Brant Gardner--AMA on Reddit

[Stormin' Mormon]

Brant Gardner is doing an "Ask me Anything" over on Reddit.  I valued his participation on this board back in the day, though we don't see him around here much anymore. 

For years, I had been wanting to buy his 6-volume "Second Witness" but I always put it off because I just couldn't commit to the $250 price tag.  And then a friend of mine bought me the first two volumes for my birthday last year, which got the ball rolling and I'm finally purchasing it one volume at a time.  He is as insightful in his published work as he was on his posts on this board.

Anyways, feel free to hop over to Reddit and listen in on his Q&A:

 

Edited January 25, 2024 by Stormin' Mormon

[Stargazer]

I wonder about the board rule against cross-posting would prefer we don't pull quotes from other boards? I thought I would quote a question and answer from today. The question seems to have been posted by a user from this board. Not everyone here would have a reddit account, so perhaps this has some utility:

@boblloyd91 :  "Hello! I've really enjoyed reading your works over the years! My question is pretty simple in that I was wondering if you feel that the case for the Book of Mormon's historicity is getting stronger through secular study. By that I mean do you think we're finding more evidence or proof of it?"

@Brant Gardner : "Quick answer=yes, it is getting stronger. Now, you have to understand the real impact of that statement. That is precisely the reverse of what should happen were the Book of Mormon the creation of a 19th century farmer (regardless of his literary genius). Actual history should have destroyed the book a hundred years ago, and the more we learn, the worse it should get. It has been the opposite.

"Now, the next thing to deal with is the problem of 'evidence.' Too many times we expect that evidence and proof are somehow connected. They really are not. We have not found proof of the Book of Mormon, and I don't expect that we do. However, what we have found is an abundance of evidence which, taken as a interconnected argument, create a very strong case."

[Stargazer]

3 hours ago, Stormin' Mormon said:

Brant Gardner is doing an "Ask me Anything" over on Reddit.  I valued his participation on this board back in the day, though we don't see him around here much anymore. 

For years, I had been wanting to buy his 6-volume "Second Witness" but I always put it off because I just couldn't commit to the $250 price tag.  And then a friend of mine bought me the first two volumes for my birthday last year, which got the ball rolling and I'm finally purchasing it one volume at a time.  He is as insightful in his published work as he was on his posts on this board.

Anyways, feel free to hop over to Reddit and listen in on his Q&A:

 

Hey, thanks for mentioning this! I am on reddit only very seldom, and usually lurk in other areas. I didn't even think about there being a subreddit for LDS. Without thinking, I would have said that reddit is only for anti-Mormons to spout their drivel.

[Stargazer]

Another one I thought was interesting...

u/somaybemaybenot : "I'm Ex-LDS but come in peace as one who still views the Book of Mormon as scripture. (When I attend church, I go to Community of Christ.) I'd be curious on your thoughts about two common questions. First, what is your take on the conventional belief that horses were brought to the Western Hemisphere by the Spanish? And, two, what about the argument that some use to discredit the Book of Mormon by claiming that there's no archaeological evidence (remains or weapons) of ancient battles on the scale described by Ether? TIA."

@Brant Gardner : "First question: There are now verified pre-Columbian (but post-Book of Mormon) horse remains. That argument will likely become less seen in the future.

"Second question: People say there is no archaeological evidence because the don't understand archaeological evidence. It is difficult to assign any artifact to specific peoples without texts. We don't get texts (with rare exceptions) until after the Book of Mormon. So we have an artifact but nothing that tells us who used it. So, it is named for the general type. Is there a car that is distintively Community of Christ? Are there pots and pans you use that distinguish you from your neighbors? That is what artifacts are like. Without an accompanying identifier, we don't know.

"Archaeological artifacts and remains are built into arguments, not proofs. Thus, we assemble arguments for the Book of Mormon.

"Third question: what about ancient Mesoamerican battles? Simple answer is that the land eats the remains. The Aztecs were nearly a thousand years later and we have good documentation of many of their battles and the sizes of the losses. We have no archaeological evidence. In addition to the problems of artifact survival in the area, we have the problem of funding. Funding goes for the cities, and many of the large battles were in fields. There is no reason to go looking for things there, so no real excavation has been done--even if there were something to find."

 

Edited January 25, 2024 by Stargazer

[webbles]

9 minutes ago, Stargazer said:

@Brant Gardner : "First question: There are now verified pre-Columbian (but post-Book of Mormon) horse remains. That argument will likely become less seen in the future.

I saw that as well.  I don't recall seeing verified pre-Columbian but post-Book of Mormon horse remains.  There was a recent study that showed that horses spread faster than the Europeans, but the horses were still post-Columbian.  And there are studies of horse bones in the Yucantan area alongside human pottery, but I thought those bones were all pre-Book of Mormon.

Any pointers to what he is talking about?  A quick glance over https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Horses_in_the_Book_of_Mormon doesn't seem to have anything new about verified horse remains.

[bluebell]

17 minutes ago, webbles said:

I saw that as well.  I don't recall seeing verified pre-Columbian but post-Book of Mormon horse remains.  There was a recent study that showed that horses spread faster than the Europeans, but the horses were still post-Columbian.  And there are studies of horse bones in the Yucantan area alongside human pottery, but I thought those bones were all pre-Book of Mormon.

Any pointers to what he is talking about?  A quick glance over https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Horses_in_the_Book_of_Mormon doesn't seem to have anything new about verified horse remains.

Is this article what he's talking about?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/native-americans-spread-horses-through-the-west-earlier-than-thought-180981912/

[webbles]

11 minutes ago, bluebell said:

Is this article what he's talking about?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/native-americans-spread-horses-through-the-west-earlier-than-thought-180981912/

I don't think so as it is not pre-Columbian horses.  That article is about Spanish horses spreading faster than the Spanish.

[Stargazer]

1 hour ago, webbles said:

I saw that as well.  I don't recall seeing verified pre-Columbian but post-Book of Mormon horse remains.  There was a recent study that showed that horses spread faster than the Europeans, but the horses were still post-Columbian.  And there are studies of horse bones in the Yucantan area alongside human pottery, but I thought those bones were all pre-Book of Mormon.

Any pointers to what he is talking about?  A quick glance over https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Horses_in_the_Book_of_Mormon doesn't seem to have anything new about verified horse remains.

I've asked him about this in the AMA. I wrote:

@Stargazer : "In answer to an earlier question, you wrote: 'There are now verified pre-Columbian (but post-Book of Mormon) horse remains.' Can you point us to the source for this? Thanks!"

ETA - @Brant Gardner : "Book of Mormon Central has a KnowWhy or two on this. They may have more information. I know that it is there, but honestly I don't pay much attention because I don't think it answers the fundamental issue of "horse" in the Book of Mormon, which is the complete absence of horse-culture in the text."

Edited January 25, 2024 by Stargazer

[webbles]

1 hour ago, Stargazer said:

I've asked him about this in the AMA. I wrote:

@Stargazer : "In answer to an earlier question, you wrote: 'There are now verified pre-Columbian (but post-Book of Mormon) horse remains.' Can you point us to the source for this? Thanks!"

ETA - @Brant Gardner : "Book of Mormon Central has a KnowWhy or two on this. They may have more information. I know that it is there, but honestly I don't pay much attention because I don't think it answers the fundamental issue of "horse" in the Book of Mormon, which is the complete absence of horse-culture in the text."

That helped.  I think he might be referring to https://knowhy.bookofmormoncentral.org/knowhy/when-lehis-party-arrived-in-the-land-did-they-find-horses-there.  That is about a study published in the last part of 2022

[Brant Gardner]

8 hours ago, Stormin' Mormon said:

we don't see him around here much anymore. 

I still stop by every so often, but I have become so Book of Mormon focused that if that isn't the topic, and I just read a little and move on. Maybe this year will have more things related to the Book of Mormon?!

[Stormin' Mormon]

4 minutes ago, Brant Gardner said:

I still stop by every so often, but I have become so Book of Mormon focused that if that isn't the topic, and I just read a little and move on. Maybe this year will have more things related to the Book of Mormon?!

I'll have to see if I can't stir up some BoM discussion in which you can drop some truth bombs. 

[Stargazer]

9 hours ago, Stormin' Mormon said:

I'll have to see if I can't stir up some BoM discussion in which you can drop some truth bombs. 

Love dem truth bombs! Lay down a carpet of them!

[Kenngo1969]

4 hours ago, Stargazer said:

Love dem truth bombs! Lay down a carpet of them!

Well, normally, you understand, I am completely against carpet bombing, but, in this case ...   Good to Cyber-see you, Brother Gardner @Brant Gardner ... Hope it happens more often!

[filovirus]

I was able to get a question to him yesterday:

My question: "Do the murals at San Bartolo have any impact on BoM historicity? A member of the Community of Christ posits that they depict Ammon and King Lamoni."

I found this book, written and researched by David B. Brown of the Community of Christ. https://www.amazon.com/Messiah-Among-Maya-David-Brown/dp/0359373437

His answer: "Sort of. I would shy away from declaring that they had Book of Mormon figures, but they do show that there was writing during Book of Mormon times. It also shows that the Maya script was evolving--dare we say becoming "reformed" by the time it arrives on the stone monuments some 500-600 years later where more can be read. There are some of the earlier glyphs that can be read, but not all."

[marineland]

On 1/25/2024 at 9:15 PM, Brant Gardner said:

I still stop by every so often, but I have become so Book of Mormon focused that if that isn't the topic, and I just read a little and move on. Maybe this year will have more things related to the Book of Mormon?!

Similar to your AMA on reddit, would you mind if users on this forum mention you in a post that relates to
a Book of Mormon question?

[Brant Gardner]

8 hours ago, marineland said:

Similar to your AMA on reddit, would you mind if users on this forum mention you in a post that relates to
a Book of Mormon question?

Mention or ask questions? I have no control over mentions (though I like the nice ones best). I would be happy to do an AMA here. If there is interest, maybe someone could start a thread?

[champatsch]

I always appreciate your insights on anthropology and archaeology as they might relate to the Book of Mormon. So I was happy to read some of these in the AMA.

Ten days ago we had occasion to briefly discuss Book of Mormon English usage, prompted by some online comments you made. I see you made comments on that subject in the AMA as well. You know that my position is that Book of Mormon English usage is a subject that must be taken seriously and studied carefully, in a comparative way.

In the AMA you wrote that the Book of Mormon text was not given to Joseph Smith "word for word because that means we have to find someone else who translated it before Joseph read it--but made the kinds of sentences and images that Joseph likely would have. So, I think the translation involved Joseph's mind and language." Elsewhere, 10 days ago, you also wrote that "the problem is that we find modern and archaic forms in the very same sentence, so the idea that a single EME fluent translator also made the “mistake” of adding in later forms."

I am interested to get some examples from you of modern and archaic forms in the very same sentence. There could very well be quite a few of these, but maybe not near as many as you think. In any event, I would like to see some specific examples of this, if you wouldn't mind.

[Brant Gardner]

The one I remember without spending a long time searching is early. In the book header for 1 Nephi we have "Nephi taketh his brethren and returns to the land of Jerusalem." This can be seen in Skousen's Earliest Text.

[champatsch]

Back in the 1980s I read a linguistics article about Shakespeare's usage, on his mixing of -s and -th inflection. He wrote plays from the late 1580s to the early 1610s. Grammars of his language have quite a few examples of immediate mixing, like E. A. Abbott’s A Shakespearian Grammar (London: Macmillan, 1869): Two Gentlemen of Verona, 4:2:15: "Yet, spaniel-like, the more she spurns my love, / The more it grows, and fawneth on her still."

Influences on variation were phonology, meter, speaker, tone, and style. In the early modern period, verbs ending in -s, like witness, could show variation of three forms: in -s, -th, and -ø. The maintenance of -th usage with a verb like witness was stronger, because of phonology. {-s} inflection was northern, and of course came to dominate. The King James Bible is an artificial representation of 1610s usage, since it has so much 1530s Tyndale usage, and very little updating, and inflectional regularizing (archaizing) over time as well. This Bible had instances of {-s} in the Apocrypha, and the verb sticks varied immediately with remembereth in 1 Esdras 4:21.

Abbott's grammar also discusses third person plural {-s} usage (§333), which is early modern usage found in the Book of Mormon but not in pseudo-biblical texts. An example is The Tempest, 3:3:2: "My old bones aches." Shakespeare has at least 10 of these with lexical verbs (in contexts where the grammatical subject is a plural NP and not an opaque relative pronoun), and 1 with is; the Book of Mormon has 2 instances with lexical verbs (aa3430, mi1017), and 4 instances with is (same syntactic context).

Here is the earliest example in Early English Books Online of close variaion of taketh and returns:

Bassianus taketh the charge of the armie, and Severus his father returnes into the Pro⸗vince.
(1606, EEBO A18928, page 119)

The author was born in 1566. There is also a 1579 example where the words are 14 words apart (translator born around 1540).

In my WordCruncher EEBO database of 1.4 billion early modern words, a quick search found 15 instances of taketh within 11 words of returns. (There are examples of this variation in an online paper of mine.) In addition, the second person variation found in the Book of Mormon is found in the early modern period as well.

What we get from uninformed critics, even academic critics, is a naive view based on little research of early modern usage. Take, for example, Bowen's 2016 dissertation (Purdue). Because he knew little about early modern variation, he thought most variation in pseudo-biblical texts was automatically a "Frankenstein hybrid". If he had looked at Shakespeare, he would have found that 23 scenes have has ~ hath variation within 20 words. So in his estimation, Shakespeare himself was creating a Frankenstein hybrid. Perhaps he thinks that the variation in the same verse of the Bible of "after that S" and "after S" is a mixing of early and late modern (Leviticus 14:43).

Think about the double standard going on here. Lexical and syntactic usage in the Book of Mormon that only occurred in the early modern period is ignored, and language variation that was characteristic of the early modern period is a sign of modern authorship.

Edited February 21, 2024 by champatsch

[Zosimus]

@Brant Gardner I recently watched your interview with Rick at Gospel Tangents. You mentioned that Manti was key to assessing whether or not a geography model fits. You also mentioned that Meso had a great candidate for Manti.

What area do you consider to be Manti in the Meso model?

[LoudmouthMormon]

On 1/25/2024 at 5:33 PM, webbles said:

I think he might be referring to https://knowhy.bookofmormoncentral.org/knowhy/when-lehis-party-arrived-in-the-land-did-they-find-horses-there.  That is about a study published in the last part of 2022

Which points to this article in the Texas Journal of Science (Yee-haw!): https://meridian.allenpress.com/tjs/article/74/1/Article 5/487323/POST-PLEISTOCENE-HORSES-EQUUS-FROM-MEXICO

Yay - horses in Mexico long after the extinction event that everybody just knows killed all the horses in North America!  There I was in the '90's and 2000's, arguing with critics, with a pretty weak argument.   "There aren't any precolumbian horses since before humans existed, the BoM couldn't possibly be accurate, Joseph Smith made it up!" they'd say.  "That just means we haven't found archaeological evidence of them yet - I'm sure they're there!" I'd say.   "You anti-science fool!  I'll now explain all the logical fallacies you're making. Everyone knows there were no horses, and here you are digging in, in defiance of overwhelmingly unanimous scientific consensus, just because you cannot admit defeat!" they'd howl back.   "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence." I'd retort.   "Do you know how weak and unconvincing your stupid faith-over-science beliefs sound?" they'd demand. And so it went.  For over a decade. 

And all it took was a few decades of digging, and the whole unanimous scientific consensus was flipped on it's head. 

 

Quote

As seemingly an incongruous data set as compared to the accepted extinction hypothesis, our data here from RC appear to be adding to a growing set of data that the late Pleistocene extinction was more a process (over many thousands of years) rather than the typically-accepted and presumed extinction event. We suggest that researchers view our data set, as well as others, as a developing hypothesis, which is testable rather than just avoided.

Gotta love it when smart people get spicy with each other in officially published publications.  Now the consensus-holders are the ones refusing to interact with the data!  Who's anti-science now?  Who's dogmatically holding on to disproven and dead notions?  (Or at least refusing to look through the Gallilean telescope of new archaeological findings.) 

 

Edited February 22, 2024 by LoudmouthMormon

[OGHoosier]

1 hour ago, LoudmouthMormon said:

Gotta love it when smart people get spicy with each other in officially published publications.  Now the consensus-holders are the ones refusing to interact with the data!  Who's anti-science now?  Who's dogmatically holding on to disproven and dead notions?  (Or at least refusing to look through the Gallilean telescope of new archaeological findings.) 

"LoudmouthMormon, I fear that thy joy doth carry thee away into boasting."

- Aaron, son of Mosiah, if he were here (probably)

Still, I'm rejoicing too. Another notch on the Trajectory of Truth.

Edited February 22, 2024 by OGHoosier

[Calm]

2 hours ago, LoudmouthMormon said:

Which points to this article in the Texas Journal of Science (Yee-haw!): https://meridian.allenpress.com/tjs/article/74/1/Article 5/487323/POST-PLEISTOCENE-HORSES-EQUUS-FROM-MEXICO

Yay - horses in Mexico long after the extinction event that everybody just knows killed all the horses in North America! 

 

Have there been responses yet in journals (not in casual conversation, but scholarship)?

Edited February 23, 2024 by Calm

[Brant Gardner]

On 2/22/2024 at 4:38 AM, Zosimus said:

@Brant Gardner I recently watched your interview with Rick at Gospel Tangents. You mentioned that Manti was key to assessing whether or not a geography model fits. You also mentioned that Meso had a great candidate for Manti.

What area do you consider to be Manti in the Meso model?

I don't have a site, but a place where Manti should be near. There is the Carrera Interactional that goes from Guatemala to Chiapas, MX. My guess is that it was built there because that is the most natural passage from Guatemala to Chiapas. Guarding a pass is where the text suggests that Manti was located. That location seems to fit.