The State of Mormon Apologetics

[jkwilliams]

Just now, ttribe said:

That much is painfully obvious from his condescending replies to you.

I’ve been condescended to by the best, and he’s a mere novice. 

[clarkgoble]

19 minutes ago, jkwilliams said:

Exactly. It boggles the mind that there can be no explanation (beyond wild speculation) other than divine intervention. 

I can't speak to anyone else but it would make very little sense to me as divine intervention. I think it does undermine the idea of Joseph as author. Again, perhaps someone will find that Joseph used such language. However I think the investigations suggest he didn't outside of the Book of Mormon.

25 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

If you think that Joseph Smith himself produced the archaisms in the text, then that conflicts with the linguistic data and the standard linguistic assumptions which support the Carmack/Skousen theory. 

If you think Joseph Smith somehow came into possession of the BofM text, which was produced by someone else, then that will require wild speculation to get around the historical data.

I think we have to be open to some of the archaism in the text being coincidental or already in the environment (such as critics were quickly able to demonstrate with chiasmus). Some things that may be archaisms might also appear in other sources. (Say Mosiah 15 as a merkabah text versus the received hermetic and platonic traditions where similar ideas can be found)

To me the most interesting bits are things that would have been obvious to someone writing a forgery, such as the nature of levitical priesthood that are contradicted by the text. Thus say the priesthood of the Nephites. That this lines up with what we understand from the Documentary Hypothesis so well is quite interesting. Likewise I have to admit I'm surprised that the rituals excluded by the text are those that scholars tend to see as post-exilic. Honestly what I'd expect from a 19th century book on lost Jews are characteristics the audience would expect about Jews. That we don't see that is rather interesting.

Now I don't want to portray those as unanswerable, although they carry a lot of weight with me. As I mentioned in the thread on Don Bradley's thesis, I think the view of Royal Arch Masonry in the 1820's is relevant here. But again that only gets one so far. 

Edited August 10, 2018 by clarkgoble

[Ryan Dahle]

14 minutes ago, jkwilliams said:

15 minutes ago, ttribe said:

That much is painfully obvious from his condescending replies to you.

I’ve been condescended to by the best, and he’s a mere novice. 

Right. As if that isn't condescending.

You are the one who made this personal. I merely expressed general disagreement with hope_for_things and you took it as an attack about your familiarity with apologetic research. You all but fished for me to give an opinion about your experience with apologetics. And I gave it. And here we are. I didn't say you weren't familiar with apologetics. I just said you aren't as familiar as you seem to think. Which simply implies that maybe there is some room for improvement.  And we all could use a little of that, couldn't we?

If you recall, I was happy to acknowledge that I was uninformed about Cooks article in the BofA debate. That isn't my specialty, and I'm glad you brought it to my attention and corrected me on the issue. No need to get so uptight about these things. Jeesh.

Quote

Exactly. It boggles the mind that there can be no explanation (beyond wild speculation) other than divine intervention. 

Ok. So what is your theory? 

[jkwilliams]

1 minute ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Right. As if that isn't condescending.

You are the one who made this personal. I merely expressed general disagreement with hope_for_things and you took it as an attack about your familiarity with apologetic research. You all but fished for me to give an opinion about your experience with apologetics. And I gave it. And here we are. I didn't say you weren't familiar with apologetics. I just said you aren't as familiar as you seem to think. Which simply implies that maybe there is some room for improvement.  And we all could use a little of that, couldn't we?

If you recall, I was happy to acknowledge that I was uninformed about Cooks article in the BofA debate. That isn't my specialty, and I'm glad you brought it to my attention and corrected me on the issue. No need to get so uptight about these things. Jeesh.

Ok. So what is your theory? 

I didn’t think anything was an attack, and I am not taking anything personally. My joke about novice condescension was intended to show I was not offended, but you took it the opposite. Sorry about that.

I just don’t understand the EModE = divine intervention argument. You’re the one making it, and frankly, it makes no sense. I’m not sure why the onus is on me to provide an alternative to revelation. I can think of a number of alternatives off the top of my head, but that would distract us from you explaining why EModE requires revelation. 

[Ryan Dahle]

12 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

I think we have to be open to some of the archaism in the text being coincidental or already in the environment (such as critics were quickly able to demonstrate with chiasmus).

Sure. Some of them could be. Yet if the archaism wasn't systematic and diverse to begin with, we wouldn't be having this conversation because Stanford would have never been convinced himself. 

15 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

I can't speak to anyone else but it would make very little sense to me as divine intervention. I think it does undermine the idea of Joseph as author. Again, perhaps someone will find that Joseph used such language. However I think the investigations suggest he didn't outside of the Book of Mormon.

I'm not sure why you feel confident, in the first place, about what the translation should have been like.

[Ryan Dahle]

36 minutes ago, jkwilliams said:

I just don’t understand the EModE = divine intervention argument. You’re the one making it, and frankly, it makes no sense. I’m not sure why the onus is on me to provide an alternative to revelation. I can think of a number of alternatives off the top of my head, but that would distract us from you explaining why EModE requires revelation. 

I didn't say it "requires revelation."

I said that so far Joseph's own claims about receiving the text through revelation have the most explanatory power when it comes to both the EModE and the historical record about the translation itself. 

So what is your theory?

Edited August 11, 2018 by Ryan Dahle

[clarkgoble]

6 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

I'm not sure why you feel confident, in the first place, about what the translation should have been like.

Not sure what you mean. I thought I've been explicitly arguing for exactly the opposite. I presume my expectations are not at all the methodology and expectations of the translator. My point was just that it seems odd to treat 16th or 17th century language as evidence of divine intervention. It seems to say nothing about that unless one has a reason to presume such language is more godly in some sense. As I said I think the evidence is Joseph didn't use such language even when receiving the D&C or writing in later religious styles such as with the Book of Abraham. To me that's significant. 

6 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Sure. Some of them could be. Yet if the archaism wasn't systematic and diverse to begin with, we wouldn't be having this conversation because Stanford would have never been convinced himself. 

Are you talking archaisms as what Carmack was addressing or other elements in the text? I'm distinguishing the former from archaic elements that go to the ancient era. (Although then of course we have to distinguish ancient as in the Roman period and ancient as in the pre-exilic period) What Carmack points out is more 16 or 17th century although there's a chance for pockets of such language that persisted. (Although it's not clear why or how Joseph would adopt such language)

I'll be the first to admit I'm not quite sure what to make of that grammatical and other syntactical elements. I think they're a strong reason to think Joseph didn't write the text. But I don't see how they'd imply the divine at all.

Edited August 10, 2018 by clarkgoble

[Ryan Dahle]

1 minute ago, clarkgoble said:

Not sure what you mean. I thought I've been explicitly arguing for exactly the opposite. My point was just that it seems odd to treat 16th or 17th century language as evidence of divine intervention.

I mean that many people seem to dismiss Carmack's research because they have presuppositions about how the translation took place and what type of translation it should have been. They don't think a revealed English translation should have extrabiblical EModE archaism, and so they assume that this was somehow part of Joseph Smith's native linguistic knowledge. 

How about an analogy.

Let's say, hypothetically, that Joseph teamed up with a brilliant linguistic scholar who knew every single language that was ever spoken in the world and who, by virtue of his linguistic prowess, was a veritable expert in all stages of English. And lets say that we knew for sure that these two individuals produced an English translation of an ancient text together, but we didn't have enough information to know who was primarily or exclusively responsible for the wording of the translation. And lets say that after thorough investigation, it became clear that much of the text was systematically archaic English, and that attempts to discover these archaisms in Joseph's environment all turned up negative. Even if we couldn't think of perfectly satisfactory reasons for why the scholar would produce a largely EModE text, wouldn't we still assume that he was the one responsible for it, rather than Joseph? We know the scholar was involved. We know he had the capacity. And we have lot's of good linguistic reasons to assume Joseph didn't have the capacity. 

Speculative assumptions about why the scholar may or may not have chosen to translate the text a certain way don't really matter much when the data essentially demands that, of the two, he is the one responsible for the translation. Of course, those who don't assume God was involved won't accept this analogy. It works best for those who already believe Joseph's story. The issues has to be argued differently for them.

22 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

Are you talking archaisms as what Carmack was addressing or other elements in the text?

Yep. English archaisms.

 

 

[hope_for_things]

1 hour ago, Ryan Dahle said:

But scholars have certainly found many good reasons to assume that it is authentically ancient, reasons which you mostly have dismissed from a distance, as far as I can tell. 

Not sure what you mean by dismissed from a distance, but I’ve reviewed the apologetics enough and considered the implications of all the evidence which has caused me to have a radical shift in my world view.  

As far as I can tell, communicating with Mormons who’ve had a faith crisis over learning about things that contradict the correlated narrative, I’ve definitely researched much more than the average person.  And a thousand times more than the average convert who gets baptized with very little information.  Which is fine with me, I think most people join churches not through an intellectual conversion.  I just don’t like it when people question the reasons for disbelief in correlated Mormonism or niche apologetic arguments.  The assumption being that these arguments are really solid scholarship, and disagreement with them is the fault of the person not understanding the complexities.  Of course the other glaring possibility is that the apologetic arguments are flawed, but that typically doesn’t get considered by devoted followers. 

[hope_for_things]

2 hours ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Well, you have to confront the archaic linguistic data that conflicts with your view and jkwilliams has to confront the strong historical data that conflicts with his. Either way, you both are going to have to make some "huge leaps."

There are apologists who don’t find the EModE evidence compelling, let alone skeptics like me, and I’d be shocked if any non-Mormon scholar actually found the data compelling.  Search for a thread from a few months back that I think was titled who wrote the BoM.  I’m on my phone, but there was some interesting debate between some proponents and Brant Gardiner.  Suffice it to say there are significant problems with conclusions drawn, assumptions made, and methodology around EModE from my perspective.  

[jkwilliams]

28 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

I didn't say it "requires revelation."

I said that so far Joseph's own claims about receiving the text through revelation have the most explanatory power when it comes to both the EModE and the historical record about the translation itself. 

So what is our theory?

Again, please explain why it implies revelation, which has the most explanatory power. I’m at a loss as to how you can support that assertion. 

[hope_for_things]

2 hours ago, smac97 said:

Joseph also said that he dictated the text in less than sixty working days.

Joseph also had a fairly limited education.

Joseph's scribes also said that he never doubled back on the text or, having returned from taking a break from translating, to be prompted as to where he had left off.  See here:

Emma apparently did not believe Joseph was, or could have been, "the source."  See here:

And so on.  Lots of questions here.

So Joseph Smith being the source is not "pretty simple" after all.

Thanks,

-Smac

Of course he’s the source, all witnesses agree, Joseph always affirmed that he dictated the text.  There is no compelling evidence to suggest otherwise.  The only question we have to grapple with is how was Joseph able to produce such a text.  I think he was a highly creative person with a gift for producing innovative theology.  

[hope_for_things]

1 hour ago, clarkgoble said:

I can't speak to anyone else but it would make very little sense to me as divine intervention. I think it does undermine the idea of Joseph as author. Again, perhaps someone will find that Joseph used such language. However I think the investigations suggest he didn't outside of the Book of Mormon.

I remember in the other thread i mentioned earlier that there was some evidence of EModE in some early copies of D&C revelations as well.  I haven’t heard a good theory as to how that could be if it’s supposedly unique to the BoM.  

[jkwilliams]

1 minute ago, hope_for_things said:

I remember in the other thread i mentioned earlier that there was some evidence of EModE in some early copies of D&C revelations as well.  I haven’t heard a good theory as to how that could be if it’s supposedly unique to the BoM.  

There is also EModE in the title page and the witness testimonies. 

[Ryan Dahle]

1 minute ago, jkwilliams said:

Again, please explain why it implies revelation, which has the most explanatory power. I’m at a loss as to how you can support that assertion. 

It implies revelation because, while the historical data says Joseph very likely produced the text, the linguistic data says he very likely couldn't have produced the text. Joseph Smith claimed to receive the text via revelation and a divinely revealed English text  resolves these otherwise opposing  set's of data. It explains how the text was dictated by him, but why it is demonstrably beyond his native linguistic capacities. 

So what's your theory?

[jkwilliams]

Just now, Ryan Dahle said:

It implies revelation because, while the historical data says Joseph very likely produced the text, the linguistic data says he very likely couldn't have produced the text. Joseph Smith claimed to receive the text via revelation and a divinely revealed English text  resolves these otherwise opposing  set's of data. It explains how the text was dictated by him, but why it is demonstrably beyond his native linguistic capacities. 

So what's your theory?

All you’re saying is that it implies he didn’t write it. How you get from there to revelation is a mystery. 

[hope_for_things]

2 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

It implies revelation because, while the historical data says Joseph very likely produced the text, the linguistic data says he very likely couldn't have produced the text. Joseph Smith claimed to receive the text via revelation and a divinely revealed English text  resolves these otherwise opposing  set's of data. It explains how the text was dictated by him, but why it is demonstrably beyond his native linguistic capacities. 

So what's your theory?

So you have two contradictory pieces of evidence, history and linguistics, that doesn’t equal positive evidence for revelation.  This is similar to a God of the gaps argument.  Every contradiction, every missing piece of data can be resolved through an appeal to a supernatural cause.  This isn’t how scholarship works.  

[USU78]

25 minutes ago, hope_for_things said:

 I think he was a highly creative person with a gift for producing innovative theology.  

How do you account then for his near-functional illiteracy per Emma?

[clarkgoble]

25 minutes ago, hope_for_things said:

I remember in the other thread i mentioned earlier that there was some evidence of EModE in some early copies of D&C revelations as well.  I haven’t heard a good theory as to how that could be if it’s supposedly unique to the BoM.  

I think there were one or two examples but not the extended number and variety that's in the Book of Mormon. However I also think that someone should make up a text collection of Joseph's writings to test this more. Do you have a link to the thread you're thinking of? Maybe it's different than the one I'm thinking of. I'm certainly completely open to such evidence.

23 minutes ago, jkwilliams said:

There is also EModE in the title page and the witness testimonies. 

Do you have a link for this? I tried googling and couldn't find anything.

15 minutes ago, USU78 said:

How do you account then for his near-functional illiteracy per Emma?

I think most people assume that was hyperbole on Emma's part. But even if he wasn't as ignorant as that account by Emma, neither was he well educated.

52 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

I mean that many people seem to dismiss Carmack's research because they have presuppositions about how the translation took place and what type of translation it should have been. They don't think a revealed English translation should have extrabiblical EModE archaism, and so they assume that this was somehow part of Joseph Smith's native linguistic knowledge. 

I'm not sure I know of anyone making that argument. I don't want to say no one has - I'm open to links. 

I do think there's a burden of proof point for people on both sides that can lead to people talking past one an other. I think for skeptics the appearance of what they see as huge anachronisms plus no positive evidence for actual Nephites in an actual location means that anyone arguing needs to clear a burden of proof. Whatever Carmack's work does, it simply doesn't clear that burden of proof. Skeptics may be unable to deal with it or explain it but because of that burden of proof they feel they can dismiss it.

In the same way, people who have strong religious experiences confirming the truth and often historicity of the Book of Mormon also feel there's a burden of proof. Thus when there's something that seems a clear anachronism like metal of the appropriate types in the Book of Mormon they may not have an explanation but they don't feel it clears the burden of proof and they feel they can dismiss it even if they can't explain it.

So in many ways the two sides are really making similar logical moves. The issue is what would it take to convince not whether everything can be explained.

Edited August 11, 2018 by clarkgoble

[jkwilliams]

 

19 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

I think there were one or two examples but not the extended number and variety that's in the Book of Mormon. However I also think that someone should make up a text collection of Joseph's writings to test this more. Do you have a link to the thread you're thinking of? Maybe it's different than the one I'm thinking of. I'm certainly completely open to such evidence.

Do you have a link for this? I tried googling and couldn't find anything.

I think most people assume that was hyperbole on Emma's part. But even if he wasn't as ignorant as that account by Emma, neither was he well educated.

I'm not sure I know of anyone making that argument. I don't want to say no one has - I'm open to links. 

I do think there's a burden of proof point for people on both sides that can lead to people talking past one an other. I think for skeptics the appearance of what they see as huge anachronisms plus no positive evidence for actual Nephites in an actual location means that anyone arguing needs to clear a burden of proof. Whatever Carmack's work does, it simply doesn't clear that burden of proof. Skeptics may be unable to deal with it or explain it but because of that burden of proof they feel they can dismiss it.

In the same way, people who have strong religious experiences confirming the truth and often historicity of the Book of Mormon also feel there's a burden of proof. Thus when there's something that seems a clear anachronism like metal of the appropriate types in the Book of Mormon they may not have an explanation but they don't feel it clears the burden of proof and they feel they can dismiss it even if they can't explain it.

So in many ways the two sides are really making similar logical moves. The issue is what would it take to convince not whether everything can be explained.

I was thinking of “of which has been spoken,” which is an archaic usage but shows up in those places. 

Edited August 11, 2018 by jkwilliams

[clarkgoble]

23 minutes ago, jkwilliams said:

I was thinking of “of which has been spoken,” which is an archaic usage but shows up in those places. 

The phrase "of which has been [verb]" doesn't appear to be 17th century doing a quick google. I found many examples although the "spoken" seems primarily out of Joseph Smith. Also the tense of the verb was usually different - often in an infinitive form. But there was an 1833 "of which has been authorized" which is the same verb tense I believe. (I confess I'm not very good at all the nuanced verb tenses beyond what we all learned in English)

I searched for papers by Carmack on this one and the one I found suggests it was't problematic, He said it was "uncommon or rare in the textual record but which have probably been viewed as unobjectionable and [had] not been edited out." ("On Doctrine and Covenants Language and the 1833 Plot of Zion") I should note I didn't read the whole paper so perhaps I'm being unfair, but it doesn't seem like a problematic example of EModE.

Edited August 11, 2018 by clarkgoble

[hope_for_things]

49 minutes ago, USU78 said:

How do you account then for his near-functional illiteracy per Emma?

Gross exaggeration on Emma’s part.  The evidence doesn’t support it.  

[jkwilliams]

1 minute ago, clarkgoble said:

The phrase "of which has been [verb]" doesn't appear to be 17th century doing a quick google. I found many examples although the "spoken" seems primarily out of Joseph Smith. Also the tense of the verb was usually different - often in an infinitive form. But there was an 1833 "of which has been authorized" which is the same verb tense I believe. 

I searched for papers by Carmack on this one and the one I found suggests it was't problematic, He said it was "uncommon or rare in the textual record but which have probably been viewed as unobjectionable and [had] not been edited out." ("On Doctrine and Covenants Language and the 1833 Plot of Zion") I should note I didn't read the whole paper so perhaps I'm being unfair, but it doesn't seem like a problematic example of EModE.

I didn’t think so, either, but it was given to me as an example in the Book of Mormon. 

[hope_for_things]

56 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

think there were one or two examples but not the extended number and variety that's in the Book of Mormon. However I also think that someone should make up a text collection of Joseph's writings to test this more. Do you have a link to the thread you're thinking of? Maybe it's different than the one I'm thinking of. I'm certainly completely open to such evidence.

Look for the Brant Gardiner posts.  Long thread.  

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/70279-where-did-the-book-of-mormon-come-from/?tab=comments#comment-1209799365

I also think other early writing and dictation should be examined, letters, revelations, JST, 1832 history.  Even work by Cowdery and other scribes.  It’s possible they also had some of these linguistic tendencies.  

[Glenn101]

9 hours ago, jkwilliams said:

I've not seen anything on this subject other than that 1966 letter from Dr. Albright cited and some speculations from Nibley that Ed Ashment dealt with 25 years ago. Albright's letter, devoid of context, isn't all that helpful.

Again, the suggestion is that these are Egyptian names. If they aren't, who cares how they got into the Book of Mormon? A private letter from 1966 is not compelling evidence.

You are missing the point, which is that those Egyptian names are some of the things that are not found in nieneteenth century texts. Please correct me if you can find some. Albright is not the only person who sees those names as Egyptian. Just Google Paanchi and Egyptian and exclude the Book of Mormon.

6 hours ago, jkwilliams said:

Oh, trust me, Stan and I have had a lot of conversations about this. But let's just say, for argument's sake, that my paradigm is wrong, and there really is significant EModE usage in the Book of Mormon. Does that tell us anything about whether it's a translation of an ancient record? If it does, I am not seeing it. If anything, it might suggest an earlier author than Joseph Smith.

That is not what we are debating, i.e. whether the Book of Mormon is a translation of an ancient record. the debate is if it is really a nineteenth century document. You have a point that it might point to an earlier, much earlier, author than Joseph Smith, someone that is/was facial with Early modern English. But to the point of the debate, the presence of extensive Early Modern English is something else that is not found in other nineteenth century texts of the era when the Book of Mormon was produced.

6 hours ago, jkwilliams said:

Now, that's just annoying. Why would you assume that I or anyone else has focused on the nineteenth century and ignored everything else? 

Sorry to irritate you. But you are ignoring the elements that I pointed out or dismissing them without showing that your opinions are based upon any type of scholarship.

Glenn