1. Eric Dursteler points out other instances in his article “Inheriting the ‘Great Apostasy’: The Evolution of Mormon Views on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” Journal of Mormon History 28 (fall 2002): 25–26.

2. Craig L. Blomberg and Stephen E. Robinson, How Wide the Divide? A Mormon and an Evangelical in Conversation (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1997); Raphael Jospe, Truman G. Madsen, and Seth Ward, eds., Covenant and Chosenness in Judaism and Mormonism (Denver: University of Denver, 2001). Two publications include responses to the Blomberg-Robinson exchange: FARMS Review of Books 11, no. 2 (1999) and BYU Studies 38, no. 3 (1999); BYU Studies 40, no. 4 (2001) is a special issue devoted to Islam.

3. Two articles provide glimpses of the impact that knowledge and ignorance of a region’s Christian background can have on Latter-day Saint proselytizing. See Peter Lineham, “The Mormon Message in the Context of Maori Culture,” Journal of Mormon History 17 (1991): 62–93; and R. Lanier Britsch, “The East India Mission of 1851–56: Crossing the Boundaries of Culture, Religion, and Law,” Journal of Mormon History 27 (fall 2001): 150–76.

4. Blomberg and Robinson, How Wide the Divide? 114–42.

5. These titles include Paul R. Spickard and Kevin M. Cragg, A Global History of Christians (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 2001); David L. Edwards, Christianity: The First Two Thousand Years (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1997); and John McManners, ed., Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity (N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1990).

6. See Thomas W. Murphy, “Other Mormon Histories: Lamanite Subjectivity in Mexico,” Journal of Mormon History 26 (fall 2000): 179–214; and Thomas W. Murphy, “Reinventing Mormonism: Guatemala as Harbinger of the Future?” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29 (spring 1996): 177–92.

7. Two examples of Chidester’s work are Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996) and Salvation and Suicide: An Interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

8. See, for instance, Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and his massive edited work, Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

9. Among Philip Jenkins’s books are Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

10. Mark A. Noll, “Turning the World Upside Down,” a review of The Next Christendom, by Philip Jenkins, Books and Culture 8, no. 2 (March–April 2002): 32–34.

11. See Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985).

12. Lowell C. “Ben” Bennion and Lawrence A. Young, “The Uncertain Dynamics of LDS Expansion, 1950–2020,” Dialogue 29 (spring 1996): 27–28.

13. Armand L. Mauss, “The Fading of the Pharoahs’ Curse: The Decline and Fall of the Priesthood Ban against Blacks in the Mormon Church,” Dialogue 14 (fall 1981): 10–45; Mark L. Grover, “Religious Accommodation in the Land of Racial Democracy: Mormon Priesthood and Black Brazilians,” Dialogue 17 (autumn 1984): 23–34.

14. Donald S. Lopez Jr., The Story of Buddhism: A Concise Guide to Its History and Teachings (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 7–9, 37–102.

15. Compare Chidester’s portrait of early Christianity with the similar account found in Burton L. Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995). Mack is a prominent contributor to the Jesus Seminar.

16. Adrian Hastings, “A Slant on the Church,” Times Literary Supplement, November 17, 2000, 28.

17. Rodney Stark, “The Rise of a New World Faith,” Review of Religious Research 26 (1984), 18–27.

18. Philip Jenkins to Richard D. Ouellette, February 28, 2003.

19. Quoted in Stephen E. Robinson, Are Mormons Christians? (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1991), 60.

20. Dursteler, “Inheriting the ‘Great Apostasy,’” 23–59.

21. See, for example, Daniel C. Peterson, “‘What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem?’ Apostasy and Restoration in the Big Picture,” FARMS Review of Books 12, no. 2 (2000): xi–liii; David L. Paulsen, “The Doctrine of Divine Embodiment: Restoration, Judeo-Christian, and Philosophical Perspectives,” BYU Studies 35, no. 4 (1995–96): 6–94; Stephen E. Robinson, “Early Christianity and 1 Nephi 13–14,” in The Book of Mormon: First Nephi, the Doctrinal Foundation, ed. Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate Jr. (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 1988), 177–91; and C. Wilfred Griggs, “Rediscovering Ancient Christianity,” BYU Studies 38, no. 4 (1988): 73–90. Five Latter-day Saint scholars (S. Kent Brown, John W. Welch, John F. Hall, Noel B. Reynolds, and John Gee) presented papers on early Christian history at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South in April 2001.

22. Latter-day Saint scholar C. Wilfred Griggs has written a well-received study entitled Early Egyptian Christianity from Its Origins to 451 C.E. (Boston: Brill, 2000). My cursory look at the book detects no obvious Latter-day Saint point of view.

23. For example, George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); and Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992).

24. See, for example, Robert L. Wilken, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 97.

25. Hugh Nibley, “The Passing of the Church: Forty Variations on an Unpopular Theme,” Church History 30 (June 1961): 131–54; Hans J. Hillerbrand, “The Passing of the Church: Two Comments on a Strange Theme,” Church History 30 (December 1961): 481–82; Robert M. Grant, “The Passing of the Church: Comments on Two Comments on a Strange Theme,” Church History 30 (December 1961): 482–83.

Richard D. Ouellette

BYU Studies Publications