Could the Book of Mormon be a 17th Century pious fraud?

[champatsch]

2 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

I did of course, just do a quick search on terms meeting a specific set of requirements, using my OED4.

There is no OED4, that I know of.  There is an online OED3, and a printed OED2, the latter also available on CD-ROM.

2 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

When Royal produces his list of "50 that should be classified as archaic or obsolete (pre-1701)," how many do you think I will be able to find easily in a later context (after 1701)? I have very high expectations. And doesn't this mitigate his claim of being obsolete or archaic in the same way?

Take counsel = 'consult' as an example. Twice in the Book of Mormon, last-dated example in the OED is 1547.  I call it a 16c lexical usage, as a shorthand.  I'm aware it is attested in the 14c, and that it continued into the 16c.  Could there be an example in the 17c.  Yes.  If it had been common, the OED probably would have an example of it.  A 17c example would be very rare.  At this point in time, it is best classified as a 16c usage.

2 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

What date do you give the translation? What sort of profile do you personally assign to the translator? What is the purpose of the archaic and obsolete language that you see in the text?

A succinct position of Book of Mormon translation might be the following:

The Lord translated the text or had it done.

Suppose it is the latter, then a slightly more fine-grained position, but still vague, might be:

The Lord directed a translation with multiple inputs, perhaps on multiple occasions.

(One issue to keep in mind is that from our limited perspective we cannot be sure we can have an accurate view of the translation process.)

The (last) translation event was probably within decades of its delivery to Joseph Smith. It could have been very close in time.

The translation included many archaic, extra-biblical elements (one-time event) or preserved many archaic, extra-biblical elements (series of translations).

2 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

how does recognizing the archaic and obsolete language in the text, as you read it, change the meaning you derive from it?

A lot of the meaning is obligatorily archaic because there is corresponding biblical usage (KJB).  Occasionally the meaning is archaic and extra-biblical.  A lot of it is persistent meaning: both early modern and late modern.  Some meanings were correctly understood in 1830, but tend to be misunderstood today.  If the surrounding syntax is archaic, and the meaning might be early modern or late modern, then the late modern sense should not be automatically favored over the early modern sense.  Determine from context and broader textual analysis.  Sometimes we need to be content with multiple possibilities.  Sometimes the meaning is obscure.  "By a garb of secrecy" may be one of these.  Most people are content with modern meanings or entertaining folk semantic possibilities.

In general, the broad EModE form and structure of the Book of Mormon was understandable to 19c English speakers.  The language, though somewhat distinct, harmonizes well with all the KJB passages and the blending of KJB language, particularly in doctrinal sections.  The early modern era was a stage of English when literature flowered.  Many non-linguist English scholars (of history, literature, etc.) find Early Modern English to be fully formed, expressive, and beautiful. Think Tyndale, Shakespeare, Milton, etc., who greatly influenced the English we know and use today.  Along with vocabulary, the extra-biblical Early Modern English verbal system resolves the issue of the nature of the translation for us: that words were continually revealed to Joseph, not merely ideas.  The archaic Book of Mormon syntax may have facilitated translation efforts into other languages, even possibly increasing accuracy, since many languages today share analogs with archaic English syntax more than with modern English syntax.  People are naturally interested in the why, which ends up being speculative to a greater degree than the linguistic description.

[champatsch]

2 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

To what extent though is the language that you offer - "caused them that they should" significantly different from the KJB: "commanded them that they should" or "charged them that they should"?

You are wondering about analogy.  First, to let you know what I know about this causative construction in the Book of Mormon compared with the textual record.  The doubled pronominals after the verb cause, with finite verbal complementation, are very uncommon in the textual record.  They are non-biblical and I have been unable to find them in the late modern period yet (after 1700).  The same goes for the more general dual-object construction after the verb cause.  The KJB has only 3 or 4 examples of finite complementation after the verb cause (out of about 300), depending on how you count it, but no doubled pronominals or even dual-object constructions.  Finite complementation is rare in the late modern period, although it can be found, but less than 0.25% of the time.  It was more common in the early modern period, but still uncommon.  Four pseudo-biblical writings I have closely analyzed don't have examples of it.  The Book of Mormon has more than 100 examples of finite complementation after the verb cause.  There is probably no other book that has that many.  There are 12 examples of the dual-object construction after cause in the Book of Mormon.  This is a subset of finite complementation.  I haven't seen a book with that many.  (To be clear, the doubled pronominals are a subset of the dual-object construction.)

On analogy and the Book of Mormon.  We could explain the dual-object causative by analogy with dual-object command syntax, and other dual-object syntax, but then why none in pseudo-biblical writings and why none in the KJB?  Suppose we go with the notion that analogy is operative in this case, then we must be consistent and use it to explain the extensive and varied correspondence of Book of Mormon grammar with Early Modern English grammar.  Dozens of cases of fortuitous analogy are required to generate the usage.  Furthermore, analogy cannot account for the archaic, extra-biblical lexis (a few dozen).  Ultimately, so many analogical hits are required to account for all the syntactic data that it ends up being an extremely unlikely position.

[mfbukowski]

On 10/10/2017 at 11:37 AM, JarMan said:

A lot of effort has gone into showing nineteenth century elements in the Book of Mormon, but in light of recent work by Skousen and Carmack I wonder if we should be looking for 16th or 17 century elements instead. Personally, I favor Joseph Smith's own explanation for how the Book of Mormon came to be, though I am interested in the expansion theory as a way to explain some apparent anachronisms. I can't buy into a pious fraud model because I don't think it's possible JS could have possibly produced the book. However, a 16th or 17th century pious fraud model is more interesting to me because it allows for a person (or persons) to have labored for years to produce the Book of Mormon and it accounts for the Early Modern English in the text. Admittedly it may present more problems than it solves, but I have been looking into several things in the Book of Mormon that seem to point to the late 16th or early 17th century. I have several examples but I will just give one for now to generate some discussion.

In Mosiah 17 Abinadi is burned to death for what essentially amounts to heresy. Later, in Alma 14 many heretics are burned to death by the people of Ammonihah. The practice of burning heretics at the stake was a common 16th century practice in Europe but had mostly died out by the beginning of the 17th century - over 200 years before JS dictated the Book of Mormon. Burning heretics at the stake seems to have originated in Europe almost 1,000 years after 600 BC so it's doubtful this practice was something the Lehites or Mulekites brought with them from the old world. But it's not just the practice itsself in the Book of Mormon that hints at 16th Century Europe. There are also several similarities to how it was practiced.

For example, Abinadi was given a chance to recant in order to save his life. In 16th Century Europe many of the people accused of heresy could also escape death by recanting. Many chose that option. (Some recanters were burned anyway, but were strangled first.)

Also, the Spanish Inquisition is known to have held mass burnings of heretics in the 15th and 16th centuries called auto-da-fe. These autos-da-fe are eerily similar to what we read in Alma 14, though I have not found any evidence that the Spanish included children in the mass burnings.

Mary I of England (Bloody Mary) is known to have executed close to 300 heretics over a five year period in the 1550's, mostly by burning. In one infamous episode she forced archbishop Thomas Cranmer to watch two other bishops' burnings. As a result, Cranmer repudiated his Protestant faith and rejoined Catholicism. (He ended up being executed anyway.) This episode is similar to Alma and Amulek's experience when they were forced to witness the burnings in Alma 14, apparently with the hope that this would force them to recant their faith.

The heretical scriptures of the people of Ammonihah were thrown into the fire and burned with them. Burning the writings of heretics was also common in 16th Century Europe (as it has been in many other eras). Recall that Martin Luther burned his Papal Bull of Excommunication and several other Catholic works in 1520. Predictably, many of Luther's works were burned in response. Later in the century Anabaptist and Calvinist writings were also burned. As part of the Inquisition many of the printers and book sellers were burned at the stake along with the books. In 1553, Servetus was burned at the stake in Geneva with a large bundle of manuscripts and books tied to to his waist.

The idea of burning heretics in the 16th Century was linked to the idea of burning in hell by people such as Thomas More and others. Thus Alma 14:14 seems appropriately ironic when Alma and Amulek are asked: "After what ye have seen, will ye preach again unto this people, that they shall be cast into a lake of fire and brimstone?"

Maybe I'm just cherry-picking here... or maybe these are mere coincidences... but it seems like the heretic-burning episodes I've referenced in the Book of Mormon make a lot of sense from a 16th Century European perspective.

Really a convoluted explanation imo

First it must be a fraud because Joseph did not receive it from an angel, right?

So the easier explanation is that it was a fraud in the 17th century that somehow Joseph got- HOW?   And could read it in what?  English?  Was it on the plates or not?

If it was on the plates why did the witnesses not just read the English?

If it was not on the plates- how did Joseph come up with something that looked like plates?  And why would he do that if it was just an old English document he had found?

His story would actually be less preposterous if the book was a found document

Sorry- doesn't come close to working as a hypothesis to me.   I'll take angels and gold plates before this one.

[Physics Guy]

5 hours ago, champatsch said:

Well, the obstacle is that you need to know a ton of archaic vocabulary and syntax and incorporate it with the content.  Syntax like the following that isn't in the KJB or pseudo-biblicals:

There are dozens of this sort of thing in the Book of Mormon that aren't what the mimics did -- they aren't (pseudo)biblical.  The archaic/obsolete lexical usage and morphosyntax are mutually supportive.

Thanks for the interesting answer.

I have found a couple of examples of this kind of construction, but they are all in literal translations of the Book of Revelation (the Darby, Young's, and Berean translations). All of those came out after the death of Joseph Smith, and while all of them aim to be intelligible in English, none of them seems to have been trying to be grammatically standard in English, but rather to reproduce the exact wording of the original Greek text. I'm not even sure this would be normal for NT Greek, though, because the examples are both in Revelation, and I understand that the Greek of Revelation is particularly bad Greek, grammatically.

I've read that the awful Greek of Revelation is usually thought to be that of someone writing in a foreign language, so perhaps this weird structure that appears in Greek in Revelation might have been more common in Aramaic or something. Has anyone looked at seemingly anachronistic English grammar in the Book of Mormon as potentially being a literal rendering of some other language? On the one hand Mormons might rejoice to find Hebraisms. Skeptics might on the other hand note that Joseph Smith could have been exposed to some non-standard English from, say, German immigrants.

To me it remains a question whether an inexpert attempt at pseudo-Biblical writing might still generate constructions that aren't actually in the KJV, out of a mistaken feeling that their weirdness was more consistent with the old-fashioned language. For example, "causing them to do" sounds so modern to me, because it is still a common sort of thing to say today, that I probably wouldn't say it if I were trying to sound Biblical—even though in fact it is a construction that the KJV uses. In other words, I'm a lousy pseudo-Biblical writer. If I started to say something like "causing them to do", but caught myself in mid-sentence saying something that sounded too modern, I might well stumble into "caused them, that they did" as an improvised archaism. In this way overdone archaism might produce too-early grammar just by trying too hard to avoid modernisms.

My point is not that Joseph Smith must have done just as I might do. It's that neither pseudo-Biblical literature by educated writers, nor Smith's own writings when he wasn't claiming to be writing anything ancient, may be adequate control groups for the Book of Mormon. If we combine Smith's own backwoodsy dialect with a deliberate but inexpert effort to sound archaic, then there's a lot more plausible leeway for non-KJV constructions than one would expect either from people of Smith's social class speaking in their natural voices or from more educated writers imitating the KJV.

[churchistrue]

7 hours ago, Glenn101 said:

But if you wanted to mimic Early Modern English you couldn't. It would have to be a part of your every day speech patterns or you would have to study it. That is the point. Critics have opined that it must have been part of Joseph's environment, fossilized speech patterns. Stanford's analysis of Joseph's 1832 history just did not find the evidence of Early Modern English that appeared in the Book of Mormon. Thus JarMan's 16th century pious fraud theory arises as an attempt to proffer one explanation as to how it came about.

Glenn

Yes, but I guess it's a different argument whether it was possible he could have done it vs he must not have done it because he didn't do it in other writings.

 

[Nevo]

19 minutes ago, Physics Guy said:

Skeptics might on the other hand note that Joseph Smith could have been exposed to some non-standard English from, say, German immigrants.

A related speculation comes from BYU linguistics professor Dallin D. Oaks (who's not a skeptic):

Quote

Documents from the general time and area of Joseph Smith's boyhood attest to the presence in the local dialect(s) of some linguistic forms that would seem archaic to people today and that are similar to the language of the King James Bible. . . . It is common for rural communities to be conservative in preserving some older forms of speech. Furthermore, some religious groups often deliberately preserve older language forms. By these measures, Palmyra and its surrounding area thus represented a prime region for the presence of many older linguistic forms, because it was not only decidedly rural but contained a substantial number of members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) whose speech, even in normal everyday settings, was highly influenced by older forms of English. . . . Milton V. Backman Jr. showed that of the various religions in the area at the time of Joseph Smith's first vision, the Friends were the most highly represented. And because Joseph Smith hired himself out to farms in the area around his home, it is likely that he encountered a great deal of the "plain" speech that characterized the early Friend communities and which would have had some resemblances to the language of the King James Bible.

— Dallin D. Oaks, "Book of Mormon, language of the translated text of," in Book of Mormon Reference Companion, ed. Dennis L. Largey (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 2003), 118–119.

 

Edited October 12, 2017 by Nevo

[JarMan]

3 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Really a convoluted explanation imo

First it must be a fraud because Joseph did not receive it from an angel, right?

So the easier explanation is that it was a fraud in the 17th century that somehow Joseph got- HOW?   And could read it in what?  English?  Was it on the plates or not?

If it was on the plates why did the witnesses not just read the English?

If it was not on the plates- how did Joseph come up with something that looked like plates?  And why would he do that if it was just an old English document he had found?

His story would actually be less preposterous if the book was a found document

Sorry- doesn't come close to working as a hypothesis to me.   I'll take angels and gold plates before this one.

Rather than getting hung up on the semantics of the how and the why of a 17th Century source for the Book of Mormon, I'm hoping people can look critically at some of the parallels. Then they can make up their minds if there may be something there or not. If they decide maybe there is something there, then they can seek to figure out the how and the why. I understand your rush to dismiss this out of hand. But if you want to play along, I wouldn't mind if you'd give some thought and criticism to some of the parallels I've mentioned. (I've got a lot more I haven't mentioned yet, as well.)

[Glenn101]

1 hour ago, churchistrue said:

Yes, but I guess it's a different argument whether it was possible he could have done it vs he must not have done it because he didn't do it in other writings.

 

The argument is that Joseph could only have done it if he had either studied it or if it was in his normal speech patterns. If it was in his normal speech patterns it would have shown up in his writings.

Glenn

[Glenn101]

1 hour ago, Nevo said:

A related speculation comes from BYU linguistics professor Dallin D. Oaks (who's not a skeptic):

That is why Stanford tested Joseph Smith's writings to see if it showed up as part of his speech patterns. The results were negative.

[champatsch]

Nevo, that somewhat dated hypothesis by Prof. Oaks is not backed up by specific study, which is what's required to determine whether such a hypothesis is actually sufficient to explain the data, and there is a lot of data in 270,000 words.  His is basically the old position held before the advent of current digital resources, which clear up the matter. Next year's critical text books will go towards clarifying lexical usage, as will further publications.

A lot of the odd grammar is not Joseph's grammar.  I gave as one example the causative construction with repeated pronominals.  At least one was edited out, the one with two it's.  It seems to have been an uncommon redundancy of the 17c.  In EEBO Phase 1 we find the following examples:

The second one with a following should is most like the Book of Mormon's example with a following shall.

In general, the large amount of subjunctive shall auxiliary usage in the Book of Mormon is most similar to 16c usage, since it occurred at a higher rate in the 16c than in the 17c.  Subjunctive shall is not illiterate usage.  The Book of Mormon is actually full of archaic literary usage.  For instance, the "save it were" and "save it be" frequently found in the Book of Mormon is non-biblical and rare before 1830 and literary in character.  "Save it were" is found infrequently after 1830, mainly in poetry.  One prose exception is Hawthorne's two examples in The Scarlet Letter.  These phrases are mainly found in Scottish writings before 1830, supported by other things in the Book of Mormon such as the intransitive verb anger (3x).  The "save he shall prepare" type usage of the Book of Mormon is rare literary phraseology as well.

Edited October 13, 2017 by champatsch

[Nevo]

11 hours ago, champatsch said:

Nevo, that somewhat dated hypothesis by Prof. Oaks is not backed up by specific study, which is what's required to determine whether such a hypothesis is actually sufficient to explain the data, and there is a lot of data in 270,000 words.  His is basically the old position held before the advent of current digital resources, which clear up the matter. Next year's critical text books will go towards clarifying lexical usage, as will further publications.

I'm not ready to throw out Prof. Oaks's hypothesis quite yet. When I looked up the cause-them-that-they-should construction on EEBO, the first hit was a Quaker tract from 1700. As you know, the database only goes up to 1700, so I couldn't say whether Quakers in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century ever used it—but it wouldn't surprise me if they did.

I don't think Joseph's everyday speech needs to have matched the way he spoke when dictating the Book of Mormon. Trance preachers contemporary with Joseph Smith would lapse into archaic Bible-like language while in a trance state, but would speak normally otherwise. Consider, for example, the case of 21-year-old "sleeping preacher" Rachel Baker:

Quote

“O friends! think it not strange that I should speak unto you,” she exclaimed during one session. “I beseech you that you would exhort one another while it is called to-day; and so much the more as ye see the end approaching, when he will come to take his weary bride home: then he will take you to himself, and he will give you a seat in his kingdom and glory.” During another session of impassioned discourse, she admonished sinners to humble themselves to God. “I, therefore, beseech you to cry mightily to the Lord,” she said, “that, haply, the Lord would give you repentance, and a broken heart and a contrite spirit; for the Lord hath said, that a broken heart and a contrite spirit he will in no wise despise.” In another session, Baker urged her listeners to repent before it grew too late: “May you, therefore, make your peace with him, before the night cometh wherein no man can work.” Further, she underscored the spiritual distance between God and man, saying that naturally “you are strangers from God, and do not love God, neither, indeed, can you, for the natural mind is at enmity with God, and is not subject to the law of God: no, not of yourselves can you come to love him, and do his will.”

— Noel A. Carmack, "The Curious Case of Joseph Howard, Palmyra's Seventeen-Year-OId Somnium Preacher," Journal of Mormon History 40, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 21.

 

Edited October 13, 2017 by Nevo

[mfbukowski]

Deleted.

Edited October 13, 2017 by mfbukowski

[Physics Guy]

The question of whether Smith could have written archaic phrases is not the same as the question of whether he commonly used them. Many people can express themselves in multiple registers. If Smith was a pious or deliberate fraud, or even if he was a genuine prophet expressing revealed thoughts in his own language rather than stenographically repeating each word as it appeared on his stone, he might very well have used a different register for Scripture than he used in normal writing or speaking.

Of course it's still worth comparing the language of the Book of Mormon with Smith's other writings, just to check (and apparently rule out) the possibility that the Book of Mormon's English was simply that of Smith's own common register. The check is by no means a decisive proof, however, that Book of Mormon English was truly foreign to Smith.

Knowing multiple registers is expected of educated people, but it is also perfectly possible for intelligent people with good language skills who lack formal education. My own grandmother was a rural schoolteacher in the 1930's, and she had a lot of funny old poems committed to memory, because her pupils had had to learn them. In Smith's time, even people who hadn't spent much time in what schools there were would often have heard old poems recited. So expressions that were still extant in Smith's time as literary forms could perfectly well have been familiar to him. The fact that Hawthorne put archaic grammar in his novels is telling on this point—all the more so because Hawthorne's main works were published years after Smith's death. Hawthorne was writing for sale and his novels sold well. So appreciation of archaic forms, as archaic forms, must have been widespread enough for a commercial author to salt them into his text, and his public to enjoy them, even a full generation after Joseph Smith.

[champatsch]

8 hours ago, Nevo said:

I'm not ready to throw out Prof. Oaks's hypothesis quite yet. When I looked up the cause-them-that-they-should construction on EEBO, the first hit was a Quaker tract from 1700. As you know, the database only goes up to 1700, so I couldn't say whether Quakers in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century ever used it—but it wouldn't surprise me if they did.

I don't think Joseph's everyday speech needs to have matched the way he spoke when dictating the Book of Mormon. Trance preachers contemporary with Joseph Smith would lapse into archaic Bible-like language while in a trance state, but would speak normally otherwise. Consider, for example, the case of 21-year-old "sleeping preacher" Rachel Baker (who was treated by Dr. Samuel L. Mitchill):

Of course a trance state would have needed to resurrect obsolete and obsolescent lexis dozens of times, and go against dominant King James idiom, in many different ways.  My second cousin Noel works hard in this domain.  After considering a huge amount of linguistic data, probably 100x the amount that Noel has considered, I conclude that his is an ideological position, at least in relation to the grammar and the lexis.  My initial hypothesis, in early 2014, was that Book of Mormon grammar was pseudo-biblical, a mixture of biblical and modern.  I have found otherwise, time and time again, against my hypothesis.  The Book of Mormon is not a pseudo-archaic text, but a genuinely archaic text, with some modern aspects as well.  For instance, the "had (not) ought to" usage of the Book of Mormon is best classified as a modern usage, because although "had ought to" is found in the Early Modern English period, it is quite uncommon, and no attestation of "had not ought to" has been found yet.  But lest anyone jump on this, bear in mind that there is a small amount of very old language in the Book of Mormon as well, things that are currently attested only in the late 14c and in the 15c.

Yes, one can find matches with 17c Quaker writings in the Book of Mormon, such as mixed pronominal usage, non-2sg art usage, plural is, was, etc. The first two are not Joseph's "bad grammar."  That, of course, is only a small part of the story.  The non-emphatic, positive declarative do/did-periphrasis found throughout the Book of Mormon is Early Modern English usage, par excellence. It isn't accurately classified as Quaker usage of the 17c.  It is primarily 16c usage, with some touches of 17c usage (such as "do/did do").  The verbal system generally, the core of grammar, is a solid match with extra-biblical Early Modern English usage.  In addition, there are many items that suggest deep philological knowledge of obscure, uncommon usage of the past.  If one looks closely at nearby variation in the Book of Mormon, and there is a lot to consider, there are many interesting examples for which we can find uncommon matches in the textual record. Here is one I considered recently:

Usage after the conjunction lest: The Book of Mormon’s pattern is archaic but neither biblical, pseudo-biblical, or modern; shall is used as a future subjunctive auxiliary more than a dozen times and there is rare, mixed auxiliary usage (above); the King James Bible has only two conjoined instances with shall; pseudo-biblical writings do not have any examples with shall.  The Book of Mormon strongly favors using an auxiliary after lest, the King James Bible is the opposite, strongly favoring no auxiliary use, just main verbs in the subjunctive; four pseudo-biblical writings, in aggregate, split usage in this regard.  Supporting the Book of Mormon's distinct lest usage is its distinct save usage, which is similar to lest usage in some respects, well-formed, and archaic.

I mentioned the Book of Mormon's high-frequency "save it were" and "save it be".  No writing that I've seen has more than two of these in it.  Was it Joseph overdoing something he thought sounded archaic?  Let's consider that very briefly.  There are three instances of "save it was".  I have looked for this in the late modern period (after the year 1700) several times and come up empty.  Maybe others can find it where I have failed.  So far I've seen it three times in the Early Modern English period, first by Tyndale in a glossary to Exodus in his translation of the Pentateuch in 1530.  If it is Joseph overdoing the archaic, then he overdid the archaic in so many domains that one must admit an extremely high level of matching in the verbal system and beyond that is unlikely for even an expert philologist to have done.  Then the lexis is a difficulty, as well as lots of little things such as many instances of archaic prepositional usage, which have been largely altered, and which very few know anything about except for Skousen who has catalogued it all.  As mentioned, two volumes treating lexis and many curious expressions will appear early next year, for those who are interested in more than ideological conjecture.

[Physics Guy]

There are at least two "save it were" in The Scarlet Letter. Just google "save it were" (with quotes) and "scarlet letter" (without). Even if there are only these two, that simply shows that people hardly ever wrote that way after 1800—not that nobody knew the phrase. The fact that Hawthorne wrote a bestseller with "save it were" in his dialogue shows that he could still count on people knowing the phrase, and understanding it as archaic flavor, a generation after Joseph Smith.

[Benjamin McGuire]

20 hours ago, champatsch said:

There is no OED4, that I know of.  There is an online OED3, and a printed OED2, the latter also available on CD-ROM.

My mistake. I have a second edition (digital, 4th version).

Quote

Take counsel = 'consult' as an example. Twice in the Book of Mormon, last-dated example in the OED is 1547.  I call it a 16c lexical usage, as a shorthand.  I'm aware it is attested in the 14c, and that it continued into the 16c.  Could there be an example in the 17c.  Yes.  If it had been common, the OED probably would have an example of it.  A 17c example would be very rare.  At this point in time, it is best classified as a 16c usage.

So, here is a text in Catechetical form (intended to be a religious history, and by catachetical, he means written in a series of questions and answers):

https://books.google.com/books?id=3Z4CAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA122#v=onepage&q&f=false

Sacred History from the Creation to The Destruction of Jerusalem in Catechetical Form by William Gowan Todd, published in 1873. This is from page 122:

Quote

Did Josue do so?
Yes: believing their story, and not having counselled God first, he entered into a league with them.

So now I have a mid-19th century usage. (This is, of course, independent of whether you have accurately classified the example you provide from Alma 39:10, which is debatable I think in the rhetorical context in which it occurs).

Quote

A succinct position of Book of Mormon translation might be the following:

The Lord translated the text or had it done.

Suppose it is the latter, then a slightly more fine-grained position, but still vague, might be:

The Lord directed a translation with multiple inputs, perhaps on multiple occasions.

(One issue to keep in mind is that from our limited perspective we cannot be sure we can have an accurate view of the translation process.)

The (last) translation event was probably within decades of its delivery to Joseph Smith. It could have been very close in time.

The translation included many archaic, extra-biblical elements (one-time event) or preserved many archaic, extra-biblical elements (series of translations).

This is somewhat fascinating to me because it is essentially something you create with no evidence. The sort of bizarre outcome should be obvious (and will be obvious to many of the participants here). Why does God need this complex multi-stage translational process? Couldn't he just give a translation to Joseph Smith directly and avoid all these middle-men? If we are invoking God (perhaps out of necessity) then why do it in such a convoluted fashion?

Quote

A lot of the meaning is obligatorily archaic because there is corresponding biblical usage (KJB).  Occasionally the meaning is archaic and extra-biblical.  A lot of it is persistent meaning: both early modern and late modern.  Some meanings were correctly understood in 1830, but tend to be misunderstood today.  If the surrounding syntax is archaic, and the meaning might be early modern or late modern, then the late modern sense should not be automatically favored over the early modern sense.  Determine from context and broader textual analysis.  Sometimes we need to be content with multiple possibilities.  Sometimes the meaning is obscure.  "By a garb of secrecy" may be one of these.  Most people are content with modern meanings or entertaining folk semantic possibilities.

I don't think anyone can seriously contest this idea that the Book of Mormon is written using specific words in places because the KJB is written using those same specific words in places. But this tells us what, it doesn't tell us why a translator would use the KJB. It doesn't helps us understand why a translation that "the Lord translated ... or had it done" would contain the errors that occur with some regularity in the KJB. It doesn't help us understand why the KJB language would be used, when it represents a translation of a text that is only connected to the Gold Plates through an extensive genealogical history of its own (we can't seriously take the idea that the Hebrew sources of the KJB Old Testament and the Hebrew sources of the Brass Plates were all that similar). So what is the rhetorical value in using this language? You are happy with descriptions of what you find, but I don't see any sense of talking about the purpose that these language features present in the text. What was the audience that God was translating for? Was Joseph the model of that audience? Was he typical? And why shouldn't we view it as a poor translation if, as you suggest, the translation was all about the words instead of the ideas ...

I just want to reiterate something - I realize (in a nod to Clark) that there are some excellent tools that get used by Skousen and Carmack to look at literature. There is a huge corpus of material out there (as I noted). The idea that something is relatively settled by an appeal to these growing bodies of material is really an assumption that can be shown to be unwarranted over and over again. Part of this is understanding both the scope of our current digital collections as well as the weakness embedded in these collections (and the ways that we can become skilled at dealing with those weaknesses). It took me less than 5 minutes to find that example once I started looking. Perhaps they aren't as rare as gets suggested ... and potentially still understood reasonably well within the context of an 1830s Book of Mormon.

Edited October 13, 2017 by Benjamin McGuire

[clarkgoble]

6 minutes ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

This is somewhat fascinating to me because it is essentially something you create with no evidence. The sort of bizarre outcome should be obvious (and will be obvious to many of the participants here). Why does God need this complex multi-stage translational process? Couldn't he just give a translation to Joseph Smith directly and avoid all these middle-men? If we are invoking God (perhaps out of necessity) then why do it in such a convoluted fashion?

Like you I'm much more skeptical about particular word semantics. I think the arguments are much stronger for unusual phrases or grammatical forms. 

To your point above though I think this is a pretty strong point. Why is the translation so convoluted? Why use KJV, different transliteration schemes (follow KJV for names in the KJV like Isaiah or Jeremiah and then a different one for most unique BoM words like Ammonihah. The endings clearly are the same Hebrew sound and meaning. Why quote the KJV and why for that matter even do what I'm calling a loose translation? God clearly doesn't need to.

Also note that this affects all three major categories of model (fraud, faithful, delusional) Take the -ihah ending. For the delusional model we'd assume some sort of unconscious writing that's going to be analogous in certain ways to contemporary machine learning using bayesian inference or neural nets. The fraud model would be the same but if anything more focus on audience expectations. So we'd expect more consistency based upon the KJV and language around Joseph Smith. Instead we have relatively (but not universally) consistent transliteration schemes that so far as I know don't match anything in Joseph's environment. While for the delusion model we'd expect phrases to bubble up regardless of location, for the fraud model we'd expect more care to not quote the NT in an OT period. (Or not quote anything from the period after Lehi left). Instead we just don't see that. Now we could argue that the fraud author (whether Joseph or someone else) just wasn't that careful and didn't think his audience would care that much. But then that undermines other types of arguments within a fraud model.

I'm not saying these issues can't be dealt with. Just that no matter what model one holds, there are some pretty strange aspects to the text. From a faithful historicist model it's hard to come up with a model of translation methodology that makes a lot of sense. This is why you get weird circumspect models postulating a translated Mormon or Moroni who learned English in the 15th century and who consciously did a very loose translation, paraphrase and revision of the underlying plates and fed that to Joseph Smith. However for completely understandable reasons you don't hear too many people coming out and actually embracing that model. (It creates many problems that are hard to resolve)

[clarkgoble]

2 hours ago, champatsch said:

The Book of Mormon is not a pseudo-archaic text, but a genuinely archaic text, with some modern aspects as well.  For instance, the "had (not) ought to" usage of the Book of Mormon is best classified as a modern usage, because although "had ought to" is found in the Early Modern English period, it is quite uncommon, and no attestation of "had not ought to" has been found yet.  But lest anyone jump on this, bear in mind that there is a small amount of very old language in the Book of Mormon as well, things that are currently attested only in the late 14c and in the 15c.

It's this mix including extensive KJV quotations or paraphrases along with a few other paraphrases such as Shakespeare that are so odd in the text. As I mentioned above you also have very diverse, yet relatively consistent, transliteration schemes. Sometimes words appear to be a somewhat literal translation of the main sense of the underlying word/symbol rather than referent but using the KJV translation. Say Sorenson's argument about horse and some, such as mine, argument about bow and arrow. The "brass" appears to match the KJV but presumably with the sense of the Hebrew not the meaning of the KJV word in the 19th century.  Sometimes you get an odd transliteration of some completely unknown word like curelom. Sometimes you apparently get more conceptual translations or even asides giving both a transliteration and translation. A good example of that would be "Irreantum, which, being interpreted, is many waters" (1 Ne 17:5) or "Liahona, which is, being interpreted, a compass" (Alma 37:38 -- translated before 1 Nephi) or "Rameumptom, which, being interpreted, is the holy stand" (Alma 31:21).

No matter how you slice it there's lots of oddities in the text. It's hard to really come up with a consistent explanation.

The fraud model pretty much demands for some of these words an author with a reasonable knowledge of Hebrew. You have with Rameumptom and Ramah. (There is a Ramah in the Old Testament - but it's not clear the literal meaning of the term in the KJV passages) There's lots of other examples of that including, I'd argue, the alternative transliteration scheme to -iah. Yet a person who knew that much presumably would know enough not to quote the NT passages or paraphrase them.

 

Edited October 13, 2017 by clarkgoble

[churchistrue]

2 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

There are at least two "save it were" in The Scarlet Letter. Just google "save it were" (with quotes) and "scarlet letter" (without). Even if there are only these two, that simply shows that people hardly ever wrote that way after 1800—not that nobody knew the phrase. The fact that Hawthorne wrote a bestseller with "save it were" in his dialogue shows that he could still count on people knowing the phrase, and understanding it as archaic flavor, a generation after Joseph Smith.

Probably because everyone was reading the Book of Mormon then.

[clarkgoble]

18 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

I've read that the awful Greek of Revelation is usually thought to be that of someone writing in a foreign language, so perhaps this weird structure that appears in Greek in Revelation might have been more common in Aramaic or something. Has anyone looked at seemingly anachronistic English grammar in the Book of Mormon as potentially being a literal rendering of some other language? On the one hand Mormons might rejoice to find Hebraisms. Skeptics might on the other hand note that Joseph Smith could have been exposed to some non-standard English from, say, German immigrants.

There's lots of theories for why there's bad Greek in Revelation including some who think it was done consciously as a style and doesn't necessarily represent a poor Greek knowledge. i.e. to mimic a certain style the way say James Joyce mimics the style of speaking of his characters. We talk of people mimicking KJV language to appear prophetic in the 19th and 20th century but the same thing happened in the ancient world too  especially in pseudopigraphal writings. Given the dependence of Revelation on 1 Enoch there may be an aping of a certain Enochian style.

The question of the Book of Mormon and an other language has been investigated. Especially with regard to Hebrew, Egyptian or other semetic languages. Indeed apologists have been doing this for ages since Nibley started. How persuasive this is varies. The problem for such apologists is coming up with a coherent translation methodology. What you end up with is an argument of convenience where Hebrewisms that can be potentially found are "evidence" for Hebrew origins without explaining why there's so much loose translation going on or even paraphrases of KJV texts anachronistically. The two arguments ends up being incoherent unless one can explain why one might used in one place and an other elsewhere. (I think some arguments along those lines are possible but I've not really seen them done in the necessary detail)

It would be interesting comparing more with the range of mayan languages along with romance languages like Spanish or French Joseph might have been exposed to or (if postulating a different author) the fraud author knew.

[mfbukowski]

47 minutes ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

This is somewhat fascinating to me because it is essentially something you create with no evidence. The sort of bizarre outcome should be obvious (and will be obvious to many of the participants here). Why does God need this complex multi-stage translational process? Couldn't he just give a translation to Joseph Smith directly and avoid all these middle-men? If we are invoking God (perhaps out of necessity) then why do it in such a convoluted fashion?

..... You are happy with descriptions of what you find, but I don't see any sense of talking about the purpose that these language features present in the text. What was the audience that God was translating for? Was Joseph the model of that audience? Was he typical? And why shouldn't we view it as a poor translation if, as you suggest, the translation was all about the words instead of the ideas ....

Yep.

I think that nails it.  I just don't see the purpose of the whole exercise.

[clarkgoble]

25 minutes ago, churchistrue said:

Probably because everyone was reading the Book of Mormon then.

It's worth noting that Mark Twain, satirizing the Book of Mormon, may well have popularized that phrase. See his Roughing It.

The Scarlet Letter is of course two decades earlier but as PhysicsGuy noted, is also attempting to emulate an archaic style. It's worth noting that William Morris also uses this same structure also while mimicking an archaic style. Morris also wrote in the mid-19th century. Comparing corpuses to 19th century figures consciously emulating an archaic style is a good null hypothesis test.

Edited October 13, 2017 by clarkgoble

[mfbukowski]

What I want to know is the origin is of the use of "even" as in "even Jesus Christ" 

"We pray for our beloved prophet, EVEN Thomas S. Monson"

Like we pray for everyone- even him ?

I have never heard it in my life spoken in any context 'save it were a Mormon one'

For me it has always been used as the dictionary describes.  To me, the above usage always sounds like "Yeah, we believe in the Word of Wisdom and Joseph Smith being a prophet, and all kinds of other stuff, even Jesus Christ"

Where did we get that usage?  It ain't below and that's all I know...

 

Quote

 

e·ven¹

ˈēvən/

adjective

adjective: even; comparative adjective: evener; superlative adjective: evenest

1. 1.

   flat and smooth.

   "prepare the site, then lay an even bed of mortar"

   synonyms:

   flat, smooth, uniform, featureless; More

   antonyms:

   bumpy

   • in the same plane or line; level.

     "run a file along the saw to make all of the teeth even with each other"
2. 2.

   equal in number, amount, or value.

   "an even gender balance among staff and students"

   synonyms:

   tied, drawn, level, all square, balanced; More

   antonyms:

   unequal

   • equally balanced.

     "it's not an even fight"

     synonyms:

     equal, the same, identical, like, alike, similar, comparable, parallel "they all have an even chance"

     antonyms:

     unequal

   • having little variation in quality; regular.

     "they traveled at an even and leisurely pace"

     synonyms:

     uniform, constant, steady, stable, consistent, unvarying, unchanging, regular "an even temperature"

     antonyms:

     variable, irregular

   • (of a person's temper or disposition) equable; calm.

     "a man of good humor and even temper"

     synonyms:

     even-tempered, balanced, stable, equable, placid, calm, composed, poised, cool, relaxed, easy, imperturbable, unexcitable, unruffled, untroubled; More

     antonyms:

     excitable, moody

3. 3.

   (of a number, such as 2, 6, or 108) divisible by two without a remainder.

   • bearing an even number.

     "headers can be placed on odd or even pages or both"
   • exactly equal to a round number; not having any fractions.

     "the Dow Jones ended at an even 10,000"

verb

verb: even; 3rd person present: evens; past tense: evened; past participle: evened; gerund or present participle: evening

1. 1.

   make or become even.

   "she cut the hair again to even up the ends"

   synonyms:

   flatten, level (off/out), smooth (off/out), plane; More

adverb

adverb: even

1. 1.

   used to emphasize something surprising or extreme.

   "they have never even heard of the US"

   synonyms:

   surprisingly, unexpectedly, paradoxically "even the best hitters missed the ball"

   • used in comparisons for emphasis.

     "he knows even less about it than I do"

     synonyms:

     still, yet, more, all the more "it got even colder"

 

1. •  

Edited October 13, 2017 by mfbukowski

[JarMan]

What if the Book of Mormon was translated close in time to Joseph Smith by someone who was not a native English speaker? Let's say the translator was as linguistically talented as someone like Tyndale, perhaps knowing several languages (such as Hebrew, for example). But then let's suppose that the corpus of English works this translator had been exposed to was primarily from the 16th Century, with some also from later periods. Wouldn't this model of translation account for many of the seeming "irregularities" in the text?

[Physics Guy]

43 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

[A] person who knew that much [Hebrew] presumably would know enough not to quote the NT passages or paraphrase them.

Not if the concept of Scripture which the person was trying to imitate was a simple-minded one in which the exact NT words were exactly what God intended, and only those exact words. I think that was a common concept in Smith's day. Many readers today may find it odd and troubling that Jesus would preach to the Nephites in the exact same words that were recorded (as conservative Christians tend to suppose) by Matthew. I suspect that most readers in Joseph Smith's day, however, would have been more troubled to find Jesus preaching in different words.

Looking at all kinds of archaic writings may be useful for assessing the language of the Book of Mormon, but it's bound to be a big can of worms to analyze this stuff. The notion that a faker could only have written in the same style that was usually written around him is a silly straw man, first of all because styles remain known, as archaic styles, long after people stop writing them for any ordinary purpose. Shakespeare and the Book of Common Prayer are still well-known today, and could be imitated without immense effort, even though no-one writes in those styles nowadays ordinarily. And secondly a writer with rough rural eloquence and oral exposure to archaic language, but little book-learning, could very well produce a kind of fake archaic prose that was quite different from the archaic styles of educated writers who could pull a few old volumes off their library shelves to brush up and make sure they got the style right. Someone who is deliberately trying to write in an archaic dialect, but not doing it well, might easily end up with an anachronistic mishmash that no-one ever naturally wrote.