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

[Physics Guy]

The explanation I like best for why God might have used weirdly archaic English for the Book of Mormon is, no doubt unsurprisingly, the one I came up with myself. It's that the original text was a weird and anachronistic dialect of Hebrew, preserved for centuries as an archaic sacred language by immigrants to the New World who were out of touch with Old World Hebrew culture. And therefore God's superhumanly expert translation hit this exact note of weirdly jumbled archaism when rendering New World Hebrew into English.

To me this explanation seems plausible, flexible, and hard to refute, since the original texts remain unavailable. I'm not Mormon myself, so maybe this hypothesis won't appeal to Mormons as much as I imagine it should. I offer it in case anyone wants it. I promise that it isn't a trap. If it ever does turn out to be problematic in any way, I really didn't plan that in advance. I don't see anything wrong with the theory.

[clarkgoble]

18 minutes ago, Physics Guy said:

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.

I'm not sure that's true since quotations from the KJV were brought up almost immediately as an issue by critics. 

But of course if you were right, that'll strongly imply a reason for God doing it in the faithful model as well.

[champatsch]

2 hours 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?

I'm actually not terribly interested in the speculation of the translation process, and there may have been no middle men.  It was stated.  Acknowledgement of that is absent in the above.  Why?  In any event, a variety of evidence points to the Lord causing words to come to Joseph Smith.

You sometimes write here of a single translator.  I'm not sure what you mean when you write it, and the typical thing that comes to mind isn't just the Lord and may be different from the reality.

God is invoked because even an erudite human in our state in the 1820s would have almost certainly been unable to generate all the forms, structures, vocabulary, and expressions, setting aside the content.

On counsel, there's another one, at Alma 37:37, "counsel the Lord".  It would be good to have a chain of usage of the type "counsel the Lord" or "counsel God".  Two 16c examples are roughly equivalent in textual frequency to 200 19c examples.  Probably obsolete after the 16c.  The view of obsolete counsel = 'consult, ask counsel of' is supported by about 50 possible items to consider in the Book of Mormon.  The syntax strongly supports the view as well.  A lot of systematic evidence to consider.  Less speculative in nature than almost everything else.

2 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

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 ...

These issues, like the translation process, are quite speculative.  Is it possible for us to be sure about such things?

What do you mean in the second line above?  Sounds like assumptions are being made.  I don't suggest the translation was all about the words instead of the ideas.  Is that what you're asserting is an inevitable result of an archaic lexical view?

Probably best to be patient and analyze the critical text publication coming out early next year and publish a detailed response. Of course analyze systematically and reasonably.

Edited October 13, 2017 by champatsch

[Physics Guy]

50 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

I'm not sure that's true since quotations from the KJV were brought up almost immediately as an issue by critics. 

But of course if you were right, that'll strongly imply a reason for God doing it in the faithful model as well.

I don't think it's ever a good argument against something being faked, to say that if it were fake it would surely have been faked better than that. As Steve Jobs said, Real artists ship. He meant that being an artist is never an excuse for fussing for ever to make everything perfect, because real artists finish their artworks within a reasonable time and deliver them to customers. Deciding when something is good enough is an essential skill in most lines of work, and successful people usually don't insist on perfection.

So in this case, yeah, quoting Matthew verbatim in a faked Book of Mormon would have had some drawbacks. There would also have been drawbacks to putting all new words in Jesus's mouth, whereas quoting the Sermon on the Mount would have laid a clear claim to the Jesus brand, and it would have been easy. I think that a talented con artist would have had a good instinct for decisions like that. 

If a lot of people expected verbatim repetition of Matthew, would God also want to play into that expectation? I really don't see this. The Mormon God is supposed to be the same who inspired the Bible, but the Bible has nothing like that kind of verbatim repetition of a long speech. The New Testament offers a non-identical parallel version of Matthew's Sermon in Luke. Saying something just because people expect it would seem to be quite the opposite of how the Christian or Mormon God usually behaves, no?

[Nevo]

17 hours ago, champatsch said:

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.

FWIW, a quick search of Shaw-Shoemaker yields a hit for "save it be" in a religious pamphlet from 1809: "The Greek Lexicon, Butterworth's Concordance, Bailey's and Entick's Dictionaries, bear their united testimony, that the plain, literal and common, if not universal, signification of the words baptism and to baptize, is immersion and to immerse, bury in water, to dip, or to plunge, a person all over in water. Here are four learned and positive witnesses to the same thing. Indeed, they give no other signification, save it be to wash, which we have seen intends a ceremonial washing, which is to put into water; or to bathe." (Daniel Merrill, The Mode and Subjects of Baptism, Examined, in Seven Sermons [Augusta, GA; 1809], 89 [Shaw-Shoemaker 13065]).

Anyway, I take your point that the Book of Mormon contains a good deal of archaic usage, some of it evidently quite rare in the early 1800s. The puzzles never cease. 

[Physics Guy]

1 hour ago, champatsch said:

IGod is invoked because even an erudite human in our state in the 1820s would have almost certainly been unable to generate all the forms, structures, vocabulary, and expressions, setting aside the content.

But it seems that all your analysis only shows that the forms and vocabulary and so on were not commonly written in the 1820s. So you seem to be arguing that a person who only knew texts that had been written in the 1820s could not have successfully produced forms that were commonly written in earlier periods.

The fact that an expression was never written in the 1820s does not mean that it wasn't known then, however. Texts written long before 1820 were still regularly read and recited in the 1820s. So there is no reason to restrict Joseph Smith's language knowledge to texts that were written during his life.

And even if someone didn't legitimately know that a certain structure would have been grammatical in the past, from having read it or even just heard it, they might still believe that it was grammatical, just from naive generalization of grammatical rules.

For instance, people today sometimes say, "I urged him to go see a doctor," and they occasionally also say, "I urged him that he go see a doctor". The latter form sounds more old-fashioned and formal. So somebody who was trying to sound formal in an old-fashioned way might imagine that "cause" also allowed "cause him that he go" as an archaic form, by generalizing from the example of "urge". That would be an overgeneralization, inasmuch as "cause him that he go" is very much more archaic than "urge him that he go". People who are learning new languages make overgeneralizations like that all the time, though.

So there's no reason to restrict Smith's linguistic production to forms that he had actually heard or read.

Edited October 13, 2017 by Physics Guy

[Benjamin McGuire]

1 hour ago, champatsch said:

These issues, like the translation process, are quite speculative.  Is it possible for us to be sure about such things?

What do you mean in the second line above?  Sounds like assumptions are being made.  I don't suggest the translation was all about the words instead of the ideas.  Is that what you're asserting is an inevitable result of an archaic lexical view?

Probably best to be patient and analyze the critical text publication coming out early next year and publish a detailed response. Of course analyze systematically and reasonably.

The first question is interesting, because if indeed the notion of the intended audience is completely speculative, then not only can we not know what that intended audience looks like, we have no idea how close we are to that audience, and we can have no certainty about how the text should be read at all, and what the text should mean. On the other hand, we have have a lot of clues within the text itself - things that can be evaluated in reasonably objective ways - issues like the intertext that we read, rhetorical devices like allusions, places where the text quotes other texts, and so on. All of these things provide evidence in the discussion about the meaning of the text, the audience it was written to, and other aspects. Just because we cannot agree on how the text comes to be doesn't mean that it isn't still a text just like any other text or that we don't read it like we read any other text.

For the second line above, this is what I mean. In our culture, we view good translations as those that are invisible. A good translation reads as though the original author was writing in the language of the intended audience, and from within their culture. A good translator replaces references and culturally idiomatic expressions in the original text (that would be largely incomprehensible to the audience) with something that provides us with the equivalent in the context of the new audience. A good translator produces a text that reads as though it were the original had the original author written in the same time and space as the translator does. The Book of Mormon, with its archaic language, is anything but that. As I pointed out a bit over a year ago, your theory is something akin to saying:

Quote

that while the translation was quite fluent, it simply could not be helped that this translation would not be read for a significant period of time, and that its first readers would not appreciate the fluency of the text – because they did not resemble the audience envisioned by the translator.

Another option, as you note might be to have a translator who produced a final version shortly before the Book of Mormon:

Quote

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

In this case, it isn't a fluid translation.

Let me try to explain it a different way. To take the Gold Plates, and translate them into early 17th century English for a 17 century audience seems perfectly natural. It would create a fluid translation, and one that could be appreciated by its first audience, and one that could certainly fit within the concept of what we consider a good translation to be. To translate the same text a couple of hundred years later into that same English (assuming that your discrete slices of English are meaningful) no longer makes for a fluid translation. It is no longer a good translation. It is inelegant. It is filled with translationese and archaic language. And it creates challenges for its first readers - they are no longer reading the text as it was originally intended to be read.

So when you ask:

Quote

I don't suggest the translation was all about the words instead of the ideas.  Is that what you're asserting is an inevitable result of an archaic lexical view?

I think that it's a logic inference from what you have said. I am reminded in all of this of a comparison that fascinates me. With the Book of Mormon, we are following a path that we can see elsewhere - particularly with the Biblical text. The comparison between the language of the Book of Mormon and these earlier periods of English isn't much different than the comparisons that began between the Hebrew Old Testament and earlier Semitic languages. And along with this sort of comparison was an abandonment of the earlier practice of emending the text - it was replaced with a search for something equivalent in other Semitic dialects - precisely so we wouldn't have to propose emendations. That seems quite like what you are doing in many ways. In Biblical studies though, solving one problem in this way simply created others. (David Clines has written more than a little about this in biblical studies - which I find quite similar to the problems we face within Mormonism and our approach to the Book of Mormon). When you start talking about multiple translation events, all we can see is a discussion about

So, yes, I think that this is part of the inevitable outcome of this archaic lexical view. And it brings us no closer to discussing what the text says to its audience.

What I believe is that the use of archaic language served a specific rheotorical function that shaped how the text was read by its 19th century audience. The the use of that archaic language is intentional, but is not useful at all in determining any sort of process of translation or even any sort of time frame. This is why the question of how seeing the archaic language shapes the way that we read the text (either in pieces or as a whole) is in fact a very important question (not just for us, but for its first readers). How does this language help us understand it (both in the individual sections and in the work as a whole)?

Perhaps the point where we agree the most strongly is that it is unlikely that Joseph Smith was the translator (or author) of the text. I am also not saying that your work isn't valuable, or that there isn't a need for this sort of lexical analysis. The problems begin with conclusions drawn. To go back to my comparison of a moment ago, when we get to a point where you suggest that a difficult reading is verified because you can find a grammatical structure over here in a different context that fits, while I suggest that we should simply emend the text: who is right? It is a bigger challenge when we try to locate the content into an appropriate context as we read. Should I be trying to read a particular narrative in an early 17th century context? Or should I be trying to read it in an early 19th century context? Or should I be trying to read it in the context of the original gold plates? In this sense, this issue of the finding a footing through the translation is important.

 

[Physics Guy]

This is where I like the idea of the awkward and anachronistically archaic English text as a fluid translation of an original that was a weird mishmash of eras in its own time, because it was written in an ossified Hebrew to which faithful Nephites clung as a sacred language even though as a natural speech it was dying. I can imagine that a language that was being preserved in that way might well mix hickish corruptions and new vocabulary that had grown up after Nephi together with super-archaic expressions from ancient Scripture that were actually much older than Nephi. Our bizarre English text could be a fluid translation of such an original, which might have read in its own time, in Hebrew, much as the Book of Mormon reads now, in English.

I'm not sure where else in history such a text might have been composed, that we could compare it to the Book of Mormon. The Talmud? That's just a shot in the dark. I know very little about the Talmud.

I don't believe that there ever were any Nephites, myself. I'm just interested in how Mormons think about their Scriptures. The viewpoints that occur to me are mostly skeptical ones, but if I happen to think of a pro-Mormon argument, I'm happy to share it. In this case, I'm not convinced that the Book of Mormon is really written in any dialect besides the one Smith invented by accident while trying to sound like the Bible. The challenge of explaining how such an odd linguistic structure could be a miraculous translation doesn't seem so impossible to me, however. There's certainly no need to bring in anyone like John Dee.

[clarkgoble]

3 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

I don't think it's ever a good argument against something being faked, to say that if it were fake it would surely have been faked better than that. As Steve Jobs said, Real artists ship. He meant that being an artist is never an excuse for fussing for ever to make everything perfect, because real artists finish their artworks within a reasonable time and deliver them to customers. Deciding when something is good enough is an essential skill in most lines of work, and successful people usually don't insist on perfection.

I'm not sure I buy that in this case since the quotations would be explicitly read from the text while simultaneously spending so much time on all these things. It's analogous to a counterfeiter spending all the time to replication the holograms in a $20 bill and then intentionally putting the wrong seal on.

If the case is that anything that seems odd for a fraud is simply carelessness or not caring about that part we quickly move into a situation that is unfalsifiable. Put an other way, what can't be explained by fraud?

54 minutes ago, Physics Guy said:

I'm not sure where else in history such a text might have been composed, that we could compare it to the Book of Mormon. The Talmud? That's just a shot in the dark. I know very little about the Talmud.

There actually are quite a few in recent history. Just relative to Mormonism there's the recent purported sealed portion of the Book of Mormon. (Although I'd argue it's much easier to make frauds today rather than in 1830) Among non-Mormon cases of the past few centuries there's quite a few modern pseudopigraphal writings, the best known of which is pseudo-Jasher. Most were written in original languages and not purporting to be a translation of ancient writings. Probably The Archko Volume comes closest to the Book of Mormon since it's purportedly ancient, is 19th century, and has remained in print. It was quickly found to be largely a copy of a French short story from 1837. The English translation pretended to be a translation from a latin manuscript and things quickly spiraled out of control. So it's kind of like the Spaulding Manuscript or View of the Hebrews claim, but with actual evidence. What's interesting though is just how short all these works are, and how different they are from the Book of Mormon.

The Talmud is nothing really like it since it's quasi-authoritative rabbinical commentary. 

3 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

So in this case, yeah, quoting Matthew verbatim in a faked Book of Mormon would have had some drawbacks. There would also have been drawbacks to putting all new words in Jesus's mouth, whereas quoting the Sermon on the Mount would have laid a clear claim to the Jesus brand, and it would have been easy. I think that a talented con artist would have had a good instinct for decisions like that. 

The Sermon on the Mount I'd actually agree would be expected at the time. But those aren't the quotations I was thinking of. (Since as I've noted they technically aren't anachronistic given they were according to the text composed around 400 AD to represent Jesus' words at Bountiful from a collection of unknown texts by Mormon) The more problematic ones that anyone would immediately see as problematic would be things like Helaman 12:25-26 partially paraphrasing John 5:29; John 11:50 in 1 Nephi 4:13 etc. Now some that critics bring up are just phrases and probably common Hebrew idioms that just didn't happen to be in the OT. Things like "Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty" (Rev 15:3) or "Now I know of a surety, that the LORD hath" (Acts 12:11). Some are also Nephi explicitly having a similar vision to John's so we'd expect similar phrases to describe it in a loose translation. But there are some that are a bit more problematic for a literal translations such as Act 3:22-23 in 1 Nephi 22:20 or Rev 14:10-11 in Mosiah 3:27. Further in that case it's abundantly clear this is intended as a quotation. These would be recognized as quotations or paraphrases to emphasize the reference.

Such paraphrases or quotations could be explained if the goal was to emphasize a relationship in the translation. i.e. the translator of 1 Nephi 22:20 explicitly wants to emphasize the NT fulfillment in a manner analogous to how the NT quotes the OT to demonstrate Christ fulfilling the role. However that's problematic if your goal is emphasize ancient nature with a worry most wouldn't. i.e. with fraud. Again I take your point about not assume competence with fraud. But this really does seem like the sort of thing that'd make sense as a translation choice before there were norms of footnotes and if the translation was loose and expansive. However it honestly makes zero since if there was a conscious fraud among people who read the Bible regularly and would have recognized the NT passages immediately. Further as I noted these seem very clearly designed to draw attention to their nature.

The point is that this isn't a mistake, carelessness or "real artists ship" type of concerns. This is an explicit strategy for the text that would have been recognized immediately and undermines the nature of the fraud. 

Now there are ways to explain this. You might say that some frauds often put things that undermine them consciously to see just how much they can get by people. i.e. it's a sign of how stupid their marks are and how good they are as a con. Whether that makes sense here seems more difficult to argue, since you expect that sort of thing in more experienced cons. However one might say that his treasure seeking fits the bill.

Edited October 13, 2017 by clarkgoble

[clarkgoble]

2 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

But it seems that all your analysis only shows that the forms and vocabulary and so on were not commonly written in the 1820s. So you seem to be arguing that a person who only knew texts that had been written in the 1820s could not have successfully produced forms that were commonly written in earlier periods.

I think it goes a bit beyond that depending upon the nature of the parallel. For instance a parallel that is in Shakespeare is unpersuasive. Ditto common old texts. Structures that only exist in rare or unlikely to be read texts are quite different. It's also worth noting that the examples you and I gave from the 19th century are intentionally aping 15th century language. The Book of Mormon might ape KJV, but why would it ape these older forms?

[Physics Guy]

Why is Shakesepearean language unpersuasive? People today often mix up Shakespeare and the KJB as sources for old expressions. My idea is that Smith was aiming at Biblical language, but his instinctive feeling for what kind of language was Biblical was really a catholic mix of everything he'd ever heard that seemed archaic and solemn—plus any overgeneralizations he might have made, to produce things that he actually hadn't heard. So he wasn't trying to ape the 15th century at all. If he did so, he did it by accident.

I also think you're overthinking the Biblical quotations problem, because I think Smith's audience thought of Scripture as pretty much all having been dictated by God. Having the same words crop up in different places, or very similar stories repeated, would have seemed to them nothing more than God repeating a few favorite phrases. Higher criticism hadn't been invented yet. Knowing what we know now, the Biblical quotes in the Book of Mormon are a bit hard to explain naturally in a Mormon way, beyond just shrugging that God could have ordained the translation in any way that God wanted. There's nothing so puzzling about these quotes and echoes for a skeptic, however. Smith's original audience just wasn't so fussy about things like that, and Smith wasn't either.

[At this point I change gears, and switch from accusing Smith of fraud to proposing a scenario that might explain the odd language of the Book of Mormon in a Mormon way. In the next two paragraphs, I'm playing Joseph Smith's Advocate.]

By my suggestion of comparison with the Talmud, what I meant was to suggest a text that might be like my hypothetical original for the Book of Mormon. Namely, a text written in an ossified sacred language that was no longer vernacular, and had therefore become a rather weird kind of language. It turns out that the Talmud actually is like that. The Torah is quoted in its Biblical Hebrew, the Mishnah is in a later dialect of Hebrew that was probably only ever used by rabbis, and the Gemara is in its own distinct dialect of Aramaic. By the time the Babylonian Talmud was being collated, the vernacular language was Arabic. Babylonian Aramaic had become a dialect that was only used for rabbinical argument, and Mishnaic Hebrew was dead.

So what would a brilliantly fluid translation of the Talmud into English be like, if it was trying to capture the way the Talmud read at the time it was composed? Perhaps it might well be an odd mixture of grammatical features from multiple eras together with modern vocabulary and an emphasis on modern issues. This is the line of argument that I'm suggesting Mormon apologists might want to pursue.

[cdowis]

5 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

Higher criticism hadn't been invented yet. Knowing what we know now, the Biblical quotes in the Book of Mormon are a bit hard to explain naturally in a Mormon way,

Please help me.  Tell us exactly what we KNOW from higher criticism.  Please convince us that, like physics, chemistry, astronomy, quantum physics, that higher criticism "tells" us anything.  It is a fake science similar to alchemy and astrology.

I have started a new thread so you can blather away to your heart's content.

Edited October 14, 2017 by cdowis

[Benjamin Seeker]

21 hours ago, champatsch said:

I'm actually not terribly interested in the speculation of the translation process, and there may have been no middle men.  It was stated.  Acknowledgement of that is absent in the above.  Why?  In any event, a variety of evidence points to the Lord causing words to come to Joseph Smith.

You sometimes write here of a single translator.  I'm not sure what you mean when you write it, and the typical thing that comes to mind isn't just the Lord and may be different from the reality.

God is invoked because even an erudite human in our state in the 1820s would have almost certainly been unable to generate all the forms, structures, vocabulary, and expressions, setting aside the content.

On counsel, there's another one, at Alma 37:37, "counsel the Lord".  It would be good to have a chain of usage of the type "counsel the Lord" or "counsel God".  Two 16c examples are roughly equivalent in textual frequency to 200 19c examples.  Probably obsolete after the 16c.  The view of obsolete counsel = 'consult, ask counsel of' is supported by about 50 possible items to consider in the Book of Mormon.  The syntax strongly supports the view as well.  A lot of systematic evidence to consider.  Less speculative in nature than almost everything else.

These issues, like the translation process, are quite speculative.  Is it possible for us to be sure about such things?

What do you mean in the second line above?  Sounds like assumptions are being made.  I don't suggest the translation was all about the words instead of the ideas.  Is that what you're asserting is an inevitable result of an archaic lexical view?

Probably best to be patient and analyze the critical text publication coming out early next year and publish a detailed response. Of course analyze systematically and reasonably.

Hey, sorry to but in, but I've got a question. Previously on this board you mentioned that that the language of certain of JS' revelations have archaic forms. I think you stated that you had found these in earlier revelations. I'm curious if in continuing that investigation you've found that archaic forms are concentrated in the early revelations and become less prevalent (or non-existent) in later revelations.

[mfbukowski]

On 10/14/2017 at 7:44 AM, Benjamin Seeker said:

Hey, sorry to but in, but I've got a question. Previously on this board you mentioned that that the language of certain of JS' revelations have archaic forms. I think you stated that you had found these in earlier revelations. I'm curious if in continuing that investigation you've found that archaic forms are concentrated in the early revelations and become less prevalent (or non-existent) in later revelations.

I am not a scholar by any means, nor do I pretend to be on the internet,  but just logically I would assume that the earlier JS revelations- including the BOM etc were alleged to be "scripture" and therefore more likely to reflect a scriptural style.  On the other hand, the later revelations like say D&C, were more conversational language contemporary to Joseph's time.   So regardless of the scholarly answer I would be skeptical about concluding anything from it.

I am virtually positive that those later revelations do not use archaic forms just by reading them.  

Edited October 15, 2017 by mfbukowski

[Benjamin Seeker]

5 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

I am not a scholar by any means, nor do I pretend to be on the internet,  but just logically I would assume that the earlier JS revelations- including the BOM etc were alleged to be "scripture" and therefore more likely to reflect a scriptural style.  On the other hand, the later revelations like say D&C, were more conversational language contemporary to Joseph's time.   So regardless of the scholarly answer I would be skeptical about concluding anything from it.

I am virtually positive that those later revelations do not use archaic forms just by reading them.  

In asking about earlier vs. later revelations, I'm referring to revelations given in the voice of God, or largely so. That includes nearly all of the revelations that are now included in the D&C, some being very early (1828-1829) and others progressively later. You can't go by the current version of D&C because there were a number of updates to previous revelations in the 1835 debut of the D&C. You would need to go back to the Book of Commandments (on the JSP website) or other early documents like the revelation books, copies in people's journals, etc.

Champatsch has stated on the forum that he had found archaic forms in early JS revelations (again referring to voice of God revelations), leading him to believe that the language in those was revealed, similar to gis stance on the BOM. Thus, my question.

[Benjamin Seeker]

6 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

I am not a scholar by any means, nor do I pretend to be on the internet,  but just logically I would assume that the earlier JS revelations- including the BOM etc were alleged to be "scripture" and therefore more likely to reflect a scriptural style.  On the other hand, the later revelations like say D&C, were more conversational language contemporary to Joseph's time.   So regardless of the scholarly answer I would be skeptical about concluding anything from it.

I am virtually positive that those later revelations do not use archaic forms just by reading them.  

P.S. I'm not sure if that was a little dig in my direction, but I am a scholar (music theory and history). I'm definitely out of my element when talking about grammar, but I can't help but be interested!

[mfbukowski]

46 minutes ago, Benjamin Seeker said:

P.S. I'm not sure if that was a little dig in my direction, but I am a scholar (music theory and history). I'm definitely out of my element when talking about grammar, but I can't help but be interested!

No dig intended at all- didn't know about your expertise in music theory and history.

For me, "scholar" is synonymous with "researcher" and I don't see philosophy as research.  I am not sure what it is.

 

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, Benjamin Seeker said:

In asking about earlier vs. later revelations, I'm referring to revelations given in the voice of God, or largely so. That includes nearly all of the revelations that are now included in the D&C, some being very early (1828-1829) and others progressively later. You can't go by the current version of D&C because there were a number of updates to previous revelations in the 1835 debut of the D&C. You would need to go back to the Book of Commandments (on the JSP website) or other early documents like the revelation books, copies in people's journals, etc.

Champatsch has stated on the forum that he had found archaic forms in early JS revelations (again referring to voice of God revelations), leading him to believe that the language in those was revealed, similar to gis stance on the BOM. Thus, my question.

Thanks for teaching me.  I can see I was confusing contexts and stand corrected.

 

[Benjamin Seeker]

33 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

No dig intended at all- didn't know about your expertise in music theory and history.

For me, "scholar" is synonymous with "researcher" and I don't see philosophy as research.  I am not sure what it is.

 

Btw, I've been doing a little reading on philosophy, just basic intro stuff, but I've been enjoying it. Your drawing on philosophy on the forum got me interested. 

[champatsch]

On 10/14/2017 at 10:44 AM, Benjamin Seeker said:

Hey, sorry to butt in, but I've got a question. Previously on this board you mentioned that that the language of certain of JS' revelations have archaic forms. I think you stated that you had found these in earlier revelations. I'm curious if in continuing that investigation you've found that archaic forms are concentrated in the early revelations and become less prevalent (or non-existent) in later revelations.

Please take a look at my September 2017 Interpreter article on the subject, if you haven't already, with plenty of JSP website links and notes.  Unfortunately we don't have the earliest versions of many of the revelations.  The D&C textual history is extremely varied and problematic.  That makes it difficult to draw firm conclusions.  We're missing too much information.  The earliest revelations were received as the Book of Mormon was.  I don't know about later ones.  There is archaic literary usage in later revelations as well as some "bad grammar" too.   There is singular ye in the early revelations, which has been edited to singular you.  I haven't looked carefully to see to what degree singular ye carried through.  A good WordCruncher version of D&C revelations is needed.  I will probably not attempt it.  Other projects are higher priority for me at the present time.

[Benjamin Seeker]

2 hours ago, champatsch said:

Please take a look at my September 2017 Interpreter article on the subject, if you haven't already, with plenty of JSP website links and notes.  Unfortunately we don't have the earliest versions of many of the revelations.  The D&C textual history is extremely varied and problematic.  That makes it difficult to draw firm conclusions.  We're missing too much information.  The earliest revelations were received as the Book of Mormon was.  I don't know about later ones.  There is archaic literary usage in later revelations as well as some "bad grammar" too.   There is singular ye in the early revelations, which has been edited to singular you.  I haven't looked carefully to see to what degree singular ye carried through.  A good WordCruncher version of D&C revelations is needed.  I will probably not attempt it.  Other projects are higher priority for me at the present time.

Thanks for the response. I'll start by reading the paper.

Another conundrum occurred to me yesterday that complicates the idea of revealed language. D. Micheal Quinn's Origins of Power outlines the evolution of several important concepts in early Mormonism, including the establishment of an institutional church, the need for baptism, and the need for priestly authority. Basically, he demonstrates how the early revelations, pre-May 1829 I think, clearly don't call for an institutional church, baptism or authority. He points out both original wordings that support those positions and  changes to one of those revelations in the 1835 D&C that reverse the positions in the text and backdate the concepts of the need for authority, baptism, and an institutional church. He also has commentary by David Whitmer supporting the evolution of an earlier non-institutional position to a later institutional position. I've also heard an additional piece of evidence on the earlier non-institutional church position from Vogel, which is the phrase "I will work a reformation among the churches" (or something very close to that). It is original to the same early revelation with all of the other changes, and the phrase was removed for the 1835 edition. I found an additional change to the same revelation, adding a specification for baptism (I have a brief write-up on the changes pointed out by Quinn, Vogel, and myself here). If you're unfamiliar with Quinn's argument, it is very compelling, and you can read it in full on pages 5, 6, and 7 of Origins.

If you give any credence to the argument that there were changes to original doctrinal positions represented in early revelation, then a believer's likely conclusion is that JS' revelations represent a mix of inspiration and his own notions, which were corrected as time went on. In that way you could conclude that it was his own mistaken notions that the call to believers was only to repent upon receiving the Book of Mormon (not be baptized and join a new church), that the "church" would consist of a loose group of believers or a reformation among members of established churches, and that no priestly office or authority was called for. The first two of these three positions are explicit in the original revelations, and so if you conclude that they are JS' mistaken notions you also conclude that revelations included JS' ideas or at least context from his own viewpoint. Of course, this would butt up against a revealed language theory, which I would assume necessitates only revealed concepts as even the wording is foreign to JS.

I'd like to know how you deal with the argument presented by Quinn and Vogel for evolving/reversing positions in early Mormonism and JS' revelations, and if you do give credence to the argument, how you would square it with the idea that the language of early revelations was revealed.

Edited October 16, 2017 by Benjamin Seeker

[clarkgoble]

23 hours ago, Benjamin Seeker said:

D. Micheal Quinn's Origins of Power outlines the evolution of several important concepts in early Mormonism, including the establishment of an institutional church, the need for baptism, and the need for priestly authority. Basically, he demonstrates how the early revelations, pre-May 1829 I think, clearly don't call for an institutional church, baptism or authority.

I confess I find this pretty unpersuasive depending upon what one means by institutional Church. It's been years since I read Quinn here last, although I remember finding it unpersuasive then to. The main problem of course is the ambiguity over "institutional church." I assume he means highly structured and hierarchal. Yet the OT had a very formal priesthood (although we can always debate how much of this developed with Josiah's centralization of the cult) yet also had many figures working outside of that hierarchy even in the post-exlic period. So would Quinn call that heirarchal or not?

This is not a trivial point since of course the big elephant in the room is how to read the Book of Mormon descriptions of authority. It's also worth noting that Quinn's referring to a pretty small number of texts with Mosiah quickly trumping them. However given we just don't know what was on the 116 pages that's a huge argument from silence that could easily undermine his view. If the early parts of the 116 pages, like 1 Nephi, discuss baptism, then of course his argument falls apart. Further as soon as Quinn brings in "I will establish my church like unto the church which was taught by my disciples in the days of old" the obvious question of baptism arises. That is, Quinn's avoiding a lot of issues and is presuming only faith is needed without really establishing that clearly. It's pretty much entirely an argument from silence based upon the original 1828 form of D&C 10 and which I think is reading vastly too much into "behold this is my doctrine: whosoever repenteth, and cometh unto me, the same is my church: whosoever declareth more or less than this, the same is not of me, but is against me: therefore, he is not of my church." To take that as implying no baptism seems dubious IMO. More significantly Quinn avoids engaging with the March 1829 (D&C 5) revelation that talks of covenants. 

Don't get me wrong. I think the understanding of Church definitely evolved. I just think Quinn is making a very weak argument regarding how people viewed it. (In that sense the Whitmer's preference is somewhat irrelevant)  

Edited October 17, 2017 by clarkgoble

[clarkgoble]

On 10/15/2017 at 10:50 PM, Benjamin Seeker said:

Btw, I've been doing a little reading on philosophy, just basic intro stuff, but I've been enjoying it. Your drawing on philosophy on the forum got me interested. 

I'd say philosophy can be research but of a particular sort, much like someone working on formal logic is doing research just as much as someone working on set theory within mathematics is. We can debate the quality of the research and more particularly the utility of the research of course. 

Edited October 17, 2017 by clarkgoble

[Benjamin Seeker]

23 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

I confess I find this pretty unpersuasive depending upon what one means by institutional Church. It's been years since I read Quinn here last, although I remember finding it unpersuasive then to. The main problem of course is the ambiguity over "institutional church." I assume he means highly structured and hierarchal. Yet the OT had a very formal priesthood (although we can always debate how much of this developed with Josiah's centralization of the cult) yet also had many figures working outside of that hierarchy even in the post-exlic period. So would Quinn call that heirarchal or not?

It's pretty clear to me that Quinn is simply referencing formal organization. The adherents of the BOM are, at the beginning don't even need to leave their former faith, at least from what I understand.

23 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

This is not a trivial point since of course the big elephant in the room is how to read the Book of Mormon descriptions of authority. It's also worth noting that Quinn's referring to a pretty small number of texts with Mosiah quickly trumping them. However given we just don't know what was on the 116 pages that's a huge argument from silence that could easily undermine his view. If the early parts of the 116 pages, like 1 Nephi, discuss baptism, then of course his argument falls apart.

If only we had those! But we don't.

Quinn rightly points out that Oliver Cowdery is involved beginning with Mosiah, and he may have influenced the fact that, according to the revelations we have now (sans the 116 pages), important ideas like baptism and authority became explicit in JS's revelations after Cowdery's arrival.

23 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

Further as soon as Quinn brings in "I will establish my church like unto the church which was taught by my disciples in the days of old" the obvious question of baptism arises. That is, Quinn's avoiding a lot of issues and is presuming only faith is needed without really establishing that clearly. It's pretty much entirely an argument from silence based upon the original 1828 form of D&C 10 and which I think is reading vastly too much into "behold this is my doctrine: whosoever repenteth, and cometh unto me, the same is my church: whosoever declareth more or less than this, the same is not of me, but is against me: therefore, he is not of my church." To take that as implying no baptism seems dubious IMO. More significantly Quinn avoids engaging with the March 1829 (D&C 5) revelation that talks of covenants.

 

Quinn does talk quite a bit about 5, but you're right that he doesnt address the covenants portion (I'll go take a look after this).  Besides the lack of baptism in the early revelations, it is also telling that Smith goes back and adds in at least two references to baptism in these early revelation in 1835.

23 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

Don't get me wrong. I think the understanding of Church definitely evolved. I just think Quinn is making a very weak argument regarding how people viewed it. (In that sense the Whitmer's preference is somewhat irrelevant)  

You should reread Quinn because there is more to his arguments then you remember, and there is sufficiently context for Whitmer's statement to be significant. Remember, he also doesn't pull punches on the priesthood restoration, which is another example of him resisting the transformations of early Mormonism.

[Benjamin Seeker]

23 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

I confess I find this pretty unpersuasive depending upon what one means by institutional Church. It's been years since I read Quinn here last, although I remember finding it unpersuasive then to. The main problem of course is the ambiguity over "institutional church." I assume he means highly structured and hierarchal. Yet the OT had a very formal priesthood (although we can always debate how much of this developed with Josiah's centralization of the cult) yet also had many figures working outside of that hierarchy even in the post-exlic period. So would Quinn call that heirarchal or not?

This is not a trivial point since of course the big elephant in the room is how to read the Book of Mormon descriptions of authority. It's also worth noting that Quinn's referring to a pretty small number of texts with Mosiah quickly trumping them. However given we just don't know what was on the 116 pages that's a huge argument from silence that could easily undermine his view. If the early parts of the 116 pages, like 1 Nephi, discuss baptism, then of course his argument falls apart. Further as soon as Quinn brings in "I will establish my church like unto the church which was taught by my disciples in the days of old" the obvious question of baptism arises. That is, Quinn's avoiding a lot of issues and is presuming only faith is needed without really establishing that clearly. It's pretty much entirely an argument from silence based upon the original 1828 form of D&C 10 and which I think is reading vastly too much into "behold this is my doctrine: whosoever repenteth, and cometh unto me, the same is my church: whosoever declareth more or less than this, the same is not of me, but is against me: therefore, he is not of my church." To take that as implying no baptism seems dubious IMO. More significantly Quinn avoids engaging with the March 1829 (D&C 5) revelation that talks of covenants. 

Don't get me wrong. I think the understanding of Church definitely evolved. I just think Quinn is making a very weak argument regarding how people viewed it. (In that sense the Whitmer's preference is somewhat irrelevant)  

Re: covenants, the covenant in 5 has nothing to do with baptism or organization. It's a promise that Martin Harris will only show the 116 to a select few. I really don't think it has much relevance, but I'd be glad to hear your thoughts.