Don Bradley's Lost 116 Pages is out...

[mfbukowski]

2 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

 

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/71707-brass-plates-gold-plates/

 

This is the thread I was thinking of.  I skimmed the thread quickly.   Dan Judd is the name of the individual making the claims.  He posts here as oklds.  Brant Gardner asked key questions, the answers to which caused Gardner to conclude that the alleged 116 pages Judd has are fakes.  There is a discussion about them being in a safe deposit box and which Judd cannot access until some time in 2021 due to legal questions which I did not bother to figure out, and the statute of limitations runs out at that time.  That should save anyone interested 4 pages of reading.

The first relevant post starts here

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/71707-brass-plates-gold-plates/?do=findComment&comment=1209895495

 

 

[ksfisher]

2 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

There is a discussion about them being in a safe deposit box and which Judd cannot access until some time in 2021 due to legal questions which I did not bother to figure out, and the statute of limitations runs out at that time. 

 

 

So until then Lucy Harris could still be prosecuted for the theft? 😉

[mfbukowski]

3 hours ago, pogi said:

I remember that fellow.  I don't remember if he posted here or if we just talked about him here.  He was a wealthy weirdo collector who hinted at a really important acquisition that had the name "Joseph Smith" on it and the total number of pages was around 116 ( a few more I think).  I don't think he ever came out and said that he had the lost manuscript though, but he sure seemed to hint towards it.  I don't know if that is the same guy you are thinking of.

It seems to be, but I don't think your description of the guy as a "wealthy weirdo collector" fits the rest of the story oklds/ Dan Judd tells.  See upthread a few posts.

[mfbukowski]

31 minutes ago, ksfisher said:

So until then Lucy Harris could still be prosecuted for the theft? 😉

It was some complicated explanation I did not bother to decipher- you can read it for yourself.   I am just assuming they are fakes, Brant knows his stuff, to say the least!.  BOM history is actually a topic I kind of avoid.  I take all revelations as personal revelation and of no historic interest, but only to be verified by personal revelation for our personal edification.  In other words all scriptures are to be used for our personal edification and not to be "verified" by historical evidence, which cannot in principle "prove" they are God-given.   But that is my take on it. I have a testimony that Joseph was a prophet of God and that is all I need, but I still read each line and judge it by my own testimony.  Who wrote it why or how is not relevant to its spiritual value, in my opinion.  I read it as philosophy- either it is justified as "true" in my mind for these purposes or not.   

 

Edited November 28, 2019 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

3 hours ago, DonBradley said:

Third, unlike how it probably would have been with a university press, Kofford Books let me write this book in the language of faith. I was not required at all to change things like describing Joseph translating the book, the book's internal authors being real voices rather than literary fictions, and so on. In fact, they got the vision of what I was doing here very well and greatly encouraged me in it

There it is, right there!  This is their strength in my opinion.

Congrats Don, a huge success!

[Robert F. Smith]

On 11/26/2019 at 5:55 PM, Ahab said:

So what was written on the lost 116 pages?  Or who wrote them?  Am I correct in understanding you to be suggesting those lost 116 pages were written by descendants of Nephi? 

The estimated 116 pages (estimated based on the 116 pages of the Printer's Manuscript pagination) were the book of Lehi, as edited by Mormon -- just like the rest of the Book of Mormon, from Mosiah to the book of Mormon.  Moroni merely adds the book of Ether and his own book of Moroni, and the Title Page.  The book of Lehi covers the same period covered by the Small Plates of Nephi (1 Nephi to Mosiah, but without the Words of Mormon).  The book of Lehi would probably have begun with Lehi's origins as a young man, gone into his call as a prophet, the trek into the desert, etc., including his visions, and then including events after Lehi's death in the New World.  Nephi wrote the Large Plates of Nephi, which were used by Mormon to create the book of Lehi.  The Book of Mormon calls it an "abridgement."  In other words, Mormon edited and reduced the amount of material in the Large Plates.

[Calm]

6 hours ago, DonBradley said:

Thank you all for your interest in this book! It has been a long time in the making and I've put a lot of myself into it!

It is great to see it become a reality, Don.

[blueglass]

I like the super early references to temple building in the Zion project.

"they were directed to stop and get materials to make brass plates upon which to keep a record of their journey; also to erect a tabernacle, wherein they could go and inquire whenever they became bewildered or at a loss what to do."  Similar to Joseph's own family situation, and my own from time to time.

"After sailing a long time, they came to land, went on shore, and thence they traveled through boundless forests, until, at length, they came to a country where there were a great many lakes;"

"which country had once been settled by a very large race of men, who were very rich, having a great deal of money. From some unknown cause, this nation had become extinct; "but that money," said Smith, "is here, now, every dollar of it."

Joseph Smith Sr. said "that money" is here, now, every dollar of it.  Considering the difficult financial circumstances after the ginseng deal gone bust - we can see the motivation to keep searching for treasure.  DId Martin Harris hope that in the "translation" of the book of mormon more specific locations would be identified for this treasure - or did he donate the money like a gift to a non-profit without expectation for return?  Or was this book project really intended to be a best seller and return the investment through book sales?  I'm interested if EB Grandin himself saw the initial 116 pages and became worried that the book wouldn't sell and requested more money down and a re-write. 

http://www.olivercowdery.com/smithhome/1870s/Laph1870.htm#may

 

[Jake Starkey]

On 11/23/2019 at 9:02 AM, Kenngo1969 said:

Not that it matters a great deal, bit I do wonder (at least slightly), why Greg Kofford Books?

Because they are becoming a first rate publisher on all matters Mormon.

The Mormon Ulysses of the American West book by Johnson is great.

[tkv]

16 hours ago, DonBradley said:

Not going to be responding a lot here, but curious whether you read the verse:

Quote

Mosiah 11:13 And it came to pass that he caused many buildings to be built in the land Shilom; and he caused a great tower to be built on the hill north of the land Shilom, which had been a resort for the children of Nephi at the time they fled out of the land

If the phrase "...at the time that..." is a way of introducing something new to the reader, it's one I'm not familiar with. I believe the observation that this was in the lost pages initially came from the late John Tvedtnes, in his Most Correct Book.

So you're saying that a when-type clause can't introduce new information. Can you direct me to a source for that view?

[DonBradley]

Hey TKV,

I'd be tremendously happy to see other readers of the Book of Mormon who feel they have better readings of the textual evidence to lay those out. I make no claim to perfection. I lay out an extensive case on this point. It would be great to see others refine the interpretation.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Don

[Jake Starkey]

Happy Thanksgiving, Don!

[mfbukowski]

11 hours ago, tkv said:

So you're saying that a when-type clause can't introduce new information. Can you direct me to a source for that view?

There are no such "sources" for linguistic usages, which are in flux constantly.

Can you show an example of your usage?

I cannot think of any.

 

[mfbukowski]

7 hours ago, DonBradley said:

Hey TKV,

I'd be tremendously happy to see other readers of the Book of Mormon who feel they have better readings of the textual evidence to lay those out. I make no claim to perfection. I lay out an extensive case on this point. It would be great to see others refine the interpretation.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Don

I am convinced that your methodologies are great tools for scriptural research, and have great potential for merging at last, aspects of Mormon studies with what has derisively known as "apologetics", and healing that great divide.  This is the kind of methodology that Wittgenstein used in his "ordinary language philosophy", and I have been convinced that this kind of contextual approach is the key to pushing LDS "theology", insofar as such a thing is possible, forward.  The key is inventing tools for hermeneutics which have not been developed well in our culture, and your approach could become a good step forward. 

[DonBradley]

4 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

I am convinced that your methodologies are great tools for scriptural research, and have great potential for merging at last, aspects of Mormon studies with what has derisively known as "apologetics", and healing that great divide.  This is the kind of methodology that Wittgenstein used in his "ordinary language philosophy", and I have been convinced that this kind of contextual approach is the key to pushing LDS "theology", insofar as such a thing is possible, forward.  The key is inventing tools for hermeneutics which have not been developed well in our culture, and your approach could become a good step forward. 

Thanks, Mark!

I agree very much on the need for and value of new tools for hermeneutics!

Don

[Rajah Manchou]

"But Joseph was not willing to give up the matter, without further trial; and from Franklin county he went to New York city, where the most learned man then in the city told him that, with few exceptions, the characters were Arabic, but not enough to make any thing out."

The Lapham interview happens before Joseph Smith writes down his two accounts of Harris' visit to New York, making this one of the earliest recorded accounts. If Lapham interviewed Smith Sr. in early 1830, then this account even predates James Gordon Bennet's 1831 article:

"Dr. Mitchell examined them—and compared them with other hieroglyphics—thought them very curious—and [said] they were the characters of a nation now extinct which he named..."

Joseph Smith Sr. in 1830, before the Book of Mormon was puiblished, told Lapham that the characters on the plates were a form of Arabic. 🤔

Edited November 29, 2019 by Rajah Manchou

[tkv]

14 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

There are no such "sources" for linguistic usages, which are in flux constantly.

Can you show an example of your usage?

I cannot think of any.

There are of course treatises on English usage, and they aren't all prescriptive.

I get it, you're trying to defend Don, but since I think this particular point is impossible to defend, I'm interested in hearing what his defense of it is.

I really don't know what you mean about showing an example of my usage. The Book of Mormon case in question is a possible example, and a multitude of examples could be given where a when-clause provides new information. You could probably manufacture a dozen related to what you've done this past week.

[DonBradley]

On 11/27/2019 at 10:58 PM, Calm said:

It is great to see it become a reality, Don.

Thank you,  Calm!!😊

[DonBradley]

TKS,

'Hope you had a good Thanksgiving!

Thanks for your interest in my arguments here, and for engaging me where you think, based on the bit you've seen about the book, where I'm misreading the data. If I'm wrong on this or other points, I most definitely want to know it.

Since I give quite an extended discussion, across several pages, of the Shilom hill incident, placing the verse you mention in Mosiah 11 in a much larger Book of Mormon context, it would do that argument injustice for me to just make a few stray statements about it on a message board when I've presented it far more fully and contextually as a substantial portion of my Chapter 14--The Mosian Reform. The arguments for reconstructing the contents of the Book of Mormon's lost pages don't lend themselves well to message board presentation. If they did, I could have saved myself eight and half years and 300-plus pages, or some 700 pages in the larger drafts of this work. 😉

Scholarship is ultimately a conversation, and one I'm explicitly inviting my readers to join. But it is a conversation that does not primarily take place on message boards, as fun as conversation here can be. Rather, it's a conversation that takes place primarily in publications, where arguments can be laid out fully, and not just piecemeal.

That said - I'm not at all above taking, and incorporating, criticism. I'm under no illusion that my conclusions are correct on every point, or that this book is the last word on the subject of the lost pages. To the contrary! As I state explicitly in my introduction:

Quote

 

All historical reconstruction is probabilistic, and some facets of the past can be reconstructed with greater certainty than others. Because the models used in this book are probabilistic, they are capable of being improved indefinitely, and doubtless will be over time—including by some readers of this book.

***

My conclusions, like all empirical conclusions, are subject to revision as the evidence grows. We will learn to make better use of the sources we have, including closer reading of our available Book of Mormon text. New sources will also be found that will require revision of existing interpretations—and also enable the confirmation and expansion of those interpretations.

 

 

If you would eventually care to borrow or check out from a library or in any other way read the full argument I make about the Shilom hill incident mentioned in Mosiah 11, and you feel you have a better full reading of the relevant data (which extends far beyond this single verse in Mosiah 11), I genuinely invite you to--or, actually, implore you, to, please, either, depending on how much you discover in that data, write a paper or other publication and put it out there--where I can assure you I'll read it and take it into account, or, if you'd like, message me, and, again, I'll read your interpretation and, as appropriate, make changes to my anticipated second edition of this book and/or other future publications on the lost pages. If you come up with a substantial new interpretation and want to publish it yourself, I'd even be willing to put in a good word for you with the editors of good journals I know and would be eager to see such new work out there.

And the same applies for everyone here. There is way more work in Latter-day Saint history and scripture study than can be done by one person, and the topic of the lost 116 pages begs for further scholarship.

If you do end up reading this part of the book, or even the book as a whole, let me know what you think, K?

Unless or until that happens, it may be helpful to know that I've made overlapping arguments, though not necessarily with as clear or full a development, which you can check out if you'd like in my M.A. thesis, American Proto-Zionism and the Book of Lehi: Recontextualizing the Rise of Mormonism, which is online, so to look at those you wouldn't necessarily need to get your hands on the book. If you do read the thesis version, I think you'll understand--from the literally dozens of pages about Mosiah I's exodus and the Shilom hill--why it would not work to try to put all that information here. But there are also further arguments in the book, so be aware that to get the full evidence for the interpretation I'm offering you would ultimately want to look there as well.

As I mention in the book, the late John Tvedtnes was really the first pioneer in piecing together contents from the lost pages. You can read his much briefer take on the Shilom hill incident mentioned in Mosiah 11, as it relates to the lost pages, in the BYU Scholars Archive, here and here.

 

Again, while I see my book and future publications, not this thread, as the place for me to systematically develop my arguments about what was in the lost pages, including the children of Nephi taking refuge at the Shilom hill, I'd be thrilled to engage and take into account any systematic interpretation you want to make of the data, either in print or in correspondence. I'd be happy to be wrong, because that would mean being better able to discover what's actually right.

Thanks,

Don

[Jake Starkey]

https://www.amazon.com/Lost-116-Pages-Reconstructing-Mormons/dp/158958760X/?fbclid=IwAR1c7PTyDgdmt7RdIbQ6d-HfJ3T4Km78hLdgiC7KkhXYHQqdzI-lG9c0oOE

[DonBradley]

Thanks, Jake, for sharing the link!

I just cannot describe to you all, my friends, how excited I am to have this work finally out! 😃

Yours,

Don

[mfbukowski]

13 hours ago, tkv said:

There are of course treatises on English usage, and they aren't all prescriptive.

I get it, you're trying to defend Don, but since I think this particular point is impossible to defend, I'm interested in hearing what his defense of it is.

I really don't know what you mean about showing an example of my usage. The Book of Mormon case in question is a possible example, and a multitude of examples could be given where a when-clause provides new information. You could probably manufacture a dozen related to what you've done this past week.

It seems like a really odd usage, that's all. I am not interested in manufacturing some odd usage, surely that would be easy,  simply one example in common usage. It just strikes me as a peculiar idea.  

The strength of ordinary language analysis lies in its ability to show how we think.  It's not about poetic, or artistic ways of presenting something it's about illustrating how we ordinarily do think about things

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_language_philosophy

And Don hardly needs MY defense.

Edited November 30, 2019 by mfbukowski

[tkv]

6 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

It seems like a really odd usage, that's all. I am not interested in manufacturing some odd usage, surely that would be easy,  simply one example in common usage. It just strikes me as a peculiar idea.

It isn't an odd usage in an absolute sense, and any examples you might consciously manufacture using events in your own life wouldn't be odd unless you inserted something else that was odd. It's an odd usage in a relative sense, since we almost always use when instead of at the time. But neither present-day usage nor even colloquial early nineteenth century usage is a useful standard to judge the language by.

Here's a Book of Mormon example from Omni where at the time is used with new information (Zedekiah being taken to Babylon): Behold, it came to pass that Mosiah discovered that the people of Zarahemla came out from Jerusalem at the time that Zedekiah, king of Judah, was carried away captive into Babylon.

This looks to be the first mention of Zedekiah being among those who were taken to Babylon. Of course, it's possible this was on the large plates and that the author assumed the reader would know this. After all, it's speculative.

[tkv]

23 hours ago, DonBradley said:

As I mention in the book, the late John Tvedtnes was really the first pioneer in piecing together contents from the lost pages. You can read his much briefer take on the Shilom hill incident mentioned in Mosiah 11, as it relates to the lost pages, in the BYU Scholars Archive, here and here.

This is from Tvedtnes (1994):

Quote

Mosiah 11: 13 speaks of a tower north of Shilom that "had been a resort for the children of Nephi at the time they fled out of the land" of Nephi. The flight obviously refers to the departure of Mosiah I from his homeland, which is mentioned on the small plates in the book of Omni. In this case, Mormon's abridgment includes details not known from the small plates and which, consequently, had to be on the large plates and most probably included in the abridgment that formed the 116 lost pages.

The conclusion that an account of the flight was on the large plates seems secure, and there's no reason it couldn't have been on the 116 pages. Actually, the flight's in the small plates; it's the resort that's missing. Just realized this distinction. So that must be the point you make. There's no reason to speculate about whether the flight was in the lost pages, since it's in the small plates. The issue is the mention of the resort.

The way Tvedtnes wrote it, however, presents the tower as the resort (taking "north of Shilom" to be an adverbial phrase), even though the tower was built later by Noah. The hill was the resort (again taking "north of the land Shilom" to be an adverbial phrase):

Quote

and he [Noah] caused a great tower to be built on the hill north of the land Shilom, which had been a resort for the children of Nephi at the time they fled out of the land; (Mosiah 11:13)

But I guess the land Shilom can't be ruled out as possibly being the resort.

So the point you must make in your book is that mention of the hill or Shilom being used as a resort was on the 116 pages. Okay, but it's in the main clause part of the relative clause. So it's more speculative to say that's old information in Mosiah 11:13 because main clauses often have new information. Subordinate clauses often have old information. But my initial point was that sub-clauses can also convey new information.

In any event, I'll check out what you have on this in the near future.

Edited November 30, 2019 by tkv

[The Nehor]

22 hours ago, Ahab said:

Ah, I think I see now.  So if the 116 pages had not been lost, and we had them in our translation of the Book of Mormon, it's possible that we likely wouldn't have the accounts between 2 Nephi and 3 Nephi and what we would have instead could have been called 3 Nephi with the current 3 Nephi called 4 Nephi instead and what we have now called 4 Nephi could have been called 5 Nephi instead.  Hmm, okay.

I wonder if Jacob, Enos, Jarom, Omni, etc wrote more in what could have been called 3 Nephi if we didn't have the smaller accounts we have of them now and what we now call 3 Nephi? 

Do you think those 116 pages covered the period after what we now call 2 Nephi was written up until the reign of King Benjamin, as Mormon seemed to indicate in his writings which we call the 'Words of Mormon'?

If that's true then maybe Jacob, Enos. Jarom, Omni etc wrote a lot more than we realize since all we have now are their small accounts instead of the lost 116 pages and can't see what they might have written.

There were two sets of records kept. The small plates of Nephi were for religious purposes. We have a translation of those. There was a larger more secular account also called the plates of Nephi (sometimes called the large plates) that were kept by the kings. We also know that Lehi and others kept other accounts. The missing pages were Mormon's summary of the large plates of Nephi and other sources he had from the same time period.