Carving Of Precolumbian Horse At Chich

[Sargon]

Shoot. I need to find time to read this thread. It must be good if after 14 pages it is still attracting the attention of some of our finest scholars. Great job John W!

[John Williams]

John W writes:But this is the case whether or not you are a postmodernist (or even merely a post structuralist). Whether or not you want to assert that texts have determinate meanings is rather aside from the fact that we still have to read them - and that our language doesn't generally give us determinate meanings as we read.

At this point though, I still think this is a dodge. Why don't we have some of you provide us with your expectations with which you approach the text so that they can be discussed openly. What is it that a divinely translated text should look like? Who would its audience be? Would it have a determinate meaning dictated by its author's intent? Is God more of a literal word-for-word kind of translator or an idea-for-idea kind of translator ...

Not talking about these things, but then using some hypothetical divinely translated text to compare with the Book of Mormon as a means of criticizing it, is, if you don't mind the expression, putting the chariot before the horse ...

Ben

Who is "using some hypothetical divinely translated test to compare with the Book of Mormon as a means of criticizing it"? The part you quoted said that (and forgive me for not remembering the context) certain textual elements (and arguments based on them) within the Book of Mormon suggested a tight translation, whereas others suggest a looser translation. That seems fairly obvious, and you seem to agree. Coming up with a hypothetical "control" document would speak volumes about our expectations from scripture, but nothing about the Book of Mormon or its hypothetical counterpart.

[cdowis]

The More I look into this the more difficult it seems to become... I mean 10000 years worth of dirt isn't very thick. So what exactly would constitute findind the BOM animals we are talking about?

Let's conduct an experiment. Go into a deep forest, and start digging for animal bones, e.g. a deer. You should only have to dig a few feet down, right? That is not very thick, right?

Get back to us and tell us the result of this experiment.

[Zakuska]

Let's conduct an experiment. Go into a deep forest, and start digging for animal bones, e.g. a deer. You should only have to dig a few feet down, right? That is not very thick, right?

Get back to us and tell us the result of this experiment.

But thats just the point. There seems to be black whole. We have surface bones. We can safelty assume they died within the past 1000 years. But other bones within the 10000 year period could also be mis judged as dieing just yesterday and be thrown away. As apparently they have been.

Heres a good recent Article... from those FARMS hacks...

http://farms.byu.edu/publications/transcripts/?id=129

[Marchese]

OK, I must confess that the images concerning Stelae B, Copan, which purport to be elephants, actually do look like elephants, on this site:

http://www.the-book-of-mormon.com/photo-proofs.html

What is the rebuttal to this? They really don't look like parrots to me.

At first glance, I only saw that they could be elephants. Then, I looked at it a little longer and decided that the trunk area could be seen as a large beak, and the circle above it might be an eye? Looks more like an elephant to me, though.

[Benjamin McGuire]

John W writes:

Who is "using some hypothetical divinely translated test to compare with the Book of Mormon as a means of criticizing it"?

It happens all the time here. In this thread, for example, Jonzlaw made the following comments:

Wouldn't this require something less than an inspired translation by Smith?

And Bender:

I don't think its 100% certain that the horses and chariots is used for transportation, but it does seem the most likely given the context of the passage and that we are supposed to be dealing with an inspired translation.

And even you yourself, in your comment involving the assumption of a loose translation. At what point do the assumptions brought to the text dictate how we read it? And can we read the text without these assumptions? In other words, all of the above assume that the horses and chariots were used for a specific purpose precisely because of the assumptions they make about the text and not what the text actually says.

I bring a different view to the text than Brant does (although I suspect our thought processes are similar, we arrive at different conclusions - I suspect I could convert him to my way of thinking fairly quickly). And there are specific places where I expect to see references to horses (if they had horses in our traditional sense) based on what I understand of the text - and the horses simply aren't there. And this further enhances my suspicions that there are language issues at work here.

[MormonMason]

Funny, a post I made more than a year ago dealt with these very issues and how they were completely consistent with early 19th-century notions of who the Native Americans were. Heck, even John Clark backed off from these "bullseyes." Maybe you aren't familiar with current scholarship.

Just got back from private business out of state and am trying to catch up on the threads....

Got a link? I think it would be interesting. However, the Book of Mormon does not discuss the Native Americans of Joseph Smith's day but rather ancestors thereof. That was widely what was and is understood to be the content of the book.

There is much, much more that is in the Book of Mormon that places it firmly in Mesoamerica rather than in North America. What I gave above was only a brief listing of some of the evidences. By the way, where is there eveidene that the North American Native Americans had the use of alcoholic beverages or where and when did they sacrifice blood? Various Mesoamerican tribes had these but I know of none amongst the Native Americans of North America.