Filler vs. action engine: ‘It came to pass' carries more weight than you think

Yahoo

16-05-2025

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Like most believers, most Latter-day Saints learn early and often how to take a joke about their faith.
After all, Mark Twain made fun of the Book of Mormon in 1891, writing that if someone removed the phrase 'it came to pass' from that book of scripture, it 'would have been only a pamphlet.'
When Elder Quentin L. Cook was a young college student, a university professor that he enjoyed quoted that bit of Twain in class 'with great glee,' Elder Cook said recently at BYU Women's Conference.
In the footnotes of his talk, Elder Cook made some notable observations about Twain's words and how they are used against the Book of Mormon and believers.
'Each new generation is presented with Twain's comments as if it is a new significant discovery,' he wrote. 'There is usually little reference to the fact that Mark Twain was equally dismissive of Christianity and religion in general. When this kind of remark is done with humor, it is probably best to join in the amusement.'
Elder Cook's story didn't end in his college class. Months later, he was serving a mission in London, England, when he met an Oxford-educated teacher at London University who took a position opposite to Twain's.
Dr. Ebeid Sarofim was a native Egyptian and expert in Semitic languages who discovered the Book of Mormon by accident and sent a letter to President David O. McKay asking for baptism. When Sarofim met with missionaries, he told them that 'it came to pass' was part of his intellectual belief in the Book of Mormon because it mirrored the way he translated phrases commonly used in ancient Semitic writings, Elder Cook said.
The missionaries told him it was essential to have a spiritual testimony, too, Elder Cook said. The professor gained a spiritual witness and was baptized.
'So, what one famous humorist, Mark Twain ... saw as an object of ridicule, a scholar of Semitic languages recognized as profound evidence of the truth of the Book of Mormon which was confirmed to him by the Spirit,' Elder Cook said at Women's Conference.
That anecdote, which has a resolution I'll come back to, didn't fit in my original coverage of Elder Cook's talk, but it drove me to look at some of the research about 'it came to pass' over the past 60 years.
The first place I went was my copy of 'Charting the Book of Mormon,' which shows that 14% of all the instances of the phrase in the 1830 edition were in 1 Nephi. So, if 2 Nephi actually were the first book in the Book of Mormon, with far fewer instances (3.5%), would the phrase stick out as much to casual or first time readers like Twain?
Second, King James translators faced the same redundant phrase, which in Hebrew is ויְהִי (vay-yihi). It shows up about 1,200 times in the Hebrew Bible, which contains most of the Old Testament. Those British translators sometimes ignored it and regularly deployed a variety of expressions in its place, such as 'and,' 'and it became' or 'and it was,' according to the BYU Religious Studies Center.
Still, there are 727 examples of 'it came to pass' in the King James Version of the Old Testament, the RSC reported. You can find plenty of jokes online about all of those uses of the phrase in other faith traditions, too. (The best of all, in my estimation, is the use in the title of a book on BYU quarterbacks, 'And They Came to Pass.' Yes, I own that one, too.)
Of course, the same phenomenon happens in the New Testament. Just think of two famous instances in Luke 2:
'And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.'
'And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.'
So, why was this Hebrew phrase so popular in Semitic writings in that age? Because it was 'an engine of narrative storytelling' in its day the same way quick visual cuts drive action movies today, BYU professor Taylor Halverson has noted.
In fact, Halverson says the phrase contains a deeper spiritual driver as a representation of Jesus Christ.
'It came to pass,' he says, is built on the same root word for God, Yahweh, the source of all things and the one who drives forward the narrative of each life.
'When we read 'it came to pass,'' Halverson writes, 'we see God's presence, his love, his concern, his energy, his knowledge, his direction, his guidance.'
That is certainly more challenges to Twain's suggestion that 'it came to pass' could be cut out without losing any meaning.
Elder Cook's underlying message for both of his anecdotes also pointed to deeper personal action.
'Dr. Sarofim's true account is interesting,' Elder Cook said, 'but I would suggest the best approach for gaining a testimony is to immerse ourselves in the Book of Mormon so we can repeatedly experience the ongoing witness of the Spirit.'
(Note: Similar to the KJV translation, the number of uses of 'it came to pass' was reduced in the Book of Mormon, too, between the 1830 and 1837 editions," according to Royal Skousen's work in 'History of the Text of the Book of Mormon.')
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