Mormon on Charity

Three results of true faith and hope are (1) being “acceptable before God,” (2) meekly confessing “by the power of the Holy Ghost that Jesus is the Christ,” and (3) having charity (7:44). Mormon’s logic here is that if you don’t have charity you are “nothing,” and, on the contrary, when a person is “acceptable before God,” that person must be something, not nothing, and thus must have charity. This is another way of saying that charity is essential, of the essence, even a necessary condition for existence in the presence of God.

Then, beginning in verse 45, Mormon used words that parallel some of Paul’s language in 1 Corinthians 13 about holy love (agape) or charity. In this text, Mormon (like Paul) told his audience what charity is and is not, and what it does and does not do:

“Charity (love) suffers long, and is kind.” (Moroni 7:45; 1 Cor. 13:4)

“Charity envies not [thou shalt not covet], is not puffed up [is not proud], seeks not its own [is not selfish or egocentric], not easily provoked [is not irritable or defensive], and thinks no evil [for as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he].” These five track 1 Corinthians 13:5, but “vaunteth not itself” and “does not behave itself unseemly” are absent in Moroni 7:45, so the two lists are not exactly the same.

Charity “rejoiceth not in iniquity but rejoiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” (Moroni 7:45; 1 Cor. 13:4).

Then, after concluding, “wherefore, my beloved brethren, if ye have not charity, ye are nothing” (Moroni 7:46) [compare “and have not charity, I am nothing” [1 Cor. 13: 3], Mormon says, “for charity never faileth” (Moroni 7:46; 1 Cor. 13:8).

Mormon then tells his audience absolutely to “cleave unto charity, which is the greatest of all” (7:46), while Paul glosses over this by saying merely that of these three, “faith, hope, charity, … the greatest of these is charity,” and beyond that, he says that what should be desired even more than charity is “rather that ye may prophesy” (1 Cor. 13:13–14:1). Mormon, on the other hand, emphatically concludes that “charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever” (7:47).

So, these two texts, while very close, are not exactly the same, nor do they understand charity or speak of it in the same ways or for the same purposes.

But still, one wonders how these wordings in these two texts came to be so similar to each other. One possibility is that Jesus spoke these words to Mormon, who was “visited of the Lord, and tasted and knew of the goodness of Jesus” (Mormon 1:15). Here in Moroni 7, Mormon speaks as a personal witness of the pure love of Jesus and of obtaining “every good thing” through Him.

Additionally, Jesus may have spoken these words to his disciples, who recorded them in the fuller version of Jesus’s ministry among the Nephites briefly reported in 3 Nephi. Mormon’s abridging still left in the point that Jesus spoke a hundred times more during those days than could be written (3 Nephi 26:6).

But, one might wonder, didn’t Paul write the “hymn to charity” in 1 Corinthians 13? Maybe he did, but maybe not. In answering a question asked of him by the editors of the Church News section of the Deseret News in 1961 about why Joseph Smith used King James English in translating the Book of Mormon, Hugh Nibley happily pointed out that esteemed scholars, such as Harnack, Weiss, and Reizenstein, had independently come to the same conclusion that “the Hymn to Charity” in 1 Corinthians 13 had not originated with Paul at all, but went “back to some older but unknown source: Paul is merely quoting from the record,” as other early Christians, such as Clement, also did. In addition, Nibley added, “It is the same Savior speaking in both, and the same Holy Ghost, and so we can expect the same doctrines in the same language.” (See Hugh Nibley, “Literary Style Used in Book of Mormon Insured Accurate Translation,” in The Prophetic Book of Mormon, The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Volume 8 [Provo and Salt Lake City, UT: FARMS and Deseret Book, 1989], 216, 254). Other Latter-day Saint scholars have recently also allowed this as a possibility. (See Richard D. Draper and Michael D. Rhodes, Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians [Provo, UT: BYU Studies, 2017], 625).

Indeed, it is also not necessary to think that Paul invented the triad of faith, hope, and charity. While Paul was fond of using that triplet (he repeats that triad in other places in his letters; see Romans 5:1–5; Galatians 5:5–6; Ephesians 4:2–5; 1 Thessalonians 1:3; 5:8; Hebrews 6:10–12; 10:22–24), this triplet also occurs in other early Christian writings such as 1 Peter 1:3–8, 21; the Epistle of Barnabas 1:4; 11:8; and Polycarp 3:2. So, it appears that it was not unique to Paul. For it to have gained such early and widespread usage, it may well have originated with Jesus himself, who spoke often of “faith” (pistis), especially in the first half of the Gospel of John, and of “charity” or “love” (agape) particularly in the second half of John. This triad also appears in Alma 7:24. Its widespread prevalence gives substance to the theory that this cluster belonged to a more primitive stratum in Jesus’ teachings, as it also rings of divine truth.

And finally, I would add that the chiastic structure of 1 Corinthians 13 supports the idea that this “hymn” preexisted Paul’s writing of 1 Corinthians in about AD 55. It seems to be an independent composition inserted helpfully by Paul into the flow of his thought. But it has its own literary character, and it is presented as authoritative, without any need for argument or persuasive buttressing. Moreover, the fact that the list of words that also appears in Moroni 7:45 is featured precisely at the C-D-C’ center of this chiastic structure would help explain why those words in particular would have stood out in the early Christian collective memory as a jewel coming from a treasured source. The following chart from Charting the New Testament (https://byustudies.byu.edu/charts/15-18-chiastic-hymn-charity) uses my translation, reflecting the Greek’s word orders and suggesting idiomatic additional meanings.

Interestingly, Joseph Smith did not include charity among the gifts of the Spirit in D&C 46:13–25 or in his Articles of Faith 7, but he often spoke of its need. And more curiously, Moroni did not include charity in his list of gifts of the spirit in Moroni 10:9–16, and neither did Paul in his list in 1 Corinthians 12:8–10. Lynne Wilson suggests that this may be because Joseph Smith (and others) may have felt that charity stood as a macro category by itself, which should be developed as an essential pervasive trait of character rather than received as a particular, received gift.

Further Reading

John W. Welch Notes

References