Constraining the Book of Mormon creation: who, when, and where

[JarMan]

The studies claiming the language in the Book of Mormon is Early Modern English have made me wonder if it was actually produced in a very different time and place than 1820's New York.  What constraints can we place on when, where, and by whom the Book of Mormon was produced based solely on its content? For instance, the reliance on the KJV means it had to have been produced after 1611. Or at the very earliest, say 1539, after the Tyndale bible. And it obviously had to have been produced by an English speaker who was familiar with, for instance, the particular animals mentioned. This would seem to exclude certain parts of the world that have different domestic animals such as Siberia (to use an extreme example) but would not exclude 1820's New York or even 17th century Scotland for that matter. Are there things in the text that constrain it to, say, the 19th century? Or to North America? I'm not interested in this particular discussion in debating whether or not the Book of Mormon is "true" or "historical" or a "pious fraud" or anything of that nature. I also don't want to discuss the translation process or how it is that JS could have dictated a document produced by someone centuries earlier.  I simply want to discuss the text and what clues it gives about when, where, and by whom it could have possibly been produced. 

[Robert F. Smith]

No one has yet been able to explain how the text came to be, even though certain systematic grammatical forms could only have been rendered by someone in England in the early 1500s.  There are still too many imponderables, such as those you mention.  The fact which is very clear is that it was not translated into English in the 1820s, and the manuscript evidence is overwhelming.

[JarMan]

14 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

No one has yet been able to explain how the text came to be, even though certain systematic grammatical forms could only have been rendered by someone in England in the early 1500s.  There are still too many imponderables, such as those you mention.  The fact which is very clear is that it was not translated into English in the 1820s, and the manuscript evidence is overwhelming.

Would you be willing to give an approximate year range for when you think the text was rendered?

I find the existence of Early Modern English fascinating but I don't think it necessarily puts a constraint on the "to" year (if I gave a range of years in the form of "from" - "to"). We may find it unlikely that certain grammatical forms were used in the 1820's but I don't think we could say it was impossible. I'm interested in what is possible, even though it may seem unlikely.

For those who think the text was rendered in the 1820's I'm interested if you find something that helps constrain the "from" year. It's been argued, for instance, that the discussion of secret combinations shows the Book of Mormon to fit with anti-Masonic sentiment of JS's time. But further review has shown, I think, that the term "secret combination" had been used in the same or similar context as the Book of Mormon for centuries before JS's time. If a future historian were to examine a document and find the word "selfie" in the context it's used today, it would put a constraint on the "from" year of the production of the document. Are there words or phrases or grammatical forms or objects or ideas in the Book of Mormon that necessarily move the "from" year beyond, say, the 1530's?

[Rajah Manchou]

1 hour ago, JarMan said:

For those who think the text was rendered in the 1820's I'm interested if you find something that helps constrain the "from" year. 

From 1492 to 1829 : )

The gentile who crossed the waters would most probably be someone after the time of Columbus. So if we set revelation/prophesy aside for a moment and look at the text critically, the translator(s) must have been anytime after the voyages of Columbus, Magellan, De Gama, and Vespucci. 

My opinion on the timing is that it was 'translated' in the decades after Columbus and Vespucci reached what they believed were the East Indies and before the first accurate maps of the American Pacific Coast. This would help explain why the BOM geography does not resemble anything in the New World and why it is full of elephants, silk, chariots and other old world material.

A good "from" time would be around the time the New World looked like this map supposedly sketched by the Columbus brothers just before Christopher died: 

 

Edited June 1, 2017 by Rajah Manchou

[Robert F. Smith]

1 hour ago, JarMan said:

Would you be willing to give an approximate year range for when you think the text was rendered?

I find the existence of Early Modern English fascinating but I don't think it necessarily puts a constraint on the "to" year (if I gave a range of years in the form of "from" - "to"). We may find it unlikely that certain grammatical forms were used in the 1820's but I don't think we could say it was impossible. I'm interested in what is possible, even though it may seem unlikely.

For those who think the text was rendered in the 1820's I'm interested if you find something that helps constrain the "from" year. It's been argued, for instance, that the discussion of secret combinations shows the Book of Mormon to fit with anti-Masonic sentiment of JS's time. But further review has shown, I think, that the term "secret combination" had been used in the same or similar context as the Book of Mormon for centuries before JS's time. If a future historian were to examine a document and find the word "selfie" in the context it's used today, it would put a constraint on the "from" year of the production of the document. Are there words or phrases or grammatical forms or objects or ideas in the Book of Mormon that necessarily move the "from" year beyond, say, the 1530's?

The constraints of EME make it impossible for the translation to have been done in the 1820s, but neither can we focus on only one particular year in the early 1500s.  There are other mitigating circumstances which suggest that some later items were inserted (as you mention) into that EME document, making the entire enterprise as complicated as dating the production of biblical Hebrew Isaiah -- in part or in whole.

Edited June 1, 2017 by Robert F. Smith

[RevTestament]

3 minutes ago, Rajah Manchou said:

From 1492 to 1829 : )

The gentile who crossed the waters would most probably be someone after the time of Columbus. So if we set revelation/prophesy aside for a moment and look at the text critically, the author(s) must have been anytime after the voyages of Columbus, Magellan, De Gama, and Vespucci. 

But where did the other Gentiles go? Not very many Gentiles went to the East - except British troops and British outcasts(Australia)

Quote

"My opinion on the timing is that it was 'translated' in the decades after Columbus and Vespucci reached what they believed were the East Indies and the first real maps of the American Pacific Coast.

I think it was translated by Joseph Smith. Why the Lord would have used some really Old English is a mystery tho - same mystery as to why even non-English words appear. 

Quote

This would help explain why the BOM geography does not resemble anything in the New World."

Depends where you look, and what you're looking for....

[JarMan]

12 minutes ago, Rajah Manchou said:

From 1492 to 1829 : )

The gentile who crossed the waters would most probably be someone after the time of Columbus. So if we set revelation/prophesy aside for a moment and look at the text critically, the translator(s) must have been anytime after the voyages of Columbus, Magellan, De Gama, and Vespucci. 

My opinion on the timing is that it was 'translated' in the decades after Columbus and Vespucci reached what they believed were the East Indies and before the first accurate maps of the American Pacific Coast. This would help explain why the BOM geography does not resemble anything in the New World and why it is full of elephants, silk, chariots and other old world material.

A good "from" time would be around the time the New World looked like this map supposedly sketched by the Columbus brothers just before Christopher died: 

 

How do you acccount for the Tyndale (or KJV) Bible dependency if it was produced before the 1530's?

[JarMan]

27 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

The constraints of EME make it impossible for the translation to have been done in the 1820s, but neither can we focus on only one particular year in the early 1500s.  There are other mitigating circumstances which suggest that some later items were inserted (as you mention) into that EME document, making the entire enterprise as complicated as dating the production of biblical Hebrew Isaiah -- in part or in whole.

What later items do you think were inserted? The idea of secret combinations seems way too central to the theme of the book to be a later insertion. Searching google books I have found the phrase "secret combination" in the proper context from a letter written in 1646. This doesn't get us all the way back to the 1530's, but it does show the term is much older than we might have thought. As the google library expands perhaps we'll find some earlier mentions.

[probablyHagoth7]

Attended a presentation by the author on the topic earlier this year. 

Initial thoughts: http://candlestickstudio.com/translationCommittee.html

 

[probablyHagoth7]

2 hours ago, JarMan said:

I think, that the term "secret combination" had been used in the same or similar context as the Book of Mormon for centuries before JS's time....

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=secret+combination&year_start=1700&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csecret combination%3B%2Cc0

Apparently. Generations before.

That the phrase saw a big spike during Joseph's lifetime is simply due to an event that provides fodder for those who want to ruminate on that.

Despite what anyone might say about him on that minor matter, Joseph was at least the one who visited that man's widow...*and likely her son*...if she had one.  

Religion pure...

[Calm]

1 hour ago, RevTestament said:

But where did the other Gentiles go? Not very many Gentiles went to the East - except British troops and British outcasts(Australia)

There were plenty of nonBritish in Asia, French Indochina for example and the Portuguese Empire:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Empire#China

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_European_colonies

[theplains]

15 hours ago, JarMan said:

The studies claiming the language in the Book of Mormon is Early Modern English have made me wonder if it was actually produced in a very different time and place than 1820's New York.  What constraints can we place on when, where, and by whom the Book of Mormon was produced based solely on its content? For instance, the reliance on the KJV means it had to have been produced after 1611.

The Book of Mormon (if it really is a historical account) could have been translated first in French or German.  
The fact that huge sections have been copied translated into King James English (which Jesus did not speak)
is irrelevant in my opinion.  I think the author used this form of English so that it would lend further support to
it having a 'familiar spirit.'. (I digress for a moment ... the term 'familiar spirit' has negative connotations in the
Bible).  I think the LDS Church appended 'Another Testament of Jesus Christ' to it to make it more acceptable
to read ... unless Jesus told the LDS Presidency that it was a mistake not to have this appendage long ago and
now it was time to put it there.

Thanks,
Jim

[The Nehor]

23 minutes ago, probablyHagoth7 said:

Attended a presentation by the author on the topic earlier this year. 

Initial thoughts: http://candlestickstudio.com/translationCommittee.html

 

I put the 'adieu' in there just to mess with people.

[Calm]

19 minutes ago, probablyHagoth7 said:

Despite what anyone might say about him on that minor matter, Joseph was at least the one who visited that man's widow...*and likely her son*...if she had one.  

Religion pure...

The "man's widow" was probably married at the time she knew Joseph Smith to George Harris (she married Harris in 1830, she was likely sealed to Joseph after his death as the only record is for 1846, Lucinda was sealed to her husband for time at the same time; there appears to be no offer of a levitate marriage from one of the 12 as happened with Zina Huntington Jacobs.

Edited June 1, 2017 by Calm

[Brant Gardner]

Answering the question posed in the opening post will be very complicated. It is worth doing, but will require a lot of patience. The problem is that we have a text in English, and (assuming antiquity for the moment) content from another language, culture, and time. That complicates things, but also tells us information. For example, if there is a translator, that translator was more fluent in English than the original language of the plates. The English doesn't show non-English constructions. JarMan is correct that the translator is familiar with the agricultural/pastoral complex the works with Western Europe and that tradition as brought to the New World. When contrasted with New World cultures, we find that there are not only mismatches in the types of animals, but in idioms that would be unintelligible in the original language. If there is a translator, whomever it might have been, it was someone not natively familiar with the world being described. 

The EME gives us a date no earlier that after the King James Bible. Although EME existed before, there are elements in the text that came into English after the KJV. That evidence is being used to suggest and end date that is indeterminate, but prior to 1820. Lack of authentic texts that show Joseph's dialect prior to the time it was being influenced by members of the church from different educational backgrounds is scant. Some elements appear to show up in early revelations, and if that is correct, then the thesis that they had all disappeared is severely weakened. That at least allows the late 1820's as a production date for the Book of Mormon English text.

Cultural evidence shows that the translator/author was an English speaker more fluent in the language and culture of his/her times than in antiquity. The idioms cannot be understood without modern western agricultural methods/implements or animal behaviors (see idioms related to lions, goats, and asses). The evidence of how italicized words effected the way KJV texts were rendered tells us that it was a non-professional who misunderstood the import of the italicized words. The nature of the changes in the Book of Mormon and in the JST use the same types of logic, understanding, and resolution. Joseph therefore had to know something of that process. If it is suggested that he learned it from the KJV, then an interesting argument would have to be made because it requires understanding a particular mindset. 

There are currently no obvious smoking guns. There is a lot of evidence, but so far it has not really been examined as a whole.

 

 

[JarMan]

With a little online research I found "secret combination" in 1611 which takes us back to KJV time. Another interesting word in the Book of Mormon is "machinery" which seems like a pretty modern word. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary claims the first known use of the word to be 1687. "Machinery" only appears once in the Book of Mormon so I suppose it's possible it was mis-heard by the scribe (though I can't think of anything similar that might have been meant).

Brant, you seem to want to go back no further than the KJV. There were two things in your post related to that idea that struck me. The first is the attention paid to the italicized words which presumably were not in the Tyndale bible. I hadn't considered that angle before. But the second was that there were elements of EME that only existed after he KJV. Do you have any examples handy or could you point me to a source where I could do some further research. (I've read the Carmack articles but can't remember anything in them that show post KJV EME.)

[Robert F. Smith]

2 hours ago, JarMan said:

What later items do you think were inserted? The idea of secret combinations seems way too central to the theme of the book to be a later insertion. Searching google books I have found the phrase "secret combination" in the proper context from a letter written in 1646. This doesn't get us all the way back to the 1530's, but it does show the term is much older than we might have thought. As the google library expands perhaps we'll find some earlier mentions.

You mentioned certain possible quotations from English versions of the Bible, and both Skousen & Carmack cover such problems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHJzY_9RZ4E .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuMOQDJagQ8 ,

 

[Brant Gardner]

53 minutes ago, JarMan said:

But the second was that there were elements of EME that only existed after he KJV. Do you have any examples handy or could you point me to a source where I could do some further research. 

McGrath, Alister. In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How it Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture. New York: Anchor Books, 2001, 275.

Quote

 

At this point, the translators have retained the increasingly rare usage of “his” as the neuter possessive pronoun. While this was normal in Middle English, it was dropping out of general use.

So how could the King James translators respond to this? They were standing at a linguistic junction, in which the words “its” was gradually gaining acceptance—but had yet to be universally recognized. To use the word “its” would cause confusion or bewilderment to at least some of their readers. On the other hand, they were aware that the use of the word “his” to mean “belonging to it” was passing out of use, and to make extensive use of this word would therefore cause confusion to later readers once this development had reached its inevitable conclusion. So what could be done? In the end, the only viable solution was to use a clumsy paraphrase, based on the word “thereof.” Instead of writing—as we would today—“its width was five feet”—the King James translators rendered this as “the width thereof was five feet.” It was clumsy, and arguably led to some of the least elegant passages in the entire King James Bible. But the use of this device avoided the problem caused by the change in English usage around this time.

 

 

[JarMan]

Not that I doubt your overall point, Brant, but the Tyndale bible uses thereof as described in the source you cited in the Pentateuch minus Genesis. This seems to be a convention Tyndale adopted after he had finished the NT. 

Edited June 2, 2017 by JarMan

[Brant Gardner]

19 minutes ago, JarMan said:

Not that I doubt your overall point, Brant, but the Tyndale bible uses thereof as described in the source you cited in the Pentateuch minus Genesis. This seems to be a convention Tyndale adopted after he had finished the NT. 

"Thereof" isn't the point at all. There was a shift that was happening prior to the adoption of the neutral "its." The use of "thereof" was transitional. The Book of Mormon uses "its," which became widespread after this transitional period.

[JarMan]

3 hours ago, probablyHagoth7 said:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=secret+combination&year_start=1700&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csecret combination%3B%2Cc0

Apparently. Generations before.

That the phrase saw a big spike during Joseph's lifetime is simply due to an event that provides fodder for those who want to ruminate on that.

Here's an interesting n-gram for "scimitar" which also sees a spike in the 1820's and for which the earliest known use is 1562. 

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=scimitar&year_start=1500&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cscimitar%3B%2Cc0

[JarMan]

1 hour ago, Brant Gardner said:

"Thereof" isn't the point at all. There was a shift that was happening prior to the adoption of the neutral "its." The use of "thereof" was transitional. The Book of Mormon uses "its," which became widespread after this transitional period.

From what I can see the Book of Mormon uses "its", "thereof" and "of it" (approximately equally). Tyndale uses "thereof", "of it", and "his" but never "its". The KJV primarily uses "of it" and "thereof" with minimal use of "his" and only a single instance of "its". So "its" was practically non-existent in the 1530's, was transitionally used in the early 1600's (and purposefully avoided in the KJV), but was in wide use by the 1820's. I can see where this might eliminate the 1530's, but couldn't it have been in semi-common usage by, say, the 1570's or 1580's?

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Its+&year_start=1500&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CIts%3B%2Cc0

The ngram seems to show that "its" was not in use in the 1530's but was in use by about the 1560's. 

Edited June 2, 2017 by JarMan

[Rajah Manchou]

9 hours ago, RevTestament said:

But where did the other Gentiles go? Not very many Gentiles went to the East - except British troops and British outcasts(Australia)

Just as we see in the Columbus map, the lines between East and West were weak. Even up to the early 17th century there was not much distinction made between the New World just discovered in the West Indies and the New World discovered in the East Indies. This, I believe, is why the new democratic utopia heralded by many thinkers in the century following Magellan was always said to be on an island, somewhere in between Europe and the Americas:

Thomas More's Utopia (1516)
Tommaso Campanella's The City of the Sun (1602)
Johannes Andreae's Description of the Republic of Christianopolis (1619)
Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627)
Samuel Hartlib's Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria (1641)

Notice how even these authors do not refer directly to the geography of the Americas. In almost every case they place their utopias on island kingdoms somewhere before the Americas. In the earliest example, Utopia, More even tells us the discovery of Utopia was made by crew members of the Vespucci expedition who separated in Brazil. The Utopia they discovered was somewhere between Brazil and Sri Lanka.

These utopian civilizations are most often populated by people who have fled the Old World before America was even discovered. Both More and Hartlib called their island utopias Macaria, Greek for "blessed". Probably a reference to the Island of the Blessed in Judeo-Christian lore. Completely independent of my faith that the Book of Mormon is a historical account of Lehites, my understanding is that the Book of Mormon falls into this genre of 16th-17th century New World utopian lore.

Regardless of where these authors intended their island Utopias to be, their motive was the establishment of a new order in the Americas. In the case of Hartlib, he dedicated most of his life to establishing one of his Rosicrucian Macarias in North America.

Edited June 2, 2017 by Rajah Manchou

[Rajah Manchou]

6 hours ago, JarMan said:

How do you acccount for the Tyndale (or KJV) Bible dependency if it was produced before the 1530's?

The 1530s was the "from" time. I suspect the early 1600s would be more likely, somewhere in the same environment that gave us New Atlantis and a Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria. We've discussed in other threads how Cumorah could be related to to early Judeo-Christian accounts of the the Island of the Blessed and the Camarini, or Makarinoi.

https://www.evernote.com/l/AAhinpj-2bdKh6SQ6_gQWRqn3GEqogf9RQM

Again, Macaria was the name given to the island Utopias of More and Hartlib.

So even though I have faith the Book of Mormon is a historical account, I'd say the BOM translation really starts to take shape around around the early 1600s with the Rosicrucian ambitions to establish a Macaria in North America.

Edited June 2, 2017 by Rajah Manchou

[probablyHagoth7]

6 hours ago, Calm said:

The..widow"...

1. Let me be more clear about the widow and any son [or daughter] she might have had...that was a secondary response to the question of whether the "secret combination" concern was a unique concern to the early 1800's surrounding a certain freemason, in which context I then alluded to the relevance phrase. FM has a very good article.

2. While on the topic of widows and a brief pivot to the NT injunction of visiting widows and the fatherless, again in the context of the freemasonry, I had read long ago that the Smiths had served the mourning widow's family back in NY in the 1820s. If that timeline is accurate, or even off by a decade, the kindness extended was real. When the Civil War foretold by him eventually broke out, she promptly packed her things, relocated to the South, and blazed a path of compassion into the darkness:  

Quote

"....when the cannon fire ceased, they did what came naturally; they ministered to the sick, wounded and dying. With their wide white cornets giving the appearance of wings, they became known as battlefield “angels.” The sight of a wide, white hat meant help was on its way. These battlefield angels witnessed some of the worst atrocities of war, yet continued with their devoted acts of mercy....their story is one of great faith, love and service."

http://www.setonmagazine.com/catholic/spirituality/the-battlefield-angels-of-the-civil-war-our-surprising-history-lesson