Ryan Dahle

I think we both agree that your approach is rather simplistic. But if you prefer to simply ignore any positive lines of evidence (which result in many apparent anachronisms pointing in the other direction) and then declare, definitively, that the text dates to a certain period (based on your apparent confidence in your ability to positively identify certain overwhelmingly dispositive anachronistic features), then I guess the conversation is over anyways.

Yes, as pointed out in the article, you have the people of Ammonihah burning records of the righteous, which is way after the days of Enos. And then we have Lamanites hunting down Nephites after the final battle, unless they renounced their religion. So you get this strong sense of intentional religious suppression and erasure up to the very end. It wasn't just control the Lamanites wanted. It was total annihilation of the Nephite religious worldview and traditional beliefs. Which seems to be partly why Mormon was hiding the records at the very end.

It's not pure speculation. The text explicitly says the Lamanites wanted to destroy Nephite records: "And they swore in their wrath that, if it were possible, they would destroy our records and us, and also all the traditions of our fathers" (Enos 1:14). Here is an article on the plausibility of records being lost through intentional destruction: https://scripturecentral.org/evidence/book-of-mormon-evidence-destruction-of-records

I actually think that can be quite so easily separated. It would be unexpected for anyone in 1829 to have implemented the Egyptian wordplays, since it was still in the beginning process of being recovered. And Smith very likely didn't not have adept Hebrew linguistic knowledge in 1829. Perhaps someone else could have implemented the Hebrew wordplays from his time period, but then you would need to look for a plausible historical candidate. In context, I think it is evidence that Smith didn't write the text and also comports very well with its claimed ancient Hebrew/Egyptian literary origins. But your point is noted. Sophisticated knowledge of Hebrew-style paronomasia alone does not necessitate antiquity. It just strongly invites that interpretation, once the contextual historical data is accounted for.

But your line of reasoning could apply just as easily (and just as fallaciously) to any other modern translation of a genuinely ancient text. You couldn't reasonably say, for example, that we know the KJV version of Genesis is "a post-New Testament text because time is, in fact, linear." That obviously doesn't work, because even though time is indeed linear the KJV version of Genesis derives from a genuinely ancient Hebrew text. In other words, simply asserting that the BofM isn't a layered text is pointless in this discussion, because that is the very thing that is being debated (i.e., whether it has a genuinely ancient origin or whether it is strictly a modern hoax). You don't win debates or persuade others by just assuming your favored conclusion and then doubling down on that conclusion when specific lines of reasoning fail. Instead, you do what @Analytics is trying to do. You discuss actual evidence, whether pro or con.

That is one possible interpretation. But one could just as easily turn to scriptural analogs to explain these same details. You might want to check out Don Bradley's analysis of symbolism of the cache of artifacts, the hill from which they were dug, the timing of their retrieval, and the mode of translation. One could find the set of objects and circumstances as being suspiciously beyond what Smith himself likely would have contrived, and also remarkably in line with ancient patterns and symbolism. More importantly, though, is that even if one were to view this scenario as suspicious in the opposite direction (the one that you gravitated towards), that wouldn't itself take away from the speed of the translation or the complexity of the text. It just introduces another tangentially-related topic that would need to be fully debated on its own terms before assigning it a probability value.

But this is merely an assumption. What I was trying to get at is that you haven't yet established that your assumption ("we’d expect Zoquean linguistic evidence") has a significant probability advantage over competing assumptions that could explain the same data. It just doesn't seem very hard to explain to me. For instance, based on a limited sampling of patterns of prayer in contemporary American Christian society, one might expect Latter-day Saints to use modern speech patterns. Instead, our religion has preserved certain archaic speech forms (pronouns, verbs, etc.). Are Later-day Saints a minority in this regard? Yes. But it is hardly an unattested phenomenon, historically speaking. In other words, it may be somewhat surprising but is not exactly hard to believe. Likewise, one might be surprised at how Jewish people throughout history have retained their Hebrew language and culture. Here is an AI response when I asked it about this phenomenon: So, how do you go about determining how improbable it would be for a group of dislocated Israelites to perpetuate the languages and literary conventions of their Hebrew ancestors, especially if they were highly religiously motivated to do so, and especially when we only have evidence that this applies to their religious scribal cultural and not necessarily their everyday speech or literary patterns? You also have to acknowledge that the text explicitly recognizes diachronic shift (Mormon 9:32-34) and that we are only getting it in an English translation. There are also a number of names that still are unaccounted for, as far as their etymology and origin. And, finally, some scholars have proposed linguistic correspondences with indigenous cultures. Here is one example of this much more limited line of evidence: https://scripturecentral.org/evidence/korihor-and-dumb-puns

For me, the issue is all about estimating the probability that Joseph Smith would (1) be able to discern a diverse set of genuine poetic features from the Bible (or some other 19th century source) and then (2) implement them in a fast-paced translation setting while also juggling lots of other complex data. There is no way to accurately estimate these probabilities. But I know from my own experience that most English-speaking individuals in modern Western cultures today do not independently and consciously notice biblical parallelisms, especially complex multi-layered chiasms. So I would rate this as a fairly low likelihood, generally speaking, especially when it comes to a diversity of parallel structures. But then the ability to dictate these types of parallelisms in a fast-paced translation amplifies that improbability considerably. One type of counter-evidence people often turn to (in an effort to establish Smith's general literary competence) is his non-canonized ecclesiastical letters (which are fairly impressive in their intertextuality and not bad grammatically and by other aesthetic measures). But these can't justifiably be used as evidence either way because believers could very reasonably assume that these religiously-charged letters reflect Smith's prophetic gift to some significant degree. So it becomes very difficult to find a sample of non-religious texts that can be used a reliable control group to establish Smith's baseline literary capacity independent of his alleged spiritual gifts. So we are left mostly with historical evidence. I think Brian Hales' has done a lot of helpful work in this regard: Brian C. Hales, “Joseph Smith’s Education and Intellect as Described in Documentary Sources,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 59 (2023): 1–32. Brian C. Hales, “Theories and Assumptions: A Review of William L. Davis’s Visions in a Seer Stone,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 39 (2020): 151–190. Brian C. Hales, “Naturalistic Explanations of the Origin of the Book of Mormon: A Longitudinal Study,” BYU Studies Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2019): 105–148. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/interpreter/vol46/iss1/16/ It will be interesting to see how the AI handles this issue.

I think you probably can guess the response for this. The text itself explicitly tells us that they preserved the languages of their forefathers. So it isn't merely a bald assumption, textually speaking. And it makes plenty of sense that they would do so, as many cultures preserve religious languages for surprisingly long periods of time. I think your real issue here is about absences of evidence. If these languages where really spoken and written by a large population over a long period of time, why don't we have extant evidence of them? But that gets into a broader set of assumptions about how and where these specific languages were used. Were they a niche development of a particular scribal school within a much broader culture of different languages? Or were they the common inscriptional languages of the every day people among Lehi's posterity and any surrounding cultures? This question matters a lot because it can potentially constrain the total quantity of Hebrew/Egyptian texts that would be available to begin with. Then there are other considerations, such epigraphic habit, climate, erasure of data by other cultures, and so forth. So I think everyone would have to admit that there is still a lot of uncertainty in this domain. Which means it is very difficult to establish the true significance of any absences of evidence. Same with the DNA and other contested data points. So you have to just come up with a mostly arbitrary probability for how much this counts against the authenticity of the Book of Mormon and then compare your resulting skepticism with lines of evidence that seem to corroborate the authenticity of the text (wordplays, Hebrew literary forms, authentic names, grammatical features, etc.). The problem is that AI itself is not going to give you accurate probability estimates for how strongly these absences of evidence truly count against authenticity. I think there are valuable lines of comparable data that we can look at. But there are too many complex underlying assumptions and not enough data. So, naturally, those inclined against authenticity will intuitively give these absences of evidence a fairly strong evidentiary value while those in favor of the text's authenticity will likely give them a much more modest value. It isn't at all clear to me, though, that such absences should overpower positive evidence such as the wordplay data or the types of linguistic evidence uncovered by Brian Stubbs. What we certainly can't do is simply preclude the significance of something like Hebrew and Egyptian wordplay proposals based on inherently tenuous absence-of-evidence arguments.

In other words, you concede that your previous justification for dating the Book of Mormon as a modern text (i.e., because its current form is English) is based on an invalid line of reasoning (since that would necessitate a modern date for many other English translations of genuinely ancient texts). So the fallback position, now that that line of argumentation has proven to be unwarranted, is merely to categorically assert the Book of Mormon as not being a translation. But that, of course, is merely assuming the very conclusion that this whole thread is aiming to investigate with actual evidence, one way or another.

I don't know anything about the dating of Daniel, specifically, so I won't comment on that issue. But I do think that dating is actually more complicated than that. Anyone who has read lots of pseudepigraphic texts knows that dating the final manuscript of a text is not the same thing is dating each layer of its its production history, much less the individual concepts or broader complexes of ideas within the text. Texts often undergo long histories of copying, redaction, expansion, amalgamation, and translation before they get to their final assigned "date." And they usually rely on traditions, whether textual or oral, that are already extant in their milieu. Saying a "text written in Hebrew can't date to 2000 BCE because Hebrew didn't exist yet" is sort of like saying that a "text written in English can't date to the first millennium BCE because English didn't exist yet." Well, in that case, I guess the KJV of the Hebrew bible must be dated to the 17th century AD. In one sense, we can all agree that it's final English form certainly dates to that era. But no one really thinks the underlying content derives from that late period. In other words, the final form of the text is not dispositive for dating the origin of its content or ideas. In virtually all cases, we actually can't date all constituent elements of ancient texts. We often can date certain features (language, grammar, theological concepts, historical references, etc.), and then extrapolate from there about how the entire text may have come to be. But the analysis inevitably becomes increasingly speculative. What this means, for our discussion, is that it is often difficult to prove a negative when it comes to early dating hypotheses. If someone argues that the core of some text may date to an earlier time, and that later layers of redaction and translation may be obscuring the text's true origins, that is not a proposal that can be easily disproven. And scholars rarely try to do so. For the most part, they reach tentative conclusions about the layers of the text that they feel confident belong to a certain time period (rather than speculating about possible underlying forms of the text or portions of the text that can neither be verified nor disconfirmed).

Several years ago I did my own very detailed analysis of Alma 36. I integrated a number of ideas from Welch, as well as from Parry and others. I think that the optimal interpretive framework essentially resolves most of Wunderli's concerns. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that everyone was convinced by my new proposal. Even then, I still don't think that alone would provide enormously powerful evidence of Hebrew authorship, much less ancient Hebrew authorship. I actually think that chiasmus and other parallel structures strengthen the aggregated case for complexity more than they do the case for ancient origins, even though they help both to some degree. For me, it is not just Alma 36. It is the persistent use of a variety of poetic parallelisms, along with some grammatical evidence, along with a decent number of anciently attested names, along with many ancient Hebrew literary forms, and then, most importantly, the abundance of Hebrew and Egyptian wordplay proposals. Although significant, Alma 36 is just a small piece of a much larger array of mutually strengthening literary evidence in several related domains. I don't see a lot of value in treating it on its own, since it isn't that decisive in isolation. I think it is a very strong candidate for an intentional chiasm and strongly suggests that whoever authored the Book of Mormon had literary competence in this area. It somewhat tips the scales in favor of ancient origins, on its own, since most Americans in Joseph Smith's day probably didn't even know chiasmus was in the Bible. It is a little more significant when we consider the historical evidence regarding Smith's education and literary background, as he seems to not fit the profile of an author who would create this type of literary feature. But, on its own, it certainly wouldn't convince a skeptic that the Book of Mormon is most likely derived from an ancient Hebrew culture. The idea that Smith discerned Alma 36 from comparable examples in the Bible or that he had more literary talent than expected are not so improbable that critics would feel they aren't live options. So, of course they take them, since they hold such wildly strong priors against Smith's miraculously claims at the outset. Overall, I think I would frame the whole project differently from the ground up. Create broader buckets of positive evidence. Treat them much more holistically and exhaustively. And then see how well current critical responses account for the full picture. Same thing for the counter-evidence. Picking certain representative samples of evidence, such as a single chiasm or a single geography model, seems to not be very helpful. They may help establish whether other evidence in the same category is generally useful. But they should be seen as representative samples, rather than stand-alone items of evidence. But maybe I'm just now following closely enough what you are doing. I sort of skim-read here and there.

That doesn't seem to be the right question. Neither Skousen nor Carmack seem to think the text was translated by a human author living in the 1500s. They think the text was revealed to Smith by revelation. And that opens up many new, but mostly untestable, authorship possibilities. It may be helpful to think of this more like an unexpected scientific discovery that has a lot of supporting data but can't yet be fully explained, especially in the deeper sense of why things exist as they do. Nearly every scientific discipline faces this on some level. And when scientists encounter unexpected data or reach the edge of their observable domain, they often enter into a phase of multiple hypothesis formulations without any definitive or compelling answers. Similar types of problems often arise in contexts of human society and behavior. Consider a murder case that goes cold. There may be enough evidence to strongly indicate that someone was murdered (in contrast to an accident or some other cause of death), but in some circumstances investigators simply don't find enough evidence to identify the culprit. They might be able to rule out many suspects, but that doesn't mean they will have a full working theory for who committed the crime or what the motivation was. The issue of the language of the Book of Mormon is actually quite similar to this. Skousen and Carmack feel they have strong enough data to rule out Joseph Smith as the likely author of the text. They can look at the language of the text, look at the language of Smith's milieu, look at examples of pseudo-biblical writings from the same period, look at language from earlier periods, and then make judgments based on robust sets of data and known principles of language use and acquisition. So, contrary to the narrator's repeated claims that they aren't engaging in linguistics, they actually are doing so. They are studying the text with the linguistic tools and databases available to them, and then reaching conclusions based on that data, as well as their own faith-convictions and the historical circumstances related Smith's dictation of the Book of Mormon. What Skousen and Carmack don't have is a lot of data about what happens on the other side of the veil. Nor do they have a lot of data about how God would go about facilitating a divine translation (not exactly a lot of specific precedents for that in scriptural data). So a good place to start would be to list out every factor in the spirit world and other heavenly realms that might possibly influence the translation of a text, as well as all of the assumptions that we might have about those realms. What is known for certain, what is less certain, and what is entirely speculative based on LDS scriptural data and other modern sources of doctrine? As I have attempted to do this myself, I realized pretty quickly that there are just a lot of unknowns, all across the board, involving just about every facet that one might imagine. We might consider factors such as: How does language and knowledge of mortal life transition into the next life? What types of languages are spoken by angelic beings? Is the gift of tongues always activated, or do spirits have more normative language acquisition processes in some contexts? What types of activities are being accomplished by spirits in the Spirit World? And to what extent do those activities relate to mortality? What types of books and texts are available in the Spirit World? How are they used? Who are they for? If God were to carry out translation for human audiences, what process would he use? Would he delegate it to a council or committee? Who would be part of such a council? Were beings from different time periods involved in the translation process? Did they speak different languages? Was the gift of tongues involved? What even is that gift, specifically and how would it work for a human translation? Or were the divine being operating more based on their own individual development and progress, without heightened linguistic gifts? Are there various versions of the Book of Mormon in the Spirit World? If so, when was the first one created? What language was it in? Do translations take place in that realm for the inhabitants there? What were all of the specific purposes and goals of the Book of Mormon's translation? Who are all of the intended audiences of the Book of Mormon, and were different aspects of the text intended to be meaningful to different audiences in different time periods? To what degree is God controlling the quantity and quality of evidence that might become available in support of the Book of Mormon's authenticity and divine origins? Are there any symbolic components to the language of the Book of Mormon? If so, what is intended? I'm sure more questions could be asked, but the point is simply that there are a LOT of questions that would first need to be answered before one can meaningfully propose or critique any specific theory of translation which posits that one or more divine entities were involved in the process. I think this is why Skousen and Carmack are not attempting to develop a detailed explanation for specifically how the text was divinely translated or why it possesses the features it does. So I think the debate primarily rests on the two following elements: (Element 1) All of the data that points away from Smith's authorship (nuanced analysis of grammar, lexis, and syntax involving a wide variety of features) provided by Skousen and Carmack (Element 2) The various limitations of the data and the underlying assumptions that are being used to interpret it (gaps in the databases, spoken vs. written language, idiolectic tendencies, varying abilities to mimic archaism, availability of archaic sources in Smith's environment, etc.) If it turns out that the linguistic data and analysis provided by Skousen and Carmack (Element 1) is actually pretty compelling and that the efforts to question or undermine it (Element 2) are actually not very valid or significant, then one will naturally be more open to the revealed-words hypothesis, despite the remaining unknowns about why the text is the way it is. One would simply assume that there could be multiple unknown factors that may have led to the specific nature of the text. In contrast, if it turns out that one or more of the issues identified in Element 2 sufficiently undermine the data and analysis in Element 1, then there wouldn't be much of a need to assume a divinely-revealed English text in the first place (since one or more factors could reasonably explain how Smith may have produced it, despite the data marshaled in Element 1). In short, I don't think it is enough to point to the fact that proponents of the revealed-words hypothesis can't explain why the text is the way it is. Everyone agrees that limitation is at play. What isn't agreed on is what significance that limitation should have relative to the rest of the data, considering all of the unknowns about divine entities and processes.

Do they? It’s so hard for me to follow. Actually, that isn't quite correct. You have to actually go read their research to sift through the nuances. Many summaries online are likely going to misrepresent their claims in some way.

Well, considering that you jumped straight to the accusation that Carmack was categorically lying when making his statements, one may question your own ability to accurately characterize what he was indeed claiming or implying. Technically speaking, his claims appear to be accurate. By Davis's own admission, multiple people were involved in helping review or contribute to his article (as would be expected of an article submitted to an academic journal). Davis named three people, as well as other "anonymous readers" (note the plural), for their contributions. The natural conclusion would be that multiple people helped review the article and gave suggestions that in some substantial way contributed to the article's creation/production. And since Carmack's comments were each contextualized by a lack of error correction, it seems pretty clear what he intended by his statements. Carmack's point was simply that none of those involved appeared to catch the errors that Carmack himself noticed. Now you want to fault Carmack for not having some type of privileged information about precisely how the named and unnamed contributors influenced the article. Somehow, he was supposed to know that Davis was "simply being nice" and that the suggestions and help that others offered really didn't in any way substantively contribute to the creation of the article. I think that, for whatever reason, you may just have an irrational hostility towards Stan, and that it is clouding your judgment. As you repeatedly noted, this conversation is triggering you. That seems quite apparent.

I actually suspect that Carmack used "involved in the creation" specifically to avoid using something like "helped author the text." To me, the creative process involves many different aspects of the production of the text (initial drafting, reviewing, editing, organizing, etc.). So, anyone involved in any way at one of those levels would be involved in the creative process. I can see how some people would associate "creation" strictly with "authorship" or origination of the main content. But that narrow interpretation doesn't seem technically necessary. I am personally involved in all or most of these processes on a daily basis, and I feel others regularly contribute to the creation of the articles that I write (without me viewing them as having secondary authorship status). For instance, if a peer reviewer suggests I rearrange content, and I follow that suggestion, then it seems like they helped in the creative production of the text. If someone suggests I take out content, include content, or revise content, then I would feel like they played an important role in the creative production of the text. And so forth.

So, I asked Chat-GPT about this, and anyone can see that I wasn't biasing the prompt in my favor. In fact, I intentionally biased it in the other direction (so that it would agree with the narrator). Yet look what we find: That is overstated. Scholars routinely understand publication as a process that can include authors, reviewers, editors, copyeditors, typesetters, and publishers. Peer reviewers and editors can sometimes influence the final article in significant ways: requesting revisions, challenging arguments, requiring additional citations, pushing for clarification, or even recommending structural changes. In that weaker sense, they are definitely “involved” in the article’s development or publication. The better distinction would be: Peer reviewers and journal editors are generally involved in the review, revision, and publication process, but they are not normally considered authors or substantive creators of the article unless their contribution crosses into major intellectual or drafting assistance. So I would say your admired person has a valid point only if “creation” means authorship or substantive composition. But if “involved in the creation” means “played any role in shaping the final published article,” then the claim is too categorical and probably misleading. Since Carmack's comments about the role of those who helped Davis with his article was contextualized primarily by error detection and not by authoring substantial amounts of text, the context of his claim sufficiently signals what he meant by others being "involved in the creation of the article." He clearly meant it in the narrow sense of the term, just as the AI response concluded was a valid possible meaning.

This is an interesting development. I hadn't checked the article myself for any expressions of thanks. And based on the narrator's persistent accusations on this front, I just assumed that Davis didn't publicly credit anyone for their contributions to his article. So it is pretty rich to then find out that Davis, in fact, DID give others credit for their helpful suggestions. Here is specifically what he said: This, then, provides an obvious basis for Stan's statements. Here is what Stan said on two different occasions: One would assume that if their feedback wasn't helpful and didn't in some way contribute to the creation of the article, then Davis wouldn't have expressed his gratitude for them. It is also not, by any means, inappropriate to describe the specific individuals that Davis named as his "colleagues," since it is a fairly loose term to begin with. Here is the immediate definition for the term "colleague" when I Googled it: In other words, it is a general enough term to be applied to those who in some way might contribute to an article or collaborate with its author (by giving suggestions, feedback, correcting for errors, etc.). Note that Carmack never described these individuals as "authors" or declared that the article had "multiple authors" (as the narrator asserted). Could Carmack have been more specific or qualified his statement in some way? Sure. But that is pretty much true of many if not most claims made on this board. Moreover, one will notice that Stan's claim in both contexts was about Davis and his contributors not detecting errors, which suggests that Carmack was primarily focused on the fact that multiple people were looking at and reviewing this article, and yet none of them seemed to notice the problems. This suggests that Carmack was not intending to assert or imply that others were contributing substantial amounts of text to the article (as if they were full co-authors). In any case, both of Stan's statements are technically accurate and the narrator never even asked for clarification. He just jumped straight to calling him a liar. Now that it comes out that Davis, indeed, did publicly give credit to others' for unspecified contributions to his article, it makes the accusation of lying all the more bizarre and unwarranted.

As I already stated and made perfectly clear, if there were any reviewers or editors who contributed in any way to the quality or contents of the article, then of course they would have technically been "involved in the creation of the article." And there was obviously good reason for Stan to assume that others were involved in the review and editing of an article published in an academic journal (assuming he didn't have actually knowledge of the process involved for this specific article; which I don't know either way). I'm sure your own "good faith" efforts, charitable disposition, and endearing communication style will be sorely missed from this thread.

I wasn't just "complaining" about what you said. I was carefully evaluating what you said in the context of what Stan said. And I found what you said to be both logically flawed and also morally wrong (since I think accusing others of lying has a moral connotation that is different than simply pointing out that they are wrong). It seems that you are simply using "whining" as a pejorative term to describe those who express disagreement with your conclusions and behavior.

First, it should be pointed out that you accused him of lying even before he made that additional statement specifically about "colleagues." So you jumped the gun no matter what. But let's actually look at what Stan said: It seems to me that Stan is simply assuming that various people were likely involved, and so he was listing the categories that typically contribute to an academic paper. In addition to the formal "reviewers" that are part of the process provided by the journal, many authors will share their article or discuss its contents with colleagues (i.e., friends, associates, scholarly acquaintances) for additional feedback or review. This doesn't mean such folks, even if they do offer feedback, should be considered as additional "authors" of the article. Note that Stan never claimed that the article had "multiple authors," only you did. Does that, in turn, mean that YOU lied about what Stan said? The extent to which you are going to make it look like he was lying or being intentionally dishonest is really quite remarkable.

Well, first of all, I don't know that "he made up things that weren't true." And his statement actually seems very likely to be true. Do you know that Davis's article didn't go through any peer review process of any king that might have spotted potential errors before publication? Also, how am I "whining" about this? Is there some aspect of my tone or in the tenor of my statements that qualifies as whining?

Why are you using the term "lie" here? Lying is when someone knows what it true and intentionally states what is untrue. As far as I recall, as soon as Stan made his initial claim, you came right out of the gate accusing him of lying. Also, I don't believe Stan specifically claimed that Davis's article had "multiple authors." Let's review the initial exchange, with Stan's specific comment and your follow-up accusation: This is a lie. You shouldn't lie, Stan. It's rather curious that you never even asked Stan why he believed that "various people were involved in the creation of the article" or what he meant by his statement. You just jumped straight to your accusation that he lied, as if you knew that he knew otherwise and was intentionally not telling the truth. Did it never cross your mind that perhaps Stan simply assumed that almost any article that gets into a journal is going to have some type of scholarly or peer review process before publication. And in that process, one would think that sloppy claims or reasoning might get cleaned up. That is pretty much par for the course, when it comes to submitting an article to an academic journal, is it not? I don't know what Dialogue's typical process is, but I assume they have something along those lines. And, if so, Stan's claim would make perfect sense. Also, note that he didn't say it had "multiple authors" as if there were multiple primary authors whose contributions were so significant that they should be listed or viewed as authors. Rather, he just said that "various people were involved in the creation of the article." And this is almost always true for any academic article, since any reviewers or editors technically are "involved" to varying degrees in the "creation of the article." But even if Stan were wrong, and if Davis's article went straight to publication without any content review or collaboration whatsoever at any stage of production (which honestly seems quite unlikely to me, even if possible), that still wouldn't mean that Stan lied. It would just mean that is claim was based on a reasonable assumption that he genuinely believed, but that he happened to be wrong about. So, unless YOU actually KNEW what was going on in Stan's mind (i.e., that he certainly knew that no review process took place and was intentionally making a false claim on that point) then it seems like your assertion that he lied would be quite premature. Honestly, your hostility towards the other participants in this discussion is just bizarre. You could have just asked Stan about the basis or specific meaning of his claim, and then rebutted it with evidence if needed. There was no need to get personal and accuse him of outright lying, unless you absolutely knew that to be the case.

Well thanks. You too. I have no animus towards you. I think the conversation has been illuminating, and I genuinely wish you well, no matter how strongly we disagree on this primarily academic issue that has little immediate moral relevance in our lives and which doesn't say anything qualitative about you or me as individuals, no matter which opinion we hold.

Then you should not have said that I was "inserting something else in its place" It should have been obvious what I was talking about, since that was already the established antecedent of the discussion. We were talking about the difference between the linguistic construction identified by Carmack and the significance of the intervening contents in the examples you provided (which disrupted his construction). No it doesn't, and if this is what you learned from your college education you should get a refund on your tuition. Are you really arguing that the following examples have the same syntactic arrangement: for this cause that he might not bring upon him injustice, he would not fall upon the Lamanites and destroy them in their drunkenness (Alma 55:19) A B C for this cause God will send them strong delusions, that they may believe a lie and be damned (Letter to editor in Times and Seasons) A C B Do you deny that the subordinate clauses and independent clauses are swapped in their arrangement? They don't rearrange the structure. The arrangement remains the same. The added explanatory clauses simply make the sentence more complex while keeping the core structure in place and in the same order. Um, no. In additional examples you cited, the core structure of the specific linguistic feature identified by Carmack (for this cause that X may/might [not] <infinitive.phrase>) retains its sequential order, but the STRUCTURE OF THE SENTENCE is obviously changed. When you swap the placement of dependent and independent clauses in a sentence, the sentence doesn't just get "more complex." The actual syntax of the sentence has changed. This is so obvious I'm surprised you are arguing against it. "frequency rates" is a made up measure that does not show what Carmack thinks it does. It is remarkable that you think this is a "made up measure" (as if Carmack simply made it up and other linguists aren't considering it as relevant in a whole host of contexts). Frequency rates for specific authors, especially when contextualized by broader frequency rates within corpora or time-period databases, is obviously relevant to the question of Book of Mormon authorship. And what is that degree? It depends. But let me give you a context to help illustrate the point. I know by my own experience that when I attend sacrament meeting, I can expect a certain degree of archaic speech forms in certain contexts (prayers, sacrament talks, lessons, etc.). For instance, I expect that when someone prays, they will likely use a few standardized forms of archaism (thee, thou, hast, wilt, etc.). But there is actually a minimal degree of expected archaism. What I definitely do NOT expect is for someone to deliver a talk using a whole host of archaic grammar, lexis, and syntax from the Bible and Book of Mormon. And it's not just that I don't expect them to use such forms in that context. It's that I don't think they would even be capable of doing so. Most of them are not consciously aware of these archaic forms, even though they read them regularly in the scriptures. And these archaic forms have never become part of their active vocabularies, since they don't speak or write like that in their normal day-to-day communications. So I think it would be highly unexpected to find members of the church today who would be capable of implementing robust archaism in ANY of their idiolectic patterns, no matter the context of their communication. And this is despite the fact that these archaic forms are embedded in the sacred religious texts that we regularly read. I suppose the exception would be folks like Stan who are particularly aware of these features and are actively exploring them at a scholarly level. But, I suspect even Stan would struggle in the context of dictating a lengthy text, day after day. Whether or not is it "possible," the statistical data and basic observations about how humans develop language patterns suggests it is highly implausible. And that, combined with a number of other considerations, points strongly toward the revealed-words hypothesis.