Helaman 16

Because of his wall perch, Samuel had built up a huge audience. Remember, one of this community’s weaknesses was love of spectacle. A dark-skinned preacher God-riffing for hours while teetering on a wall was just the ticket for a crowd.

Some of the audience took his message to heart, looked up Nephi, and scheduled baptisms. Others just got mad, threw rocks and shot arrows at Samuel. But God’s spirit stops rocks and arrows, at least when it he wants to. The unscathed Samuel’s apparent invincibility, as it turned out, only made more converts and racked up more baptisms for Nephi.

Samuel’s message could have been thought old hat. Nephi had been saying the same things for years. But sometimes a fresh face, especially an exotic ethnic one, gets people’s attention.

Not everyone who saw Samuel evade the rocks and arrows was convinced. Some called the militia and said, “Lock him up. He’s literally a devil—not that we believe in such things. But if we did, he’d be Exhibit A. Satanism protects him from being hit.”

They started to climb up to nab him, but he jumped down the outside of the wall, ran off and took up preaching on his home turf. The Nephites never saw him again.

That’s how Year 86 ended. (Lots more happened that year, but, as usual, we’re just looking for juicy religious tales.)

Year 87: more of the same, with the win going to the unrighteous, who were all proud, networked, and prone to mutual back-scratching.

Year 88 and 89: Same. Or the-same-on-steroids, with the main change being heftier doses of debauchery.

Year 90: Things picked up. Angels appeared to wise men (though remained invisible to fools, i.e., most others). Speculation widened. Pride thickened. You could almost churn with it.

Old-time apostates speculated thus: statistically, educated guesswork would account for the right “inspired” answers to anyone’s questions. Meanwhile, statisticians began calculating the probability of certain things happening, fully and in a certain order. Not helpful to those doing holy campaign work based on prophecy fulfillment.

Arguments for divine equanimity sprang up: if Jesus is coming to the Old World, and we’re supposedly all on equal footing with God, why isn’t Jesus coming to the New World? Why is this supposedly intimate, lovingly nosy God always trying to mystify us with geographical and temporal remoteness?

Some raised deeper philosophical questions. All this prophecy fulfillment, for example, could involve psychological issues that went beyond mere differing perspectives. And how fair is it for the historically Nephite God to suck up to their cousins and ignore the alleged favorites? What about the senses as confirmation of alleged facts? Divine invisibility is never a decent phenomenological foundation. Don’t predicate our survival, some said, on your particular version of God. Blah blah blah blah blah like that, for days. A jumble of digs to the departed Samuel.

Accusations of power-grabs and self-absorption heated up on both sides of the mini-debates. Both sides accused the other side of being closet devil-worshippers. Or devilish closet-worshippers.

Cultural depredation gradually metamorphosed into cultural psychosis. The deaf leading the deaf—off the deep end.

The End

(of Year 90)

(and this book)