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Book Of Mormon Textual "parallelomania"


Uncle Dale

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I still need to go back and clean up the font-sizes, and other formatting oddities, but I think

that Ben's article is worthy of some notice here:

Parallelomania, by Ben McGuire

Your thoughts, FAIRites?

Uncle Dale

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I still need to go back and clean up the font-sizes, and other formatting oddities, but I think

that Ben's article is worthy of some notice here:

Parallelomania, by Ben McGuire

Your thoughts, FAIRites?

Uncle Dale

Frankly, I always suspected Warrenâ??s book was based on Payne's History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. I'm glad we've got that problem solved!

Very interesting article. It does rather undercut Donofrio's exhuberant conclusions, eh?

Best.

CKS

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I thought Donofrio's Spalding parallels were considerably stronger than his Book of Mormon parallels, so it's interesting that Spalding comes out as a 10% match with Warren compared to the 5% match that seems to be average for all the other parallels.

Part of Ben's analysis is based on shared vocabulary. I wonder what the result would be if we cut out all the BoM's quotations from the Bible. How well would the remaining text match up to these different sources?

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CK,

>>Part of Ben's analysis is based on shared vocabulary. I wonder what the result would be if we cut out all the BoM's quotations from the Bible. How well would the remaining text match up to these different sources?

The percentage of correlations would only increase in proportion to the amount of text you are excluding to facilitate such an increase.

If you exclude all the text not a part of the correlations you could make it 100%...that wouldn't prove much though.

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CK,

>>Part of Ben's analysis is based on shared vocabulary. I wonder what the result would be if we cut out all the BoM's quotations from the Bible. How well would the remaining text match up to these different sources?

The percentage of correlations would only increase in proportion to the amount of text you are excluding to facilitate such an increase.

If you exclude all the text not a part of the correlations you could make it 100%...that wouldn't prove much though.

Well, the BoM itself claims to be a composite text -- so I'd like to see this sort of vocabulary comparison

calibrated down to the level of individual "records" in the BoM -- In particular I'd be curious to see Spalding's

vocabulary compared to that of Helaman I, Shiblon and Helaman II.

Maybe.... someday.

UD

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Warship,

If one is trying to do a statistical analysis of a text, doesn't it make sense to exclude from the analysis parts of the text where they're quoting someone else? For example, say I want to prove that you're the author of a post. But I don't exclude the part where you quoted CK Salmon. That totally throws off the statistics, because obviously you're not the author of CK Salmon's post! Wordprint studies of the BoM do the same thing: they try to avoid BoM passages that substantially quote the Bible, lest their results be colored by the biblical syntax and word choice.

I'd think that if one is going to compare Joseph's writings to another text, one would want to focus exclusively on those writings that are really by Joseph, and to avoid places where he is obviously quoting someone else.

Extensive use of the Bible is part of the reason I don't think wordprint or other statistical studies of the BoM will ever be really useful. Even where the BoM isn't explicitly quoting Bible verses, it often seems to be combining, re-wording or re-working them. Conceivably, the entire BoM is colored by the language of the King James Bible.

-CK

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U Dale and CK,

I can see what ya'll are saying and your probably right, I didn't think it thru..its late :P Sorry.

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Heh, yes, M.D. Hooker is a woman. We discussed that way back, I guess I never corrected it.

On a side note, I would make this suggestion -

The King James Bible in its language, was one of the most influential and widely read works of literature in early America. The only value in removing it from the Book of Mormon for this kind of stastical model, would be in removing the quoted material (which is identified as being quoted). While this makes up a substantial part of the use of the Bible in the Book of Mormon, it is by no means most of the use of the Bible in the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon tends to interpret passages of the text, as in the use of Psalm 95 in Jacob.

It is the interpretational passages which are really the most interesting. The Psalm 95 usage, for example, fits an Old Testament reading, but is completely unaware of (or contrary to) the interpretation given to Psalm 95 in the New Testament.

My own discussion on the extensive use of 1 Samuel 17 in the Book of Mormon's 1 Nephi 3-4 is also of interest here. There is no doubt that we can talk about the Book of Mormon and it's textual reliance, the issue is more a matter of method.

Finally, if the Book of Mormon makes clear and intentional use of Old Testament material using a range of apparent rhetorical figures, it stands to reason that we should expect to see a similar use of non-Biblical material proposed as being used by the author of the Book of Mormon.

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Heh, yes, M.D. Hooker is a woman. We discussed that way back, I guess I never corrected it.

On a side note, I would make this suggestion -

The King James Bible in its language, was one of the most influential and widely read works of literature in early America. The only value in removing it from the Book of Mormon for this kind of stastical model, would be in removing the quoted material (which is identified as being quoted). While this makes up a substantial part of the use of the Bible in the Book of Mormon, it is by no means most of the use of the Bible in the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon tends to interpret passages of the text, as in the use of Psalm 95 in Jacob.

It is the interpretational passages which are really the most interesting. The Psalm 95 usage, for example, fits an Old Testament reading, but is completely unaware of (or contrary to) the interpretation given to Psalm 95 in the New Testament.

My own discussion on the extensive use of 1 Samuel 17 in the Book of Mormon's 1 Nephi 3-4 is also of interest here. There is no doubt that we can talk about the Book of Mormon and it's textual reliance, the issue is more a matter of method.

Finally, if the Book of Mormon makes clear and intentional use of Old Testament material using a range of apparent rhetorical figures, it stands to reason that we should expect to see a similar use of non-Biblical material proposed as being used by the author of the Book of Mormon.

I can make that correction in the web-page, Ben.

Tom has also written a reply, which I'll post there, after you've had a chance to go back through

your paper and finalize its text.

I'll also standardize the font size and make a couple of other formatting changes.

Let me know --

Uncle Dale

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