A Hebraism In The Book Of Mormon

[Rob Bowman]

Wade,

Let's cut through the swamp. Please define what you mean by the term secular.

[wenglund]

Wade,

Let's cut through the swamp. Please define what you mean by the term secular.

Rob,

Stop filling up the swamp. I have already sufficiently defined the term and clarified it for you, but you don't get it--in part because you seem intent on not getting it. I have accepted the wall, and I am pleased to leave each to their own.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

[Rob Bowman]

Wade,

Regarding the term secular, you wrote:

I have already sufficiently defined the term and clarified it for you....

CFR. A simple link to the post in which you defined the term will do.

Edited March 1, 2012 by Rob Bowman

[Cobalt-70]

Methinks you don't know what you are talking about. The book of Isaiah prophetic/poetic literature. It is a completely different kind of literature from, say, the book of Chronicles, or Deuteronomy, or proverbs etc., or indeed other parts of the Book of Mormon. They have different literary qualities and characteristics. What you demand is like saying that the book of Job should have the same "density of Hebraism" as the book of Esther--without having a clue what kind of "Hebraisms" you are talking about. Your argument is becoming sillier and sillier by the minute. The Book of Mormon is true. It is a literal translation from an ancient Hebrew text. There are as many Hebraisms in it as there are in the Bible, which can be demonstrated in many ways, especially the ways that I had outlined in my earlier posts.

That's why the test would only include Hebraisms that are common throughout all the Old Testament and would be expected to be in any ancient Hebrew prophetic work. Anything overly poetic, or which is is only found in Isaiah, would be excluded. Like I say, a lot of details would have to be worked out, and the precise list of Hebraisms would be one of them.

[altersteve]

Wade,

Let's cut through the swamp. Please define what you mean by the term secular.

From what I can understand, he means that we believe the Bible because we have a spiritual witness testifying of it, whereas you, he claims, believe it because of physical/historical evidence.

[wenglund]

CFR. A simple link to the post in which you defined the term will do.

Sorry, I am not going to scale the mountain of our resent interactions looking for it. If it is important to you (it isn't to me--particularly given the "wall"), then you can spend the time searching for it yourself. Good luck with that. If it is of any help, I believe it may be in the thread where I first rightly described your approach as secular--though I can't recall at the moment which on that was.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

[Nemesis]

Sorry, I am not going to scale the mountain of our resent interactions looking for it. If it is important to you (it isn't to me--particularly given the "wall"), then you can spend the time searching for it yourself. Good luck with that. If it is of any help, I believe it may be in the thread where I first rightly described your approach as secular--though I can't recall at the moment which on that was.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

Wade there are two choices here retract the statement or fulfill the cfr. We require it out of critics we will require it from LDS

Nemesis

[wenglund]

From what I can understand, he means that we believe the Bible because we have a spiritual witness testifying of it, whereas you, he claims, believe it because of physical/historical evidence.

Not that it matters much, but I used the term "secular" more in relation to Rob's approach to the Book of Mormon than the Bible, as differentiated from the approach of believing LDS to the same.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

[wenglund]

Wade there are two choices here retract the statement or fulfill the cfr. We require it out of critics we will require it from LDS

Nemesis

Fine. Even though I am quite certain I defined the term for Rob in an earlier thread, I don't wish to waste my time looking for it, and so I will retract the statement, and I will simply decline Rob's request to define it at this time.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

[zerinus]

That's why the test would only include Hebraisms that are common throughout all the Old Testament and would be expected to be in any ancient Hebrew prophetic work. Anything overly poetic, or which is is only found in Isaiah, would be excluded.

You have just excluded the whole of Isaiah from your experiment.-- like I said, sillier and sillier by the minute!

[wenglund]

Please define what you mean by the term secular.

I define "secular" as that which is not inherently religious. Secular methods, then, would be methods that are employed by religionists and non-religionists, theists and atheists, alike, and in relation to religious as well as non-religious matters. These are methods designed by and reliant upon man rather than God.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

[Benjamin McGuire]

Rob writes:

Actually, no. The way I presented it, that is precisely what it is. You can propose your own broader "step two," but that will be your presentation, not mine.

No. This isn't the case. The way you originally presented it did not use the word "linguistics", did not present a narrow definition. What you said was:

Step two is possible only if original-language manuscripts of the work are available, and that is to determine based on the details of the language the period in which it was written.

"Language" is not so narrow a word that it only refers to morphology - it includes grammar, it includes meaning and so on. You then more narrowly defined this - but in doing so, you created a step two that bears very little resemblance to how the scholarly world (which you admit that you do not participate in for this aspect of texts) actually works - which is far closer to my description of the process.

This is all a bit nebulous for me to follow, and even confusing ("an earliest possible date that allowed for an absence of prophecy"?), but I will comment on what I can. In the case of the Book of Isaiah, we do not "have a series of texts." We have a single book that many scholars think originated as a series of texts redacted at different times. The alleged discrete texts are hypothetical, not extant or in our possession as such.

Right, and so based on this, scholars assume that Isaiah (as we have it) is more closely connected (date wise) with the oldest manuscript that we do have, than with any date contemporaneous to the person it was alleged to be written by. Wouldn't you agree with that? In other words, according to scholars, the Book of Isaiah as we have it, was not authored by Isaiah in any sense of the notion, although it may well have incorporated material written by Isaiah.

We're talking here about the generalities of the method, not the actual details and arguments. I'm not going to argue Isaianic higher criticism with you. I'm not engaged in polemics on this issue at all, but simply responding to your polemical claim that I operate by a double standard with regard to methodology. The fact is that I don't. If Isaiah originated in the way the dominant school of thought maintains, orthodox Christianity could still be true, though our view of how to interpret Isaiah would have to be modified. But if the Book of Mormon originated in the nineteenth century, then Mormonism cannot be true, as your own leaders have repeatedly insisted. So this isn't a useful comparison if you're trying to paint me as a wild-eyed polemicist unaware of the state of biblical studies.

The problem with discussing methods, Rob, is that they are theoretical (and only theoretical) until you apply them to some sort of specific examples. The reason that I see that you do not want to discuss this particular example is clearly because, as I note, you hold the Bible to a different standard - one where you disagree with the conclusions that such a methodology presents. You do have a double standard. And your suggesting that this doesn't matter is in fact part of the core of this discussion. It's easy for you to suggest that it could be accurate and not have an impact, and yet, you don't believe that it is accurate, and that actually allows you to minimize that impact.

The flip side to this coin is that there are in fact Mormons who assert that the Book of Mormon is entirely of modern origins, and yet, hold that the religion is still valid. Van Hale, for example, is one prominent person who believes this. But, the truth is, that we aren't here discussing this larger framework. We are talking about methods of evaluating texts - any texts - and such a method is independent of any particular set of religious beliefs. You want to apply a method to the Book of Mormon (at least in theory) that you simply do not apply to the Bible. The rest of it is largely unimportant. The Bible is a text like any other text. The Book of Mormon is a text like any other text. The methods used apply to both equally.

Well, for starters, I'd expect there to be a text! There isn't, you know.

And the question gets deflected. You aren't describing the text (as I asked) but trying to assert the need for an artifact. Of course, to return to the example, there is no artifact history for Isaiah that comes earlier than the relatively very late earliest manuscript copy (several hundred years late). And of course, we know of texts that we don't question the historical relevance of, even though the original does not exist, and the text we have is merely a translation. So your position here doesn't actually help - it is just posturing.

Your claim that my method would allow someone to presuppose the modern origins of any ancient text and then try to buttress that presupposition with "parallels" is outlandishly false. It is impossible to do so with Augustine's City of God, for example (written about the same time the Book of Mormon was supposedly completed). Only by ignoring the primary, fundamental issues of extant texts and external attestation could one even get started with such a foolhardy project. Since those issues are fundamental to my method, it is simply not true that my method would allow for any ancient work to be falsely characterized as modern in origin.

Actually, its quite possible to do - and yes, it would involve ignoring some things. But here we are, the critics contributing to this thread have decided to ignore certain things and focus only only modern issues. I would have thought that was quite clear. You yourself seem to fit this mold. Which is why I asked the question about what you would expect from a genuine translation from a non-existing ancient original. Trying to deflect that by asserting the need for an artifact doesn't help you address the issue. But, I do agree with the characterization - that is, that the critics are engaged in a foolhardy project.

Trying to place the burden of proof entirely on me isn't right; it isn't reasonable.

You are absolutely right. So we won't place the burden of proof entirely on you. Just most of it. Which is also appropriate. You see, what you are essentially saying is that it is completely okay for you to accept the Book of Mormon as an entirely modern text on the basis that there is no artifact. This is no different from claiming that the Book of Isaiah is no earlier than the first time we encounter it as an artifact in the historical record. Its a very simple argument. But it doesn't generally work very well. But, you do hold to a single Isaiah writing the Book of Isaiah, and this means that you hold to a real double standard.

Ben M.

[DubaDNura]

The only ones in the Orthodox world arguing differently are those who take a particular stance in regards to the Rambam.

The commonly accepted explanation is the one favoured by Scholem, the Zohar being almost entirely a creation of R. Moshe de Leon. Originally roposed by Yehuda Liebes, a different idea has been gaining traction. According to it, R. Moshe de Leon wasn't the sole author, the Zohar growing out of the writings of a circle of Kabbalists in Christian Spain. Both Liebes and Moshe Idel have been showing that many ideas, concpets and even phrases used by the Zohar go back much further, and Ronit Meroz has been identifying different layers in what grew to be the Zohar. Not saying you ought to believe in any of that, but figured I'd offer a brief overview of the secular academic beliefs.

That's interesting, and not terribly surprising. I have no doubt that the redaction of the Zohar accomplished by R' Moshe de Leon required him to restate certain concepts in his own words. The Zohar as it stands now most likely has the imprint of de Leon on it in imperceptible ways (and even perceptible ways: a friend of mine familiar with the development of Spanish told me that some of the more unwieldy words in the Zohar are unwieldy specifically because they're medieval Spanish rather than Aramaic). It is also clear that there are many different versions that were floating around prior to the turn of the last century. The first Rebbe of Chabad, R' Schneur Zalman of Liadi, quotes the Zohar as saying "one who blows out, blows out from within him" in reference to G-d breathing life into Adam. The problem is that in modern editions of the Zohar, that statement cannot be found anywhere. But I believe strongly that the ideas expressed in the Zohar, and to a great extent the language in which they were expressed, belong to Rabbi Shimon and his immediate followers.

Also, even the tradition that has been passed down among Orthodox Jewry has parts of the Zohar being redacted at different times. If you've ever looked into one of the more traditional printings of the Zohar (Mosad HaRav Kook has published one of the better ones), you'll notice that there are sometimes sections that are placed side-by-side with the regular text, and sometimes sections that are just spliced into the regular text, but indicated with different headings. That's because the Zohar contains several books all in one. Raya Mehemna, Midrash HaNelam, Idra Zuta, Idra Raba, etc., are all books that can be found inside most editions of the Zohar - usually alongside the standard text, rather than has standalone books. So a section of Raya Mehemna that relates to the the beginning of Leviticus will be placed in the section of the Zohar on the beginning of Leviticus. One of those standalone books that has been spliced in is the Tosefta, which means "Extra". Its called that because it was redacted after the Zohar - and while it reflects Rabbi Shimon's work, it was clearly not redacted by R' Shimon. There are also teachings that did not make it into the Zohar, and did not make it into the Tosefta, that are called "Zohar Chadash," or "The New Zohar." All of that material was clearly redacted well after Rabbi Shimon.

So the story of the Zohar is not a simple one, even to those of us with simple faith.

[DubaDNura]

That's interesting, and not terribly surprising. I have no doubt that the redaction of the Zohar accomplished by R' Moshe de Leon required him to restate certain concepts in his own words. The Zohar as it stands now most likely has the imprint of de Leon on it in imperceptible ways (and even perceptible ways: a friend of mine familiar with the development of Spanish told me that some of the more unwieldy words in the Zohar are unwieldy specifically because they're medieval Spanish rather than Aramaic). It is also clear that there are many different versions that were floating around prior to the turn of the last century. The first Rebbe of Chabad, R' Schneur Zalman of Liadi, quotes the Zohar as saying "one who blows out, blows out from within him" in reference to G-d breathing life into Adam. The problem is that in modern editions of the Zohar, that statement cannot be found anywhere. But I believe strongly that the ideas expressed in the Zohar, and to a great extent the language in which they were expressed, belong to Rabbi Shimon and his immediate followers.

Also, even the tradition that has been passed down among Orthodox Jewry has parts of the Zohar being redacted at different times. If you've ever looked into one of the more traditional printings of the Zohar (Mosad HaRav Kook has published one of the better ones), you'll notice that there are sometimes sections that are placed side-by-side with the regular text, and sometimes sections that are just spliced into the regular text, but indicated with different headings. That's because the Zohar contains several books all in one. Raya Mehemna, Midrash HaNelam, Idra Zuta, Idra Raba, etc., are all books that can be found inside most editions of the Zohar - usually alongside the standard text, rather than has standalone books. So a section of Raya Mehemna that relates to the the beginning of Leviticus will be placed in the section of the Zohar on the beginning of Leviticus. One of those standalone books that has been spliced in is the Tosefta, which means "Extra". Its called that because it was redacted after the Zohar - and while it reflects Rabbi Shimon's work, it was clearly not redacted by R' Shimon. There are also teachings that did not make it into the Zohar, and did not make it into the Tosefta, that are called "Zohar Chadash," or "The New Zohar." All of that material was clearly redacted well after Rabbi Shimon.

So the story of the Zohar is not a simple one, even to those of us with simple faith.

Grr. I forgot to post in green.

Grrr. I forgot to psot i

[DubaDNura]

Grr. I forgot to post in green.

Grrr. I forgot to psot i

I think I stopped being able to figure out new technologies at some point when Windows 95, or even 3.1, came out.

[Rob Bowman]

Ben,

You wrote:

No. This isn't the case. The way you originally presented it did not use the word "linguistics", did not present a narrow definition. What you said was:

Step two is possible only if original-language manuscripts of the work are available, and that is to determine based on the details of the language the period in which it was written.

"Language" is not so narrow a word that it only refers to morphology - it includes grammar, it includes meaning and so on. You then more narrowly defined this - but in doing so, you created a step two that bears very little resemblance to how the scholarly world (which you admit that you do not participate in for this aspect of texts) actually works - which is far closer to my description of the process.

Sigh. First of all, I did not say that I do not participate in the scholarly world with regard to the study of the origins of texts. What I said, in the sentence immediately following the one you quoted, was that I was not qualified to make such judgments with regard to the Zohar: "Most critical scholars using this step (I am not qualified to perform this step myself for a work like the Zohar) conclude on this basis that the Zohar probably did originate in the thirteenth century."

Second, I told Wade that I was giving him a quick and informal description of the methodology I use. You need to allow me the right to explain more formally or precisely what I meant if I tell you that you have misunderstood me, which you did.

Third, I never claimed I was referring only to "morphology" to the exclusion, for example, of "grammar," which you claimed I was doing. You are the one narrowing my meaning to something I didn't say. I was referring to the whole range of linguistic considerations -- morphology, grammar, syntax, style, diachronic semantic analysis, idioms, loan words from other languages, evidence the text may have been translated from another language, etc. -- by which scholars determine the approximate time period of the text (which of course is often earlier than the earliest extant manuscript). Obviously, none of this can be done with the Book of Mormon, because we don't have a text of the Book of Mormon, as I have explained. What we have is an English work purported to be a translation from a language that even devotees cannot agree as to its identification (Egyptian? Hebrew written with Egyptian characters?) and that most devotees agree was written largely if not entirely in the style and idiom of the translator and with heavy use of the KJV Bible.

Fourth, I was not claiming that scholars pursue this second step to the exclusion of other considerations (historical, cultural, etc.). I treated the linguistic considerations as a distinguishable "step" not to exclude other considerations but to highlight a basic type of evidence that cannot even be considered with regard to the Book of Mormon.

I had written: In the case of the Book of Isaiah, we do not "have a series of texts." We have a single book that many scholars think originated as a series of texts redacted at different times. The alleged discrete texts are hypothetical, not extant or in our possession as such.

You replied:

Right, and so based on this, scholars assume that Isaiah (as we have it) is more closely connected (date wise) with the oldest manuscript that we do have, than with any date contemporaneous to the person it was alleged to be written by. Wouldn't you agree with that? In other words, according to scholars, the Book of Isaiah as we have it, was not authored by Isaiah in any sense of the notion, although it may well have incorporated material written by Isaiah.

No, I would not agree with that at all. Most (not all) scholars think that the historical person of Isaiah was responsible for the material in Isaiah 1-39, which is somewhat more than half of the book. It would be more accurate to say that most scholars think that a book authored by Isaiah had substantial additional material appended to it. But the consensus of those who partition Isaiah is that the additional material was written in about the sixth century, several centuries earlier than the earliest extant manuscript.

You wrote:

The problem with discussing methods, Rob, is that they are theoretical (and only theoretical) until you apply them to some sort of specific examples. The reason that I see that you do not want to discuss this particular example is clearly because, as I note, you hold the Bible to a different standard - one where you disagree with the conclusions that such a methodology presents. You do have a double standard. And your suggesting that this doesn't matter is in fact part of the core of this discussion. It's easy for you to suggest that it could be accurate and not have an impact, and yet, you don't believe that it is accurate, and that actually allows you to minimize that impact.

I have discussed the issues in scholarly discussion of Isaiah relevant to your accusation of a double standard. I don't mind doing so. Rather than you continuing to engage in mind reading, perhaps you could let me explain my method in my way. In my opinion, if the evidence shows that the historical Isaiah did not write Isaiah 40-66, we should reconcile ourselves to that conclusion. The issue must be addressed as an historical question using the same historical methods of study we would use for any other document. I don't give the Bible a pass in that regard. I have studied the critical issues regarding Isaiah and respectfully disagree with the majority view on this question. I simply don't agree with the arguments against Isaianic unity. Might I be mistaken? Yes, that's a possibility. But I am not operating by a double standard. I don't appeal to religious authority to negate the arguments used by the majority of scholars. You haven't actually seen me do that, have you? No, you are assuming something not in evidence.

You wrote:

The flip side to this coin is that there are in fact Mormons who assert that the Book of Mormon is entirely of modern origins, and yet, hold that the religion is still valid. Van Hale, for example, is one prominent person who believes this. But, the truth is, that we aren't here discussing this larger framework. We are talking about methods of evaluating texts - any texts - and such a method is independent of any particular set of religious beliefs. You want to apply a method to the Book of Mormon (at least in theory) that you simply do not apply to the Bible. The rest of it is largely unimportant. The Bible is a text like any other text. The Book of Mormon is a text like any other text. The methods used apply to both equally.

I agree with that. If you want to talk to someone who doesn't, try Wade. He exempts the Book of Mormon from these methods. As I have explained, you are mistaken in thinking that I don't apply the same method to the Bible that I do to the Book of Mormon. Your mistake is in assuming that if I don't agree with the majority of scholars on Isaiah then I must do so on dogmatic or religious authority grounds rather than on the basis of a critical examination of the issues. That is just not the case.

You had asked what I would expect the Book of Mormon to look like if it were authentic:

I think that one of the most interesting questions (that never gets answered - at least by the critics) is the question of what we should expect if the narrative provided by the Book of Mormon has some basis in reality. What would you expect the text to look like, what would you expect it to say, and so on.

I had replied:

"Well, for starters, I'd expect there to be a text! There isn't, you know. There is only the English work called the Book of Mormon, one that most Mormons cheerfully agree includes copious quotations from the King James Version (including the New Testament!), however this is explained. There is no text of the Book of Mormon written in its supposedly original Reformed Egyptian script. Mormons here have told me that it includes an indeterminate amount of 'midrashic' material that is admittedly modern. What is modern and what is not depends on the Mormon. I just go farther than such Mormons and say that all of it is modern!"

You quoted only the first two sentences above and then replied:

And the question gets deflected. You aren't describing the text (as I asked) but trying to assert the need for an artifact. Of course, to return to the example, there is no artifact history for Isaiah that comes earlier than the relatively very late earliest manuscript copy (several hundred years late). And of course, we know of texts that we don't question the historical relevance of, even though the original does not exist, and the text we have is merely a translation. So your position here doesn't actually help - it is just posturing.

The deflection is really coming from you, in desperately trying to minimize the significance of the lack of any text or attestation of any text for the Book of Mormon prior to the 1820s. I'm not about to fall into the trap of trying to describe what the Book of Mormon should have looked like if it were authentic. Such a question calls for speculation. It is certainly appropriate for me to point out that we would expect to have a text that we could actually inspect. Beyond that obvious point, we would expect the text to be written in a language and style that fits in the place and time of its purported composition (my informally designated "step two") and that it would not contain egregiously anachronistic material. I made those points in the rest of the paragraph that you did not quote.

You pointed out that there are writings for which we have only a translation and not a text in the original language. Since you didn't specify any examples, I cannot be sure exactly what you have in mind here. Perhaps you can give me an example. I agree that such writings exist and that in some cases we can be reasonably sure an earlier version in a different language once existed, but that fact doesn't negate my position or method at all.

I had written:

Your claim that my method would allow someone to presuppose the modern origins of any ancient text and then try to buttress that presupposition with "parallels" is outlandishly false. It is impossible to do so with Augustine's City of God, for example (written about the same time the Book of Mormon was supposedly completed). Only by ignoring the primary, fundamental issues of extant texts and external attestation could one even get started with such a foolhardy project. Since those issues are fundamental to my method, it is simply not true that my method would allow for any ancient work to be falsely characterized as modern in origin.

You replied:

Actually, its quite possible to do - and yes, it would involve ignoring some things.

If one must ignore those things, then it is impossible to do without ignoring those things, which means it is impossible to do according to the historical method I set forth.

You wrote:

But here we are, the critics contributing to this thread have decided to ignore certain things and focus only only modern issues. I would have thought that was quite clear. You yourself seem to fit this mold.

What is it you claim I am ignoring?

You wrote:

You are absolutely right. So we won't place the burden of proof entirely on you. Just most of it. Which is also appropriate. You see, what you are essentially saying is that it is completely okay for you to accept the Book of Mormon as an entirely modern text on the basis that there is no artifact.

No. You are twisting my argument by isolating this very important point from the rest of the argument.

You continued:

This is no different from claiming that the Book of Isaiah is no earlier than the first time we encounter it as an artifact in the historical record. Its a very simple argument. But it doesn't generally work very well.

You're right, the caricature you present is both simple and not very workable, but it isn't my argument, as I have explained.

You wrote:

But, you do hold to a single Isaiah writing the Book of Isaiah, and this means that you hold to a real double standard.

Answered above.

Edited March 1, 2012 by Rob Bowman

[Calm]

I think I stopped being able to figure out new technologies at some point when Windows 95, or even 3.1, came out.

FYI....

When you reach 25 posts you will be able to edit your posts as well as start new threads in this forum. If mistakes are bothering you, you can go into the Social Hall Forum and post several times in the Three Word Story thread to up your posts or just start a thread in Social and ramble for a couple of posts. Once you hit 25, you will be able to go back and edit older posts as well as your new ones.

Also another frustrating at times attribute of the board...the board can at times be slow in posting (though so far today it seems good), so don't click more than once thinking your post isn't going through. Either wait patiently or click on "General Discussions" or another link after copying and saving your post just in case and it should take you to that page right away (and you can then go back and check to make sure your post 'took') or it might just refresh the page with your new post on it if you are lucky. It's about 50/50 new page/refresh page for me so far.

[DubaDNura]

By the way, I'm quite impressed that this forum allows for so many different views, when it is ostensibly dedicated toward preserving and defending the Mormon view of the world. The fact that someone who openly is involved with an organization that seeks to dissuade membership in the Mormon church (Rob Bowmna's "Institute for Religious Research") is allowed to post here, uncensored, is a testament to your overall strength of character; and the fact that you let a rambling Jewish guy post here (me) is much appreciated.

[DubaDNura]

FYI....

When you reach 25 posts you will be able to edit your posts as well as start new threads in this forum. If mistakes are bothering you, you can go into the Social Hall Forum and post several times in the Three Word Story thread to up your posts or just start a thread in Social and ramble for a couple of posts. Once you hit 25, you will be able to go back and edit older posts as well as your new ones.

Also another frustrating at times attribute of the board...the board can at times be slow in posting (though so far today it seems good), so don't click more than once thinking your post isn't going through. Either wait patiently or click on "General Discussions" or another link after copying and saving your post just in case and it should take you to that page right away (and you can then go back and check to make sure your post 'took') or it might just refresh the page with your new post on it if you are lucky. It's about 50/50 new page/refresh page for me so far.

Thanks. (This should bring it to 23.)

[wenglund]

I agree with that. If you want to talk to someone who doesn't, try Wade. He exempts the Book of Mormon from these methods.

Wrong.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

[Rob Bowman]

Wade,

If I understood you correctly, you do not approve of non-Mormons using so-called "secular" methods to show that the Book of Mormon is false or to learn that it is true, but only for Mormons to use those methods to show that objections to the Book of Mormon can be answered.

[Benjamin McGuire]

This wil get long, so I tried just to condense out what I think are the important issues for me. Rob wrote:

Obviously, none of this can be done with the Book of Mormon, because we don't have a text of the Book of Mormon, as I have explained. What we have is an English work purported to be a translation from a language that even devotees cannot agree as to its identification (Egyptian? Hebrew written with Egyptian characters?) and that most devotees agree was written largely if not entirely in the style and idiom of the translator and with heavy use of the KJV Bible.

This still seems to be avoiding the issue, don't you think? Setting aside the Book of Mormon for a moment, and discussing methodology in general, does the absence of an original language text somehow create an impenetrable barrier? (I also want to point out that your use of the "Book of Mormon" is confusing, since the Book of Mormon is the English language text produced in 1829-30, and the gold plates would be the original language text - we do have a text of the Book of Mormon, we don't have the text of its alleged source). It obviously doesn't. So the question becomes whether or not we can talk about clues to original language in the text (which is something this thread was about in the OP). Your response (which was the first) wasn't to deal with the text of the Book of Mormon along the same lines as your method. You immediately jump right to looking for modern parallels. That was symptomatic. I found it interesting that while you produced lots and lots of hits for what you call a "familiar idiom" in Joseph's day, didn't result in a single exact match to the Book of Mormon text ("souls did expand"), so while the idea of an expanding soul is there, the Book of Mormon text doesn't contain a "familiar idiom". But, it was this immediate turn to the modern that creates this gap that I describe. A bit later you noted this:

I have studied the critical issues regarding Isaiah and respectfully disagree with the majority view on this question. I simply don't agree with the arguments against Isaianic unity. Might I be mistaken? Yes, that's a possibility. But I am not operating by a double standard. I don't appeal to religious authority to negate the arguments used by the majority of scholars. You haven't actually seen me do that, have you? No, you are assuming something not in evidence.

Now, you may be right, but then, quite recently, you also wrote this here in these forums:

Conservative evangelicals reject the Deutero-Isaiah theory because they understand the point of Isaiah 40-66 to be that the Lord knew and announced ahead of time through Isaiah that although Jerusalem was going to be conquered and its people scattered, he would restore the city and its people in order to prepare for the coming of the Messiah.

Why is it that conservative evangelicals (as a group) reject the notion of Deutero-Isaiah? I am reminded of something that Bart Ehrman wrote in his book Jesus Interrupted:

there are certain views of the inspiration of Scripture, such as the one I had pounded into me as a late teenager, that do not stand up well to the facts of textual criticism. For most Christians, who don't have a conservative evangelical view like the one I had, these textual facts can be interesting, but there is nothing in them to challenge their faith, which is built on something other than having the very words that God inspired in the Bible. . . . In any event, as I indicated, these theses themselves were almost entirely noncontroversial. Who can deny that we have thousands of manuscripts? Or hundreds of thousands of variants? Or that lots of the variants involve spelling? Or that scholars continue to debate what the original text was in lots of places? All of these statements are factually true.

The one statement that has stirred up controversy is my claim that some of these variations are significant. This view has been objected to by some conservative evangelicals and no one else that I know of. That gives me pause—why is this criticism coming only from people with a particular set of theological views?

Perhaps you are right, that your faith does not force you to reject the current scholarly view of Isaiah. And yet, it is your religious background that exclusively (at least according to Ehrman - although he might be exaggerating somewhat) that finds themselves dealing with this conflict in this way. So, perhaps you might be willing to recognize that although you don't see your faith reflected in your decision, lots of the rest of us do. And we don't find your rejection of the scholarly perspective compelling for us when we don't share a certain set of values kept largely by conservative evangelicals. Perhaps your faith plays a greater role than you are willing to give credit to here in this forum.

But, what also strikes me is a contrast between two things that you wrote in this thread:

... they are largely historical-critical arguments that presuppose such assumptions as that God does not inspire predictive prophecy (an assumption I do not bring to the table in my study of the Book of Mormon),

The uses of that name and of so many clear allusions to the KJV New Testament are anachronistic in a way that cannot be accommodated by an English-idiom translation model of the Book of Mormon.

I sense a bit of irony here.

Beyond that obvious point, we would expect the text to be written in a language and style that fits in the place and time of its purported composition (my informally designated "step two") and that it would not contain egregiously anachronistic material. I made those points in the rest of the paragraph that you did not quote.

So here we get to the interesting stuff. While you have been very dismissive of the idea that many LDS disagree on some fundamental issues with regards to the text, we can talk about a few points which I think are largely uncontroversial relative to these remarks.

1: The Book of Mormon claims to be a translation. (We can all agree on this, right?)

2: Language and style seem to be somewhat subjective (at least in light of issue 1) in this way, wouldn't you agree? Let's use a widely known example. Here is 1 Samuel 20:13, first from the NIV, and then from the paraphrase NLT:

Saul’s anger flared up at Jonathan and he said to him, “You son of a perverse and rebellious woman! Don’t I know that you have sided with the son of Jesse to your own shame and to the shame of the mother who bore you?

Saul boiled with rage at Jonathan. “You stupid son of a whore!” he swore at him. “Do you think I don’t know that you want him to be king in your place, shaming yourself and your mother?

Both represent an authentic ancient text, right? You may have your doubts about the value of a text like the NLT, but it doesn't change the situation.

3: If the Book of Mormon derives from an authentic ancient source, then we have the issue with the idea of egregious anachronisms, right? We have to be able to come up with some kind of guidelines to determine which can be attributed to the modern translation, and which can only come from the allegedly ancient source.

So in this thread, you present this synopsis of your thought:

To review: (1) The sermon in Alma 5 is pervasively composed in the idiom or speech patterns of English and American speakers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (2) The sermon contains several clear allusions to the New Testament that considered as a whole show that the sermon is definitely dependent on the New Testament. (3) The sermon is in genre and in the substance of its message consistent with and typical of revivalist sermons in Joseph Smith’s immediate culture. These three considerations of speech patterns, sources, and genre/message, taken together cumulatively, seem to me to make an extremely powerful case for the sermon originating in early nineteenth century America.

Do you see the issue that I see? Your two steps will never tell you anything different about the Book of Mormon - that is step one ("Step one of my method would be to determine the earliest extant copies or manuscripts of part or all of the work in question as well as the earliest external references to the work in question.") will never result in a different answer - independent of any presentation or question asked of the Book of Mormon text, and step two ("Step two is possible only if original-language manuscripts of the work are available, ...") will never result in anything at all for you precisely because as you noted above, you don't believe that a discussion about a potential urtext is even possible for the Book of Mormon. Armed with the results of these two steps, you automatically conclude that it must be of modern origin, and so any analysis should only look to modern sources. Have I missed anything here Rob? So we end up having to talk about other texts and other examples, because this one is already a closed book for you. Not because of the actual value of any argument about an alleged hebraism in the text, but because there is no possibility of an ancient source behind the Book of Mormon according to your methodology. You prefaced your comments, by the way, with this statement:

As I look at Alma 5 as a whole, I find three considerations that lead me to conclude that Alma's sermon in Alma 5 originated in the early nineteenth century AD rather than the first century BC.

Not a single time in your arguments did you make any reference to anything related to a first century BC context. Now, let me repeat myself, if you start from certain assumptions (which you obviously do), this isn't an unreasonable argument to make. However, it also isn't the argument that you claim to be making.

And then you get right back to your two steps:

It is certainly appropriate for me to point out that we would expect to have a text that we could actually inspect.

We get this confusion in your language again (we do actually have a text that we can inspect - it's just not the alleged original language text, right?). This absence of an original language text doesn't seem to be a huge barrier in other cases resulting in the decision of either the probability of an authentic source or the determination of a fraud. Apparently is can be done. But, you get to avoid that issue by declaring that in the absence of such a text, there is no point in trying to deal with stage two. You continue:

Beyond that obvious point, we would expect the text to be written in a language and style that fits in the place and time of its purported composition (my informally designated "step two") and that it would not contain egregiously anachronistic material. I made those points in the rest of the paragraph that you did not quote.

And of course, in any reasonable discussion there might actually be some of this. And with it the neessary distinction between what must be original to the source, and what must come from the translation. And yet you did none of this. You made a google search, you made a couple of bad conclusions, and then you present your findings and conclude that it couldn't come from a first century AD source. Amazingly enough, one of your basic premises is something that you take a completely different approach to when we talk about Isaiah (from the perspective of course of a conservative Evangelical).

Ben M.

[wenglund]

Wade,

If I understood you correctly, you do not approve of non-Mormons using so-called "secular" methods to show that the Book of Mormon is false or to learn that it is true, but only for Mormons to use those methods to show that objections to the Book of Mormon can be answered.

Here, as well, you did not correctly understand me.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

[wenglund]

Step two is possible only if original-language manuscripts of the work are available, and that is to determine based on the details of the language the period in which it was written. Most critical scholars using this step (I am not qualified to perform this step myself for a work like the Zohar) conclude on this basis that the Zohar probably did originate in the thirteenth century.

Wasn't the earliest extant manuscript for Zohar written in Spanish?

Do we have "original-language" manuscripts for the first five books of the Old Testament? In other words, since you believe Moses wrote the first five book, do we have extant manuscripts in the same language spoken and written by Moses?

Prior to 1947, weren't the earliest extant manuscripts for the Old Testament written in Greek (i.e. not the original language in which the Old Testament was written)?

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

Edited March 1, 2012 by wenglund

[Rob Bowman]

Ben,

I'm disappointed that you ignored most of my post and didn't answer the questions I put to you there.

You wrote:

This still seems to be avoiding the issue, don't you think? Setting aside the Book of Mormon for a moment, and discussing methodology in general, does the absence of an original language text somehow create an impenetrable barrier?

Your question obscures the issue by creating a straw man of my argument. Must I really go through it again?

The absence of an original-language text makes certain kinds of investigation into a text impracticable if not impossible. You know this is so. Such an absence does not automatically, apart from other considerations, mark the existing version as fraudulent or make it useless as a historical source, and I never claimed that it did. Context! One must put the absence of an original-language text in context. For example, we do not have a complete copy of the Gospel of Thomas in Greek (although a few small fragments have been found), which almost all scholars think was its original language, but the Coptic version is extant in a manuscript dating only about a century after the Greek original would have been written, and the Coptic manuscript became extant in circumstances raising no reasoned basis for suspicion. Furthermore, the original language of the work is an incidental issue (the Coptic version makes no claims or statements on that subject). Scholars are pretty sure that the Coptic version differs in some substantial matters from the Greek original, but it doesn't matter too much. Nor does establishing that there was most likely a Greek original end the historian's inquiry; on the grounds of the work's likely date and general contents almost no one thinks it was actually written by the apostle Thomas. So I would never treat the issue of having an original-language text as the end-all or be-all of historical inquiry. It is, however, a significant issue in some contexts.

For example, the Russian writer Nicolas Notovitch claimed that the Life of Saint Issa was a composition he produced based on a scroll about the life of Jesus that was interpreted for him as a monk read them aloud in a Tibetan monastery (!). There is no Tibetan scroll extant (researchers actually went to the monastery to check up on Notovitch); there is no ancient text to which anyone can refer. The chronological gap between the alleged original and the modern book, together with the suspicious circumstances of its production, lead scholars to the obvious conclusion of fraud. One can then read the work and see all sorts of confirming reasons reinforcing that conclusion, including clear evidence of the book's dependence on the New Testament writings (even though Notovitch claimed it was written just a few years after Jesus' death). This is a perfectly sound method and one that scholars have used repeatedly with works claiming to be based on ancient texts that for whatever reason are inaccessible. The method cannot be invalidated by erecting a straw-man objection about the absence of an original not being an insuperable problem for the work's authenticity.

You wrote:

So the question becomes whether or not we can talk about clues to original language in the text (which is something this thread was about in the OP). Your response (which was the first) wasn't to deal with the text of the Book of Mormon along the same lines as your method. You immediately jump right to looking for modern parallels. That was symptomatic.

The context of the opening post was the proposal that the particular expression in Alma 5 ("their souls did expand") was a Hebraism based on an unworkable connection to the Hebrew word translated "expanse." I pointed out that the connection was implausible and provided evidence that the expression was perfectly recognizable in the English idiom of Joseph's own culture. We were not at that point discussing the origins or authenticity of the Book of Mormon per se. Brant Gardner could have written what I did in that post! Of course, in my subsequent post, in response to Robert F. Smith, I did argue that Alma 5 was a nineteenth-century composition. But there I based my argument on more than an isolated English idiom. No one post is going to include everything, so I didn't discuss the lack of an original Hebraic text, which in any event was already presupposed by the opening post! I fail to see how my arguments in those posts in any way violated my method.

You wrote:

I found it interesting that while you produced lots and lots of hits for what you call a "familiar idiom" in Joseph's day, didn't result in a single exact match to the Book of Mormon text ("souls did expand"), so while the idea of an expanding soul is there, the Book of Mormon text doesn't contain a "familiar idiom".

This is a rather lame criticism, since we are only talking about an incidental grammatical variation, not about the idiom itself.

You wrote:

Why is it that conservative evangelicals (as a group) reject the notion of Deutero-Isaiah? ...Perhaps you are right, that your faith does not force you to reject the current scholarly view of Isaiah. And yet, it is your religious background that exclusively (at least according to Ehrman - although he might be exaggerating somewhat) that finds themselves dealing with this conflict in this way.

The statements you quoted from Ehrman at some length have nothing to do with the Deutero-Isaiah issue. But you are confusing religious perspective with the method someone chooses to articulate or defend that perspective. Some evangelicals reject the Deutero-Isaiah on dogmatic grounds; they see it as simply incompatible with their faith, and that's it. Other evangelicals are open to following the evidence wherever it may lead, and simply reject the methodological assumptions by which most scholars reach their conclusion. My claim was not that my religious beliefs are irrelevant to my positions on such issues, but that my religious beliefs do not operate as dogmatic premises in my study of the historical dimensions of the biblical texts. I realize that may be a subtle distinction for some, but I really think you're sharp enough to grasp it.

You claimed to find an ironic contrast between the following two statements that I had made:

"...they are largely historical-critical arguments that presuppose such assumptions as that God does not inspire predictive prophecy (an assumption I do not bring to the table in my study of the Book of Mormon)..."

"The uses of that name and of so many clear allusions to the KJV New Testament are anachronistic in a way that cannot be accommodated by an English-idiom translation model of the Book of Mormon."

I don't see any contrast or irony. Belief in predictive prophecy does not prevent me from identifying anachronisms in allegedly inspired writings.

You wrote:

1: The Book of Mormon claims to be a translation. (We can all agree on this, right?)

Of course.

2: Language and style seem to be somewhat subjective (at least in light of issue 1) in this way, wouldn't you agree?

No, I would not.

Let's use a widely known example. Here is 1 Samuel 20:13, first from the NIV, and then from the paraphrase NLT.... Both represent an authentic ancient text, right? You may have your doubts about the value of a text like the NLT, but it doesn't change the situation.

What's your point? Although both the NIV and the NLT are written in contemporary English, the NLT consistently employs a more idiomatic style. So?

3: If the Book of Mormon derives from an authentic ancient source, then we have the issue with the idea of egregious anachronisms, right? We have to be able to come up with some kind of guidelines to determine which can be attributed to the modern translation, and which can only come from the allegedly ancient source.

What's your proposal?

You wrote:

Do you see the issue that I see? Your two steps will never tell you anything different about the Book of Mormon - that is step one ("Step one of my method would be to determine the earliest extant copies or manuscripts of part or all of the work in question as well as the earliest external references to the work in question.") will never result in a different answer - independent of any presentation or question asked of the Book of Mormon text, and step two ("Step two is possible only if original-language manuscripts of the work are available, ...") will never result in anything at all for you precisely because as you noted above, you don't believe that a discussion about a potential urtext is even possible for the Book of Mormon. Armed with the results of these two steps, you automatically conclude that it must be of modern origin, and so any analysis should only look to modern sources. Have I missed anything here Rob? So we end up having to talk about other texts and other examples, because this one is already a closed book for you. Not because of the actual value of any argument about an alleged hebraism in the text, but because there is no possibility of an ancient source behind the Book of Mormon according to your methodology.

No. The lack of an original-language text or of any text other than the English Book of Mormon, in the circumstances and context in which it appeared, create a reasonable presumption that the book is modern, but as I said when I first described those "two steps," such a presumption could be overturned by compelling evidence. An alleged Hebraism that even other Mormons reject and that can be more directly and easily explained as an English expression common in Joseph Smith's culture doesn't qualify as such compelling evidence!

You wrote:

You made a google search, you made a couple of bad conclusions, and then you present your findings and conclude that it couldn't come from a first century AD source.

No, what I said was that the evidence I presented yielded "an extremely powerful case" for an early nineteenth-century origin. You haven't addressed the specifics of the argument, let alone showed that it included some "bad conclusions." You have only complained that it didn't consider a possible first-century BC (not AD) context. Would you like to propose one? Come on, Ben. Put up or...well, you know. If you can put together an argument mustering evidence in support of a first-century BC context that does a better job of explaining all of the evidence from Alma 5 that I adduced in support of my conclusion, do so.