Zosimus

If King Benjamin was the first to formulate it, then he wouldn't have done it by merging 1 Corinthians and Romans. The simpler explanation is that Rev Boston did the merging, Edwards borrowed from him a year later, and then Joseph wrote it into Mosiah 3:19.

Boston's sermons with both phrases had been republished in New York in 1811 by Evert Duyckinck, who coincidentally also published Anthon's Classical Dictionary, which IMO was another source for Book of Mormon narrative elements

Very funny, after you posted this I also looked up "plan of salvation" in Google Books and one of the same books that came up for my search on "natural man is an enemy to God" popped up again. Both phrases are in one text: Human nature in its four-fold state by Rev. Boston (1735) Plan of salvation is in there three times, and it looks like Wesley lifts his passage from Boston almost verbatim Boston: "Every natural Man is an Enemy to God, as he is revealed in his Word. An infinitely holy, just, powerful, and true Being, is not the God whom he loves, but the God whom he loaths. In effect, Men naturally are Haters of God..." Wesley: "Every natural man is an enemy to God, as he is revealed in his word, — to an infinitely holy, just, powerful, and true Being. In effect, men are naturally 'haters of God'..."

Also variations found in a sermon by Jonathan Edwards in 1736, and then published within America MEN NATURALLY GOD'S ENEMIES. AUGUST, 1736. SERMON, VII. "A natural man is as full of enmity against God."

WW Phelps was an editor of one in nearby Canandaiga. Phelps has a lot of telling phraseology that gives away his learning. He certainly had access to books, journals and editorials from all over the country, and Europe. Phelps read the Book of Mormon just 3 days after it was published and a year later was called to "to head printing and publishing for the Church" I think we often overlook that much of the unique theology in Mormonism was developed after 1830, when Joseph was swimming in theological, philosophical and political conversations, and lots of print

That was my first thought, but George's journal has far more detail, such as: "When the spies first began to question us, it was observed that they picked out the greenest looking fellows in the Camp to quiz. As I was only 16, very large of my age, my eyes weak and naturally deficient of sight, wore a pair of striped bed-tick pantaloons, which were worn off on the inside, nearly up to my knees on account of my interfering as I walked, my straw hat having been smashed by accidentally sitting on it in the tent, Joseph invited me to throw myself in a position to answer such questions; and on passing through the towns I generally fell somewhat in the rear cutting a sorry figure which naturally singled me out — on the principle that children and fools always tell the truth. In this way I had many amusing conversations with inquisitive strangers. I tried to treat them with kindness and urbanity, but presume very few of them gained much information by talking with me." And if History isn't sourcing the account from GAS, then I don't know where else it would be coming from

Yes, the George A. Smith journal is nearly word-for-word, so it must come from there, with the [as I was called] insertion added later. The question would be when did the editors gain access to George A. Smith's journal? He was only 16 during Zion's Camp, and it seems he is writing much of it from memory after the fact.

As Weebles mentioned, it is also in the A1 volume of the History of the Church, which was partly dictated and edited by Joseph Smith. The George A. Smith account published later is almost word-for-word, so the History of the Church version must have been taken from his journal? There is an insertion in the paragraph that attributes the account to Joseph Smith, suggesting the editors (if not Joseph himself) intended the account to be first person: After reading the full entry, I am surprised that the camp was not making an effort to fool the attendees into thinking they were a camp full of liberal freethinkers. They served sacrament to all attendees, and it was only Joseph's speech that was not related to a Christian topic like baptism or free grace or restorationism. It was Joseph who decided the topic and the speaker, so I wonder why Joseph chose to speak on liberal freethinking, when he could have given himself any topic he wanted. Makes me think either, 1. he was very comfortable with the topic, or 2. he wanted to communicate ideas that resembled liberal freethinking. I suppose there are other options, but those two seem most logical to me

The footnote in the Bushman article is confused or wrong. But found it here

I don't think we know the names of any other local youth who participated the debate club. There were the Lapham brothers, Increase Lapham (b 1811) went on to become an accomplished antiquarian and scientist. He was the first to excavate the burial mounds of Aztalan, Wisconsin, thought to be the location of the Aztec homeland at that time. So at some point he was able to become one of the leading experts on the moundbuilders. His brother Fayette would interview Joseph Smith Sr. in 1829. But they were a few years after Joseph and moved around a lot, so they don't fully represent the learning available to a young man in Palmyra in the 1820s. There's also Luther Bradish, who at the time Joseph would have been participating in the debate club, was traveling deep into Egypt/Sudan and was riding camels into Jerusalem and Syria before continuing on through Europe to Scandinavia. Bradish wasn't in Palmyra between 1820 and 1826, but since his parents lived in Palmyra at the time, I imagine his travels were closely followed and discussed by the locals. Bradish would of course become the first to give his opinion on the transcript of the gold plate characters. It was possible for a young man from Palmyra to access the outside world. That account was not Turner's, it was George A. Smith, Joseph's first cousin (source)

Turner was clear, he thought Joseph was lacking in intellect and ambition. Which makes it all the more convincing when he admits Joseph had enough intellect to help solve questions at the debate club, and that he had enough ambition and skill to very passably exhort on theological topics at the camp meetings. Portentous had a more specific meaning between 1830s and 1850s. This is how Turner used the word in a different context in the same book: "In 1786, '7, a boy, I saw the Revolutionary fathers in their primary assemblies. The scene was solemn and portentous! They found their common country without a constitution and govern- ment, and without a union. The supposed oppressive measures of an adjoining State had so alarmed the people of a portion of it, that open resistance was made for self-protection, and the protection of property." Source Regardless of any intended sarcasm, Turner is saying that Joseph Smith participated in discussions of topics that would have certainly required some overlap with texts that were sitting right there on the shelves of the print shop and of the old red school house on Durfee Street. I find it unthinkable that Joseph Smith wouldn't have picked up any of those books, and even if he didn't, that he didn't ponder deeply the questions others were discussing at the debate society. It raises another question. If Moroni had been instructing Joseph Smith on so many topics from theology to the ancient inhabitants of the Americas since 1823, then wouldn't Orasmus Turner have seen some of that learning sneak though? Why would Joseph be able to tell so many wonderful things to his family about the ancient inhabitants of America, but then Turner didn't notice anything remarkable? I think Turner was actually impressed by Joseph, and was simply underselling his intellect and ability

You think its far out that young boys are meeting at a debate society to discuss articles from a dictionary about the religions of the world that they found in the local iibrary? When exactly did Joseph learn enough much about freethinking deism to convince two to three hundred people over the space of an hour that he was one of the greatest reasoners they had ever heard? We need to explain where he picked up all that knowledge. I seriously doubt he was reading Paine, Hume and Volney after he restored the Gospel. I seriously doubt Moroni taught him enough freethinking deism that he could convince hundreds of people that he was one. The simple answer is, as one of the most respected Mormon scholars argues, he learned it while discussing books like Hume, Paine and Volney at the debate club. If those books were known to the youth at the club, why couldn't they also know the books like Dictionary of all Religions and Travels of Cyrus which were available at the Manchester Library? Both these books were widely circulating and popular. How is this far out?

the tool I’m referring to is simple, you load a pdf of a book into it and ask questions about the contents, and discuss in more detail the responses. In a similar way,Joseph would have been able to ask questions to people who had read the books in the Manchester Library, and then discuss in more detail the responses. It seems like this is exactly what would have been happening in the debate club on Durfee Street when Joseph was helping to solve moral and ethical questions being discussed Good example of how I imagine things played out. Lucy mentioned in her account that the neighbors accused them of stopping their farm work to win the Faculty of Abrac. Her response was something like the family did in fact endeavor “to remember the service of & welfare of our souls”, but not to the neglect of their farm. So let’s say Joseph spent the majority of his day working on the farm and then set an hour or two of his day to learning more about Abrac. He would go to Durfee Steet to discuss such questions. Let’s say someone at the club had checked out Hannah Adam’s Dictionary of All Religions at the nearby Manchester Library. They could have shared that Abraxas was the chief angelic spirit of a vast multitude of beings in the religious system of Egyptian Christians in the second century. These beings then formed a heaven for their own habitation and brought forth other beings of a slightly inferior nature. Then someone could say, hey, that sounds like the doctrine of order out of chaos I read about in Ramsay’s Travels of Cyrus down at the Manchester Library. Then they could debate whether or not angels and spirits preexisted and whether or not beings and creation emanated out of God, or were created out of nothing Joseph could then take those learnings back to the farm and ponder them for several hours while working in the fields Also, Lucy doesn’t say Joseph couldn’t read, only that he was less inclined to reading than his siblings. My sense is he preferred to do things like solve questions “of a religious nature” (as Lucy phrased it) from discussions he’d have at places like the debate club, and then ponder them in deep study, as Lucy herself suggests

He's referring to his mother's intellect shining through feebly, not to his public speaking skills. Also Orasmus Turner's account is hostile, so we should expect some effort to continue portraying Joseph in a negative light. When he says "Joseph had a little ambition", it feels to me like he's underselling Joseph's ambition, in line with the previous sentence portraying Joseph as being "lounging, idle, (not to say vicious,) and possessed of less than ordinary intellect" In any case, Joseph went from being a "very passable exhorter" able to help solve "portentous questions of moral or political ethics" to "one of the greatest reasoners" the crowds around Zions' Camp in 1834 had ever heard. The dictation of the Book of Mormon occurred at some point along that spectrum

"But Joseph had a little ambition, and some very laudable aspirations; the mother's intellect occasionally shone out in him feebly, especially when he used to help us to solve some portentous questions of moral or political ethics, in our juvenile debating club, which we moved down to the old red school-house on Durfee street, to get rid of the annoyance of critics that used to drop in upon us in the village; amid, subsequently, after catching a spark of Methodism in the camp-meeting, away down in the woods, on the Vienna road, he was a very passable exhorter in evening meetings." Source If we consider Joseph's (with Moroni's instruction) ability to entertain his family with stories of ancient civilizations alongside his (without Moroni's instruction) public speaking abilities on theology, free-thinking, moral and ethical issues, we're pretty close to understanding how he would have been able to dictate the text of the Book of Mormon.

June 1834 ”Sunday, June 1, the camp settled about a mile from Jacksonville. Fredrick G. Williams announced to the people of Jacksonville that there would be preaching on the Sabbath. George A. Smith noted that two to three hundred of the local inhabitants came to hear. The Prophet (who was called “Squire Cook” by the men of the camp that day) spoke, professing to be a liberal free thinker. [23] The crowd listened to his remarks with great attention, and many noted he was one of the greatest reasoners they had ever heard. ” Source What I gather from Bushman’s paper is that Joseph learned all this during a crisis of faith before he translated the gold plates. So even if he learned his oration skills after, he was deep in the discussions well before. The Book of Mormon is a remarkably sophisticated response to Paine’s theological works. Not only does it provide a clever response to his criticism of Josiah’s reforms (Lehi fleeing Jerusalem) but it also responds to Paine’s attack on the Pentateuch being a pious fraud orchestrated by Hilkiah to justify Josiah’s reforms (brass plates containing the original 5 Books of Moses) The Book of Mormon looks like a direct response to the deists like Hume, Paine and Volney using the same playbook (arkite myth-making) that Biblical apologists like Bryant and Faber used to respond to the same deists. Joseph could have got all that material easily through books and social clubs, as it was one of the hottest topic of the day. The origins of the moundbuilders being another its unconvincing to say that Joseph Smith was unfamiliar with moundbuilder speculations, or of Paine and the responses to Paine simply because he did not have a subscription to the Manchester Library. The whole church v. freethinker debate was dramatized within his own home, according to Lucy Mack Smith herself

I've loaded all the books in the Manchester Library into a tool for parsing contents, and am convinced there was more than enough there to account for the Book of Mormon AND early Mormon doctrine. Hannah Adam's Dictionary of all Religions alone could account for most early doctrine. And then there's Tytler's General History and Ramsay's Travels of Cyrus. Much of what we usually consider to be unique to Mormonism was already published before 1830, and was being debated at the local social clubs: Joseph Smith and Abraham Lincoln "While taking divergent paths, Joseph and Lincoln passed through the same dark plain early in life. They both struggled with skepticism about the scriptures and the Christian religion. Lincoln’s encounter is more fully documented and had a more lasting effect, but there is good evidence Joseph also had a bout with what was then called “infidelity.” The term referred to a conglomerate of beliefs put forward by Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason, Ethan Allen in Reason the Only Oracle of Man, David Hume in On Miracle, C. F. Volney in Ruins of Civilization, and other works in a similar vein." The works of Paine, Allen, Hume and Volney alone are a significant foundation for a restoration movement. Paine talks at length in his Theological Works (Origins of Free-masonry) about how King Josiah's reforms pushed true believers underground into secret groups that eventually became the freemasons who adopted the lost symbology of the First Temple in their lodges. We know Paine was being thrown around the Smith home. But then there's Volney's Ruins, which itself covers enough ground to become a foundation for a restoration movement. We haven't yet done enough work to establish that the material was not sufficient to account for the Book of Mormon Given the environment, the Book of Mormon is exactly what we should expect someone to publish around 1830. There's a long lineage of these kinds of texts, almost every Christian kingdom since medieval times has "recovered" a manuscript linking their heritage to Noah and the Biblical chronology. There are literally dozens, some honestly more elaborate than the Book of Mormon. One such history (which linked a character named Ethor to the sons of Noah) written in mysterious characters was pulled out of a cave in Ohio, the same year Joseph Smith learned about the gold plates. Whether the neighbors recognized it or not, the Book of Mormon was inevitable "One Sunday when the marchers were trying to disguise their Mormon identity before a crowd of curious onlookers, Joseph spoke for an hour pretending to be a “liberal free-thinker.” According to George A. Smith, “Those present remarked that he was one of the greatest reasoners they ever heard.” - Joseph Smith and Abraham Lincoln If Joseph was able to speak convincingly to an audience for an hour about skepticism, deism and freethinking, this is far more telling than him giving recitals about the American natives

We have accounts of Joseph reading Arabian Nights. Philetus B. Spear recalled that Joseph had a few novels including a “copy of the Arabian Nights". William Purple claimed Joseph and the treasure diggers "drew all their philosophy from the Arabian nights and other kindred literature of that period", around the same time his mother has him reciting stories of the ancient inhabitants of America. Joseph was also surely interested at that time in the source from whence those moundbuilders sprang. More on this below... What if Joseph had built (or extended) his paracosm from the geography of Arabian Nights? I'm thinking it was the Edward Forster's translation, 4th edition, London 1815 that Joseph had access to. I believe the Arabian Nights listed in the Social Friends' Library at Dartmouth College was this same edition, which was re-published widely in America: Philadelphia, Mathew Carey and successor firms (Carey & Hart, etc.), multiple impressions 1794–1820s. Boston, various firms, at least two reprints in the 1800s–1810s. New York, Evert Duyckinck / G. & R. Waite, Forster-derived 4-vol. sets in the 1810s. Worcester, MA, Isaiah Thomas produced a two-volume printing in 1794 that stayed in circulation. "We set sail, and steered towards the East Indies [by way] of the Persian gulf, which is formed by the coast of Arabia Felix on the right, and by that of Persia on the left, and is commonly supposed to be seventy leagues in breadth in the widest part; beyond this gulf, the Western Sea, or Indian Ocean, is very spacious, and is bounded by the coast of Abyssinia, extending in length four thousand five hundred leagues to the island of Vakvak." In the notes found in Forster's translation, Vakvak are the islands beyond China. So in the book that William Purple says had diseased Joseph's mind, the hero skirts Arabia and sails into a chain of mysterious islands, one of which was known as Comorin, where several contemporary accounts in Joseph's orbit (eg. View of the Hebrews) identify a colony of first temple Israelites (Tribe of Manasseh in some accounts) who had fled Jerusalem with records (written on brass plates in some accounts) that predated the Babylonian captivity. When Martin Harris took the gold plate characters to Mitchill and Anthon, they were both in the middle of building out their own moundbuilder theories about the ancient inhabitants of America, and the source from whence they sprang. They both were in agreement, that the source was the maritime networks stretching to America from South India or, as it was known in Anthon's Classical Dictionary published the year before Harris showed up at his office, Comaria: Joseph had years to build his Lehite paracosm, from Arabian Nights all the way forward to Mitchill and Anthon giving Harris their learned dissertations on the characters and the nation, in the east, that they came from

Expanding the field to include evidence outside Mesoamerica is not the same as solving puzzles, or resolving issues over time: "Importantly, this study does not attempt to correct or contend with the geographic or demographic assumptions held by those who have proposed anachronisms. Rather, it aims to simply identify, categorize, and assess allegations on their own terms, based on whatever stated or implicit assumptions the authors bring to the table. Given the imprecision and variability of the claims involved, this requires the investigation of a broad swath of literature and scientific data. That is, when an alleged anachronism assumes a hemispheric model for the Book of Mormon’s geography, evidence from the entire Western hemisphere is considered as relevant and valid for assessing the claim." - Anachronisms: Accidental Evidence in Book of Mormon Criticisms Well sure, if we consider all the models, then all our issues can be resolved over time. This is what Analytics is pointing out. You can't draw a target around Mesoamerica to solve the River Sidon problem, and then draw one around the Arctic Circle to solve the mammoth elephant problem, and then one around India to solve the metal plate inscription problem and then one around Argentina to solve the pre-Columbian horse problem. Wouldn't Kuhn say that forever expanding the constraints of your paradigm to solve puzzles is a sign that your paradigm isn't working? Every piece of Old World evidence used to support the Meso paradigm is a problem, and Roper's scorecard is full of them. Every loan shift is damage and Roper's scorecard is full of them. It starts to feel like this approach to solving puzzles

What could help is a single LGM as a null hypothesis, or a wrong model, to test whether Sorenson is correct in saying "Mesoamerica is the only plausible location of Book of Mormon lands." A geographic correlation needs to demonstrate not just that the text fits a proposed location, but that it fits that location better than it fits a control location we know is wrong. If the null model passes the test, the test isn't working. If a randomly chosen geography that has nothing to do with the Book of Mormon also has evidence for the Book of Mormon in it, then we can be pretty sure that the methodology of identifying Book of Mormon geographies is broken.I don't think anyone has ever ran that control against the methodologies Since Analytics and Pyreaux have both mentioned India in this thread, why not test it as the null model? That the right model feeds back into the text and explains oddities is interesting but could an explanation be produced for any setting if we looked hard enough? Mesoamerican coronation sacrifice explains the Ammonihah raid, ok, but what would a null test find if we looked just as hard at the same passage in the wrong place? For example, you use the example of the Anti-Nephi-Lehis not fighting back. Well that sounds kinda like the Sabbath Massacre which was known in 1820s America through 1 Maccabees 2:29-38. It also sounds a lot like the tradition of nonviolence (ahimsa) practised in India since the Mahabharata. I don't know of any examples of tribes making a moral decision to be nonviolent in Mesoamerica. So the wrong place could explain an oddity better than the right place, if you pick and choose which oddities you care about

There were a few accounts of seeing the old man with a book-shaped bag. Source 1: David Whitmer interview with Orson Pratt and Joseph F. Smith, September 1878 Published in the Deseret News, 16 November 1878. Reproduced in Dan Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 5:51-52. When I was returning to Fayette, with Joseph and Oliver, all of us riding in the wagon, Oliver and I on an old-fashioned, wooden, spring seat and Joseph behind us; while traveling along in a clear open place, a very pleasant, nice-looking old man suddenly appeared by the side of our wagon and saluted us with, “Good morning, it is very warm,” at the same time wiping his face or forehead with his hand. We returned the salutation, and, by a sign from Joseph, I invited him to ride if he was going our way. But he said very pleasantly, “No, I am going to Cumorah.” This name was something new to me, I did not know what Cumorah meant. We all gazed at him and at each other, and as I looked around inquiringly of Joseph, the old man instantly disappeared, so that I did not see him again. (source) When asked about the man's appearance, Whitmer replied: I should think I did. He was, I should think, about 5 feet 8 or 9 inches tall and heavy set, about such a man as James Vancleave there, but heavier; his face was as large, he was dressed in a suit of brown woolen clothes, his hair and beard were white, like Brother Pratt’s, but his beard was not so heavy. I also remember that he had on his back a sort of knapsack with something in, shaped like a book. It was the messenger who had the plates, who had taken them from Joseph just prior to our starting from Harmony. Soon after our arrival home, I saw something which led me to the belief that the plates were placed or concealed in my father’s barn. I frankly asked Joseph if my [page 773] supposition was right, he told me it was. (source) Source 2: Edward Stevenson's journal, December 23 1877 Quoted in Richard L. Anderson, Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1989), p. 30. And an aged man about 5 feet 10, heavy set and on his back an old fashioned army knapsack strapped over his shoulders and something square in it, and he walked alongside of the wagon and wiped the sweat off his face, smiling very pleasant. David asked him to ride and he replied, ‘I am going across to the Hill Cumorah. (source) Stevenson adds Joseph's reported explanation: He said that the Prophet looked as white as a sheet and said that it was one of the Nephites, and that he had the plates.” (source) Source 3: David Whitmer on Mary Whitmer's encounter (same figure, at the Whitmer barn) From the same 1878 Deseret News interview: Some time after this, my mother was going to milk the cows, when she was met out near the yard by the same old man (judging by her description of him) who said to her: “You have been very faithful and diligent in your labors, but you are tired because of the increase in your toil; it is proper therefore that you should receive a witness that your faith may be strengthened.” Thereupon he showed her the plates. (source) Source 4: John C. Whitmer (Mary's grandson) on Mary's encounter I have heard my grandmother say on several occasions that she was shown the plates of the Book of Mormon by a holy angel, whom she always called Brother Nephi. It was at the time, she said, when the translation was going on at the house of the elder Peter Whitmer, her husband. (source) And his fuller account of the encounter: He then untied his knapsack and showed her a bundle of plates, which in size and appearance corresponded with the description subsequently given by the witnesses to the Book of Mormon. This strange person turned the leaves of the book of plates over, leaf after leaf, and also [Page 38]showed her the engravings upon them; after which he told her to be patient and faithful in bearing her burden a little longer, promising that if she would do so, she should be blessed; and her reward would be sure, if she proved faithful to the end. The personage then suddenly vanished with the plates, and where he went, she could not tell. (source) Source 5: Elvira Pamela Mills, written by Orville Cox Day: One morning, just at daybreak, she came out of her cow stable with two full buckets of milk in her hands, when a short, heavy-set, gray-haired man carrying a package met her and said: “My name is Moroni. You have become pretty tired with all the extra work you have to do. The Lord has given me permission to show you this record:” turning the golden leaves one by one! (source) According to Ethan Smith, the Cochin Jews were not a lost lost tribe, in View of the Hebrews he gives his arguments for why he believed they arrived in India shortly after the Babylonian captivity. There are also several reference works from the 18th century describing the cooper plates as Hebrew documents and the Cochin Jews as the Tribe of Manasseh. For example: "CochIn is situated on an island separated from the main land by a narrow creek of the sea. It is a rajahship dependent upon that of Travancore, which extends along this coast to Cape Comorin. Cochin was one of the earliest settlements of the. Portuguese in India. The Dutch gained possession of it in 1660; and from them it was taken, in 1795, by the English. In the vicinity of Cochin are to be found some thousands of Jews, who pretend to be of the tribe of Manasseh, and to have records engraven on copper-plates in Hebrew characters; they are said to be so poor, that many of them embrace the Gentoo religion." (source) My secular explanation for the Book of Mormon is the ordinary angel witnessed by David and Mary Whitmer was walking the roads around Palmyra carrying a book (engraved metal plates whether ancient or modern bundled up in his knapsack) that he claimed was a record of the Tribe of Manasseh from Comorin, the record was an account of these people, and the source from whence they sprang. It was very popular in the early 1800s to speculate that American Indians were Semites, Japhethites or Hamites (Cushites) from India. I'd argue it was the default view, as it was supported by the best scholars in that day, from Bryant to Faber to Humboldt to Samuel Mitchill and Charles Anthon. After the old man gave the plates to Joseph Smith to translate, Anthon and Mitchill would both recognize the characters, following their own theories that American Indians were Semites/Cushites from India. My secular explanation for the Book of Mormon text is that it was a pseudo-historical account of Israelites that left Jerusalem in 600 BC, the Semites/Cushites of Comorin discussed in the works of Bryant, Buchanan, Faber and Ethan Smith were the historical template for the narrative. This is the most historically grounded explanation for the narrative in the text, as there's nothing in the Book of Mormon that doesn't fit a South Indian setting. I compared this model to Roper's Anachronism list and it fits surprisingly well, even against a list that is biased towards favoring an American setting. Roper Anachronisms (2025) × Comorin Model — All 226 Items, Direct Comparison

Turns out the evidence for it being a Kircher forgery isn't so strong, and there very well may have been a history of Egypt and lexicon of hieroglyphics written by a Rabbi Nephi after all: Some Interesting New Insights into Medieval Legends about Ancient Egypt "The least important of these, but nevertheless interesting, is a translation of the notes that the astronomer and antiquary Nicolas-Claude Peiresc left about the manuscript of the Rabbi Barachias Nephi (Abenephius), an Arabic-language text known only from excerpts quoted by Athanasius Kircher in his various works. In these, Abenephius provides variants and echoes of the medieval Islamic pyramid myth, but many scholars have argued that Kircher fabricated the text to support his own eccentric theories. Peiresc left the only independent account of the manuscript, and his handwritten notes have never been published in full (two partial transcripts exist) nor translated into English. However, much of the debate centered on a centuries-long game of telephone in which Peiresc’s 1633 notes were excerpted, transmitted through secondary sources, and distorted over time. Eventually, the standard story became that Kircher would only show Peiresc one page of the manuscript, suggesting fraud. However, the original notes make clear that Peiresc actually said that he saw the complete folio volume, which he skimmed through. He described at least two major parts: a history of Egypt and a lexicon of hieroglyphics. He also described the contents of the lexicon but said that Kircher would not allow him to copy even a single page of that section. This is the origin of the claim he saw only one page. Peiresc though the manuscript might have been a copy of Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica, but that cannot be true because the list of hieroglyphs he provided does not match those in Horapollo. In short, Peiresc’s full notes make plain that there was an actual Arabic-language medieval manuscript that Kircher drew from and it did indeed contain content of the type Kircher quoted. A subsequent letter from Peiresc describing the book at a manual for making talismans confirmed my own suspicions many years ago that Abenephius’s book was just such a manual, which we know from Islamic sources were both popular in medieval Cairo, where Abenephius allegedly lived, and often written by Jews, who did good business in talismans."

This is going to be critical to solve. For example, there are other good candidates for the turn east, and some of them originate much closer in time to the translation of the Book of Mormon. A Frederick G. Williams document claimed the Lehites traveled "nearly a south, southeast direction until they came to the nineteenth degree of north latitude; then, nearly east to the Sea of Arabia." That's 200 miles north of NHM and after looking at John Cary's 1804 map that includes a "Nehem", I find a good Bountiful candidate at 19 degrees north that kinda supports H2. So how to score a candidate that 1. accounts for NeHeM, and 2. provides a viable Bountiful candidate, and 3. also aligns well with Frederick G. Williams One fix is to consider the text only, and shelve whatever Williams and others outside the text had to say about the eastward turn, but then would we also need to shelve what Williams had to say about the Lehites continuing on to Chile? Once you look at only the text, there's nothing obviously Mesoamerica or Heartland in it. That's all external commentary from H1 proponents. So do we need to consider Old World LGMs, that resolve almost all the weakness of H1 models, too? I just don't know where "the text itself" ends, and "its claimed historical/geographical context" begins, when trying to agree on which LG is tested. Either way, if Williams's candidate for the eastward turn is not considered along with any others, then the next test for Bountiful will be biased for the candidates that are directly east of NeHeM. Even if Khor Kharfot or Khor Rori ultimately fit the real world better, the Bountiful test is not going to give equal weight to other candidates. So you have to test all H1 candidates, but won't testing multiple mutually contradictory H1 candidates just expose that H1 proponents can't agree on which model even applies, effectively reducing their evidentiary weight? I realize its likely out-of-scope, but you'd also need to test candidates that a skeptic might provide in support of H2, like a garbled pre-1829 travel account or inaccurate map describing a fertile coastal location in Arabia that could have served as a 19th-century source. That kind of match that supports H2 should get the same treatment. It complicates things significantly, but without weighing all candidates (both H1 and H2) the results will drift in bias towards H1 simply because nearly all the supporting data for LGMs comes from widely-published researchers who were specifically looking for ancient origin matches in one place, without considering data that could have been used by a 19th century author as inspiration. I can already predict Mesoamerica will win every LGM test for lack of a good control/baseline. Somehow you have to figure out how to also test for the River Sidon in places where the author of the text could have found a River Sidon on a map, anywhere in the world. So, maybe add a bullet to the methodology? First, we'll build a master list of evidentiary categories — specifically, the strongest "hits" that proponents point to in the scholarly/apologetic literature. THEN, we'll build a master list of candidates for each category including both the strongest "hits" that proponents of H1 propose and the strongest "hits" that proponents of H2 propose. My apologies if you've already explained all this in your previous comments

Are you planning to publish your list and the publications you are working from? With tools like Claude Cowork and Obsidian as a memory vault, sorting and parsing and presenting is no longer a time-consuming process. I'm building out an Claude Cowork project on this same topic, and would like to include every source possible. I'm not even interested in writing the prompts, I'll make it available for eveyone to access and query the database as they choose

Although I don't think it necessary to explain physical plates getting to New York, somewhere on this forum I did propose that the plates were authentic ancient plates, carried to New York by a totally ordinary (apart from the disappearing acts) heavy-set old man who was described by several witnesses (including David and Mary Whitmer) carrying the plates in a rucksack. In my version, the old man the Whitmer's described was perhaps a sailor from Salem. These sailors would often bring back artifacts from their travels through the East Indies to be catalogued and displayed at the East India Marine Society Museum. Since many Salem traders passed through South India, they would have been curious about the mysterious Jewish copper plates. But perhaps the old man was carrying something far less exotic, a set of tin roof tiles or copper printing plates Regardless of where the plates came from, I do think the pleasant old gentleman on the road to Cumorah deserves a lot more attention. The Whitmers had two separate encounters with him and the plates or whatever was in the book-shaped bag. If we're going to accept Mary Whitmer's testimony as valid, we also have to consider it was the same ordinary old man with a knapsack that showed her the plates Here's an example of some copper plates from India from the 1830s that somehow ended up in New York. So although my scenario is highly ridiculous, its not entirely ridiculous.