Harmer that the biblical term “dwelling deep, which Jeremiah recommends to some Arab tribes (Jeremiah 49:8, 30), means this plunging far into the deserts; rather than going into deep caves, and dens, as commentators suppose.”¹⁵ To this day the proximity of the desert to the town “at the best of times . . . hampers the government by offering a refuge and recruiting ground to all the enemies of order.”¹⁶ But fleeing into the wastes, which from the point of view of the city people is the act either of insane or criminal persons, all such refugees being lumped together as outlaws,¹⁷ has been the resort of the righteous as well as the wicked from the beginning: “Come out of her, O my people! Partake not of her sins lest ye partake of her plagues!” (See Revelation 18:4).

Come Out of Her, O My People!

Careful studies of the apocryphal writings have revealed that in olden times the Jews believed that even the Ten Tribes “in order to be able to live the Law without molestation, resolved . . . to depart from the society of mankind and migrate in terram aliam, that is, to the Other World . . . ‘in a land beyond, where no member of the human race had ever before lived.’“¹⁸ Such was certainly the case of the Jaredites, who at the beginning of history were ordered to leave the wicked and fallen world of the Tower and betake themselves “into that quarter where there never had man been” (Ether 2:5). The Rekhabites who went out into the desert before Lehi’s day are typical of the back-to-the-wilderness movements among the Jews in every age, the paritsim, or “those who separated themselves from the nation,” and were viewed accordingly as traitors and outlaws by “the Jews who were at Jerusalem.”¹⁹ Lehi could never have gone back to Jerusalem even if he had wanted to. In 1 Maccabees 2:29 (written about 175 B.C.), we are told that “at that time many who were seeking after righteousness and judgment went down into the desert [or wilderness] to settle, with their children and their wives and their property, being sore oppressed by the evils of the time.”²⁰ In the Dead Sea Scrolls we have the contemporary records of just such a community. Another such were the Ebionites, who from their teachings have the peculiar appearance, even as the Dead Sea people and Lehi’s own community do, of being both Christians and Jews at once.²¹ From the Talmud we learn that any Jew was free to take the Nasir oath that bound him to observe the severe and simple ways of Israel in the wilderness—a way of life that never ceased to appeal to individuals and groups.²²

“Idumea, or the World . . . “

In Jewish tradition the pious man who flees to the desert is represented by Elias, according to Käsemann, “as the counterpart of Adam, the sum and type of all righteous souls,” as well as the pattern of the high priest. This Elias-Adam, the great high priest, is a stranger on the earth, or “wicked Idumea,” where only his holy office and mission enable him to survive at all, and where when that mission is completed he is put to death by the wicked.²³ Idumea is the desert to the south of Judaea, where Lehi began his wanderings as an outcast, having been “driven out of Jerusalem”—a classic place both of suffering and of temptation. In using the expression “Idumea, or the world,” the Lord opens his book of revelations for this last dispensation by reminding us that we too are travelers and outcasts in the wilderness.²⁴

Käsemann begins his remarkable study of the Christian community of ancient times as God’s people wandering in the wilderness by observing that a state of homeless migration is the “normal manner of existence of those who are the bearers of revelation.”²⁵ The early Christians, he says, regarded themselves as wholly led by revelation: for them everything is directed from the other side; their whole life is oriented towards the epangelia, the promise, which is the goal of their journeyings. Their life and mission on earth was for them “a confident journeying” from a heavenly past to a heavenly future,²⁶ or in the words of the apostolic fathers and the Dead Sea Scrolls, “The way of light is out of one eternity and into another.”²⁷ Käsemann further notes that this way through life was one set out in God’s plan from the beginning of the world, and though its continuity has often been broken by the wickedness of man, “God constantly restores it to earth by his Word, as at the beginning.” By this way the saints must walk while they are in the earth, their life here being an apodemia, both figuratively (as in the Jewish philosopher Philo) and literally, i.e., a temporary sojourn in a strange land.²⁸ Such being the case, the journey in the wilderness is, in the primitive Christian view, God’s special way of training and educating his people. As they travel through the wilderness they are led and sustained by revelations from on high, exactly as Alma describes it (Alma 13:23); yet they are also given an earthly leader, who is properly designated as the high priest.²⁹ Like the early Hebrews and the later Jews, the first Christians thought of themselves as walking in the ways of their spiritual ancestors, “a band of homeless saints passing over the earth in search of their heavenly home.”³⁰

It is not surprising, then, to find the Dead Sea sectaries organized in camps in deliberate imitation of Israel in the desert,³¹ or to learn that many scholars see in John the Baptist, the voice in the wilderness, the surest link between those sectaries and the first Christians.³² Some have detected wandering Israel in the organization of the apostolic church, in which all the general authorities “received nomadic apostolate.”³³ John’s description of the church as a woman who flees to the wilderness always captivated the imagination of later churchmen, who never knew quite what to make of it.³⁴

Attempts to Return to the Old Ways

Just as pious Christians have always looked for “letters from heaven” and willingly accepted forgeries when the real article has failed to appear, so Christian communities in every century have made determined attempts to get back to the ways of the wilderness and the wandering, and not hesitated to produce by artificial means the conditions and surroundings necessary to put themselves in a situation resembling that of Israel in the desert of the Exodus. Like the Jewish sectaries before them, enthusiasts of the Christian monastic movement diligently sought out the wildest deserts they could find as the only proper setting for a way of life pleasing to God.³⁵ In the same spirit the pilgrims of the Middle Ages inflicted upon themselves all the hardships of wandering in strange lands and thirsty deserts in the endless search for a heavenly Jerusalem,³⁶ while in modern times Protestant sects have attempted to relive at their camp meetings the very life of ancient Israel on the march. These and many like practices bear eloquent testimony to the deep and abiding influence of the wandering and the desert in the Christian and Jewish traditions. Throughout the whole course of the history of the Christian churches, one detects the powerful working of the conviction that God’s people must always be travelers in the wilderness, both literally and figuratively.

The Real Church in the Real Wilderness

While some groups such as the Quakers and Pilgrim Fathers have been driven into the wilderness against their will—though always with a measure of calculation on their part—one church alone has had the honor of resembling Israel on the march in all details without having to resort to any of the usual artificial devices and theatrical props.

The parallels between the history of the restored Church and the doings of the ancients are so numerous and striking that even enemies of the Church have pointed them out again and again—what writer has not compared Brigham Young to Moses, for example? But I think in the case of the Latter-day Saints these resemblances have an extraordinary force, and that, for two main reasons: (1) that they are not intentional and, (2) that they actually are the fulfillment of modern-day prophecy.³⁷

The prophecy in question is found in the Doctrine and Covenants 49:24—25:

But before the great day of the Lord shall come, Jacob shall flourish in the wilderness, and the Lamanites shall blossom as the rose. Zion shall flourish upon the hills and rejoice upon the mountains, and shall be assembled together unto the place which I have appointed.

It is significant that all three of these “chosen people” were to suffer and dwell in the wilderness before the days of their rejoicing. The trials and tribulations of Zion in a very real wilderness in the remotest regions of the earth were matched by those of the Lamanites, driven from their lands and reduced to the last extremes of poverty and hardship in miserable and out-of-the-way tracts of wood and desert, and even more closely resemble the untold labors and dangers of the heroic settlers in the barren wastes of modern Palestine. All this is a sequel and vindication of the Book of Mormon, binding the Old World and the New together in a single divine economy, as the prophets foretold.³⁸ The principal actors of the mighty drama are still the descendants of Lehi on the one side and the children of “the Jews . . . at Jerusalem” on the other, and the scene of their trials and victories is still as ever the desert.

A Constant Theme

One often hears it suggested that perhaps the Latter-day Saints overdo the “pioneer business.” Yet as far as can be discovered the true church in every age has been one of pioneers—wanderers and settlers in the wilderness in the most literal sense. And in every age the church has been careful to preserve and recall in the midst of its own trials the pioneer stories of its own early days and of still earlier dispensations, thousands of years ago. If the stories are all strangely alike that is no accident: we can do no better than to “liken all scriptures unto us,” as did Nephi of old, “that it might be for our profit and learning” (1 Nephi 19:23).

Questions

1. Is the recollection and admiration of the deeds of pioneer ancestors peculiar to the church of this dispensation alone?
2. Anciently what was the purpose in rehearsing those deeds and recalling those tribulations?
3. Why did the Hebrews always look back upon the years of the wandering as “Israel’s ideal time”?
4. How old is the religious concept of man’s life as a wanderer in the wilderness? What theories might account for its origin?
5. What does the desert have to offer to the righteous? To the wicked?
6. How was the tradition of the desert kept alive among the more pious members of the Jewish society?
7. How do desert conditions enforce an austere and abstemious way of life?
8. What is there in the New Testament to illustrate the early Christian concept of life as a pilgrimage?
9. Name some instances of attempts by Christian groups to revive the old life of Israel in the wilderness.
10. What is singular about the relationship of the Latter-day Saints to the wilderness? What aspects of their flight to the West are peculiarly like those of ancient times?
11. Is the pioneer theme overemphasized in the Church today?
12. What is the significance of the flight-into-the-wilderness theme for modern Americans? Where do we go now?

Notes

1. See “The Flight into the Wilderness,” ch. 11 above.
2. Georg Molin, Die Söhne des Lichtes Zeit und Stellung der Handschriften vom Toten Meer (Vienna: Herold, 1954), 140.
3. David Daube, “Concerning Methods of Bible-Criticism, Late Law in Early Narratives,” Archiv Orientální­ 17 (1949): 88.
4. Alfred Haldar, The Notion of the Desert in Sumero-Accadian and West-Semitic Religions (Uppsala: Lundequistska, 1950), 14, 25.
5. Ibid., 5.
6. Ibid., 25—26.
7. Ibid., 68.
8. See Hugh W. Nibley, “Strange Ships and Shining Stones,” IE 59 (September 1956): 672—75; below, chapter 26. Herbert Braun, “Der Fahrende,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 48 (1951): 32—38, comparing the Greek with the scriptural wandering hero. For a wide scope of comparisons, Vladimir Vikentiev, “Le retour d’Ulysse du point de vue égyptologique et folklorique parallèles anciens et moyen ageux,” Bulletin de l’Institut d’Egypte 29 (1946—47): 189—219. The reader may wonder why we cite pagan rituals and legends to illustrate Jewish, Christian, and Book of Mormon teaching. In this case it is the great and undoubted antiquity of the sources that makes them significant. We do not pretend for a moment that these people had the true Gospel, but we do believe, as Eusebius maintained long ago in the opening sections of his Church History I, 2—4, that all the ancients possessed fragmentary bits and distant memories of the true Gospel. This teaching is brought out by President John Taylor in The Mediation and Atonement (Salt Lake City: Stevens & Wallis, 1950). Today scholars everywhere realize for the first time that the scriptures must be read along with all the other old sources. Thus Cyrus Gordon tells us that the Old Testament must be studied “in the light of parallel literatures from the pagan forerunners and contemporaries of the Hebrews, in Bible Lands,” if it is to be rightly understood. Cyrus H. Gordon, Ugaritic Literature (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1949), 7. “The Bible strikes root into every ancient Near-Eastern culture,” writes Albright, “and it cannot be historically understood until we see its relationship to its source in true perspective.” William F. Albright, “Review of Books,” JAOS 64 (1944): 148. Today, says another scholar, “the Old Testament horizon must be expanded and its history interpreted against this larger background.” John Paterson, “The Hurrians,” in C. J. Mullo Weir, ed., Studia Semitica et Orientalia 2 (Glasgow: Glasgow University, 1945): 97. Theodor Haering, “Das Alte Testament im Neuen,” Zeitschrift für Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 17 (1916): 222, goes so far as to suggest that all ancient literature, sacred and profane, Jew and Gentile, may be regarded and should be read as pages in a single book. All this should give great impetus to Book of Mormon study. In “The Apocrypha and the Book of Mormon,” and “Old World Ritual in the New World,” chs. 16 and 23 below, we make extensive use of pagan sources as evidence for the Book of Mormon. Just as we find in the writings of many churches today much that is of value in illustrating and proving the true Gospel, which they do not possess, so the pagans of old can teach us a great deal.
9. John L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys (London: Colburn & Bently, 1831), 1:360, 363, 367.
10. Ibid., 367, 363.
11. Victor Müller, En Syrie avec les Bédouins (Paris: LeRoux, 1931), 182—83.
12. Al-Ḥārīrī of Basra, Makamāt, tr. Theodore Preston (London: Madden, 1850), 270—71. These are the opening lines.
13. Claude R. Conder, Tent Work in Palestine (London: Bentley, 1878), 2:272.
14. Thomas Harmer, Observations on Divers Passages of Scripture . . . by Means of Circumstances Mentioned in Books of Voyages and Travels into the East, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Johnson, 1776), 1:101: “When the Arabs have drawn upon themselves such a general resentment of the more fixed inhabitants of those countries, that they think themselves unable to stand against them, they withdraw into the depths of the great wilderness.”Ibid., 102, quoting Jeremiah 49:8, 30; Judges 6:2; 1 Samuel 13:6; Jeremiah 41:7, 9; Isaiah 31:6; Ezekiel 3:5—6; and noting confirmatory passages from writers in the time of the Crusades.
15. De Lacy O’Leary, Arabia Before Mohammed (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench & Trubner, 1927), 3.
16. The city people knew the desert from personal contact—and loathed it. The thought of one living his whole life there was simply unendurable. A famous Egyptian text, the Teaching of Merekaure says (Sect. 21): “Behold the wretched Aamu [desert-dweller, Asiatic], toilsome is the land wherein he is. . . . He dwells not in a single place, but his legs are [ever] driven wandering (?),” cited by Alan H. Gardiner, “New Literary Works from Ancient Egypt,” JEA 1 (1914): 30. Cf. Ludwig Keimer, “L’horreur des egyptiens pour les démons du desert,” Bulletin de l’institut d’egypte 26 (1943—44): 135—47. The attitude of Lehi’s family on the subject is very plainly stated. See below [211—14].
17. Hugo Gressman, “Der Ingang ins Paradies,” Archiv für Orientforschung 3 (1926):12, citing 4 Ezra 13:40—42 and Deuteronomy 29:27.
18. Robert Eisler, Iesous Basileus ou Basileusas (Heidelberg: Winter, 1930), 1:14, 479—81, 512—14, for the meaning of the words; 2:267, 493, 571, 575, 787, for the charges against them.
19. Exactly as in other cases “the king’s men” spied on them and his armies tried to exterminate them. Ibid., 2:30—31; cf. Mosiah 18:32—34, and below [156].
20. Heinrich H. Graetz, “Die Ebioniten des Alten Testaments,” MGWJ 18 (1869): 1—20, 49—71, 115—16. He identifies the Ebionites with the Levites, 13, and even the Prophets, 7.
21. Molin, Die Söhne des Lichtes Zeit und Stellung der Handschriften vom Toten Meer, 144. The Nasirite vows and ways of life have been the subject of much investigation. The identity of the word with Nazarene has often been insisted on. The Nazarenes were, strictly speaking, those who had taken secret holy vows and entered into sacred covenants.
22. Ernst Käsemann, Das wandernde Gottesvolk (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1957), 137—38. For English translation, see Ernst Käsemann, The Wandering People of God, tr. Roy A. Harrisville & Irving L. Sandberg (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984), 212—15.
23. D&C 1:36. Idumea was both the classic land of rebellion, Josephus, Wars of the Jews 2:55; Eisler, Iesous Basileus ou Basileusas 1:512—13, and the home of false priests and royal pretenders, the most notable of whom was Herod the Great. “The Idumeans were not originally Jews,” says an ancient fragment, quoted by Eisler, ibid., 1:343, n. 1, “but were Phoenicians and Syrians who had been overcome by the Jews and forced to accept circumcision.” Cf. Lauri Iktonen, “Edom und Moab in den Psalmen,” Studia Orientalia 1 (1925): 78—83; Fritz Hommel, Ethnologie und Geographie des alten Orients (Munich: Beck, 1926), 182—83, 594, on Idumea as the wicked world.
24. Käsemann, Das wandernde Gottesvolk, 5—8; cf. The Wandering People of God, 17—22.
25. Käsemann, Das wandernde Gottesvolk, 11, 15, 24; cf. The Wandering People of God, 25—26, 30—32, 44—45.
26. Thus, Manual of Discipline (1QS) 2:1; Barnabas, Epistola Catholica (Catholic Epistle) 18, in PG 2:775—78.
27. Käsemann, Das wandernde Gottesvolk, 27—29, 45—47; cf. The Wandering People of God, 48—51, 74—79.
28. Käsemann, Das wandernde Gottesvolk, 51; cf. The Wandering People of God, 84—86; on wandering as an education device, Das wandernde Gottesvolk, 141, 147; cf. The Wandering People of God, 218—19, 226—27; the greatest of all these High Priests was Jesus, of whom Adam was a type, Das wandernde Gottesvolk, 156; cf. The Wandering People of God, 239—40.
29. Käsemann, Das wandernde Gottesvolk, 156; cf. 37; and The Wandering People of God, 239—40; cf. 62—64.
30. André, Dupont-Sommer, The Dead Sea Scrolls, tr. E. Margaret Rowley (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 61—63. A. Rubinstein, “Urban Halakhah and Camp Rules in the ‘Cairo Fragments of Damascene Covenant,’ ” Sefared 12 (1952): 283—96.
31. See note 12 in “The Apocrypha and the Book of Mormon,” ch. 23 below. Henri de Contenson, “In the Footsteps of John the Baptist, Notes on the Rolls of the Dead Sea,” Antiquity and Survival 1 (May 1955): 37—56, for some wonderful photos. Moses Gaster, “A Gnostic Fragment from the Zohar: The Resurrection of the Dead,” in Studies and Texts, 3 vols. (1928; reprinted, New York: KTAV, 1971), 1:370.
32. Auguste Sabatier, Les religions d’autorité et la religion de l’ésprit (Paris: Fischbacher, 1904), 60—61.
33. The avoidance of the theme is very noticeable in the indices of the PL 219:233, 672—74. The idea of the Church still looking for its heavenly home was repugnant to the fathers after Augustine, who first established the doctrine that the Church on earth is the Kingdom of God and the heavenly home of the saints. Methodius, Convivium Decem Virginum (Banquet of the Ten Virgins) VIII, 11, in PG 18:153—58, claims that the woman who flees to the desert is the Church in Paradise!
34. “The Church of Constantine drove into solitude and the desert those who wished to devote themselves to religion,” says Adolf Harnack, Monasticism: Its Ideals and History, and the Confessions of St. Augustine, tr. E. E. Kellett & F. H. Marseille (London: Williams & Norgate, 1901), 43.
35. Bernhard Kötting, Peregrinatio Religiosa. Wahlfahrten in der Antike und das Pilgerwesen in der alten Kirche (Munster-Regensburg: Forschungen zur Volkskunde, 1950), Heft 33—35, deals with the pagan background of the Christian pilgrimage, which was not a continuation of ancient Jewish or Christian practices.
36. Hugh W. Nibley, The World and the Prophets (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1954), 214—15; reprinted in CWHN 3:235—37.
37. Thus 1 Nephi 19—22, quoting various prophets.