Reading and the Menardian Paradox in 3 Nephi

While scholars have given much attention to the differences between the Sermon on the Mount as it appears in the New Testament and as it appears in 3 Nephi in order to demonstrate what the Book of Mormon appears to restore, we have underdeveloped theoretical understandings of what it means to find moments of perfect coincidence between the two accounts. Using Jorge Luis Borges’s classic 1939 short story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” and Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics as illustrative points of comparison, this essay explores a theory of revelation that helps us to account for both revelation’s divine force as well as for the historicity of the reader’s imagination that brings revelation to bear on lived experience. Ultimately, the essay argues that the coincidence of language makes an implicit argument for revelation as