Zosimus

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.

True. Bryant was wrong about Chatterton's education. By 15 Chatterton had read several books at the charity school and his early poems show his literary influences. His charity school education was far more substantial than Bryant claimed. Yes, Chatterton was mixing his invented pseudo-archaism with his modern usage, whereas Champatsch argues the BoM exhibits something almost inverse. If Carmack is right, that's super significant. The old parchment collection at the church does explain pseudo-archaic Rowleyese in a way that the archaisms in the BoM can't be explained. However, I do think it's worth looking at 16th-17th century reference works and older Bibles that were circulating in lending libraries and were on shelves at, for example, the charity school Hiram attended. But these are all fair points you make, so let me reframe what I think the Chatterton example demonstrates. That is, restored texts (whether the Rowley Poems or the Book of Mormon) are so powerful and timely that many will embrace them as true without much concern for evidence or provenance. Having committed, they are then motivated to defend the text to preserve authenticity. That's the overlap with Chatterton I find interesting. For example, Bryant defended the ancient Rowley texts by arguing Chatterton was too ignorant and poor to have produced such sophisticated works. When skeptics established that Chatterton was actually well-read and his charity school education was decent, the defense shifted to something else, the language, the historical and geographical references, the parchment witnesses. But alongside the evidence-based arguments, a second line of defense ran in parallel. William Blake bypassed the debates entirely and simply declared: "I believe both Macpherson and Chatterton that what they say is ancient, is so." For Blake, the poems were too mighty and too ancient-feeling to have been a con job orchestrated by a 15 year old boy. He could feel that burning in the bosom, despite the critics. What's interesting is that both lines of defense are recognizable in this thread. Smac, Champatsch and Ryan Dahle are doing sophisticated evidence work, the same work Bryant did for Chatterton. But this is hard because critics will challenge the evidence requiring another kick to the can down the road. At that point yesterday's Nibley apologetics and Sorenson's Mormon's Codex are no longer enough. We are then introduced to more sophisticated word-play analysis, pseudo-archaic language, and the impossible-to-argue-against witnesses to the tangible plates. Alongside all these arguments Smac also does the Blake move, describing Moroni's Promise as "the catalyst" from which everything else is derivative of and is "downstream from". The evidence doesn't establish the foundation, only personal revelation can do that, and the evidence reinforces it. Like Blake, Teddyaware skips the evidence entirely, "once authentic faith is exercised, the doors of spiritual perception are unlocked and it becomes so perfectly obvious that the Book of Mormon is a mighty miracle." This IMO is what App means by #3 transmission lineages. The defense of the restored text becomes the transmission. The restored tradition thrives not despite its critics but because of them. The irony is the critics are likely so active because they sense that same mightiness and power in the restoration. This is likely why Strang's movement failed, his restored texts weren't as powerful as the Book of Mormon, and they weren't as timely (published after the Book of Mormon), so after he was killed he lost his defenders and the critics along with them.

I do much prefer all these options, as fraud is such a loaded term. I'm following Urs App's idea of a long-running tradition of "original truth" restorers across a wide range of traditions. What stands out is how consistently the same elements appear across different cultures and contexts, without any obvious imitation. Drawing on App's case studies, the pattern involves: An original pure teaching or proto-revelation. A Golden Age → Age of Degeneration → Age of Restoration arc. A transmission lineage connecting the original teaching to the present. Pivotal figures who serve as links in the chain. A protagonist as the restorer, the one who recovers the primordial doctrine. Ancient texts and material objects serving as proof. He even references Smith while defining #6 in the pattern: "divine revelations stored on golden tablets in heaven or in some American prophet's backyard." App's point (that I'm grappling with) is that this isn't a playbook for fraudsters and con artists. It's the pattern of restorationism, and seekers like Joseph Smith unwittingly fall into the pattern because the template already existed and the hunger for original truth is genuinely human. Devotional mythmaking does capture the idea. So does Jan Shipps' mythmaking. But making myths kinda sounds like lying, so it still feels inadequate to me. The word I keep returning to is restorationist, as it describes the pattern of restoring something that was lost, rather than inventing or imagining something new. It describes a pattern of recovering truth without passing moral judgements

I think the misunderstanding has been around this point: And also this: You are not wrong, but I can't help but to want a 4th option, whether its epistemologically sound or not. I've tried to explain through examples of other sincere people believing that they were playing a role in a restoration of a lost truth, including ancient texts. I don't see them as liars or frauds. Swedenborg is another example. He wrote thousands of pages describing his visits with angels in spiritual worlds and the teachings and texts that the angels revealed to him. I don't think Swedenborg was lying, or delusional, but he also wasn't telling the truth as I would understand it. I don't believe Swedenborg actually spoke with angels. But I believe he was sincere in believing that he did, and that he wasn't running some con job or fraud. I don't know what truly happened to Swedenborg, so I don't want to be forced into calling Swedenborg a deceiver, a dupe, or someone who was simply insane. I feel the same about Joseph Smith and the witnesses. I just find myself unable to collapse it into three options, so I suppose I am trying to resolve for myself what a 4th option might look like and what the implications would be. So I think we can close this out with our agreement that "by the time the witnesses experience the plates, they knew enough about the importance and significance of Smith's translation project to endorse it and support it and to commit to their testimonies all their lives." Thanks for the discussion

I tend to agree, but even then I do find a lot of people still insisting that one be completely familiar and versed with massive books like Mormon's Codex, with all the same methodological problems, blatant errors of fact and notable omissions. Responding to Sorenson's work is grueling and tedious, but its a prerequisite to the discussion. The more significant data will be parsed in time Yes

I brought Chatterton into the discussion not just as another example of a talented and "imaginative historian" who wrote pseudo-archaic works that still impress literary critics today. I mostly introduced him here as an example of how scholars like Jacob Bryant explained away Chatterton's natural talents to prove that Chatterton's works were authentically ancient. Similar explanations are often used to explain away Joseph's natural talents to prove that the Book of Mormon is authentically ancient: The "Ignorant Transcriber" argument. After interviewing Chatterton's mother, sister and friends, Bryant claimed that Chatterton was described as a dull boy incapable of instruction. He was fatherless and poor so his mother could only teach him to read from a music book and a Bible. Bryant's argument was that Chatterton was too ignorant and under-educated to have fabricated such sophisticated and apparently ancient material. Lack of Historical and Geographical Knowledge The Rowley poems contained obscure historical references that Bryant believed a poorly educated charity-school boy could never have known. When writing in his own hand, Chatterton exhibited no familiarity with geography, believing for example that the Tiber River was in Arabia. Unknowable dialects thought to be bad grammar. Rowley's poems were written in an older dialect that Chatterton couldn't have known. When critics complained about “bad grammar” Bryant pointed out that Chatterton had tried to fix up awkward 15th century language using his own 18th century language. Bryant also provided examples of grammar and syntax inaccessible to an under-educated teenager. Chatterton was too poor and busy. "If a young lad of little or no principle should find a treasure of old poetry, and put it off for his own; I should not much wonder. But that such a person should compose to this amount, and then give the credit of it to another, is past my comprehension." The argument was that Chatterton was too busy trying to escape poverty that he wouldn't have time to do all of the above. Witnesses to the process. Bryant interviewd neighbors who knew Chatterton intimately testified that they had seen him copying from ancient parchments and that he never hinted at being the author. Too long and sophisticated to produce in so short a timeframe. 3,700 verses on various subjects and in very difficult language (see below) within the time frame of about eighteen months. His verses were admired by Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth etc. Not a single copy/paste job from the KJV and no "it came to pass" filler

The point of this portion of the discussion was whether or not Joseph Smith "hardly knew" the Whitmers, after living in their home for 3-4 weeks while translating the gold plates. My opinion is by the time they witness the plates, they knew enough about the importance and significance of Smith's translation project to endorse it and support it and to commit to their testimonies all their lives. I responded to Smac's line of questioning already. From my view, he is also misrepresenting the parallels, inflating some and ignoring others. So its a draw of sorts I suppose. What's getting strange is your constant fixation on my unwillingness to discuss the moral character of Joseph Smith, James Strang and their witnesses. Discussing the moral character of Smith, Strang and the witnesses would be a waste of time. I don't mind discussing motives, so long as we "don't go down the path of depending on all the statements of all the angry villagers 40 years after the fact." See above. I don't frame Joseph as a con artist or a fraud. I did once use the term pious fraud, but qualified that I think fraud isn't the right term. My words were: ""I view the projects of both Smith and Strang as pious frauds, but even then I don't like the word fraud because I don't think Smith was necessarily a fraud. I believe he was sincere." I also said I don't think con job is a fair label for the translation project, and I provided examples of other "imaginative historians" that did indeed fabricate histories for reasons that explain why I do not consider them to be con artists involved in fraud.

I mentioned the scorecard I've been working on in the other thread, in case its helpful here: Category A. Flora (Items 1-8) Scorecard Category B. Fauna (Items 9-18) Scorecard Category C. Metallurgy and Materials (Items 19-27)Scoredcard Category D. Writing Systems and Record-Keeping (Items 28-33) Scorecard Category E. Weapons and Military (Items 34-42) Scorecard Category F. Economy, Trade, and Monetary System (Items 43-48) Scorecard Category G. Government and Law (Items 49-53) Scorecard Category H. Religion and Temples (Items 54-58) Scorecard Category I. Vehicles, Transport, and Maritime (Items 59-62) Scorecard Category J. Demographics and Settlement (Items 63-67) Scorecard Category K. Chronology and Civilization Trajectory (Items 68-70) Scorecard Category L. Physical Geography (Items 71-82) Scorecard Global Scorecard & Conclusion: Which Geography Most Resembles the Book of Mormon? Master Comparison Matrix: Categories A-L (Items 1-82)

There are too many examples throughout history of witnesses corroborating suspicious artifacts. Sometimes they go along with it even if they know the artifact is dubious. There are a number of reasons why, but usually it boils down to the witnesses have something to gain or something to lose, or some combination of both. I gave the example earlier of police investigators and a wide range of church and state officials going along with the Etruscan texts (scariths) that Curzio buried throughout his hometown. Even if state officials knew the artifacts were fabricated, they vouched for their authenticity, because they all had enough to gain from it. There are dozens of similar examples over the past 400 years. Its not that difficult to explain. I believe the witnesses to the gold plates and the witnesses to Strang's plates were motivated to vouch for the authenticity of the plates, because they had something to gain from it. They were similarly motivated to never recant, because they all had more to gain by not reversing their previous witness of the plates. I know there's the argument out there that the Cowdery, Harris and the Whitmers faced tremendous hardship because of their testimonies, but IMO this is why they were quick to fall out with Smith and then Brigham Young. They perceived they would benefit by falling out and starting their own movements. But as the plates were central to the movements that they were starting themselves, they needed to maintain their testimonies of the authenticity of the plates and their angelic witness. They benefited by falling out with Smith, while at the same time they also benefitted by maintaining their testimony of the plates.

Meyerstein’s 1930 biography treated the Rowley poems as serious art, identifying a consistent meter resembling Edmund Spenser (16th c) and spotting numerous echoes of Shakespeare and Dryden Taylor’s 1971 Complete Works set the Rowley canon and traced sources for “Rowleyese”. Taylor is the one that compiled a glossary of all Chatterton's invented archaisms, and recast Chatterton as an “imaginative historian” rather than a con artist. Cottle complained that critics obsessed over the suicide and the forgeries instead of reading the Rowley poems as real literature. Farrer wrote about how the Rowley poems still impress even when read today. Hall and Forman argued the musical and natural qualities of Chatterton's can only be sensed when read in the original fake-archaic diction. Groom used the fake Rowley documents, ink, and parchment to question how history and texts get their authority in the first place. Studies of Keats show how deeply Chatterton’s style and medievalism seeped into Romantic poetry. Overall, modern scholarship places Chatterton within a wider revival of medieval things and praise him as a wildly inventive "poet historian" who invented his own language in an age obsessed with reason. FWIW, my sense is Joseph Smith's approach to inventing a language and history for America was not much different.

Chatterton was using dictionaries from his local library. He scanned the dictionary for any term labeled “Obsolete” and then worked that into his manuscripts. Consistently enough to convince experts like Jacob Bryant. AFAIK there’s no one arguing that the language of the Book of Mormon is correct for 400 AD. Champatsch would know better than me, but seems the argument is that the language of the Book of Mormon is more aligned with 17th century. Idk, were the dictionaries and glossaries that Chatterton used to isolate archaisms also circulating in the Americas? The KJV certainly was. For me, Chatterton demonstrates that a 15-17 year old from an impoverished background with minimal education was capable of producing a set of pseudo-archaic documents that impressed the likes of Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Bryant and Blake. He wrote them himself. In 1768, he invented his own 15th century “provincial dialect” using nothing but dictionaries and glossaries from his local library. He did all this without his family and friends suspecting any fraud

In 1768, an impoverished and under-educated 15 year old boy in Bristol named Thomas Chatterton claimed to have discovered a chest full of 15th century manuscripts written by a monk named Rowley. He produced transcripts in his own handwriting of the 15th century documents along with a few of the originals written in a pseudo-medieval script. The language of the transcripts was so unique and seemingly authentic that many well-known scholars believed Chatterton. It was only after Chatterton committed suicide at the age of 17 that the debate about their authenticity exploded in print literature. Jacob Bryant, one of the most respected antiquarians at that time, wrote a full volume on the controversy, arguing that the Chatterton documents were authentic 15th century manuscripts. His arguments can be summarized as: The "Ignorant Transcriber" argument. After interviewing Chatterton's mother, sister and friends, Bryant claimed that Chatterton was described as a dull boy incapable of instruction. He was fatherless and poor so his mother could only teach him to read from a music book and a Bible. Bryant's argument was that Chatterton was too ignorant and under-educated to have fabricated such sophisticated and apparently ancient material. Lack of Historical and Geographical Knowledge The Rowley poems contained obscure historical references that Bryant believed a poorly educated charity-school boy could never have known. When writing in his own hand, Chatterton exhibited no familiarity with geography, believing for example that the Tiber River was in Arabia. Unknowable dialects thought to be bad grammar. Rowley's poems were written in an older dialect that Chatterton couldn't have known. When critics complained about “bad grammar” Bryant pointed out that Chatterton had tried to fix up awkward 15th century language using his own 18th century language. Bryant also provided examples of grammar and syntax inaccessible to an under-educated teenager. Chatterton was too poor and busy. "If a young lad of little or no principle should find a treasure of old poetry, and put it off for his own; I should not much wonder. But that such a person should compose to this amount, and then give the credit of it to another, is past my comprehension." The argument was that Chatterton was too busy trying to escape poverty that he wouldn't have time to do all of the above. Witnesses to the process. Bryant interviewd neighbors who knew Chatterton intimately testified that they had seen him copying from ancient parchments and that he never hinted at being the author. Too long and sophisticated to produce in so short a timeframe. 3,700 verses on various subjects and in very difficult language (see below) within the time frame of about eighteen months. His verses were admired by Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth etc. Not a single copy/paste job from the KJV and no "it came to pass" filler Example. This poem Keats called the "purest" English: O! synge untoe mie roundelaie, O! droppe the brynie teare wythe mee, Daunce ne moe atte hallie daie, Lycke a reynynge ryver bee; Mie love ys dedde, Gon to hys deathe-bedde, Al under the wyllowe tree. Blacke hys cryne as the wyntere nyghte, Whyte hys rode as the sommer snowe, Rodde hys face as the mornynge lyghte, Cale he lyes ynne the grave belowe; Mie love ys dedde, Gon to hys deathe-bedde, Al under the wyllowe tree. Bryant was completely convinced, and other writers like William Blake would claim Chatterton to be a kind of visionary figure beyond explanation. But it is much more plausible (and is the scholarly consensus) that the boy was a precocious prodigy, and that he had mined old dictionaries and glossaries from his local lending libraries to stitch together a syntax and narrative with archaic vocabulary and pseudo‑medieval spellings to give his poems a fifteenth century feeling. He used candles and yellow ochre to artificially darken and age the manuscripts. Over time, scholars identified anachronisms such as the knitting of stockings before anyone knew how to knit stockings and Bristol being identified as a city before it was one. Analysts figured out that beneath the archaisms and props, the dialect (consisting of over 1,800 unique words now known as Rowleyese) was entirely invented by a 15 year old boy trying to make a name and a career for himself

3-4 weeks living in someone's home is more than enough time to invite them to be witnesses to whatever was in the trunk, with an appearance of gold. See all my responses to this same question in out previous conversations What makes you say the 19 year old who found the Etruscan texts was tricking people? Read the whole story, its more complicated than that. Curzio Inghirami was, in part, providing a way for people to discuss topics that would normally get them burned at the stake. There are a couple other reasons why I consider the scarith controversy to be far more than a con job and Curzio and his family and witnesses more sincere than con artists Same goes for Joseph Smith and his family and witnesses No, it doesn't. See above

I am interested in discussing Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon a I am interested in discussing James Strang and the Record of Rajah Manchou and the four witnesses and the Brass Plates of Laban and the seven witnesses I am interested in discussing the three witnesses: Martin Harris, David Whitmer and Oliver Cowdery and their written witness testimony I am interested in discussing the eight witnesses to the gold plates: the five Whitmers and the three Smiths I am interested in discussing how Smith's gold plates differ from Strang's brass plates I am interested in discussing how Smith's witnesses differ from Strang's witnesses However, I am not interested in a back and forth about the moral character of Joseph Smith, James Strang or any of the witnesses. I am not interested in what Joseph Smith would later say about the moral character of the witnesses, and the reasons why they were excommunicated I am not interested in what the witnesses would later say about Joseph Smith's moral character I am not interested in what some would later say about James Strang's moral character and the reasons why he was excommunicated I am not interested in what neighbors or villages who knew Joseph Smith and his witnesses or James Strang and his witnesses said about their moral character I was just listening to a podcast about the Scarith of Scornello. A 19-year old boy staged an elaborate set of forged Etruscan texts (scarith) and buried them all over the city as evidence of their antiquity. State officials came to investigate, and ended up also convinced that the texts were authentically ancient, and they issued witness statements confirming. "For the next two weeks, the two officials alternated days in the field with days spent examining witnesses, and there is no doubt which days they enjoyed more. Proud of their own Etruscan heritage, they found the dig at Scornello an intoxicating immersion in their ancient past. Thirteen new scarith emerged from the chalky soil during their seven days of on-site investigation, two of the capsules wrested from a gnarled tangle of oak tree roots by none other than Ottavio Capponi himself. Their direct experience of amateur archaeology had a forceful effect on the granducal agents: after a trip to view the oldest documents in Volterra's civic archive, they officially declared that the scarith of Scornello had been genuinely buried and were very, very old." The forger then used all the witness testimonies to convince others, all the way to the Vatican. He said: "It is evident that when [the scarith] first began to be found, the Criminal Court intervened from the very beginning, and then the whole City of Volterra; many people have intervened from almost every place in Tuscany, and all the principal Cities, and places of Italy, and in effect all those who have fancied clar- ifying their ideas about the truth have been present at the finding of these memorials, and this has not happened on one single occasion, but in a lapse of time, bit by bit, so that from 25 November 1634 up until now these have always been found, and are still continually being found. In addition to this, they are reinforced by the authentic testimony of a public trial, held with the greatest diligence by Signor Tommaso Medici and Signor Ottaviano Capponi, delegated to this task by the Most Serene Grand Duke of Tuscany, in the presence of a nearly infinite number of eyewitnesses, and ratified thereafter by the order of His Highness, who sent the Signori Mario Guiducci and Niccolò Arrighetti, Gentlemen of Florence, to examine the place and watch the excavations, and this document is preserved in the Archive of the City of Volterra." So my view is more nuanced than calling something like this a "con job". I think it just sort of starts small as a curiosity, and then spirals out of control due to more intense curiosity combined with social, familial and economic pressures, religious motives, and an "intoxicating immersion in the ancient past" and once it reaches a certain point, its easier to go along with the string of events that has everyone so excited.

You mean Christian, Jacob, Peter, and John Whitmer and Hiram Page, the husband of Catherine Whitmer? Joseph Smith was invited by the Whitmers to live in their home. Joseph, Emma and Oliver lived with the Whitmers for 3-4 weeks while translating the gold plates in their home. Two of those Whitmers (Christian and John) acted as scribes. They were actively contributing to the translation project for weeks, and certainly were not strangers. Would a defense attorney be able to convince a jury that Joseph Smith "hardly knew" 5 people from a family he had been living with for 3-4 weeks? If two of those five had helped him translate the plates, can we say Joseph hardly knew them? Also, you fail to mention that the other 3 witnesses were Joseph Smith's own family, his two brothers and his father.

This is not in the linked article. If you are discussing all this with AI, you might be getting hallucinations. I’ve seen this quite a lot with ChatGPT. It will make up an authoritative quote and even cite a journal and a paper, but the paper might be completely hallucinated, and the quote is loosely based on words it finds in similar papers in the cited journal. Can you find the actual quote in that journal? Or ask your AI to verify the quote, pointing out that it might be hallucinating. It will usually fess up if it has and you catch it.

Is it certain that the “modern” human‑adapted strains didn’t also have seals as an earlier vector? Can we conclude for certain that IS6110 spread through human‑to‑human contact only, rather than also moving through earlier animal and hosts we haven’t sampled yet? I don't find any mention of L. serricone in the linked text. All it says is: "Three utilized samples of rope recovered from around the ankles and wrists of skeletons or isolated limbs; the fourth was done from a sample of fly and beetle remains collected from within the skull of H33. Because of the small size of the samples, all were analyzed by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS)." How to determine these beetle remains were L. serricone? The real question is how those traces ended up in those vials in the first place. Samorini is basically saying these results are so wild, and the reporting is so thin, that we shouldn’t rewrite global history yet. In other words, we shouldn't limit ourselves to results of 1990s positives from Balabanova and Parsche & Nerlich, versus other teams on other mummy sets that don’t see cocaine at all. Better to be cautious given the high likelihood of contamination. This is why nobody has given much weight to these results.