How Does the Book of Mormon Clarify the Bible?

[Robert F. Smith]

25 minutes ago, Exiled said:

Do Messrs Carmack and Skousen claim the entire thing was written in EmodE? I thought their claim was that they merely found some archaic structures in the text and then made the standard "how would Joseph Smith have known this" claim afterward.

Actually they did not draw any conclusion about whether Joseph could have known that.  Dr Carmack's articles instead have shown in excruciating detail the undeniable presence of systematic EModE grammar and expressions in the Book of Mormon.  We are not talking about just one little item here or there, but a systematic usage pattern which is statistically significant (and which does not appear in the KJV).  What conclusions one might draw from that are still up in the air.  All it really does it set the authorship of the English BofM back a couple of centuries, such that one member of this board speculates that Hugo Grotius may have been the author, while I have merely suggested that Dr John Dee (magician and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I) was knowledgeable enough to have done it.  Neither of us actually knows who did the English, though it is clear that only a well-educated man from the EModE era could have done it.  Now, is that the final word?  Certainly not.  However, it does throw a monkey wrench into the usual assumptions.

[champatsch]

1 hour ago, Kevin Christensen said:

And of course, if someone else besides Joseph Smith produced the Book of Mormon, that implies that a full document existed and the loss of the first 116 pages of dictation should have posed no crisis.  If the translation was just play-acting in some form, reading a prepared script, then there would be no trouble in doing it again.

I don't think I need to tell you that it doesn't work to argue for a position with weak secondary evidence (speculation and put-downs—e.g. play-acting, mechanical, seerstone as teleprompter, mimicking a court recorder) when another position is supported by strong primary evidence (syntax, lexis, grammar, non-paraphrastic biblical quotation with many complex differences [ > 700 constituent differences in 36 sections with matching n-grams > 15], unfamiliar names, textual consistency, internal declarative support [2n2724]).

It doesn't take much thought to counter what you just wrote with the following speculation:

The Lord might not have wanted competing versions published of the beginning of Mormon's abridgment at the very outset of the Book of Mormon's publication history, since as we know through revelation the thieves were bent on modifying the text, and they could have modified it in many perversely creative ways.

[tkv]

On 6/19/2019 at 12:04 AM, clarkgoble said:

we're missing the 116 pages (which Don Bradley suggests might be of significant length in terms of percentage of the whole - perhaps as much as half).

Where does Bradley suggest this?  Simple calculations point to about 25 percent of the whole, not 50 percent.

[clarkgoble]

https://www.ldsperspectives.com/2018/01/31/lost-116-pages-book-mormon/

Quoting from the transcript:

The preface is written when the Book of Mormon is starting to go to the press, and it’s one of the very first things that’s going to be typeset. Josephdoesn’t have a lot of time to come up with this preface to explain things, so again, I think he’s oversimplifying. So again, 116 pages just happens to be the length of the small plates that replaces the lost manuscript in theprinter’s manuscript of the Book of Mormon.

What it looks like is that Joseph probably doesn’t know how many pages were in the lost manuscript. It probably wasn’t paginated. He’s trying to give a rough estimate of the length without knowing how long it was. How is he going to do that? He looks at the replacement for the lost manuscript and says, “It’s probably about as long as its replacement,” and gives it the number of 116 pages, just like that manuscript.

There are other reasons to think that that number is mistaken. One of those reasons comes from Joseph himself. As I mentioned earlier, Joseph tells us that Martin took dictation on the lost manuscript – or what would become the lost manuscript – from about April 12 to about June 14 of 1828. In the following year, in 1829, to translate 116 pages took Joseph about 2.5 weeks – that’s about how long it took him to do the small plates.

If it took him and Martin two months in 1828 to do 116 pages, they’regoing very, very slow. In fact, they’re going even slower than that because Martin wasn’t the first scribe to assist Joseph with that manuscript. Emma was his first scribe, then two of her brothers, Alva and Reuben Hale, helped. Then apparently Samuel Harrison Smith, Joseph’s brother, helped.

Martin was the fifth scribe to work on that manuscript. Now the others probably did only small amounts, but still – if Martin worked on it for two months and four other scribes had worked on it before, they didn’t just come up with 116 pages in that time. At least, it seems very unlikely.

Another reason to believe that the manuscript would have been longer than 116 pages is to look at the length of time that the manuscript covered. The lost manuscript covered a full half of Mormon’s abridgement,Mormon’s abridgement meaning the text that he’s abridging all the way from Lehi down to the time of Ammaron, who told him about the plates in the year 320. That’s 600 years from Lehi to Christ, then 320 more years. That’s 920 years that Mormon covers in his abridgement.

About 450 of that – so almost exactly half – he had covered in the lost manuscript. The second half of Mormon’s abridgement is much longer than 116 pages. Why would the first half be so short?

The last piece of evidence is less inferential and more direct. We’veactually got an account from Martin Harris’s brother with whom he apparently talked about the lost 116 pages, because this brother knew narratives about some of the content of the lost pages. That brother is Emer Harris.

Emer Harris was, I think, a pioneer of 1847. He came out to Utah. He’sactually familiar to Latter-day Saints of today indirectly since he’s the ancestor of Dallin Harris Oaks, which is what the “H” stands for. Anyway,that’s just to tell you who Emer Harris is.

Emer Harris, speaking at a stake conference in Utah on April 6, 1856, talked about the Book of Mormon manuscript and the theft, and he says that before the theft, his brother Martin scribed for “near-200 pages of themanuscript.” Emer was well aware of the 116 number because he’d served a mission with Martin, actually, where he was distributing many of those 5000 original copies of the Book of Mormon printed in 1830, and every single one of them had the number “116 pages” in it. If Emer Harris thought that the number his brother had recorded was nearly 200, then he had some information that was different than the 116 pages number.

I think Martin might have actually had a better count of the number of pages than Joseph did, and the reason is that Martin was the scribe and Martin was the person who probably purchased the paper and would have known what quantity of paper he had purchased and how much of it they had left. My suspicion is that he purchased 200 pages of paper, and they had nearly filled that all up, and that’s why he told his brother that he had written nearly 200 pages of the manuscript.

[...]

It could be...that the 116 pages would be more accurately 116 sheets. That seems more likely to be about the length of the lost manuscript. If Joseph is not deriving the number from the length of the small plates in the printer’s manuscript, he may be conflating pages with sheets, and perhaps the book was around 232 pages, or 116 sheets.

In any case, it really appears that it was much bigger than what we have thought. If it was about that length, it would be about half the length of the present Book of Mormon. That’s how much we would have lost – about half of that length, so about a third of the total Book of Mormon.

Edited June 25, 2019 by clarkgoble

[Exiled]

2 hours ago, Kevin Christensen said:

One conspicuous puzzle that shows up in Givens's By the Hand of Mormon, his Oxford published reception history of the Book of Mormon, and studies of the use of the Book of Mormon by early members is, they never used it to settle Biblical controversies in this way.  The Saints accepted and used the Book of Mormon as a witness rather than as a way to settle Bible controversies.  And one more thing I find amusing in Campbell's oft quoted assessment that "it settles all the great controversies" is that he seems rather offended that anything outside of the document that produced the Great Controversies should resolve them.  As if that is the last thing God would try to do is settle controversies.

And of course, if someone else besides Joseph Smith produced the Book of Mormon, that implies that a full document existed and the loss of the first 116 pages of dictation should have posed no crisis.  If the translation was just play-acting in some form, reading a prepared script, then there would be no trouble in doing it again.

FWIW

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

It could be that it was invented on the fly by Joseph Smith with a little help here and there from Oliver Cowdery and/or others.  There could have been some editing and reworking of the story in between the dictation and publishing. As for the 116 pages, Joseph Smith probably had the story in his mind and could probably have retold it, maybe not word for word, but the essence of it, whenever.  This would explain the fear of being discovered when the repeat of the lost 116 happened, if he chose to repeat the story.  The fear would have been that if it didn't appear to be word for word as the supposed lost 116, then the focus would have been on Joseph as inventing the story instead of translating it from the plates.

[Robert F. Smith]

3 hours ago, Kevin Christensen said:

......................

And of course, if someone else besides Joseph Smith produced the Book of Mormon, that implies that a full document existed and the loss of the first 116 pages of dictation should have posed no crisis.  If the translation was just play-acting in some form, reading a prepared script, then there would be no trouble in doing it again...................

So obvious, Kevin, that no one has yet made that suggestion -- until you came along . . .  

[Robert F. Smith]

8 minutes ago, Exiled said:

It could be that it was invented on the fly by Joseph Smith with a little help here and there from Oliver Cowdery and/or others.  There could have been some editing and reworking of the story in between the dictation and publishing. As for the 116 pages, Joseph Smith probably had the story in his mind and could probably have retold it, maybe not word for word, but the essence of it, whenever.  This would explain the fear of being discovered when the repeat of the lost 116 happened, if he chose to repeat the story.  The fear would have been that if it didn't appear to be word for word as the supposed lost 116, then the focus would have been on Joseph as inventing the story instead of translating it from the plates.

As ever, of course, the 16th century EModE text of the BofM would prevent Joseph from having invented it.  No one, including Joseph the country bumpkin, could have produced such a text in the 19th century, even if they wanted to.  Indeed, the first thing Joseph tried to do when getting ready to produce the second edition of the BofM (the 1837 ed) was to begin making vast grammatical "corrections."  Those "corrections" were not necessary in an EModE text, but he and his colleagues did not know that then, and none of us knew that until very recent years.  It has come as such a surprise due to the lack of information on the EModE language in the past.  No one ever suggested or even suspected it.

Also, the problem with conspiracies is that some members of the conspiracy cannot keep their mouths shut.  No one can keep such a secret for too long.  Bear in mind that Oliver actually left the Church.  Why did he not then denounce Joseph?  Instead, he later came back and got rebaptized by Brother Brigham.  If it was all so phony, why would he do that?

[Exiled]

20 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

As ever, of course, the 16th century EModE text of the BofM would prevent Joseph from having invented it.  No one, including Joseph the country bumpkin, could have produced such a text in the 19th century, even if they wanted to.  Indeed, the first thing Joseph tried to do when getting ready to produce the second edition of the BofM (the 1837 ed) was to begin making vast grammatical "corrections."  Those "corrections" were not necessary in an EModE text, but he and his colleagues did not know that then, and none of us knew that until very recent years.  It has come as such a surprise due to the lack of information on the EModE language in the past.  No one ever suggested or even suspected it.

Also, the problem with conspiracies is that some members of the conspiracy cannot keep their mouths shut.  No one can keep such a secret for too long.  Bear in mind that Oliver actually left the Church.  Why did he not then denounce Joseph?  Instead, he later came back and got rebaptized by Brother Brigham.  If it was all so phony, why would he do that?

I think Oliver may have wanted to take over the church, given the power vacuum that existed. I don't think Brigham Young had consolidated his power at the time and hadn't proclaimed himself the president yet. So, Oliver perhaps thought he could have had a chance.

Also, people keep silent about things all the time. Conspiracies work.  Not all, but they do work from time to time. How many murders go unsolved? How many crimes go unpunished? How many involve conspiracies? We don't know perhaps because the conspiracy holds.  Two or more teenagers spray paint a freeway over pass and the crime doesn't get solved. The drugs still are flowing from columbia to the US, etc.

[Kevin Christensen]

41 minutes ago, Exiled said:

It could be that it was invented on the fly by Joseph Smith with a little help here and there from Oliver Cowdery and/or others.  There could have been some editing and reworking of the story in between the dictation and publishing. As for the 116 pages, Joseph Smith probably had the story in his mind and could probably have retold it, maybe not word for word, but the essence of it, whenever.  This would explain the fear of being discovered when the repeat of the lost 116 happened, if he chose to repeat the story.  The fear would have been that if it didn't appear to be word for word as the supposed lost 116, then the focus would have been on Joseph as inventing the story instead of translating it from the plates.

This is why I like Kuhn so much.  This is an explanation but is it a good one?  And not "good" in terms of secular assumptions and therefore satisfyingly "orthodox" and suitably dismissive of angels.  But:

Testable.  (How do you test something as vague as "Joseph did it somehow"?

Accuracy of Key predictions (What specific testable predictions come from "he invented it on the fly?"  On the other hand, when I ran across Barker's The Older Testament, proposing that there was a violent social revolution in Jerusalem in 600 BCE that Lehi, if he existed, ought to have noticed had he been there.  That is very testable, and in ways that neither Joseph, Oliver, or Alexander Campbell could have imagined. And Campbell was a better educated contemporary of Joseph Smith, but he had no access to many key the resources that Barker brought in.  And then there is the prospect of following Lehi's trail and seeing if the details of time, place and culture all make sense.  Again, the paradigm that Joseph was telling the truth and translating a real record is far more testable and the accurate predictions we find have claim to carrying far more decisive weight,)

Comprehensive and Coherence, and integrating diverse fields of knowledge and information.

Fruitful.  If I spent a few years pondering this point of view, what will I encounter that I would otherwise never have seen?  Will what I see in exploring that paradigm explain the bulk of information and seemingly accurate information that historicity explains for me now?

Simplicity and Aesthetics.  Well, it's simple.   Simple on Star Trek to "beam me up" when you don't have to produce or explain the technology.  The label "transporter" covers a multitude of serious issues.  But a truly workable simple explanation has to confront and explain the tiny details and the breadth of converging information.  Including the kind of details that accumulate in things like Glimpses of Lehi's Jerusalem, Lehi in the Desert, and In the Footsteps of Lehi, and thousands of detailed studies.  

Future Promise ...

There is more to the Book of Mormon than just the story between the covers of a book, but also the story of the people around the emergence of the Book, and that includes things like D&C 3, one of the oldest LDS writings, and one that was produced at a moment in time when Joseph had nothing going for him but failure. 

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

[Kevin Christensen]

17 minutes ago, Exiled said:

I think Oliver may have wanted to take over the church, given the power vacuum that existed. I don't think Brigham Young had consolidated his power at the time and hadn't proclaimed himself the president yet. So, Oliver perhaps thought he could have had a chance.

Also, people keep silent about things all the time. Conspiracies work.  Not all, but they do work from time to time. How many murders go unsolved? How many crimes go unpunished? How many involve conspiracies? We don't know perhaps because the conspiracy holds.  Two or more teenagers spray paint a freeway over pass and the crime doesn't get solved. The drugs still are flowing from columbia to the US, etc.

When Oliver came back, he refused any calling higher than being a deacon so he could pass the sacrament. 

It's worth reading Scott Faulring's essay on "The Return of Oliver Cowdery."  And the work of Larry Morris.  They provide a check on the this kind of speculation.

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

[Gervin]

4 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Actually they did not draw any conclusion about whether Joseph could have known that.  Dr Carmack's articles instead have shown in excruciating detail the undeniable presence of systematic EModE grammar and expressions in the Book of Mormon.  We are not talking about just one little item here or there, but a systematic usage pattern which is statistically significant (and which does not appear in the KJV).  What conclusions one might draw from that are still up in the air.  All it really does it set the authorship of the English BofM back a couple of centuries, such that one member of this board speculates that Hugo Grotius may have been the author, while I have merely suggested that Dr John Dee (magician and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I) was knowledgeable enough to have done it.  Neither of us actually knows who did the English, though it is clear that only a well-educated man from the EModE era could have done it.  Now, is that the final word?  Certainly not.  However, it does throw a monkey wrench into the usual assumptions.

Why exclude the KJV?  It presents the overwhelming evidence for EModE outside of the the realm of Joseph Smith's knowledge; more than fifty thousand phrases of three or more words, excluding definite and indefinite articles, are common to the Bible and the Book of Mormon.

[Exiled]

2 hours ago, Kevin Christensen said:

When Oliver came back, he refused any calling higher than being a deacon so he could pass the sacrament. 

It's worth reading Scott Faulring's essay on "The Return of Oliver Cowdery."  And the work of Larry Morris.  They provide a check on the this kind of speculation.

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

Perhaps. His renunciation of leadership was a condition of readmittance. But circumstances change and leaders change their minds all the time "for the good of the people." Anyway, he died soon after baptism and so we won't know if there was a motive for returning beyond what happened.

[Robert F. Smith]

2 hours ago, Gervin said:

Why exclude the KJV?  It presents the overwhelming evidence for EModE outside of the the realm of Joseph Smith's knowledge; more than fifty thousand phrases of three or more words, excluding definite and indefinite articles, are common to the Bible and the Book of Mormon.

No one is excluding the KJV.  The main point, Gervin, is that the truly distinctive and systematic EModE grammar which we don't find in the KJV does show up on the BofM.  That should be impossible in the 19th century.  For a scholar writing in 1540, no problem at all.  It fits the time and place.

[Robert F. Smith]

3 hours ago, Exiled said:

I think Oliver may have wanted to take over the church, given the power vacuum that existed. I don't think Brigham Young had consolidated his power at the time and hadn't proclaimed himself the president yet. So, Oliver perhaps thought he could have had a chance.

That bespeaks a lack of understanding of the LDS Church on your part, because Brother Brigham was certainly the type of leader who could not be upstaged by an apostate.  Oliver came to him with a contrite spirit.

3 hours ago, Exiled said:

Also, people keep silent about things all the time. Conspiracies work.  Not all, but they do work from time to time. How many murders go unsolved? How many crimes go unpunished? How many involve conspiracies? We don't know perhaps because the conspiracy holds.  Two or more teenagers spray paint a freeway over pass and the crime doesn't get solved. The drugs still are flowing from columbia to the US, etc.

Actual conspiracies seldom hold.  Someone nearly always talks, even in the mafia.  The most dangerous criminal organizations have been broken up because the inner circle could not hold.  La Eme is a prime example in which everybody ratted each other out.  There really is no honor among thieves.  Hugh Schonfield hatched the same irresponsible notion that early Jewish Christians stole Jesus" body in what Schonfield called The Passover Plot.  Even mainstream, non-Christian scholars thought the idea ridiculous.

[Gervin]

49 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

No one is excluding the KJV.  The main point, Gervin, is that the truly distinctive and systematic EModE grammar which we don't find in the KJV does show up on the BofM.  That should be impossible in the 19th century.  For a scholar writing in 1540, no problem at all.  It fits the time and place.

It's no problem for an author writing in 1540 to create over 50,000 phrases that later appear in KJV, ca 1611?  How so? 

[Calm]

4 hours ago, Exiled said:

The drugs still are flowing from columbia to the US, etc.

Are the same individuals doing it or is it more there is always someone willing to step into the gap when others are taken down?

[Robert F. Smith]

1 hour ago, Gervin said:

It's no problem for an author writing in 1540 to create over 50,000 phrases that later appear in KJV, ca 1611?  How so? 

You might want to read up on the KJV, which was not a new translation in 1611.  There is a whole string of earlier translations which preceded it, and which were nearly always copied verbatim.  Sometimes the KJV scholar committees differed from the older translations, but not often.

Also, you apparently misunderstood what I said about a hypothetical scholar writing in 1540.  I said that it would have been no problem at all for a scholar writing in 1540 to have created the EModE grammar and expressions which appear in the BofM.  Why?  Because that was his language, a language which would be long extinct in 1829.  Moreover, when Dr Carmack examines the BofM, he finds hundreds of systematic grammatical usages which either do not appear in the KJV, or appear very infrequently.  It is as though the BofM and KJV come from very different worlds.  This would not be possible if the two were written in the same exact language.  This is all the more amazing since the BofM quotes KJV-style biblical phrasing so often.  However, it is precisely where the BofM differs from the KJV in its tell-tale usage of EModE that we have the best diagnostic tool to establish the date of authorship.  Thus far, there is no rational explanation of why this should be true.  Perhaps you have a valid explanation?

[Exiled]

1 hour ago, Calm said:

Are the same individuals doing it or is it more there is always someone willing to step into the gap when others are taken down?

Are you trying to say that no conspiracies can last?  How do you know this? Maybe this or that drug lord gets pinched but the collective survives. The drugs continue to flow.  The cartels continue and the governments that support them continue.

 

[Calm]

7 minutes ago, Exiled said:

Are you trying to say that no conspiracies can last?

No.

[Calm]

Exiled, how would you suggest determining the difference between a successfully secret conspiracy and a nonexistent conspiracy?

[Hamba Tuhan]

24 minutes ago, Calm said:

Exiled, how would you suggest determining the difference between a successfully secret conspiracy and a nonexistent conspiracy?

Excellent question. The local trade unions council last week launched a new website to warn that the political party I belong to has rather detailed 'secret plans' going into our next election. As senior adviser to a parliamentarian, I have access to all of the party's internal plans, and none of what the unionists are claiming is even remotely true. But it's hard to convince people of that because, well, that's precisely what I would say about 'secret plans', isn't it? 

[Exiled]

42 minutes ago, Calm said:

Exiled, how would you suggest determining the difference between a successfully secret conspiracy and a nonexistent conspiracy?

Of course that is impossible by definition as the successfull secret conspiracy will remain secret. How can one know the entire scheme if it is secret? However the mafia does exist, right? Cartels exist down in Mexico, right?

So, I see conspiracies being alleged every day, almost, in court. Some are proven and the criminals go to prison or civil conspirators are held liable. I don't think you are saying that criminals can't combine together and form a criminal plan. Surely you aren't trying to say that conspiracies do not happen, are you? Weren't the gadianton robbers a thing in the book of mormon?

[Exiled]

28 minutes ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

Excellent question. The local trade unions council last week launched a new website to warn that the political party I belong to has rather detailed 'secret plans' going into our next election. As senior adviser to a parliamentarian, I have access to all of the party's internal plans, and none of what the unionists are claiming is even remotely true. But it's hard to convince people of that because, well, that's precisely what I would say about 'secret plans', isn't it? 

Are you trying to say that criminal conspiracies cannot happen? Does the mafia exist in your mind? Some shop owners near my office claimed they were subjected to an extortion racket and the cops, courts, etc.. believed them. The alleged criminals are doing time now. Perhaps there was a miscarriage of justice?

[Exiled]

3 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Actual conspiracies seldom hold.

I wonder how you know this? I've been part of many legal conspiracies on behalf of clients that have held. As a lawyer, I am not required to disclose past crimes or negligence committed by clients. From time to time I have successfully held client confidences and continue to do so to this day. These are conspiracies to withhold the truth from whomever and they survive. So, how can you say that actual conspiracies seldom hold?

[Hamba Tuhan]

38 minutes ago, Exiled said:

Are you trying to say that criminal conspiracies cannot happen?

Is that what you got from what I wrote???