The DNA Issue again.

[mfbukowski]

7 hours ago, Atheist Mormon said:

You were right 😞 Bukowski. Sorry

No prob

I was wrong once too, I think it was 1975.

 

[Atheist Mormon]

11 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

No prob

I was wrong once too, I think it was 1975.

 

Good thing you're funny (otherwise I couldn't take your arrogance).

[USU78]

15 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

No prob

I was wrong once too, I think it was 1975.

 

Ha! It was 1976. 

[mfbukowski]

2 hours ago, USU78 said:

Ha! It was 1976. 

Nope.

See that proves even you can be wrong right there.  😎

 

[Rajah Manchou]

10 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

While quite speculative I wrote up one way to think about the Jaredites in terms of polynesian voyages. 

I'm nitpicking, but the Jaredites were contemporary with the Chamorro and Austronesians. 

"Somewhere between 2000 and 1500 BC, around the time that Abraham was moving out of the Chaldees to his new home in what was later to be Palestine, another movement was taking place. Sailing canoes from the west arrived bringing the first people to settle in Micronesia." (source)

There is evidence of sharing of boat forms between Austronesians and Phonecians Mesopotamians from an early period.


(source)

Note: the reference to Mesopotamians and Phoenicians in Kamarupa/Kamara mentioned in Waruno Mahdi's article above supports the Book of Mormon narrative of Jaredites/Israelites in Cumorah. In my opinion, of course.

[Brant Gardner]

On 6/15/2018 at 10:32 PM, sunstoned said:

All I am just saying that a one thousand year history and there is no reference to anyone else living there. Just nephites and laminates. No one else. No other tribes, no neighbors, no trading, no communication, no alliances, no treaties,  no wars, and no first contact accounts. Nada.  Empty land.  Only populated by the descendants of Lehi.  The title page of the BoM use to call this out.  That is until DNA came along. 

There is a major problem in the way the Book of Mormon is approached. In general, the idea is that the Book of Mormon cannot be historical, and the proof is that if we read the text in a way that no text from history should be read, then we see that it isn't historical. To give a little perspective, here is John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One, p.8:

Quote

As complicated a translating a foreign language can be, translating a foreign culture is infinitely more difficult. The problem lies in the act of translating/., Translation involves lifting the ideas from their native context and relocating them in our own context. In some ways this is an imperialistic act and bound to create some distortion as we seek to organize information in the categories that are familiar to us. It is far too easy to let our own ideas cree in and subtly (or at times not so subtly) bend or twist the material to fit our own context.

That is for the Bible, where we know a lot more from a longer tradition of written documents. What happens with the Book of Mormon? Take the empty land hypothesis. That is a very logical thing to look for from our perspective. We think first contact information should be there, and it isn't. Therefore, the text cannot be historical. However, that requires that we judge the text by a modern assumption about the text. If the text were to be ancient, then it should be judged against antiquity, not modern perspectives. Why did the writers' write? What did they intend? if we look at the text according to what it tells us about itself, there is a very different answer.

1) Why doesn't Nephi tell us about first contact? Maybe he did. We have the second record, not the first. What we have came 30 years after first contact. Both by interest and definition of the document, it would be in the other record. Nephi's purpose in writing what we have is distinctly different--and meeting others upon arrival is completely beside the point (as well as being rather well established after thirty years).

2) Why didn't Mormon tell us? Mormon used Nephi's other document, and if the first contact were in the other document, Mormon could have mentioned the others. There is no indication that he would have cared. If Nephi was not writing about them thirty years later, Mormon had less of a reason to be interested a thousand years later. What Mormon wrote was lost (116 pages), but since no one remembered "others," it is pretty safe to assume that it wasn't there.

3) Is it true that the text doesn't mention others? Again, it depends upon how you read the text. Jacob tells us that Nephite and Lamanite are political designations (as well as retaining a tribal affiliation). So Lamanite and enemy became basically the same word. The Jews spoke of gentiles. The function is the same (and there are reasons why Nephi makes certain that enemies=Lamanites). 

4) If it isn't explicit, then is it true that there is no reference to others? This is where it is most interesting. The places where we see others is exactly where it should be in an ancient text. They are assumed, and referenced obliquely while the text is talking about things it is more interested in. One of the ways you note a work of fiction is in the necessary world-building. The author has to spell it out for the reader. An ancient document reflects its world, it doesn't explain it.

On that last point, there are a couple of places where there are some out-of-place descriptions that shouldn't be in an authentic native text. I'm thinking of the geography in Alma 19 and the weights and measures in Alma 11. Neither of those should be in an ancient document. Interestingly, they aren't. What I mean by that is that both cases are an insertion that Mormon makes to give an explanation that his reader is going to need. It wasn't in the reference, but is discernibly an insertion into what he had been writing. In other words, the places where it seems that we have the wrong text, it happens in such a way that it is faithful to the ancient text and explicable as an insertion (not ancient for the writer, even though the writer is ancient to us).

Saying the Book of Mormon cannot be historical because it doesn't fit what a modern audience believes it should be is not an argument about the text at all, but about what modern readers believe it to be.

[clarkgoble]

15 hours ago, Brant Gardner said:

1) Why doesn't Nephi tell us about first contact? Maybe he did. We have the second record, not the first. What we have came 30 years after first contact. Both by interest and definition of the document, it would be in the other record. Nephi's purpose in writing what we have is distinctly different--and meeting others upon arrival is completely beside the point (as well as being rather well established after thirty years).

I think the issue of the 116 pages looms large here. Although to be fair to the counterview, if the 116 pages had discussion of others in the land then wouldn't Joseph and Oliver (or other scribes) have knowledge of that? Wouldn't, in turn, that affect how they discuss native Americans in the region they lived in from the 1820's through Joseph's death? Yet we don't see a lot of evidence of that. While I'm extremely dubious of the great lakes geography model, one thing they do raise is the assumption about how early Saints including Joseph viewed natives of the region.

My guess is that discussion of Others also wasn't on the 116 pages. However we should note that the 116 pages aren't Nephi's writing but Mormon's summation of Nephi's historical records. It's quite reasonable that Mormon just didn't mention it, much like Moroni didn't mention it in Ether. As you note in your #2, it's quite plausible Mormon just didn't care. Why wouldn't he care? Presumably because the empty hemisphere model was so alien he didn't even consider it as a possibility. The empty land model of course presupposes a type of "literalist" interpretation that only really arose in the modern era. (Here meaning roughly the post-Cartesian period through the beginning of the 20th century) That in turn arises as Protestant hermeneutics develop in lockstep with hermeneutics of science and hermeneutics of legal texts. Yet all those assumptions about reading texts are novel in the modern era and for the most part alien to the ancient world. It's just that they've become such a part of our culture people don't realize the ways they are reading texts.

15 hours ago, Brant Gardner said:

On that last point, there are a couple of places where there are some out-of-place descriptions that shouldn't be in an authentic native text. I'm thinking of the geography in Alma 19 and the weights and measures in Alma 11. Neither of those should be in an ancient document. Interestingly, they aren't. What I mean by that is that both cases are an insertion that Mormon makes to give an explanation that his reader is going to need. It wasn't in the reference, but is discernibly an insertion into what he had been writing. In other words, the places where it seems that we have the wrong text, it happens in such a way that it is faithful to the ancient text and explicable as an insertion (not ancient for the writer, even though the writer is ancient to us).

These could also plausibly be additions at the time of translation as Blake Ostler has suggested.

15 hours ago, Brant Gardner said:

Saying the Book of Mormon cannot be historical because it doesn't fit what a modern audience believes it should be is not an argument about the text at all, but about what modern readers believe it to be.

What's most interesting is that this logic presupposes that the text isn't authentically ancient since it demands it accord to how a modern text would be written. So there's a really interesting and obscured element of circular logic to many claims of achronisms. 

[Rajah Manchou]

On 6/19/2018 at 11:43 AM, Brant Gardner said:

Why did the writers' write? What did they intend? if we look at the text according to what it tells us about itself, there is a very different answer.

"We have been driven out of the land of our inheritance; but we have been led to a better land, for the Lord has made the sea our path, and we are upon an isle of the sea...wherefore as it says isles, there must needs be more than this, and they are inhabited also by our brethren."
- 2 Nephi 10:20

What do you suppose the "it" is, and who are the brethren that it refers to?

[Exiled]

On 6/19/2018 at 12:53 PM, clarkgoble said:

I think the issue of the 116 pages looms large here. Although to be fair to the counterview, if the 116 pages had discussion of others in the land then wouldn't Joseph and Oliver (or other scribes) have knowledge of that? Wouldn't, in turn, that affect how they discuss native Americans in the region they lived in from the 1820's through Joseph's death? Yet we don't see a lot of evidence of that. While I'm extremely dubious of the great lakes geography model, one thing they do raise is the assumption about how early Saints including Joseph viewed natives of the region.

My guess is that discussion of Others also wasn't on the 116 pages. However we should note that the 116 pages aren't Nephi's writing but Mormon's summation of Nephi's historical records. It's quite reasonable that Mormon just didn't mention it, much like Moroni didn't mention it in Ether. As you note in your #2, it's quite plausible Mormon just didn't care. Why wouldn't he care? Presumably because the empty hemisphere model was so alien he didn't even consider it as a possibility. The empty land model of course presupposes a type of "literalist" interpretation that only really arose in the modern era. (Here meaning roughly the post-Cartesian period through the beginning of the 20th century) That in turn arises as Protestant hermeneutics develop in lockstep with hermeneutics of science and hermeneutics of legal texts. Yet all those assumptions about reading texts are novel in the modern era and for the most part alien to the ancient world. It's just that they've become such a part of our culture people don't realize the ways they are reading texts.

These could also plausibly be additions at the time of translation as Blake Ostler has suggested.

What's most interesting is that this logic presupposes that the text isn't authentically ancient since it demands it accord to how a modern text would be written. So there's a really interesting and obscured element of circular logic to many claims of achronisms. 

I guess there are a lot of possibilities for what was in the new world. One can imagine almost anything ... as long as it supports what today's believing group believes? However, aren't you imposing a modern believing view on the text by interpreting it in a faithful manner?  Maybe the anachronisms are anachronisms and the text is meant to be viewed as a 19th century man's view of the mound builder myth?

[Rajah Manchou]

On 6/20/2018 at 2:53 AM, clarkgoble said:

I think the issue of the 116 pages looms large here. Although to be fair to the counterview, if the 116 pages had discussion of others in the land then wouldn't Joseph and Oliver (or other scribes) have knowledge of that?

Only Joseph, Emma and Martin Harris would have worked with the contents of the 116 pages. As you know, Joseph Smith Sr. told his version to Fayette Lapham supposedly before the Book of Mormon was published. My reading of Sr's account is that there were others in the land, but that had become extinct just previous to the arrival of the Lehites:

"After sailing a long time, they came to land, went on shore, and thence they traveled through boundless forests, until, at length, they came to a country where there were a great many lakes; which country had once been settled by a very large race of men, who were very rich, having a great deal of money. From some unknown cause, this nation had become extinct...When they, the Jews, first beheld this country, they sent out spies to see what manner of country it was, who reported that the country appeared to have been settled by a very large race of men, and had been, to all appearances, a very rich agricultural and manufacturing nation."

[clarkgoble]

9 hours ago, Rajah Manchou said:

My reading of Sr's account is that there were others in the land, but that had become extinct just previous to the arrival of the Lehites:

The difficulty of this is that it's just describing the landing area not the entire region. It also doesn't address the more interesting question of what happens with the split of the Nephites from the Lamanites.

Edited June 21, 2018 by clarkgoble

[clarkgoble]

10 hours ago, Exiled said:

I guess there are a lot of possibilities for what was in the new world. One can imagine almost anything ... as long as it supports what today's believing group believes? However, aren't you imposing a modern believing view on the text by interpreting it in a faithful manner?  Maybe the anachronisms are anachronisms and the text is meant to be viewed as a 19th century man's view of the mound builder myth?

The trick is to understand the range of ways to read the text. Certainly 19th century fiction is possible, although then there are often oddities for such a work IMO. However the main issue - and this is just as true of Biblical hermeneutics and related texts - is to see how it lines up with the purported context. All my point is that purported anachronisms frequently (although not always) are tied to particular interpretations without even acknowledging there are other very defensible ways to read the text.

[Rajah Manchou]

3 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

The difficulty of this is that it's just describing the landing area not the entire region. It also doesn't address the more interesting question of what happens with the split of the Nephites from the Lamanites.

To me it sounds like Sr. was referring to the Great Lakes region, and New York. For brevity, I didn't include the full statement, but Sr. mentions that the riches of the extinct race (Jaredites?) was to be found in New York. That would mean the Lehites walked at least that far from the landing area. 

"After sailing a long time, they came to land, went on shore, and thence they traveled through boundless forests, until, at length, they came to a country where there were a great many lakes; which country had once been settled by a very large race of men, who were very rich, having a great deal of money. From some unknown cause, this nation had become extinct; "but that money," said Smith, "is here, now, every dollar of it."

[clarkgoble]

I confess that to me that doesn't necessarily imply the New York region. There are after all lake regions elsewhere. I've no idea what inferences Smith Sr. made. He could quite easily take a description of mesoAmerica and think it referred to the great lakes region for instance. But the descriptions are pretty vague.

[ksfisher]

On 6/18/2018 at 10:43 PM, Brant Gardner said:

On that last point, there are a couple of places where there are some out-of-place descriptions that shouldn't be in an authentic native text. I'm thinking of the geography in Alma 19 and the weights and measures in Alma 11. Neither of those should be in an ancient document. Interestingly, they aren't. What I mean by that is that both cases are an insertion that Mormon makes to give an explanation that his reader is going to need. It wasn't in the reference, but is discernibly an insertion into what he had been writing. In other words, the places where it seems that we have the wrong text, it happens in such a way that it is faithful to the ancient text and explicable as an insertion (not ancient for the writer, even though the writer is ancient to us).

Could you expand on this a bit?  I'm particularly interested why Mormon would take to time to spell out the weights and measures in Alma 11, when it seems like he could have just said it was a big bribe.  Why did he take the time to explain the system in such detail?

[Physics Guy]

On 6/19/2018 at 6:43 AM, Brant Gardner said:

Saying the Book of Mormon cannot be historical because it doesn't fit what a modern audience believes it should be is not an argument about the text at all, but about what modern readers believe it to be.

Up to a point I agree with all of your points. Ancient texts were written by ancient writers who had even less idea what our world would be like than we have of how theirs was. So indeed they cannot be expected to have anticipated all the things that seemed obvious in their time but would require explanation for us. Real ancient texts are not like the kind of mediocre science fiction that has characters explaining trivia to each other for the reader's benefit. Nobody bothers with world-building when they're describing their own real world—that's a good way to put it.

The problem I have is this. Even as ancient writers cannot be expected to go out of their way to mention things that would be salient for modern readers but not for them, so they also cannot be expected to go out of their way to avoid mentioning things that would be commonplace for them, just because these commonplace details would not be an essential part of the message they were trying to convey to their audience. It would not occur to them that those details could be problematic distractions which should be suppressed—for the same reason that it would not occur to them to explain things that we want explained.

I'm not an expert in either aboriginal American culture or the Book of Mormon, so let me put forward a sentence in quotation marks. It's not a claim that I'm prepared to defend, but simply a statement of what I think skeptics of Book of Mormon authenticity might say, which your argument does not seem to me to address.

"To say as little about aboriginal cultures as the Book of Mormon says, ancient writers who were actually in contact with much larger aboriginal cultures would have had to censor themselves in a way that no ancient writer would do."

[Rajah Manchou]

10 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

I confess that to me that doesn't necessarily imply the New York region. There are after all lake regions elsewhere. I've no idea what inferences Smith Sr. made. He could quite easily take a description of mesoAmerica and think it referred to the great lakes region for instance. But the descriptions are pretty vague.

What I mean is that Joseph Smith Sr was saying the extinct civilization was in New York, or rather all their money was.

[ksfisher]

17 minutes ago, Physics Guy said:

"To say as little about aboriginal cultures as the Book of Mormon says, ancient writers who were actually in contact with much larger aboriginal cultures would have had to censor themselves in a way that no ancient writer would do."

The record was censored, or rather abridged, by Mormon.  We don't have everything that Alma or Heleman or the later Nephis wrote.  We only have their writings that Mormon chose to include.  And Mormon makes it clear that his purpose in writing was to persuade people to come to Christ.

Even with Nephi and the other early writers of the Book of Mormon we don't have their complete record.  Nephi makes it clear that what we have today, the small plates, only includes the more spiritual matters.  The more secular history was to be found upon his other plates.

What we have is a very limited snapshot of Nephite history.

[CA Steve]

5 minutes ago, ksfisher said:

The record was censored, or rather abridged, by Mormon.  We don't have everything that Alma or Heleman or the later Nephis wrote.  We only have their writings that Mormon chose to include.  And Mormon makes it clear that his purpose in writing was to persuade people to come to Christ.

Even with Nephi and the other early writers of the Book of Mormon we don't have their complete record.  Nephi makes it clear that what we have today, the small plates, only includes the more spiritual matters.  The more secular history was to be found upon his other plates.

What we have is a very limited snapshot of Nephite history.

Are you saying there were no conversions from the indigenous peoples? Wouldn't the stories of those conversions be part of the spiritual history?

[ksfisher]

10 minutes ago, CA Steve said:

Are you saying there were no conversions from the indigenous peoples? Wouldn't the stories of those conversions be part of the spiritual history?

That's not what I said at all.  You will recall that early in the record Jacob mentions that anyone that wasn't a Nephite they called a Lamanite. There are mentions of many conversions from among the Lamanites, but the record usually does not say if these were ancestral or political Lamanites.

[Brant Gardner]

21 hours ago, Rajah Manchou said:

"We have been driven out of the land of our inheritance; but we have been led to a better land, for the Lord has made the sea our path, and we are upon an isle of the sea...wherefore as it says isles, there must needs be more than this, and they are inhabited also by our brethren."
- 2 Nephi 10:20

What do you suppose the "it" is, and who are the brethren that it refers to?

The reference to being on an isle of the sea is limited to Nephi and Jacob. It comes from their linking themselves to Isaiah's prophecies of a return, and they saw themselves in the same kind of diaspora as the ten tribes, which was Isaiah's more specific reference. Since the word translated as "isles" could mean any location with a coast, I doubt that there was any intention to suggest that they were surrounded by water. It is a reference to scripture, not geography.

[Brant Gardner]

10 hours ago, ksfisher said:

Could you expand on this a bit?  I'm particularly interested why Mormon would take to time to spell out the weights and measures in Alma 11, when it seems like he could have just said it was a big bribe.  Why did he take the time to explain the system in such detail?

The best beginning source is Gordon C. Thomasson, "What's in a Name? Book of Mormon Language, Names, and [Metonymic] Naming."  See here. Thomasson will give you the basic argument you are looking for. What I have found is that the extent of metonymic naming is much greater than Thomasson has noted--and is quite important to the text.

[Brant Gardner]

10 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

"To say as little about aboriginal cultures as the Book of Mormon says, ancient writers who were actually in contact with much larger aboriginal cultures would have had to censor themselves in a way that no ancient writer would do."

This all depends upon what they are talking about. If they were discussing a feast and failed to mention some unique foods (Mesoamerican tamales, for example), that would be surprising. However, if they never talked about eating, then there is no reason to be surprised at the absence of the mention of specific foods.

The next problem is that we have the text in translation. I am not one of those who holds to the divinely dictated translation method. I think Joseph had a part in the translation, and we shouldn't be surprised to find things in his translation that reference his understanding of certain topics (such as revival language). I suspect that there are some occasions where the flora and fauna are anachronisms of translation rather than being attributable to the original text. That isn't surprising. Early Spanish writers described native religion, but in European categories that took a long time to unravel to see how the native religion differed from the descriptions.

[Exiled]

49 minutes ago, Brant Gardner said:

This all depends upon what they are talking about. If they were discussing a feast and failed to mention some unique foods (Mesoamerican tamales, for example), that would be surprising. However, if they never talked about eating, then there is no reason to be surprised at the absence of the mention of specific foods.

The next problem is that we have the text in translation. I am not one of those who holds to the divinely dictated translation method. I think Joseph had a part in the translation, and we shouldn't be surprised to find things in his translation that reference his understanding of certain topics (such as revival language). I suspect that there are some occasions where the flora and fauna are anachronisms of translation rather than being attributable to the original text. That isn't surprising. Early Spanish writers described native religion, but in European categories that took a long time to unravel to see how the native religion differed from the descriptions.

With all due respect, this just sounds like an ad hoc justification for why there are 19th century elements in the book. For me, I couldn't continue believing in what's merely possible.

[Brant Gardner]

30 minutes ago, Exiled said:

With all due respect, this just sounds like an ad hoc justification for why there are 19th century elements in the book. For me, I couldn't continue believing in what's merely possible.

With all due respect, my position is the result of a lot of careful thought about the nature of the translation process and the way in which the text reflects the time and overall culture in which it was created.