Brant Gardner

It is the new FARMS (Faithful Answers, Remedial Math Skills).😃

As my good friend Gordon Thomasson has noted, during Joseph's lifetime the word "illiterate" would be better understood as "unlettered," or without formal education. Of course he could read and write.

You know, I have so many people wonder why I think I might be an authority on anything--so I guess it just goes with the territory.

I have it on pretty good authority that he is skeptical of Hebraisms that are not involved with names. Names appear to follow a different logic in the translation--or so I think he thinks.

You'll get a little taste of my commentary in Valletta's book. He cites it from time to time.

I have met him, but do not know him. Here is a short bio from BYU: https://rsc-legacy.byu.edu/authors/valletta-thomas-r

Tom Valleta's is another commentary that is a collection of quoted material--but this time from other commentaries. You should think about the online version which has enlarged content. On the free side, the ScripturePlus app has an integrated commentary. It includes Jack Welch's notes from classes taught over the years and a commentary on verses that I'm partial to.

Yes, some are simply unnecessary. As with the problem of suggesting that there isn't a problem because it is a 22.9% problem, the fact that one can make excuses for some of them doesn't alter the problem with the others. And this continues to be the problem. You certainly have a lot of evidence for your thesis, but there are small but substantial problems that you are ignoring rather than either integrating into the thesis, or realizing that they can invalidate the thesis. The major one is the problem of latest date. There are two problems with your data. One is that some of the evidence is later than the Early Modern English hypothesis. The second is that there is an inherent problem with the way the exclusiveness of the data is asserted. It is asserted because it wasn't yet found. Then then you publish articles indicating that some of them have been found. That, of course, is precisely what a scholar should do--but for some reason you don't understand that it continues to undermine the proposal that "Joseph couldn't" when you find that perhaps he could have on some of them. Your hypothesis cannot explain all of the data, and when it falls short of explaining all of the data, it simply cannot be accepted as an explanation. I suppose a third issue is the idea that a small, but significant percentage of variation from your hypothesis can be dismissed. A fourth would be your own evidence finding similar evidence in the early revelations, but not all revelations. None of those would be translations, and they related to Josephs current situations. There is no need for someone who hasn't learned to keep up with English for 200 years to have given them to him, not to mention the strong evidence that Joseph was very willing to alter them when he thought he needed to communicate the idea better. If your hypothesis only answers one possible question and ignores so many, it isn't very useful.

I continue to be fascinated by this interesting "defense" of the changes at italics. It doesn't say that it didn't happen. It doesn't say that the problems introduced didn't happen. It simply says it wasn't consistent. Yes, they were wrong but not consistently wrong is a strange defense. What the statistics show is that attention was paid to italics. That all of them were not changed does not change the problem for the 22.9% of them that were changed--especially in cases where the change left an incomplete sentence, or required circumlocution to repair the damage of the change. There might be some that were seen as improvements, but I don't remember any. Say it is only 90% of the 22.9% of changes at italics. That still is important information about a process that occurred at a specific location that is definable, and related to the visual inspection of the text. I agree that there is no evidence that a Bible was present, so we still have to figure out how this happened. Presumably the person/persons who did the translation that Joseph read were less than competent translators?

Indeed. I have seen what I think are elements of a primarily oral culture even in writing. It becomes obviously difficult to separate that type of orality from dictation orality. I doubt we will soon have anything that reaches strong consensus. I think the first important barrier created by the English text to fall is the assumption of literal translation. I think there is a reasonable consensus that our English text cannot be a precisely accurate rendition of the Nephite text. I think we can find obvious cases where the modern (even if Early Modern) translation is the cause of certain passages. I have argued for some passages that I think were prophetic expansions on the text, and I am seeing more of those. So far, I'm not sure that there are any that can be dated sufficiently to argue exclusively either for Joseph of the putative earlier translator(s).

My point is that physically writing is a different process than oral presentation of information. The nature of the "or" changes fit oral much better than writing (based on Walter Ong--but I'm too lazy to dig for the citation). The next question is whether the plate text is copied from a less permanent medium. Perhaps, but there is also evidence that many things are triggered asides based on what was just written. If this is posited for the les permanent medium, we have to wonder about the editorial process which didn't create a more coherent text on the plates. It appears to me that the plates were being written on, and that these asides were unplanned additions as the writing occurred. Positing a two-phase writing opens the door to even more editorial changes which are even more surprising to not see in the plate text.

We clearly see understanding the translation very differently. The problem of multiple previous translators is precisely a question of Book of Mormon authorship. We have managed to clarify that the original translation (by whomever) was, in Skousen's terms, "cultural and conceptual." That finally moves away from the problematic word for word translation that cannot explain the text at all. So that does answer one question about the translation. Now we have to understand how that "cultural and conceptual" translation came to be dictated to Oliver. We know Joseph played a part, and since he claimed to be the translator, it seems that we ought to at least attempt to take him seriously. If we look at his revisions to the Book of Mormon, if we look at the way he handled issues of italics in large quotations of biblical material, if we look at the process by which the revelations were received, I submit it begins to be clear that Joseph was an active participant in the process. The entire book Producing Ancient Scripture documents the ways in which Joseph is best seen as an active participant.

Again, this is the standard suggestion, that somehow the engraving on metal made a strikeout difficult. I submit it is a nice idea, but incorrect. There is no reason that a strikeout would be more difficult on plates than on paper. There is no reason that we would expect the original to be without error. However, this type of error is qualitatively different from the "or" clauses. In this case, there was a significant amount of text to be repaired, and the solution was similar to other cases of interjection--the repetitive resumption we see after those insertions. That is different from the problem of the "or" clause which could be fixed much more quickly with the crossout of a single word and a replacement. The "or rather" is very similar to the regular "or." Think about how slowly one has to go when engraving on metal. How soon after writing the word that headed in the wrong direction would you notice it? I know that on a computer keyboard, there are times when I know my fingers have made a mistake and I am backspacing almost without even looking. If not, I can check what I have written very quickly. My fingers are significantly faster on a keyboard than engraving would be--and most of the time I am catching my error in the very word that is a mistake. This is an issue of the difference between writing and oral speech.

That has become the standard explanation, but it doesn't work. The changes are to whole clauses. If you were writing on paper, you would cross out the word. When the Maya carved glyphs, they recarved them. It is more efficient to stop at the first word and cross it out--it is much harder to write several more words on the plates. Where we do see this kind of correction is in oral discourse because the phrase is out when the need to clarify it becomes apparent. You cannot cross out oral texts, but it is easy and well attested on physical texts.

And yet we still have the problem that there are aspects of the text that postdate the other evidence. Since Early Modern English also gets extended to 1800, the issue isn't even Early Modern English, but the conservation of earlier variants. It is possible, perhaps, to posit parts of the Book of Mormon to have been translated earlier, but it must also be conceded that some elements were translated later. If we have only one translator, we have to assume the most recent. If there were multiple translations, then we are in the realm of inexplicable mystery. We haven't even attempted a discussion about the unusual logic of some translator a hundred years before Joseph. That couldn't have been done on earth, and if in Heaven, then why the archaic language?