A few decades ago, I served a mission in the American South. This meant that I got to have lots of conversations with Christians who thought Mormonism was wrong from the get-go simply because we have extra scriptures in addition to the Bible. The Bible itself says you can’t add to or take away, they would say, so that’s all there can be. A point I sometimes tried to make in response was that even accepting all the books in the Bible as inspired does not require you to believe that they are the only inspired books. In other words, I was trying to separate the writers of the Bible from the compilers of the Bible, to point out that the compilers may not have had access to every inspired book, or they may have even made mistakes in leaving some books out.
Needless to say, this argument never made much headway with anyone I talked to. I remembered it recently, though, because the distinction between writers and later compilers seems parallel to a distinction that is relevant to the current debate in the United States about whether we should tear down monuments to Confederate soldiers and politicians. When people make arguments against removing these monuments because “you’re erasing history,” it seems to me that they’re missing the distinction between the historical figures who are portrayed by the monuments and the later politicians and private groups who chose to honor them. Just as the compilation of the Bible was done years (centuries) after the writing, and by different groups of people, Confederate statues were commissioned years later, by people other than those portrayed. To tear down a statue of a Confederate figure is not to pretend they didn’t exist. It is to say that we do not want to honor what they fought for. It is not erasing the history of their existence. It is disagreeing with the later groups who decided that what the Confederate figures had done was of good report.