The State of Mormon Apologetics

[jkwilliams]

Just now, Ryan Dahle said:

I think that the vast majority of Americans in Joseph's day were too ignorant of Hebrew literary forms to produce a text like the Book of Mormon. I don't think any of them could have produced it under the circumstances described by the witnesses and to some degree confirmed by the manuscript evidence. And I think Joseph, in particular, was especially unlikely to be able to produce such a text under any circumstances, let alone the circumstances described by the witnesses. Time will tell, though, I suppose.

I suppose time will tell, indeed. And for the record, I am not a "Book of Mormon antagonist."

[clarkgoble]

36 minutes ago, jkwilliams said:

For me, a lot of the problem is that we're working with an English text, not a Hebrew or Egyptian text, so, as Clark Goble mentioned, any Hebrew words are merely words that "sound like" possible Hebrew words. Even if we assume that Jershon is Hebrew, we then are left to wonder why people who apparently assimilated with Mesoamericans are, after 500 years, still doing wordplays in a language that likely only the priests and scribes would have known. And even then, we're told in the BofM that Nephi wrote in Reformed Egyptian but spoke Hebrew, so assimilation likely means Hebrew didn't survive as a spoken language or a written language, as it had been superseded by Reformed Egyptian.

It's quite likely that if they're inducted into a scribal language, as the text suggests in some places, that they'd come to better know these literary figures and be more apt to use them themselves. While I'm critical about assuming the gold plates are Hebrew in any straightforward way it does seem like the brass plates were more likely to be Hebrew in heiratic or some other similar method of writing. But no matter what we do there are lots of presuppositions about language that are hard to support. My presupposition, which I think is pretty defensible, is that reformed egyptian is more a style of shorthand and abbreviation than a language per se. However they have the brass plates plus whatever paper writing survives the early Nephite refugee movements. It's at least plausible that priests had access to a reasonable amount of Hebrew and possibly even proper Hebrew writing.

However overall I tend to agree with you. I think a lot of these sorts of things presuppose a high degree of familiarity with Hebrew by at least Mormon that I'm not sure is justified. Although I also am not a Hebrew speaker so I don't know how much more obvious puns and poetry is in the original Hebrew. My usual first instinct is to assume Hebrewisms are artifacts of a loose translation that makes heavy use of the KJV. I will confess though that there are some that seem more obscured by the translation and thus aren't due to KJV paraphrases or quotations that are pretty compelling.

Edited August 15, 2018 by clarkgoble

[Analytics]

19 hours ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Let's just concentrate on the actual content first and bracket the question of intentionality. A chiasm is still a chiasm even if you can't prove one way or another if it was intentional or accidental. The great number of good proposals of a type of Hebraism you find concentrated in a single text, the more likely it is that they are mostly intentional. Same thing with Hebrew wordplays or any other Hebrew feature. 

How about you just name a 19th century text that you think has as many good and diverse proposals for Hebrew content as the Book of Mormon. 

Moby **** by Herman Melville.

[jkwilliams]

Just now, clarkgoble said:

It's quite likely that if they're inducted into a scribal language, as the text suggests in some places, that they'd come to better know these literary figures and be more apt to use them themselves. While I'm critical about assuming the gold plates are Hebrew in any straightforward way it does seem like the brass plates were more likely to be Hebrew in heiratic or some other similar method of writing. But no matter what we do there are lots of presuppositions about language that are hard to support. My presupposition, which I think is pretty defensible, is that reformed egyptian is more a style of shorthand and abbreviation than a language per se. However they have the brass plates plus whatever paper writing survives the early Nephite refugee movements. It's at least plausible that priests had access to a reasonable amount of Hebrew and possibly even proper Hebrew writing.

However overall I tend to agree with you. I think a lot of these sorts of things presuppose a high degree of familiarity with Hebrew by at least Mormon that I'm not sure is justified. Although I also am not a Hebrew speaker so I don't know how much more obvious puns and poetry is in the original Hebrew.

Obviously, I'm not a Hebrew speaker, either. I just think that, given that we're working with an English text, some caution is warranted in assigning Hebraistic usage or structures. 

[Ryan Dahle]

16 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

51 minutes ago, jkwilliams said:

For me, a lot of the problem is that we're working with an English text, not a Hebrew or Egyptian text, so, as Clark Goble mentioned, any Hebrew words are merely words that "sound like" possible Hebrew words. Even if we assume that Jershon is Hebrew, we then are left to wonder why people who apparently assimilated with Mesoamericans are, after 500 years, still doing wordplays in a language that likely only the priests and scribes would have known. And even then, we're told in the BofM that Nephi wrote in Reformed Egyptian but spoke Hebrew, so assimilation likely means Hebrew didn't survive as a spoken language or a written language, as it had been superseded by Reformed Egyptian.

It's quite likely that if they're inducted into a scribal language, as the text suggests in some places, that they'd come to better know these literary figures and be more apt to use them themselves. While I'm critical about assuming the gold plates are Hebrew in any straightforward way it does seem like the brass plates were more likely to be Hebrew in heiratic or some other similar method of writing. But no matter what we do there are lots of presuppositions about language that are hard to support. My presupposition, which I think is pretty defensible, is that reformed egyptian is more a style of shorthand and abbreviation than a language per se. However they have the brass plates plus whatever paper writing survives the early Nephite refugee movements. It's at least plausible that priests had access to a reasonable amount of Hebrew and possibly even proper Hebrew writing.

However overall I tend to agree with you. I think a lot of these sorts of things presuppose a high degree of familiarity with Hebrew by at least Mormon that I'm not sure is justified. Although I also am not a Hebrew speaker so I don't know how much more obvious puns and poetry is in the original Hebrew. My usual first instinct is to assume Hebrewisms are artifacts of a loose translation that makes heavy use of the KJV. I will confess though that there are some that seem more obscured by the translation and thus aren't due to KJV paraphrases or quotations that are pretty compelling.

It shouldn't matter a whole lot what the language of the text was. As long as the language was phonetic, it could transliterate terms from other languages whenever the need or desire arose. For example, I'm pretty sure we see Egyptian words (with wordplay, I might add) written as Hebrew transliterations in the Hebrew Bible. See, for example, Pi-hahiroth. 

[clarkgoble]

49 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

It shouldn't matter a whole lot what the language of the text was. As long as the language was phonetic, it could transliterate terms from other languages whenever the need or desire arose. For example, I'm pretty sure we see Egyptian words (with wordplay, I might add) written as Hebrew transliterations in the Hebrew Bible. See, for example, Pi-hahiroth. 

Right - but that premise of it being phoenetic rather than ideogram or similar conceptual shorthand is more or less my criticism. It's also why I think stylometry is bunk and irrelevant to the text. Now that doesn't mean the original text is like that - that is the texts Mormon was paraphrasing, summarizing and shortening. Just that what ends up on the plates seem unlikely to preserve such relations if it's isn't fully Hebrew merely recorded in a different set of glyphs.

Now of course if the full Hebrew was preserved on the plates that's one thing. However if the translation in terms of content was very loose (which the extensive quotations and paraphrases of the KJV seems to require) then we've still got a problem. If the translation is more interpretive paraphrases making use of 19th century content, why would we expect Hebrew puns and poetry to survive? It'd seem they'd only survive if there was a fairly strict translation method functioning primarily at the word level. There's just little indication of that though. Even if it happens, it appears to happen in short sections.

Whatever the nature of the writing on the plates, it seems pretty hard to believe we're dealing with a simple transition from the original (in the sense of Mormon, Nephi or Jacob's pre-plate text) to the translation (the English in the original manuscript). Without that, why should we assume most of these would survive? More attention needs paid to this role of the KJV as paraphrases and quotations when the underlying text clearly isn't tied to the original Hebrew translated to the KJV. The way this was usually dealt with, particularly in the rise of Hebrewisms in the 90's, was to assume any parallel to the KJV reflected a common earlier source. So a NT quotation or paraphrase doesn't represent a loose conceptual method of translation and reference. Rather it reflects a common source to the NT that is pre-exilic. That's pretty hard to believe and I think people were largely just finding an excuse to bracket questions of the translation as it hinged upon their apologetic arguments.

Edited August 15, 2018 by clarkgoble

[Ryan Dahle]

14 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

Right - but that premise of it being phoenetic rather than ideogram or similar conceptual shorthand is more or less my criticism. It's also why I think stylometry is bunch and irrelevant to the text. Now that doesn't mean the original text is like that - that is the texts Mormon was paraphrasing and shortening. Just that what ends up on the plates seem unlikely to preserve such relations if it's isn't fully Hebrew merely recorded in a different set of glyphs.

Now of course if the full Hebrew was preserved on the plates that's one thing. However if the translation in terms of content was very loose (which the extensive quotations and paraphrases of the KJV seems to require) then we've still got a problem. If the translation is more interpretive paraphrases making use of 19th century content, why would we expect Hebrew puns and poetry to survive? It'd seem they'd only survive if there was a fairly strict translation method functioning primarily at the word level. There's just little indication of that though. Even if it happens, it appears to happen in short sections.

Whatever the nature of the writing on the plates, it seems pretty hard to believe we're dealing with a simple transition from the original (in the sense of Mormon, Nephi or Jacob's pre-plate text) to the translation (the English in the original manuscript). Without that, why should we assume most of these would survive? More attention needs paid to this role of the KJV as paraphrases and quotations when the underlying text clearly isn't tied to the original Hebrew translated to the KJV. The way this was usually dealt with, particularly in the rise of Hebrewisms in the 90's, was to assume any parallel to the KJV reflected a common earlier source. So a NT quotation or paraphrase doesn't represent a loose conceptual method of translation and reference. Rather it reflects a common source to the NT that is pre-exilic. That's pretty hard to believe and I think people were largely just finding an excuse to bracket questions of the translation as it hinged upon their apologetic arguments.

I don't think we know enough about the condensed nature of the text to make a solid determination one way or another at the outset about whether it was phonetic, shorthand-phonetic, logogrammatic, or ideogrammatic. All we can confidently say is that it was likely more condensed than paleo-Hebrew. I try to let the nature of the text inform my assumption, rather than letting my assumption discount evidence from the nature of the text. I see pervasive New Testament intertextuality as a sign of non-literal translation (better to avoid "tight" vs. "loose" terminology). However, I see parallelisms, wordplays, stylometry, and some grammatical features as signs of a fairly literal translation from a source text that could convey very specific, and orderly types of linguistic ideas. 

My best guess is that the text was mostly short-hand phonetic and that the translation was dyamic, shifting back and forth between literal and non-liter to meet the various goals of the translator(s). It could also have been a strange hodge podge--phonetic when necessary and logogrammatic when not. Often, the lines between logograms and phonemes are blurred anyways. I find the stylometric data pretty compelling, and I have spent quite a bit of time studying it. I have a very hard time believing we would get these separation of styles if the translation came from very broad ideograms (even though I think it is still possible through a divine translation process). 

 

[jkwilliams]

3 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

I don't think we know enough about the condensed nature of the text to make a solid determination one way or another at the outset about whether it was phonetic, shorthand-phonetic, logogrammatic, or ideogrammatic. All we can confidently say is that it was likely more condensed than paleo-Hebrew. I try to let the nature of the text inform my assumption, rather than letting my assumption discount evidence from the nature of the text. I see pervasive New Testament intertextuality as a sign of non-literal translation (better to avoid "tight" vs. "loose" terminology). However, I see parallelisms, wordplays, stylometry, and some grammatical features as signs of a fairly literal translation from a source text that could convey very specific, and orderly types of linguistic ideas. 

Wow, I said something like that sometime in the late 1990s. Do you not see how problematic that approach is? 

[Ryan Dahle]

14 minutes ago, jkwilliams said:

Wow, I said something like that sometime in the late 1990s. Do you not see how problematic that approach is? 

I'm sure you will enlighten me.

[USU78]

In response to several questions on the Phinehas flavored BY quote gratuitously employed by stem, I put pen to paper to re-map out what others have said (and I still am too lazy to research who).  My apology to the OP for length of this threadjack by stem and my addition to it:

BY’s address was given on 8 March 1863.  Let’s take a look at the historical context in which it was given:

The Civil War is not going particularly well for either side.  The previous September, Lee attempted to score a knockout punch in an invasion of Maryland, but was thwarted at Antietam, where 26K men died in a vicious slaughter.  In December, newly minted commander of the Army of the Potomac Burnside returned the favor by invading Virginia but was likewise thwarted at Fredericksburg, insanely throwing wave after wave at the entrenched defenders, losing 12K men in the process to the defenders’ 5K. 

Most recently, Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 Jan 1863.  He also got approval for a draft, which went into effect 1 Mar 1863, a week before the address.  Whether BY had received notice of the brand new draft, signaling, along with Burnside’s proof of deadly resolve at Fredericksburg, the North’s intentions would have been clear to BY, and had to have been much on his mind.

Just what is this address about?  Look at the peroration: 

 

Quote

 

If the Government of the United States, in Congress assembled, had the right to pass an anti-polygamy bill, they had also the right to pass a law that slaves should not be abused as they have been; they had also a right to make a law that negroes should be used like human beings, and not worse than dumb brutes. For their abuse of that race, the whites will be cursed, unless they repent.

I am neither an abolitionist nor a pro-slavery man. If I could have been influenced by private injury to choose one side in preference to the other, I should certainly be against the pro-slavery side of the question, for it was pro-slavery men that pointed the bayonet at me and my brethren in Missouri, and said, “Damn you we will kill you.” I have not much love for them, only in the Gospel. I would cause them to repent, if I could, and make them good men and a good community. I have no fellowship for their avarice, blindness, and ungodly actions. To be great, is to be good before the Heavens and before all good men. I will not fellowship the wicked in their sins, so help me God.

Joseph Smith, in forty-seven prosecutions was never proven guilty of one violation of the laws of his country. They accused him of treason, because he would not fellowship their wickedness. Suppose the land should be cleansed from its filthiness and the law of God should predominate, if a man or woman should be found who had corrupted themselves and thereby become diseased, that man or woman would be placed by themselves, as the lepers were anciently, never more to commune with the human family. Purify your flesh and blood, your spirits, your habitations, and your country, and then you will be pure before God. This change has got to be before this earth will be taken back into a celestial atmosphere.

Find fault with me because I have wives! They would corrupt every wife I have, if they had the power; and then they cry to the government, “You had better do something with the Mormons; they are deceitful and disloyal!!” I am disloyal to their sins and filthiness. Cleanse your hearts and the whole person, and make yourselves as pure as the angels, and then I will fellowship you.

I say to every man and woman in this community, suffer not your affections to wander after that which is unholy; do not lust after gold, nor the things of this world. Sanctify yourselves before your God and before one another, until you are pure outside and in and all around you, and see that you faithfully perform every duty.

Now, as we are accused of secession, my counsel to this congregation is to secede, what from? From the Constitution of the United States? No. From the institutions of our country? No. Well then, what from? From sin and the practice thereof. That is my counsel to this congregation and to the whole world.

May God bless everybody that wishes well to his kingdom on the earth. Amen.

 

What are the high points?  1.  Abuse of black slaves, responsibility for which BY places clearly in Congress’ lap:  if an anti-Polygamy bill is constitutional, surely an anti-Slavery one is; 2.  BY favors the anti-Slavery side of the question, but only on points and not by knockout because of the wickedness of both camps; 3.  The solution to what was wrong with the USA/CSA was personal obedience to G-d’s laws; 4.  Mormons should likewise eschew the unholy:  the solution for them is the same as the solution for the USA/CSA; and 5.  Be secessionists indeed, but secede from sin.

BY is thus concerned chiefly with two matters:  the abuse of the helpless and personal purity/obedience to G-d’s law.  The business about who is right and who is wrong on matters of national policy are not particularly interesting to him except to the extent that policy speaks to those two matters.

So, let’s discuss first the issue of abuse of the helpless.  The first mention of the particularly helpless folks, more helpless than the Saints in the face of their serial abusers, was this:

Quote

The Southerners make the negroes, and the Northerners worship them; this is all the difference between slaveholders and abolitionists.

Now, how exactly were “Southerners mak[ing] negroes?”  Remember that Congress passed the law prohibiting the importation of slaves into US states and possessions in 1807, with Britain following in 1833.  So how were they making them?  By breeding and by rapine.  Everybody knew this.

In the very next paragraph BY gives stem his money quote:

Quote

Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot.

BY, of course, is then suffering from the same inherited confusion as the Southern preachers concerning their justification of enslavement.  He confuses Canaan’s curse with Cain’s.  Both are considered at that time in that age justification for slavery by what BY called “the World,” though BY is more concerned, as evidenced by the next prior paragraph, with who is “mak[ing] negroes” and how they are being treated by their masters, echoing Paul’s concerns for ethical behavior by both master and slave during Pax Romana.  BY knew about abolition movements worldwide, but, like most men of his time, he probably didn’t see its abolition as likely or even possible.  Surely the course of the Civil War didn’t give BY any indication of affecting its abolition.

Let’s parse the stem’s money quote:

1.    If a white man

2.    Mixes his blood

3.    With the seed of Cain

4.    The penalty is death

Whose death?  The white man mixing his blood.

How does he mix his blood with the seed of Cain?  By fathering children on slaves.

Now, does BY actually call for the death of those fathering children on slaves, “breeding” further slaves?  No, he does not.  He does call them cursed, however, and not just the ones doing the blood mixing:

Quote

If the Government of the United States, in Congress assembled, had the right to pass an anti-polygamy bill, they had also the right to pass a law that slaves should not be abused as they have been; they had also a right to make a law that negroes should be used like human beings, and not worse than dumb brutes. For their abuse of that race, the whites will be cursed, unless they repent.

Now, stem uses the BY quote, disingenuously as I pointed out earlier and in this instance quite gratuitously, to slam Mormons.  It didn’t and doesn’t matter to the antiMormon whether a quote ingeniously mined has anything or everything to do with the substance of the slam.  The substance of the entire quote is to show that abuse of the weak is a terrible thing, and both those who do the abusing and those who, with power to prevent it, suffer it to continue will suffer G-d’s wrath unless they repent.

The invocation by BY of Phinehas’ “zeal” in obeying G-d’s specific command for a specific people at a specific point in time is done in order to contrast G-d’s will concerning a specific people at another specific point in time:  Black slaves are not to be abused, and both those who do it and those who countenance it are accursed.  The capital punishment aspect of it is merely spice to the main point.  Remember who is accursed, who is doing the mixing of blood, and for what purpose they were doing the mixing.

[jkwilliams]

2 minutes ago, USU78 said:

In response to several questions on the Phinehas flavored BY quote gratuitously employed by stem, I put pen to paper to re-map out what others have said (and I still am too lazy to research who).  My apology to the OP for length of this threadjack by stem and my addition to it:

BY’s address was given on 8 March 1863.  Let’s take a look at the historical context in which it was given:

The Civil War is not going particularly well for either side.  The previous September, Lee attempted to score a knockout punch in an invasion of Maryland, but was thwarted at Antietam, where 26K men died in a vicious slaughter.  In December, newly minted commander of the Army of the Potomac Burnside returned the favor by invading Virginia but was likewise thwarted at Fredericksburg, insanely throwing wave after wave at the entrenched defenders, losing 12K men in the process to the defenders’ 5K. 

Most recently, Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 Jan 1863.  He also got approval for a draft, which went into effect 1 Mar 1863, a week before the address.  Whether BY had received notice of the brand new draft, signaling, along with Burnside’s proof of deadly resolve at Fredericksburg, the North’s intentions would have been clear to BY, and had to have been much on his mind.

Just what is this address about?  Look at the peroration: 

 

What are the high points?  1.  Abuse of black slaves, responsibility for which BY places clearly in Congress’ lap:  if an anti-Polygamy bill is constitutional, surely an anti-Slavery one is; 2.  BY favors the anti-Slavery side of the question, but only on points and not by knockout because of the wickedness of both camps; 3.  The solution to what was wrong with the USA/CSA was personal obedience to G-d’s laws; 4.  Mormons should likewise eschew the unholy:  the solution for them is the same as the solution for the USA/CSA; and 5.  Be secessionists indeed, but secede from sin.

BY is thus concerned chiefly with two matters:  the abuse of the helpless and personal purity/obedience to G-d’s law.  The business about who is right and who is wrong on matters of national policy are not particularly interesting to him except to the extent that policy speaks to those two matters.

So, let’s discuss first the issue of abuse of the helpless.  The first mention of the particularly helpless folks, more helpless than the Saints in the face of their serial abusers, was this:

Now, how exactly were “Southerners mak[ing] negroes?”  Remember that Congress passed the law prohibiting the importation of slaves into US states and possessions in 1807, with Britain following in 1833.  So how were they making them?  By breeding and by rapine.  Everybody knew this.

In the very next paragraph BY gives stem his money quote:

BY, of course, is then suffering from the same inherited confusion as the Southern preachers concerning their justification of enslavement.  He confuses Canaan’s curse with Cain’s.  Both are considered at that time in that age justification for slavery by what BY called “the World,” though BY is more concerned, as evidenced by the next prior paragraph, with who is “mak[ing] negroes” and how they are being treated by their masters, echoing Paul’s concerns for ethical behavior by both master and slave during Pax Romana.  BY knew about abolition movements worldwide, but, like most men of his time, he probably didn’t see its abolition as likely or even possible.  Surely the course of the Civil War didn’t give BY any indication of affecting its abolition.

Let’s parse the stem’s money quote:

1.    If a white man

2.    Mixes his blood

3.    With the seed of Cain

4.    The penalty is death

Whose death?  The white man mixing his blood.

How does he mix his blood with the seed of Cain?  By fathering children on slaves.

Now, does BY actually call for the death of those fathering children on slaves, “breeding” further slaves?  No, he does not.  He does call them cursed, however, and not just the ones doing the blood mixing:

Now, stem uses the BY quote, disingenuously as I pointed out earlier and in this instance quite gratuitously, to slam Mormons.  It didn’t and doesn’t matter to the antiMormon whether a quote ingeniously mined has anything or everything to do with the substance of the slam.  The substance of the entire quote is to show that abuse of the weak is a terrible thing, and both those who do the abusing and those who, with power to prevent it, suffer it to continue will suffer G-d’s wrath unless they repent.

The invocation by BY of Phinehas’ “zeal” in obeying G-d’s specific command for a specific people at a specific point in time is done in order to contrast G-d’s will concerning a specific people at another specific point in time:  Black slaves are not to be abused, and both those who do it and those who countenance it are accursed.  The capital punishment aspect of it is merely spice to the main point.  Remember who is accursed, who is doing the mixing of blood, and for what purpose they were doing the mixing.

I acknowledge I'm having a hard time following your logic, but I want to return to what you said earlier:

Quote

But then he turns it all on its head by saying the Church should do no such thing as execute white male church members who sleep with black women.

I am not seeing this at all. 

[clarkgoble]

4 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

I don't think we know enough about the condensed nature of the text to make a solid determination one way or another at the outset about whether it was phonetic, shorthand-phonetic, logogrammatic, or ideogrammatic. All we can confidently say is that it was likely more condensed than paleo-Hebrew. 

Right, I completely agree. However the answer to that question significantly affects arguments in many areas.

5 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

I see pervasive New Testament intertextuality as a sign of non-literal translation (better to avoid "tight" vs. "loose" terminology).

I think "literal" is even worse than "loose" vs. "tight" as it conveys a lot of unwanted connotations. I think saying loose content translation is the best way to describe the issue of fidelity to the original text. Loose form translation probably works well too.

7 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

I see pervasive New Testament intertextuality as a sign of non-literal translation (better to avoid "tight" vs. "loose" terminology). However, I see parallelisms, wordplays, stylometry, and some grammatical features as signs of a fairly literal translation from a source text that could convey very specific, and orderly types of linguistic ideas.

I'm certainly open to inconsistency in form style (meaning relationship in form to original text). I think we need some way of determining this. Otherwise you've got a vicious circle. i.e. stylometry and wordplay are accurate because the text is tight to Hebrew and the text is tight to Hebrew because of stylometry and wordplay. Now there are non-vicious circles - that's the whole point of hermeneutics. It just seems to me that thus far papers making these claims haven't engaged with the translation issues at all.

 

[USU78]

10 minutes ago, jkwilliams said:

I acknowledge I'm having a hard time following your logic, but I want to return to what you said earlier:

I am not seeing this at all. 

Well the whole thing, in this thread, is a rathole hardly worth more than a one-off.  Wish I could remember who originated the analysis.  Tried looking on FAIR, but I can never negotiate their search function.  Maybe somebody else remembers it.  I would guess this has come up a couple of dozen times in the past hereabouts every time somebody abuses BY's quote so they can roast Mormons on their PC barbecue and feed it to their sacred cow.

[jkwilliams]

Just now, USU78 said:

Well the whole thing, in this thread, is a rathole hardly worth more than a one-off.  Wish I could remember who originated the analysis.  Tried looking on FAIR, but I can never negotiate their search function.  Maybe somebody else remembers it.  I would guess this has come up a couple of dozen times in the past hereabouts every time somebody abuses BY's quote so they can roast Mormons on their PC barbecue and feed it to their sacred cow.

It just seems wrong to label Stem as "disingenuous" because he doesn't read it the same way you do. I've read the passage several times now, as well as your explanation above, and I just don't see what you're seeing. 

[USU78]

Just now, jkwilliams said:

It just seems wrong to label Stem as "disingenuous" because he doesn't read it the same way you do. I've read the passage several times now, as well as your explanation above, and I just don't see what you're seeing. 

Let's just leave it there then.  It's a threadjack.

[jkwilliams]

25 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

I'm sure you will enlighten me.

It's a rather ad hoc way of cherry-picking data.

Does something appear anachronistic? Well, that's loose translation.

Is there a possible Hebraism? Well, that's tight translation.

It's exactly the opposite of "let[ting] the nature of the text inform my assumption."

[ALarson]

49 minutes ago, jkwilliams said:

I acknowledge I'm having a hard time following your logic, but I want to return to what you said earlier:

I am not seeing this at all. 

Because it's simply not there.  He has not provided anything to back up his claim that Brigham Young then "turns it all on its head by saying the Church should do no such thing as execute white male church members who sleep with black women".

And of course, now he's very anxious to just move on .

 

Edited August 15, 2018 by ALarson

[Gray]

Just as I suspected - an eisegetical reading meant to sanitize the text and its authors to suit modern sensibilities.

Edited August 15, 2018 by Gray

[jkwilliams]

9 minutes ago, ALarson said:

Because it's simply not there.  He has not provided anything to back up his claim that Brigham Young then "turns it all on its head by saying the Church should do no such thing as execute white male church members who sleep with black women".

And of course, now he's very anxious to just move on .

But there's one thing we can all agree on: Stem is disingenuous. 

[Ryan Dahle]

20 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

49 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

I see pervasive New Testament intertextuality as a sign of non-literal translation (better to avoid "tight" vs. "loose" terminology).

I think "literal" is even worse than "loose" vs. "tight" as it conveys a lot of unwanted connotations. I think saying loose content translation is the best way to describe the issue of fidelity to the original text. Loose form translation probably works well too.

I actually agree that loose/tight work better. The problem is that Skousen's well-known loose/tight dichotomy refers to the degree of divine control, and not to the literal/functional aspect of the translation. I think hope_for_things still doesn't understand the distinction, so I'm trying to use words that aren't confusing to others. But I will use loose/tight going forward in this conversation to indicated the literal/non-literal aspect of the translation.

 

27 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

I'm certainly open to inconsistency in form style (meaning relationship in form to original text). I think we need some way of determining this. Otherwise you've got a vicious circle. i.e. stylometry and wordplay are accurate because the text is tight to Hebrew and the text is tight to Hebrew because of stylometry and wordplay. Now there are non-vicious circles - that's the whole point of hermeneutics. It just seems to me that thus far papers making these claims haven't engaged with the translation issues at all.

I'm not sure why you see this as a vicious cycle. There is nothing very abnormal about a translation that vacillates between loose and tight. Most translations do to some extent. If either option is perfectly acceptable (in principle), then why not let other data determine what is most likely in a given circumstance. Imagine an artist that uses two different sizes and styles of paint brush. As you analyze the painting, you determine what size of brush was used for different portions based on the evidence of the individual strokes. The only way this is a problem is if you have some compelling reason to think the artist should have predominantly used one or the other to begin with. I don't think that is a valid assumption, though, when it comes to the translation. 

Sometimes, data could collide just as brush strokes might overlap, but as I've thought about it, I haven't found this to be a very frequent problem. I personally don't see a bunch of stuff that demands a loose translation. New Testament intertextuality is pervasive, but it isn't nearly as pervasive as the function words used for the stylometric data. On average, a fairly solid NT connection probably only shows up once (on average) on every page or so of the text. These types of connections could easily be loosely translated for the purpose of doctrinal congruity and cross referencing, while the majority of the text (most of the other word on the page) could be a much tighter translation. Moreover, common idioms in the text may be loosely translated, but also fairly consistently translated, so that there is a tight one-for-one relationship between words despite the conceptual looseness. Heck, even function words and syntax could be both loose and yet consistently translated. Whenever source texts presents X syntax, the translation might frequently use an expanded version of Y and Z syntax in EModE. And so on and so forth.

The whole loose/tight option seems like a false dichotomy to begin with. I see the translation as shifting between the two, and even integrating them in various ways, without any major problems.

[jkwilliams]

Just now, Ryan Dahle said:

The whole loose/tight option seems like a false dichotomy to begin with. I see the translation as shifting between the two, and even integrating them in various ways, without any major problems.

Again, 20 years ago I said something almost exactly the same and was roundly criticized for it on the old a.r.m. board. It took me a while to understand just how problematic that approach is. YMMV

[Ryan Dahle]

40 minutes ago, jkwilliams said:

It's a rather ad hoc way of cherry-picking data.

Does something appear anachronistic? Well, that's loose translation.

Is there a possible Hebraism? Well, that's tight translation.

It's exactly the opposite of "let[ting] the nature of the text inform my assumption."

Does systematic stylometric analysis demonstrate distinct voices based on function words? Yes. Mostly likely tight translation.

Are there numerous examples of viable proposals for Hebrew/Egyptian wordplays? Yes. Mostly likely tight translation.

Do if/and conditionals show up (intentionally) in English? No. Do they show up Hebrew? Yes. Most likely tight translation.

Is it likely that pervasive New Testament phrases were in the plate text? No. Most likely loose, expansive translation.

Does something appear anachronistic? We will have to wait, seeing that loan-shifting is a very real phenomenon but also because new discoveries have frequently rendered previous anachronisms as non-anachronisms. Indeterminate translation.

The problem is that you assume, from the beginning, that there is something wrong in principle with a dynamic translation. There is no good reason why it couldn't be one or the other in any given circumstance. There is no good reason why it couldn't vacillate between the two quite frequently. So your concern is unfounded. It is based on a false dichotomy. 

[Ryan Dahle]

9 minutes ago, jkwilliams said:

Again, 20 years ago I said something almost exactly the same and was roundly criticized for it on the old a.r.m. board. It took me a while to understand just how problematic that approach is. YMMV

Your just repeating yourself, reminiscing on the younger you, without actually making a case for why a translation can't be dynamic. 

[jkwilliams]

Just now, Ryan Dahle said:

The problem is that you assume, from the beginning, that there is something wrong in principle with a dynamic translation. There is no good reason why it couldn't be one or the other in any given circumstance. There is no good reason why it couldn't vacillate between the two quite frequently. So your concern is unfounded. It is based on a false dichotomy. 

I'm not assuming that. I'm saying your adoption of "dynamic translation" is a direct result of the inability to reconcile different aspects of the text. It's an ad hoc way to approach the text, and once you open yourself up to "loose, expansive translation," then the whole thing could be "expansion," or modern in origin. You seem to acknowledge that the Biblical excerpts in the Book of Mormon were sourced from the King James Bible. If that's true (and it clearly is), then you have to open yourself up to the possibility that there were other source texts, as well. 

In short, your ad hoc approach opens up a lot of possibilities, and of necessity, you can't rule anything out as a possible source.

[ttribe]

17 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

The whole loose/tight option seems like a false dichotomy to begin with. I see the translation as shifting between the two, and even integrating them in various ways, without any major problems.

Let's just step back, look at the big picture, and ask a couple of questions - Why would the Creator of the Universe follow such a pattern?  What possible purpose could it serve, or what could necessitate such a method of translation?