Two voices in the Book of Mormon

[Chris Smith]

Besides, Chris's implicit suggestion that other family members could have contributed to the book would not, on a naturalistic explanation, be the least bit unreasonable. So, both for secular-explanatory purposes and apologetic purposes, the net gathering wordprint candidates should be cast wide enough to cover these folks.

I've always thought that if Joseph Smith had helpers or "co-conspirators", JS Sr. and Alvin were by far the likeliest candidates.

[Uncle Dale]

I've always thought that if Joseph Smith had helpers or "co-conspirators", JS Sr. and Alvin were by far the likeliest candidates.

From Dr, John Stafford -- the Smiths' next-door neighbor during the 1820s:

"I suppose I knew him as well as any one," he said yesterday, when questioned regarding his acquaintance with the Mormon leader. "I went to school with him, He was a strong, healthy boy, but was not considered remarkably bright. The people around town always thought his mother had more to do with writing the Book of Mormon than Joseph did. Even after the Smith family moved to Palmyra they said that they believed rich treasure was buried in that section. The mother of the family said that her family was going to get rich. A son, Alvin, went out West in search of wealth, but was unsuccessful and in a short time returned."

"It was soon after this that they began to write the book. They lived on what is now the Chapman farm. A man named Oliver Cowdry wrote the book. It was our belief that the old lady did a good deal of the dictating. It was said that Joseph would put his face into a hat and while thus gazing into darkness, would experience the revelations that enabled him to compose the Book of Mormon. When they had completed the work they tried to sell copies of the first sheets to people in the town, but they did not sell. People around there had no confidence in Mormonism."

http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/NY/miscNYS4.htm#031604

I'm sure you are also aware of a similar report from Orsamus Turner.

In fact, in those parts of Turner's report, where he evidently was

not an eyewitness, he probably derived his information from the same

"people around town" in Manchester, mentioned by Stafford.

It was Lucy who once wrote a book -- you may recall, and not her husband.

UD

[Chris Smith]

Interesting points, Unk. I'm sure I've seen that quote before, but I'd forgotten about it. Thanks!

[Uncle Dale]

Interesting points, Unk. I'm sure I've seen that quote before, but I'd forgotten about it. Thanks!

There was an interesting recollection given by Gov. Harding,

of his visit to the Smith home at the time the BoM was in the

press in nearby Palmyra. Harding only says a little about

Mother Smith -- but leaves the impression that she and Oliver

Cowdery got along fairly well.

I suspect that when Oliver was living with the Smiths, prior

to his moving to Harmony, that his closest ties were with

Lucy and not with Joseph, Sr. ---

http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/IL/miscill4.htm#042311

UD

[Glenn101]

noel00, on 08 June 2010 - 08:42 PM, said:

When is this paper being published?

http://statistics.by.../LLC_paper7.pdf

You don't deal much with the historical issues that Jockers and Criddle include. Craig is awar eof this paper.

Is the word "awar" a Freudian slip?

Sad to say, I have no idea when it is being published. The last I heard from the editor (6 months ago) was that they were waiting for a second review. The paper is not about the historical issues, but rather is about ways to extend NSC to deal more appropriately with complicated authorship attribution situations. There is a short appendix about historical issues. But I'm no historian. Matt Roper has published excellent historical replies to recent work on the Spalding-Rigdon theory.

By the way, this is not the paper that I referred to in my response to Craig as being accepted to a statistics journal. I'll send that link when revisions are complete.

Please tell Craig that I look forward to Craig's rejoinder to my response above.

(Dale: I guess the cat's out of the bag. You can uncross your fingers now.)

I read the paper and while I cannot follow the math, the results from testing the Hamilton Federalist papers for authorship by Rigdon, Cowdery, Prtatt, Smith, and Spaulding without including Hamilton produced results pretty much as I expected. And when Hamilton was included, the results also were pretty much as expected, i.e. Hamilton was the winner every time.

Bruce, hope you don't mind me throwing this out there.

Glenn

[Benjamin McGuire]

I think Noel, that you miss the issue with Bruce's paper that you linked. I already stated this a bit to Dale, but I am going to repeat it here.

The Jockers study claimed to be able to say something about authorship using its NSC modeling of data. It claims not only to be able to predict the most likely author of a series of candidates, but also to be able to predict which potential authors are not likely to be the real authors. The major flaw in the methodology is that in order for it to have any chance at predicting the real author of an unknown text, that real author must be in the list of proposed candidates. So far so good?

The historical data that the Stanford study presented was aimed at arguing that the potential candidates likely included the real candidate.

However, the problem that results is that none of the potential candidates statistically compared well to the Book of Mormon - that is, using the modeling of the Stanford study, the data (as Bruce has presented it here in this thread and in the article you link to) suggests that even the most probable potential author from the list of authors presented was not a likely author of the Book of Mormon. The Stanford study still predicts a most likely author - but that author isn't close enough to the unknown author(s) of the Book of Mormon to warrant accepting the study as having valid results. In other words, the NSC study from Stanford provides enough evidence to make a reasonable statement that Spaulding and Rigdon, and the other potential authors presented in that study, were not the authors of the Book of Mormon in the sense that the study hoped to demonstrate.

In this perspective, while Matt Roper may be responding to the long chains of plausibilities and unproven possibilities that constitute the various versions of the Spaulding/Rigdon/Smith conspiracy, the problem remains that even were you to have a historical argument that seems plausible, the statistics presented in the Stanford study simply do not support any of these individuals as an author of the Book of Mormon. And from that perspective, a detailed response to the historical issue simply isn't necessary when looking at the statistical modeling.

Further, despite your claims that it is the most plausible, there are obviously other theories (of natural origins) that are represented here in this thread - which have been well documented and published - and which the Standford study did not attempt to address. Perhaps the authors of the Stanford study believed that their results would speak for themselves - when clearly they haven't.

Ben M.

[MCB]

From Dr, John Stafford -- the Smiths' next-door neighbor during the 1820s:

I'm sure you are also aware of a similar report from Orsamus Turner.

In fact, in those parts of Turner's report, where he evidently was

not an eyewitness, he probably derived his information from the same

"people around town" in Manchester, mentioned by Stafford.

It was Lucy who once wrote a book -- you may recall, and not her husband.

UD

UD, Given Dr. Stafford's statement, the textural similarities of the dreams in Lucy's account, Lucy's obvious presence throughout early Mormonism, and her following Strang, who was such an obvious fraud, and Mormon cultural sexism, it is obvious to me that Jockers missed a very hot candidate. She simply wanted to support her family, and raise them above the poverty which was alien to her. Note that Joseph Sr. just faded into the background next to her.

[USU78]

[Jockers] claims not only to be able to predict the most likely author of a series of candidates, but also to be able to predict which potential authors are not likely to be the real authors. The major flaw in the methodology is that in order for it to have any chance at predicting the real author of an unknown text, that real author must be in the list of proposed candidates. So far so good?

The historical data that the Stanford study presented was aimed at arguing that the potential candidates likely included the real candidate.

However, the problem that results is that none of the potential candidates statistically compared well to the Book of Mormon - that is, using the modeling of the Stanford study, the data (as Bruce has presented it here in this thread and in the article you link to) suggests that even the most probable potential author from the list of authors presented was not a likely author of the Book of Mormon. The Stanford study still predicts a most likely author - but that author isn't close enough to the unknown author(s) of the Book of Mormon to warrant accepting the study as having valid results. In other words, the NSC study from Stanford provides enough evidence to make a reasonable statement that Spaulding and Rigdon, and the other potential authors presented in that study, were not the authors of the Book of Mormon in the sense that the study hoped to demonstrate.

Here's another issue I've been stewing about: What effect if the original author(s) wrote in another language, which language is claimed to have been translated into English by a single English speaker?

[Mola Ram Suda Ram]

UD, Given Dr. Stafford's statement, the textural similarities of the dreams in Lucy's account, Lucy's obvious presence throughout early Mormonism, and her following Strang, who was such an obvious fraud, and Mormon cultural sexism, it is obvious to me that Jockers missed a very hot candidate. She simply wanted to support her family, and raise them above the poverty which was alien to her. Note that Joseph Sr. just faded into the background next to her.

For kicks and giggles, I too would like to see it ran with her in the mix.

[MCB]

USU:

The text would be heavily influenced by the interpreter. Particularly if he interpreted the text loosely. But Joseph Smith influence is relatively small, according to Jockers.

[MCB]

For kicks and giggles, I too would like to see it ran with her in the mix.

I think I would be the one with a joyous sense of humor upon seeing the results.

Glad to see you acting civil.

[Mola Ram Suda Ram]

I think I would be the one with a joyous sense of humor upon seeing the results.

Glad to see you acting civil.

Ok ok ok. As if I don't normally act civil. Lol.

As to the results I just hope some one does it. I say the more they can through in the mix the better.

[MCB]

. I say the more they can through in the mix the better.

I think all are agreed on that. The research is only beginning.

[Benjamin McGuire]

Dale writes:

robuchan did raise one good point, that has not been disposed of yet -- and that is the possibility of multiple authors for individual Book of Mormon chapters.

I know that Dale has raised this more than once. I think that when we get to this kind of issue, our only real conclusion can be this - if this is the case, then these kinds of studies involving stylometry are not likely to yield very useful information. I see this for a couple of different reasons -

First, trying to separate the text into these various authors would be a very subjective process, without any real guarantee of achieving the objective.

Second, it would result in text samples that are quite small - allowing an increasing error rate due to simple variation.

Both of these issues would tend to invalidate the findings of a study like the Stanford study.

We could produce some hypotheticals and work with those I suppose, but again, it would be a lot of theory and not necessarily theory that would translate well to reality. We could, for example, take a Spaulding and Rigdon sample and merge them (creating for all intents and purposes a unit of text half written by Spaulding and half written by Rigdon) or any other two authors (or even more). And see how that composite and artificial author compares (there isn't much different in this than in using the artificial Malachi/Isaiah author that the Stanford study used). If I had to take a guess in this regard, I would expect that a Rigdon/Spaulding mix would be plotted somewhere in between Rigdon and Spaulding, and not moving in some completely different direction. But that's just a hunch.

At any rate, if this is what is believed about the Book of Mormon - that there are multiple authors engaging the text in this way, then I think that these kinds of stylometric approaches will simply fail to yield reliable data about authorship. On the other hand, if we see distinct clusterings in the Book of Mormon data (by chapter), then it could be argued that this represents a series of real authors and not the complete randomness we would expect from a text with no discernable authorship pattern.

Ben M.

[USU78]

The text would be heavily influenced by the interpreter. Particularly if he interpreted the text loosely. But Joseph Smith influence is relatively small, according to Jockers.

Those who've looked into the issue of "tight" vs. "loose" are all over the place, depending upon which part of the BoM we're talking about. Not much help there.

[Benjamin McGuire]

In adding to the other comments (before I move on), I think that throwing in more possible authors isn't a bad thing. I think that you would need to move to a pre-determined list of words (preferably all non-contextual). In doing this, it would eliminate some of the work needed to create the whole vocabulary for comparison, and so on, and it would be useful to do such a study with dozens of authors instead of just a few. If nothing else, to give us a broader perspective on how texts by different authors actually compare in such a modeling (the known ones - not just the unknown ones).

I think that talking about a translation process and so on isn't very helpful in this case. The argument isn't about trying to privilege the Book of Mormon as some kind of special text. It is a text. It can be treated like any other text. The only way you might look into how issues of translation affect these kinds of studies is to actually study texts in translation - and to do that you would need the translation and other original text by the same author that did the translation - for comparison. If we collected enough data to allow for predictive models, it might be helpful, but my guess is that there isn't going to be enough perceived value in this to really give anyone the impetus to move forward with such a project.

Ben M.

[mfbukowski]

No, I think you're missing the point (well, mine anyway). If all the known, plausible 19th century authors were excluded by such studies, this would put the Book of Mormon in a more defensible position. Of course this wouldn't satisfy those for whom only the naturalistic explanation was a live option, but the relevant audiences for discussion on Book of Mormon historicity are not exhausted by the complete naturalists and those with testimonies such that they would ignore any counter-evidence.

Besides, Chris's implicit suggestion that other family members could have contributed to the book would not, on a naturalistic explanation, be the least bit unreasonable. So, both for secular-explanatory purposes and apologetic purposes, the net gathering wordprint candidates should be cast wide enough to cover these folks.

Cheers,

Don

Hmmmm....

I'm not sure who is missing who here, but I agree with you.

What I am saying, as pointed out further by Unc Dale and Chris above, there are many others who conceivably could have been involved, in fact so many as to make the whole hypothesis perhaps untestable.

You could test each and every reasonable possible co-conspirator, but still leave out a possible author deemed "unreasonable" who was in fact the author, -- the town librarian or some other individual who was never considered a reasonable possibility, and thus remained untested.

Yes, the absence of a strong single hit for any single author would give the BOM some "credibility", but the evidence, in my opinion would still be too inconclusive as to really "prove" anything useful. There still could be an untested co-conspirator somewhere. The "naturalistic explanation" is just as non-falsifiable as the "super naturalistic explanation" in this scenario.

The point is, if the purpose is to discredit Joseph's story of the plates and a translation, this methodology, in my opinion, cannot reach that objective.

Of course there may be some other point I am missing here, but without a strong conclusive "hit" for any individual other than Joseph, I think the naturalistic explanation is in trouble.

In fact, for me, evidence of multiple authors is a pretty clear "hit" for the notion that the BOM is in fact a work by multiple authors, translated. Perhaps, for example, Joseph in his translation was in fact using various different 19th century "voices" familiar to him to mimic the different voices he was interpreting.

[Kevin Christensen]

Dale what is your response to this "Matt Roper has published excellent historical replies to recent work on the Spalding-Rigdon theory" I notice many LDS seem to assume every response by a LDS historian or scholar has demolished the arguments of the enemy.An yet one does not have to be a professional historian to notice certain things. For example Bushman ommitts his Spring 1969 Dialogue article in his RSR. Why? Was it because Walters demolished his arguments? Backman the supposed authority of the issue makes no mention at all of the the papers in Spring 1969 Dialogue. I know it's off the topic, I just thought I would throw my two cents worth in.

FWIW, Dialogue online used to have a long article by Michael Quinn in which he chides other LDS scholars, including Bushman, for giving in too much to Walters on the 1820 revival issue.

Kevin Christensen

Pittsburgh, PA

[DonBradley]

From Dr, John Stafford -- the Smiths' next-door neighbor during the 1820s:

I'm sure you are also aware of a similar report from Orsamus Turner.

In fact, in those parts of Turner's report, where he evidently was

not an eyewitness, he probably derived his information from the same

"people around town" in Manchester, mentioned by Stafford.

It was Lucy who once wrote a book -- you may recall, and not her husband.

UD

Hey Dale,

Remind me exactly what Turner said.

BTW, I only recently finally saw the Staker book. Are you still looking for it, or has it been sent to you in some other way?

Don

[DonBradley]

Yes, the absence of a strong single hit for any single author would give the BOM some "credibility", but the evidence, in my opinion would still be too inconclusive as to really "prove" anything useful. There still could be an untested co-conspirator somewhere. The "naturalistic explanation" is just as non-falsifiable as the "super naturalistic explanation" in this scenario.

I agree that ruling out Joseph Smith would do the most to bolster ancient origins, but, given the Spalding theory, etc., others would need to be ruled out as well. But, ultimately, as you suggest, one's judgment on naturalistic vs. supernatural origins is probably not usually going to, and should not, hinge on wordprint studies.

Cheers,

Don

[Uncle Dale]

Hey Dale,

Remind me exactly what Turner said.

This is from 1850:

...Mrs. Smith was a woman of strong, uncultivated intellect; artful and

cunning; imbued with an ill-regulated religious enthusiasm. The incipient

hints, the first givings out that a prophet was to spring from her humble

household, came from her; and when matters were maturing for denouement,

she gave out that such and such ones -- always fixing upon those who had

both money and credulity -- were to be instruments in some great work of

new revelation. The old man was rather her faithful co-worker, or executive

exponent....

...The mantle of the prophet which Mrs. and Mr. Joseph Smith and one

Oliver Cowdery had wove themselves -- every thread of it -- fell upon their

next eldest son, Joseph Smith, Jr.... Joseph had a little ambition, and

some very laudable aspirations; the mother's intellect occasionally shone

out in him feebly...

...the book itself is without doubt a production of the Smith family,

aided by Oliver Cowdery, who was school teacher on Stafford street,

an intimate of the Smith family, and identified with the whole matter.

The production, as all will conclude who have read it, or even given

it a cursory review, is not that of an educated man or woman...

...The primitive design of Mrs. Smith, her husband, Jo and Cowdery, was

money-making; blended with which perhaps was a desire for notoriety...

http://olivercowdery.com/texts/1851Trn1.htm#turn1850

originally published in the Rochester "Daily American"

I'm still working on that paper's articles:

http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/NY/miscNYS3.htm#111649

Turner does not say that Mother Smith contributed any text

to the BoM. Rather, he paints an historical picture of cooperation

between her and Oliver Cowdery. By the time Oliver was living

with the Smiths (1828), Turner had moved a few miles west -- so

I suspect that his professed knowledge of Cowdery in Manchester

was second-hand.

BTW, I only recently finally saw the Staker book. Are you still looking for it,

or has it been sent to you in some other way?

...

I finally obtained a copy -- took a few weeks.

My initial inspection of the book is partly mentioned here:

http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/features/hiram2.htm#staker

UD

[DonBradley]

Cool! Thanks, Dale!

Don

[MCB]

Thanks, Dale, for the extra info. I'm going to have to change the title of the Joseph Smith biography section to "Smith Family". As you know, I was already half-way there. She was probably far more instrumental in the writing of the book than anyone thought.

Now, according to this:

William Cowdery, Jr. (1765-1847) was born on September 5, 1765 in the village of East Haddam, Middlesex County, in the British Colony of Connecticut. He married Rebecca Fuller (1768-1809) in about 1787. Rebecca's Grandfather was John Fuller (c. 1656-1726) and John Fuller's brother was Shubael Fuller (c. 1684-1748). Shubael's Granddaughter, in turn, was Lydia Gates (1732-1818), mother of Lucy Mack Smith. In other words, Rebecca Fuller and Lydia Gates were full cousins, both born in East Haddam. The two Granddaughters no doubt knew each other and their respective children, Oliver Cowdery and Lucy Mack Smith, almost certainly knew of each other prior to their supposed initial meeting in Manchester, Ontario, NY in the fall of 1828.

http://www.olivercow...gen4.htm#report

Oliver's and Lucy's grandfathers were brothers, right? Yes, nevermind. I'm just not used to reading genealogies.

[Uncle Dale]

...

"Smith Family"

...

I am not totally discounting the involvement of

Joseph Smith, Sr., in his son's 1820s activities,

of course. I just see Lucy as the dominant force

in the family. She's one of my ancestral relatives

(while JSSr is not), so perhaps I have a bias.

For additional testimony of this subject, see the

statements of William Hyde, who knew the family:

http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/IL/mischig.htm#101488

http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/LDS/ldsnews2.htm#111088

UD

[Bruce Schaalje]

It looks like this thread is dying. I really would like to hear from Noel/Craig regarding my comments on this thread about the Jockers/Criddle paper. I take their silence as a sign of at least having to give serious thought to my statistical points.

I feel bad about my altercation with Noel about historical details in the Jockers/Criddle paper and papers by my friend Matt Roper. I reread the historical section in the Jockers/Criddle paper (just over one printed page) tonight and have to say, however, that I was underwhelmed. I had the impression from Noel that this was perhaps the strongest element of Criddle

heat map.pdf