In 2007, Matthew Philip Gill, a resident of Derbyshire, England, announced the formation of the Latter Day Church of Jesus Christ. He claimed to be acting under angelic direction, and produced a new scripture, the Book of Jeraneck, to usher in his new faith. Gill’s church is a restoration of a restoration: he claims to have restored the Mormon movement, which Joseph Smith founded as a restoration of the church Jesus organized, but which Gill claims has fallen into apostasy?particularly its primary iteration, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), which Gill was raised in but has abandoned. This article analyzes the relationship between Gill’s movement and the LDS church, pointing out the ways in which Gill draws upon the Mormon tradition to claim authority for his new church, but also the ways in which Gill seeks to alter the balance of tension between the LDS church and the culture around it. The article particularly explores Gill’s founding narrative, comparing its language, motifs, and forms of spirituality with those of Joseph Smith; the Book of Jeraneck’s intertextual relationship with the Book of Mormon; and Gill’s story of LDS apostasy.

And an excerpt:

The Book of Jeraneck is Gill?s crowning prophetic accomplishment, not least because it exemplifies a very Mormon piety.  Latter-day Saints of the early twenty–first century give scriptural priority to the Book of Mormon; they understand it to be a clarifier, commentator, and interpreter to the Bible; the work which presents God?s truth most clearly.[i] However, it is also deeply dependent upon the Bible. It quotes or paraphrases the Bible on over a thousand occasions; it roots its plot in Biblical history and echoes in type–scenes its most sacred events.[ii] It uses this relationship to justify both its existence and Joseph Smith?s role as a prophet. The questions it asks and the right it claims to answer depends upon the authority it gains through its association with the powerful religious expressions of Biblical Christianity.  It reinvents, rather than manufactures, that religion.

The Book of Jeraneck functions in much the same way in relation to the Book of Mormon, and is thus Matthew Gill?s primary tool for reinventing Mormonism. Just as Gill presents himself as the culmination of Smith?s prophetic mission, so is its existence proof.  The book twines together the multiplicity of Mormon sacred narratives, not only the forms and motifs and scenes of the ancient story of Smith?s Book of Mormon, but also the sacred narrative of Joseph Smith?s life. It thus legitimates Gill?s attempts to emulate both in the present; the very fact of the Book of Jeraneck is a foundation stone from which Gill can began to build his own Mormonism.  But as Alter notes, the key to finding meaning in types is in the differences; both the book and the prophet suffer from what literary critic Harold Bloom has called in poets ?the anxiety of influence;? the desire to emulate and separate oneself from predecessors at the same time.[iii] If the Book of Jeraneck were exactly like the Book of Mormon it would serve little purpose to a prophetic reformer like Gill.  While the forms, lessons, and typologies of the book revitalize the narratives of Mormon piety, they also give it the spiritual legitimacy Gill needs to confront those narratives and alter them.

The Book of Jeraneck?s emulation begins with its very words.  Its language echoes the stilted grammar of the Book of Mormon. It follows not the omniscient narration of the Bible but the personal, first person voice of the Book of Mormon, a discourse deeply associated with Mormon spirituality.  Its redacted structure, claiming to be the product of an ancient editor working many texts into a single prose narrative of exodus and civilization building, clearly models the Book of Mormon.  Both Biblical and Book of Mormon characters, phrases, and plot forms make appearances in the pages of the Book of Jeraneck.    It also emulates the Book of Mormon?s structure.  Both works claim to be a sacred narrative of a civilization produced by a godly redactor late in that civilization?s history, who writes in a nostalgic tone, for their civilizations are close to destruction because of their wickedness.  Both civilizations are the children of pilgrims, guided by God out of ancient Israel on the eve of a great disaster, and brought to a new promised land, where they flourish and falter dependent upon their obedience to God, and are governed by prophet–kings.

But in addition to echoing the Book of Mormon the work also echoes the sacred history of Joseph Smith?s life.  The redactor Jeraneck opens his own story in the autobiographical form, writing ?I have been taught the Gospel of the Christ and the almighty God by my Father and Mother.? (1,1)  Jeraneck then tells us that in his youth ?I desired to know of many things.?  He went into ?a great forest? to pray, and there ?a great light gathered and I beheld in that light a personage and I became afraid and I was about to get to my feet and run when the personage spoke to me . . . and I stayed kneeling on the ground.?   We see in these words the shadowy images of both Nephi and Smith?s First Vision, the stories so many Mormon children are raised on, but also that of the twelve year old Gill himself. (JS-H, 1:14-17)

The blurring between the literary and the historical here is quite intentional.  Gill marshals the imagery of Smith?s scripture not only because he has absorbed its spiritual style, but because it is Smith?s prophetic legacy he seeks to fulfill.   The origins of both books are tied inexorably to the supernatural experiences of the men who produced them, binding both prophets into the narratives they produce.  The prophet?s experience and the stories of the books are of a piece; the presence in the lives of these men of heavenly messengers who are simultaneously characters in the texts?Moroni, Jeraneck?makes the two histories bleed into each other, become mutually reinforcing, and transform the mundane history of the present age into an extension of the sacred history of the scripture.   Reproducing Smith?s accomplishment has been perhaps Gill?s most important legitimating achievement, for it places him not only in Smith?s prophetic mold, but also his movement in the providential iteration of history where Smith lived.

The book?s ability to bridge the gap between sacred and secular history, to transform one into the other, is crucial because it means the stories of the Book of Jeraneck are legitimate grounds for re-conceiving the relationship between Gill?s version of the Mormon faith and the world around it.  Indeed, Gill?s attempts to revision the foundational narratives of Mormon sacred time and sacred space find their ultimate ground in that text, using its theological power to create revised stories of the Mormon past.

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[i] Philip Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: the place of the Latter-day Saints in American religion (New York: Oxford, 1991) 224; Ezra Taft Benson, ?The Book of Mormon is the Word of God,? Ensign (January 1988) 2-5.