My American friends will be celebrating Columbus Day this Monday. Usually, this results in a few debates in LDS circles about the character of Columbus, as the overwhelming interpretation of the figure 1 Nephi 13:12 is Columbus himself.
Michael Knowles recently posted this video defending the character of Columbus:
For a different view, see Jared Cook, “A man among the gentiles”: Questioning our assumptions.
In his essay, Not Joseph's and Not Modern, Daniel C. Peterson wrote:
Michael Knowles recently posted this video defending the character of Columbus:
For a different view, see Jared Cook, “A man among the gentiles”: Questioning our assumptions.
In his essay, Not Joseph's and Not Modern, Daniel C. Peterson wrote:
Christopher Columbus and the Libro de las profecÃas
One of the best-known prophecies in the Book of Mormon has generally been understood to predict the career of Christopher Columbus, who is usually reckoned the effective European “discoverer” of the New World. Accordingly, Columbus emerges from the very pages of scripture itself as an important and foreordained actor in the divine plan:
And I looked and beheld a man among the Gentiles, who was separated from the seed of my brethren by the many waters; and I beheld the Spirit of God, that it came down and wrought upon the man; and he went forth upon the many waters, even unto the seed of my brethren, who were in the promised land.25
Skeptical readers of the Book of Mormon, however, have tended to dismiss this passage as a cheap and easy instance of prophecy after the fact, composed centuries after Columbus’s death—but postdated, as it were, in order to create a seemingly impressive and self-validating prediction by an ancient prophetic writer. At the very most, some have observed, a “prophecy” of Columbus hardly constitutes evidence for the antiquity or inspiration of the Book of Mormon.
On a surface level, such critics seem to be right. It would have taken little talent in the late 1820s for someone to prophesy the discovery of America nearly three and a half centuries earlier. But the description of Columbus provided by 1 Nephi 13:12 nonetheless remains a remarkable demonstration of the revelatory accuracy of the Book of Mormon. It is only with the growth of Columbus scholarship in recent years, and particularly with the translation and publication of Columbus’s Libro de las profecÃas in 1991, that English-speaking readers have been fully able to see how remarkably the admiral’s own self-understanding parallels the portrait of him given in the Book of Mormon. The Columbus revealed in very recent scholarship is quite different from the gold-driven secular adventurer celebrated in the textbooks and holidays most of us grew up with.26
We now understand, for example, that the primary motivation for Columbus’s explorations was not financial gain but the spread of Christianity. He was zealously committed to the cause of taking the gospel, as he understood it, to all the world. He felt himself guided by the Holy Spirit, and a good case can indeed be made that his first transoceanic voyage, in particular, was miraculously well executed.
Columbus was a serious and close student of the Bible. Among his very favorite passages of scripture was John 10:16: “And other sheep I have that are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold and one shepherd.” This verse provided significant support for his image of himself as a bearer of the gospel to the New World. And, though he was unfamiliar with the writings of Nephi, Columbus was convinced that his role had been predicted by ancient prophets. “The Lord purposed,” he wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella,
that there should be something clearly miraculous in this matter of the voyage to the Indies. . . . I spent seven years here in your royal court discussing this subject with the leading persons in all the learned arts, and their conclusion was that it was vain. That was the end, and they gave it up. But afterwards it all turned out just as our redeemer Jesus Christ had said, and as he had spoken earlier by the mouth of his holy prophets.27
“For the execution of the journey to the Indies,” he said, “I was not aided by intelligence, by mathematics or by maps. It was simply the fulfillment of what Isaiah had prophesied.”28 Referring to his first crossing of the Atlantic, Columbus declared,
With a hand that could be felt, the Lord opened my mind to the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies, and he opened my will to desire to accomplish the project. This was the fire that burned within me. . . . Who can doubt that this fire was not merely mine, but also of the Holy Spirit who encouraged me with a radiance of marvelous illumination from his sacred Holy Scriptures, by a most clear and powerful testimony . . . urging me to press forward? Continually, without a moment’s hesitation, the Scriptures urge me to press forward with great haste.29
As noted, the quite recent publication of Columbus’s Book of Prophecies in English translation—much too late for Joseph Smith to have used it—now permits us a window into the great admiral’s soul. And what we find there is strikingly reminiscent of prominent themes in the Book of Mormon. Columbus was fascinated, for instance, by such subjects as the recovery of the Holy Land and the rebuilding of the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem. One of his favorite scriptures, in this regard, was Isaiah 2:2 (= 2 Nephi 12:2): “And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.” He was also, as mentioned, deeply committed to the notion that the gospel had to be preached to the ends of the earth and the inhabitants thereof brought to Christ before the end of the world. For much of this, as careful readers of the Book of Mormon might have guessed, Columbus’s favorite author was the prophet Isaiah. Indeed, it was in that prophet’s book that Columbus thought he could see himself and his voyages divinely foretold. Among the passages that caught his attention was Isaiah 55:5:
Behold, thou shalt call a nation that thou knowest not, and nations that knew not thee shall run unto thee because of the Lord thy God, and for the Holy One of Israel; for he hath glorified thee.
Columbus seems to have regarded this as a prophecy of his own mission, along with Isaiah 42:1—4 (“Behold my servant, whom I uphold; mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth; I have put my spirit upon him. . . . and the isles shall wait for his law”), which students of the Book of Mormon will have no difficulty connecting with the prophet Jacob’s remarks at 2 Nephi 10:20—22:
And now, my beloved brethren, seeing that our merciful God has given us so great knowledge concerning these things, let us remember him, and lay aside our sins, and not hang down our heads, for we are not cast off; nevertheless, we have been driven out of the land of our inheritance; but we have been led to a better land, for the Lord has made the sea our path, and we are upon an isle of the sea.
But great are the promises of the Lord unto them who are upon the isles of the sea; wherefore as it says isles, there must needs be more than this, and they are inhabited also by our brethren.
For behold, the Lord God has led away from time to time from the house of Israel, according to his will and pleasure. And now behold, the Lord remembereth all them who have been broken off, wherefore he remembereth us also.
Therefore, cheer up your hearts.
“Our Lord,” Columbus said in 1500, “made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth, of which he spoke in the Book of Revelation by St. John, after having spoken of it by the mouth of Isaiah; and he showed me the place where to find it.”30 Christopher Columbus would have heartily agreed with the Book of Mormon’s description of him as a man “wrought upon” by “the Spirit of God.”
Notes for the Above
25 1 Nephi 13:12
26 A good treatment of this subject is Arnold K. Garr, Christopher Columbus: A Latter-day Saint Perspective (Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1992). Prof. Garr’s book is reviewed and summarized by Daniel C. Peterson, “Christ-Bearer,” in FARMS Review of Books 8/1 (1996): 104—11. See also Pauline Watts, “Prophecy and Discovery: On the Spiritual Origins of Christopher Columbus’s ‘Enterprise of the Indies,'” American Historical Review (February 1985): 73—02, of which a brief summary appears in Reexploring the Book of Mormon, ed. John W. Welch (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1992), 32—35.
27 Delno C. West and August Kling, The “Libro de las profecÃas” of Christopher Columbus (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991), 107.
28 Ibid., 111.
29 Ibid., 105.
30 Cited in Kay Brigham, Christopher Columbus: His Life and Discovery in the Light of His Prophecies (Barcelona: CLIE, 1990), 50 (or 57 n).